When I Grow Up

There are some video games that play more like a dance than a traditional game. There may be some improvisation, or varying levels of planning and decision making, but once you know the route the real game lies in performing it. You need to practice until the keypresses burn themselves into your muscles, until the independent motion of each digit no longer crosses signals in your brain, but the most import thing, always, is the rhythm. Timing is everything.

TrackMania is a game you play on a server with other people, even though each of you remains effectively wholly locked into your own world. You can see the other cars on the track but cannot touch them - can’t even compete with them head-to-head, since every player will restart at random times and your best runs will be staggered out of sync. But the online provides an essential component of the game despite having no tangible effect on the outcome: it changes what you are doing into a performance.

My favorite way to play Mirror’s Edge is in a room full of people going round-robin style. Someone plays until they fuck up, then the next person grabs the controller and gets their chance to show off. The feeling generated when the whole room keeps on dying to one tricky jump until your turn comes around and you’re able to nail it perfectly is a great one. Roles start to emerge - some will ace the combat sections (this is never me), others will do great with the traversal, and some will be best at the indoor spatial puzzling sections. When people hit one of the other sections, they start to fail until the controller naturally moves around to the one who is good at those bits, who then gets the opportunity to proudly save the day.

I think the link that immediately formed in my head between Dustforce and those other games is that element of performance. This is a game that a robot could play perfectly, given the exact buttons to press and millisecond perfect times for each. There is some amount of thought to it on your first few tries of a level while you work out the best route, but once you have the layout down it is all about playing until you get it right. Until you can not only plan out the dance but perform it as well. And a big driver of that is that your Steam friends list is watching, able to call up a replay of your best run at will and compare themselves to it, or try to beat it.

Some levels become battlegrounds where you defend your turf from people who come in and challenge you. Someone came in to Server Room and beat my time, I watched their replay and tuned my own run until I was able to bring it to 1 second faster than them. On one level I spent two hours to come in 0.067 seconds below a friend’s fastest time. There is something captivating about fights over hundredths of seconds, where the tiniest detail of every movement starts to matter, and the high precision of the controls becomes absolutely essential. You can feel their eyes watching you as you get that string of jump-dash-run-jump-attack-dash down to a science.

Dustforce certainly isn’t the first of its kind, but it is one of the best. For all the things that video games give you to show off, for your towering skyscrapers in Minecraft, or your immaculately kept-up FarmVille plots, or your perfectly timed super-move parry in Street Fighter 2, or your Super Mario Brothers speedrun, now you can add to the list your balletic aerial display of pushbroom prowess.

“Swift*Stitch is a game about joy.”

I’m thinking up what I want to post about the game while I play. I’ve been on level 18, a level that would take around 20 seconds to run perfectly, for about an hour. My mind is wandering.

“It’s a game about finding that perfect run. Threading the needle.”

I can see exactly how to beat this level. There’s no mystery here, just the utter impossibility of pressing and releasing the one mouse button that controls everything at the proper times. I make it through the first two turns at the little narrow part on instinct, then plow directly into the floor on the third. I notice that my muscles are tensed traveling all the way up my arm. My right big toe is tensed and curled on the floor beneath my desk.

“It is a game about-” FUCK.

I inhale, and direct all of my concentration on the tiny triangle on screen. I can click fast enough to do this. I can- SHIT.

Exhale. My right big toe uncurls.

Starting again, a warm fuzziness surrounds my head. I explode five times in quick succession, missing turns I made easily on previous runs. I start to relax. I let it all go.

“Swift*Stitch is a game about zen. To master it, first you must master your-” COCK.

I made it past all of the turns on the little narrow part. I must have actually been in some sort of zen state, it feels like I did it without even trying. Pressing on into unfamiliar territory I know I need to dip down to the red line and reverse my vertical direction, then resume moving to the right. I right click to activate the slow motion in hopes of getting this move perfect on the first try, and that extra bit of hand motion is enough to make me entirely forget what my other finger on the left mouse button does. I hold down wildly, trying to recall if holding down makes me go up and down or sideways, and crash into the ceiling.

Bloody hell.

The game had taken pity on me several levels previous and popped up an extremely polite, almost sycophantic dialog box letting me know that I could - and this was just an option, you know, between me and the game, and no one would ever have to know - lower the speed just a bit.

But fuck that! I mean, I’m not going to try the higher speeds, I’m not stupid or anything, but I’ll be damned if I let an hour or two of failure make me drop below the default ship speed of 4. Not on your life.

“Swift*Stitch is a game about masochism.”

I can feel myself getting better at the level. For the first four turns, my fingers perform flawlessly with little or no intervention of conscious thought. It reminds me of piano classes I took as a kid - I always knew I would never be able to play with the kind of effortless grace that I had seen others manage, but after several thousand attempts I could feel my stupid clumsy fingers begin to form the notes on their own.

“It’s a game about pounding your head against a rock repeatedly, learning nothing new about the rock or yourself until finally the front of your skull caves in.”

There’s a bonus gem right at the beginning of the map. It doesn’t take a genius to see what I would have to do to get it, but it reveals a remarkably evil genius on the part of the person who put it there. To get that gem I would have to navigate through the entire level, turn around and come back, mastering the level backwards. And then die, since there is no way to turn around again back there where the gem is.

I have no plans to ever get that gem.

“Swift*Stitch is watching your life tick away and not knowing why you’re doing it.”

I must have died over one hundred times by now. I certainly haven’t been keeping count, but there’s no way it could be less than triple digits. The narrow part is a piece of cake, and I even got the dip into the red line right once and died right before I hit the goal.

That gem at the beginning is not the only bit of cleverness to Swift*Stitch. The concept of it is so simple - unstoppable forward movement at a constant speed, one button to switch between vertical and horizontal direction. Passing through lines reverses your direction along the two axes. And yet each new stage in the game finds a new challenge it can craft out of this simplicity, and it always feels fresh and surprising.

“Swift*Stitch is about misery and self loathing and-” oh shit.

I won! Fireworks! Accomplishment!

It’s about joy after all.

Now for stage 19.

For all the games out there that go for a pixely look, it still has the capability to wow me when done as well as it is in Hyper Princess Pitch. So much about this game’s style transports me back to when I was a kid, playing games by Apogee Software and Epic Megagames (I never had a Nintendo like my friends growing up, for me game nostalgia is all about Mode 13h).

This game has two ancestors, neither of which I have played: Garden Gnome Challenge, a previous Remar Games product that introduced Princess Pitch as a minor character, and Operation: Carnage a 1996 DOS game that Daniel Remar cites as an inspiration. After playing this, though, I definitely intend to try both of those out.

The controls take some getting used to. It’s basically the same scheme as Voxatron - movement is all 8-direction, and you shoot in whatever direction you are moving in. Once you start shooting, you will hold that direction and strafe for as long as the fire button is pressed. For myself I’m way more used to twin-stick style controls, and found this very awkward at first - in fact it stopped me from playing Voxatron altogether, but in the case of this game I stuck it out and eventually developed some skill with it.

Princess Pitch herself is a hell of a character. She is dressed in a pink dress and a crown, and she carries a rocket launcher and an endless well of violence. She expresses herself through short exclamations and/or suplexes. The game is very short, it only has 4 stages (plus one secret one) and should take you around half an hour to play all the way through. You can replay the whole thing many, many times though - the levels all have multiple paths through them, and there are a lot of difficulty levels to try, with various unlocks for each one you complete. And that good ending is something to behold as well, I definitely recommend going back to get it.

Gyossait, from the creator of All Of Our Friends Are Dead and Au Sable (available here), is an endlessly gothy game. Which is not necessarily a bad thing. Odd association time: Amon26’s games remind me most of the output of the demoscene group cocoon from the late 90s through the early 2000s, when they were mining a similar goth-industrial-future-horror vein.

Gyossait has a story, or at least a progression. The actual story is vague, and given in bits and pieces and general feelings through the elliptical dialogue. There is this bit of flavor text on the game’s Newgrounds page:

Oyeatia, creator and god of man surrenders his deity, descending to the green earth in search of a lost love. Gyossait sleeps in the warm black heart of the dying planet, her dreams seep into the weakening minds of man. The end begins.

I couldn’t have relayed to anyone else my idea of what the story had been when I finished the game. Even so, I had a sense of who Oyeatia was, and the glimpses of the world behind him - though abstracted by the tiles and platforms and sprites - were evocative. There’s a Lovecraft vibe in there, a sense of the world gone mad as it dreams it’s own doom, of decadent cults and ancient uncaring cosmic forces.

So the game though, it is somewhat frustrating to play. While there are checkpoints (generally well placed, except in one head-poundingly painful spot), there is no way I could find to save your progress and leave, and the game is somewhat long for a single sitting. It took me in the neighborhood of half an hour to 40 minutes to complete, though that may very well have been due to my repeated deaths.

I died a lot in Gyossait, and while I was probably the one to blame, more often than not I was cursing the jump controls as I respawned back at the nearest tree. The jumping physics are not refined to the point I like to see in a platformer, Oyeatia is a very small sprite on screen and jumps several times his own height, but doesn’t have a lot of horizontal movement to go with the vertical. “Floaty” has become something of a useless catch-all word when talking about platformer physics, but it perfectly describes what happens here: in most of the precision jumps, the best tactic seems to be to jump up over the spot you want to land on, then air control down to it. It gets especially frustrating in corridors where the character’s head is hitting the ceiling at the top of the over-high jump and messing up the arc making it harder to predict.

However, aside from one particular spot - where a sadistically placed air cannon blows you backwards into some moving spikes that you just navigated through - the game seems well tested to be doable even with the awkward controls, and it does a good job of training the player in how the mechanics of the world work without ever needing to tell them straight up.

Whenever you think of a creature, think of a lion—how a lion can be absolutely malignant or benign, majestic, depending on what it’s doing. If your creature cannot be in repose, then it’s a bad design.

There is a fantastic podcast that was posted this week, in which Julian Murdoch moderates a discussion about games and movies between Ken Levine and Guillermo del Toro. You should absolutely listen to it. In it, Guillermo del Toro mentions the above quote from movie special effects creator Ray Harryhausen about designing a monster. He goes on to talk about how he designs a monster as a character rather than as a function. It’s a great point and immediately struck me as something that, in games at least, applies not just to monsters but to the world of the game itself.

I’m a big appreciator of place as a narrative device and a character in a story, especially in game stories. In most of the games where I’ve really liked the story, the largest part of that narrative was told silently by the world. Silent Hill isn’t scary because it’s filled with monsters, it’s scary because the town itself seems to have a soul, a sense of living presence that mirrors and elaborates on the psychology of the protagonist. 

So in analyzing about what makes a world good or memorable as a character in the narrative, I think this principal of Harryhausen’s is useful: being able to imagine the world in repose, at rest. I think this is a big part of the appeal of open world/exploratory games to me, the ability to simply stop and watch the world go by, to see it existing independently of your goals, to however temporarily not see it as a function.

I think it also helps explain cases where a game world doesn’t work. Gears of War puts a lot of time and effort into establishing a distinctive sense of place for Sera, but I never get the feeling walking through it that I can imagine people living in those massive Gothic ruins, or walking to work past those networks of chest-high walls. And for all the effort that the Call of Duty and Battlefield games put in to building mundane and realistic settings, the constant push forward and never-stopping rush of enemies undermine my ability to imagine the world doing anything at all other than trying to kill me. Half-Life 2 on the other hand, despite being cut from the same linear shooter cloth as those other games, fills itself with quiet moments and quiet places - things you can run right past if you want, but that you can also stop and explore.

This principal is one of the ways in which games have a really unique advantage as a medium: they have the time to indulge the concept of seeing the world at rest. A movie doesn’t have this luxury, except in the odd art film like Koyaanisqatsi or Empire, they have only a few establishing shots allowed to set up a place on its own before they must fill it with people who have the business of plot to attend to and relegate the world to the background. Which isn’t to say that movies (or books, or plays, or operas) are unable to build compelling and alive feeling places, or to push them into central narrative roles - only that they must work harder to do this, sneaking them in around all the people and events that are working to steal the spotlight. They don’t have the option, as games do, of letting the audience stop and examine the space at the whim of their own curiosity. Of taking a break from the mad rush toward the end of the story to sit in some corner and imagine the world around them in repose.

Credit where it’s due: the image at the top of this article is from the cool Half-Life 2 Photography Flickr group, and the text of the Harryhausen quote is from a New Yorker interview with del Toro in which he also cited it.

It doesn’t take long to figure out that The Binding of Isaac is one of those those games. The ones that have read up on reward scheduling, the ones that are effortlessly and endlessly compulsive. The game is simple but seemingly bottomless. I’ve poured hours into it and that item list still has a gigantic number of question marks on it left for me to find in some randomly generated basement room.

A strange comparison kept popping up in my head between this game and Jason Rohrer’s Inside a Star-filled Sky. That game was surprisingly similar to what is going on here, but it didn’t work for me in pretty much all of the ways The Binding of Isaac does. The two games have completely different flavor - and I’m counting the story and body-horror-black-comedy atmosphere of Isaac as well as the debatably under-utilized recursion gimmick in Star-filled Sky as flavor here - but the underlying structure, the emotional journey of going through it, and even the basic controls are very close. At their core, both games are about starting as a weakling and going deeper and deeper into a random world finding upgrades until you are a force to be reckoned with.

Okay, so it’s an odd comparison, but it might still be helpful in analyzing what it is here that works for me. In Star-filled Sky, you are thrown into a void with no point of reference and nowhere to really go - Isaac, by contrast, mercilessly pushes the player forward. Once you’ve dropped down a floor in Isaac, there is no way back up ever. You’ve cleared a floor but have no keys to open the gold door and get a new item? No going back and farming for them, your only option is to press on and forget about it, since you will never see that specific door again. Between every level you’re given a very clear map of the game’s progression and where you stand on it. Similarly, in Star-filled Sky your powerups enter a limited number of inventory slots and quickly begin replacing each other - and with the ability to lose them by dying, the track from weak to strong is uncertain and frustrating. Isaac has two item slots that replace, the secondary weapon slot and the pills/tarot card slot, but it also has the main upgrade track that only accumulates permanently (complicated by the occasional random chance to buy upgrades for that track at the cost of health), so that no matter what you are almost always making some sort of progress - the visuals associated with this as Isaac himself becomes less and less recognizable are either funny or frightening, depending.

The Binding of Isaac is also full of secrets and surprises - which is probably to be expected coming from an Edmund McMillen game. Each level has a secret room accessible by bombing the right wall - there are a few ways to find these, either by using the compass, the treasure map or the tarot card The World, but once you get a handle on how the maps are generated it becomes very easy to guess as well. There are other nice little touches to discover, such as how the bombs force open doors so you can escape from a tough fight, or push rubble from rocks into holes so you can cross without a ladder. And sometimes if you use the teleporter too much things get real weird.

So the end result is that The Binding of Isaac, simple as it is, has stolen many hours of my life and will probably steal many more. If you want to be cruel, look at my Steam profile and mock me for just how much time I’ve wasted on it so far. I’m sure the number will continue to tick upwards after I post this.

Sometimes I dream about large empty spaces filled with shadowy ruins. I wonder what you dream about, Aggie. I know what you are supposed to say when you see a dog kicking its legs around…

Ruins is a beautiful, dreamlike exploration game by indie developer Cardboard Computer. I’ll cop to some bias here, this being a game from Chicago (I don’t live in the city, but I visit often enough to take some undeserved pride in the cool things that come out of it.)

If you’ve played Cardboard Computer’s previous games, the tone of Ruins is familiar. Like Hummingbird Mind, or Jake Elliott’s Ludum Dare game Last Tuesday, this is a game about slowly exploring every corner of a quiet, dreamy world. You will make some dialog choices, but unlike those games they don’t seem to lead to any major branching off from the main path here. This is a visual novel through-and-through - or, at 10-15 minutes long, maybe closer to visual flash fiction.

The visuals are all contrast. Shadows stretch out long over the ground, giving the sense of a setting sun. Combined with Chopin’s music in the background, there is an eerie funereal sense to the world. Or are those long shadows cast by low-lying sun at dawn? And could those ruins instead be preludes to some future construction?

Background

This is a response to a response to a response to an article, so it probably needs some retelling right off the bat. Chronologically, the timeline is this: a Gawker intern named Alyssa Bereznak posted an article on two of Gawker’s websites, Jezebel and Gizmodo. The article was a smear piece about a date she went on with a man named Jon Finkel, apparently a Magic: The Gathering world champion - there’s not much to it beyond her calling him the “champion of dweebs” and expressing anger that he had not included his shameful geekery in his online dating profile.

Given that Gizmodo is a high traffic blog for a geek audience, the response was predictably large-scale and scornful. It quickly devolved into defensiveness, name-calling and misogyny and displayed some of the worst and most ugly aspects of nerd culture.

Geordie Tait, in a sprawling 11,000 word article at StarCityGames titled “To My Someday Daughter,” wrote incisively and eloquently about that ugliness and about the deeper problems in the culture from which it arose.

Why I’m reluctant to criticize it

I probably shouldn’t be writing this. I will probably, in fact, regret it.

When a man is presented with misogyny, it is easy - almost reflexive - for him to dismiss it out of hand or to attack the messenger. I had to give a lot of thought to whether or not that is what I was doing, and it is definitely not my intention here. I haven’t looked at the comment thread on SCG, but I can imagine that it is probably filled to brimming with male voices responding either angrily or with concern trolling. I don’t want to be one of them, or add my voice to theirs.

Maybe it would help if I started by talking about why I think Tait’s article is important and shouldn’t be ignored, and the things I liked about it.

The nerd community has problems. Big problems, that are generally ignored in polite company. It’s easy to say “yeah, that’s those other guys” and continue on, but the fact is that they are the product of a culture in which we all take part. Ignoring it will only make it worse. Tait’s article is great because it shines a light where nobody wants to look, and does so unsympathetically.

His brutal takedown of the myth of the Nice Guy™ is excellent, as is his section on character designs in games and how embarrassingly they pander.

Now on to the criticism

My problem with the article started when I hit this line:

This story sounds mean. It’s about a girl who poked fun at some boys…

To understand what I’m talking about here, let me describe what seems to me to be the most common form of sexism I see in online games and forums where nerds gather. There are two contradictory yet simultaneously held beliefs that are stated loudly whenever possible in nerd space you go to, and underlie a lot of what is said there:

1. Women with [nerd interest x] do not exist.
2. In the case where they do exist, they only express [nerd interest x] for the express purpose of getting the attention of men with [nerd interest x].

There are some great articles written by women expressing frustration with these two assumptions, such as this one by Whitney Butts on The Escapist and this one by Cara Vainio, former director of PlanetQuake (back in GameSpy’s glory days.) These articles don’t make some kind of revolutionary feminist point. They simply point out, in frustration, for the thousandth time, that yes, we do exist and no, we do not have this hobby just because we want your attention. That they had to be written at all is a sad indicator of the state of our culture.

Rule #1

Now back to that line I quoted above. What exactly in Bereznak’s article limits her scorn for this nerdy hobby to men? When a major journalistic organization like Gawker considers it newsworthy to stop and mock by name a random person on two of their media outlets just for having an interest they find laughable, why exactly should this be framed as “making fun of a group of boys”? The only possible way that makes sense is if you go in from the beginning with Internet Assumption #1: Nerdy Women Do Not Exist. Period.

Once you start to notice it, it pops up all over the article:

Gamers are not a cringing minority but the same scornful, entitled males you’ve been dealing with your entire life.

Guess who recently laughed at a big group of men?

If you said Alyssa Bereznak, you’re a good guesser.

Her laugh could be heard echoing across the internet, and the silhouette of her chortling, dismissive mouth was like a Bat Signal for every humiliated and fearful geek to whom the marginalization of his identity was an affront.

Emphasis mine.

Again and again, when a “gamer” is presented as an abstract hypothetical concept, this ur-gamer is immediately identified as male.

So is it true? Did Bereznak’s article cause a reaction only in men? Was there some male-exclusive payload hidden in the article, a sense of vicarious rejection that struck home only for terminally virginal straight men? We can actually check on this. A simple google search returns a raft of responses from Women geeks: Chenda Ngak on CBS, Ruth Suehle on GeekMom, Melissa Bell on The Washington Post, Susan Arendt at The Escapist, Rebecca Watson of Skepchick, and uncountable numbers of tweets and forum and blog posts.

So why aren’t any of these responses mentioned in the article? Oh that’s right, I forgot Rule #1. These posts are by women who write about nerdy things, and Nerdy Women Don’t Exist.

Except when they do.

Rule #2

…it is hard for girls to be taken seriously in gaming when dozens of wannabe FragDolls are tap-dancing on top of the dugout and offering opposing players “a shine.”

Tait says this in reference to an article by fellow Gizmodo author Elly Hart. That article has its problems and I don’t really want to get into defending its content here. I would, however, like to defend its author’s motivation for writing it.

Tait’s out of hand dismissal of this post as nothing more than an attempt by Hart to win male favor disturbs me. Is it so inconceivable that a woman who writes for a tech website might be dismayed to read an article one day, posted on her own site, that mocks and belittles nerdy interests that she might very well share? Is it impossible that she reads the line calling Jon Finkel the “champion of the dweebs” and feels that she herself has been called a dweeb? Couldn’t she be feeling genuine frustration and lashing out?

No, obviously. Rule #2. The only possible option is that she is a “FragDoll wannabe,” dancing for the attention of the slobbering gamer boys with no interests or identity of her own.

The thing about dismissing an opinion in such a gendered way is, it paints with a broad brush. All those women I mentioned before, the ones who weren’t even included, are now implicated as “FragDoll wannabes” too by association thanks to the gendered response that Tait chose to use on Elly Hart. So it’s not about the problematic content in Hart’s article, it’s about the systematic dismissal and erasure of those who don’t fit in to the central false dichotomy of the article: women on one side, nerds on the other.

But I can’t be sexist! I checked with a woman, she said i