Category: Writing

Games in the Social Tapestry

In a country of just under 300 million people, current statistics suggest that roughly 60% of the population plays games on a regular or semi-regular basis[1] — that games have taken a central role in how we occupy our time is undeniable, and more and more people enjoy Slot games, if you are one of those you may interesting in the info at https://insidepulse.com/2020/11/17/four-of-the-very-best-no-deposit-bonuses-for-slot-players/ . What is still under debate, however, is how these games affect our lives outside the game, and how we interact with others in society. There has been some indication that video games temporarily increase aggression, but no more than watching an action movie or even a particularly rousing football game, with no long term corollary showing up to date.[2] Additionally, the role video games have on aggression is a relatively small element in the larger role games have on the social tapestry. The question that most interests me in this field is “How do games bring people together?”

One of the most immediately apparent examples of games serving as a coagulant for community building is the Massively Multiplayer Online style of game, which places thousands of players together within a persistent virtual world, where relationships with other players must be formed to survive. The most popular of these games is Blizzard’s World of Warcraft (WoW), which recently passed the 6 million player mark, making it more than twice as large as its nearest competition. World of Warcraft has even been alluded to replacing golf as the networking tool of choice in the realm of technology oriented business.[3] The comparison continues to gather steam, with exclusive guilds replacing country club memberships, and a number of celebrities playing together (notably Dave Chappelle, comedian and star of The Chappelle Show, and rumors suggest that Jon Stewart of The Daily Show with Jon Stewart also plays[4]).

The more interesting question to ask, however, is not how World of Warcraft reached this position, but why it did. It clearly is filling a role that society felt was needed; the game has largely operated on grassroots advertising and gamer-centric marketing, so the fact that it has garnered a wider market appeal suggests that it is fulfilling a role that was lacking in society. In The Great Good Place, Ray Oldenburg discusses the essential role a “third space” that is neither home nor work plays in the health of a community, and decries the destruction and devaluation of these places with the growth of suburbia and a commuter culture. I have a strong suspicion that the appeal for WoW, and other online games, is in its ability to create a virtual third space, a place for people to have shared experiences and garner a sense of comradeship. While it is not necessarily a perfect marriage, since it still ultimately keeps individuals physically apart and isolated, it is a stopgap solution the larger social organism has created to fulfill this necessary role in culture.
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Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas

Released in October of 2004, Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas is the latest installment in the Grand Theft Auto series of games, developed by Rockstar Games and distributed by Take Two Interactive. This installment outsold its already best selling predecessors (Grand Theft Auto III, and Grand Theft Auto: Vice City respectively), taking place in a fictionalized variant of LA in the early 1990’s. The game’s encouragement and emphasis of in-game violence had already caused a considerable amount of uproar from several advocacy groups, but did not receive its true level of infamy until early July of 2005, when a “mod” was discovered called “hot coffee” that allowed the player to participate in a sexual act, which was construed as a violation of its Mature game rating (instead of Adults Only), and has sparked a flurry of lawsuits, media attention, and reactionary legislation against video games in general.

Before I discuss the game itself, let’s address the Hot Coffee scandal a little more directly. The content within the mod is overtly sexual, though nothing is actually seen beyond the player’s character behind his in-game girlfriend, making sexual movements. Because of this, it is true that the game should have received an Adults Only rating from the Entertainment Software Rating Board (ESRB), had the content been available to players. The only way to access this content is through manually altering the code through external means (on the PC, this involves physically altering game files; on the Playstation 2, this involves using another device such as a “Game Shark” to manipulate the game data or downloading and installing a patch on a system that has no direct method of downloading or installing patches). Insisting upon an Adults Only rating because of this content is roughly akin to insisting that a movie be given an NC-17 or even X rating because of a scene that was filmed but then cut from the final version of the film. Given that the game’s rating was already Mature, which has the same requirements for purchase or to watch as an R rated movie (age 17 or higher), this uproar becomes even more ludicrous. It has unfortunately caused a flood of knee-jerk legislation[1] and use as a political tool by those seeking re-election,[2] despite clear first amendment violations within the proposed laws that have already shut down early attempts at similar legislation.[3] The overwhelming amount of bad press and shoddy handling of the situation on the part of Rockstar Games and Take Two Interactive has caused company assets and stock value to plummet, inciting an additional string of lawsuits by the companies’ own stockholders.[4] Regardless of whether or not any of this furor is merited, it may well mean no more Grand Theft Auto games, and potentially hard and restrictive times for the game industry as a whole.
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Katamari Damacy

While my personal focus is on story-centric, or narratological games, I would be remiss to not also address some gameplay-centric, or ludological games. Without some ludological elements, a game would not be a game; it is essential to the definition of what a game is, and good gameplay is often pivotal to an immersive storytelling experience. With this in mind, I’ve decided to take a closer look at Katamari Damacy, which was published by Namco in 2004, and is arguably one of the most pure modern examples of a ludo-centric game.

The basic premise behind Katamari Damacy is simple and surreal: your father, the King of All Cosmos had an accident, and destroyed all the stars in the sky. Your task is to gather up material to recreate the stars, using a rolling ball called a “katamari” that picks up any object smaller than itself. The game starts by rolling up items around a house, collecting push pins and ants and stamps and pencils and tape dispensers, and proceeds to target larger items as the game progresses, until you are able to roll up cars and people, and then even buildings. In the final stage, the task is to recreate the moon, which involves creating a katamari so large that you are able to roll up the islands themselves. The story is really an excuse for the gameplay, which is itself an evolution of an early gameplay pattern seen in games such as the Pac-Man series (navigate an environment collecting objects, try to avoid running into things you can’t pick up). The game is simple, but engaging and more fun than its description suggests.
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Xenogears

While I may comment on the unfortunate lack of effective narratological games, that does not mean the field has been entirely devoid of effective titles; I would be hard pressed to make an argument for greater narrative in games if there weren’t games that have done so in the past with varying degrees of success. Most of the Final Fantasy games are good examples, though they are not the only ones. In my estimation, one of the best narratological games to date is not in fact a Final Fantasy game, though it was created by the same developer. Released quietly in 1998 by Squaresoft, Xenogears quickly gathered a cult following, due in large part to quite possibly the most epic and involving story yet attempted in a video game.

Xenogears is actually part of a larger storyline known as Xenosaga, of which Xenogears is episodes 5 and 6. (In a similar fashion to the Star Wars trilogy, the prior episodes had not been developed or released; also similarly, these earlier episodes are now in the process of being developed and released, though with nowhere near the critical acclaim and fanbase the original had.) The game starts with an animated sequence that takes place 10,000 years prior to the events in the game, showing a starship being overrun by some unknown force and being destroyed, the remains crashing onto a nearby planet. The game then shifts 10,000 years forward, in a small village, where a young man named Fei lives, who is the central protagonist in the game. Fei is asked to collect some things for a wedding to be held the following day from the doctor who lives above town. After making his way to the doctor’s house, on the way back the village, a large “gear” (a mechanical piloted robot) flies by and crashes into the village, pursued by other gears. Fei rushes back to the village, where a fire fight between the gears has ensued. While helping evacuate the village, Fei notices that the gear that was being pursued was now unmanned, and impulsively leaps into the device to try and defend his town. Things are going well, until an event occurs that causes Fei to lose control of the gear, which causes a blast of energy that utterly decimates the village. Upon waking up, Fei is exiled by the remaining villagers, which begins his journey into the larger world.
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Taking Back “Literature”

Video games are a category of creative work that deserves consideration and respect as an art form, and to be valued as literature. For nearly as long as there has been art or literature, there have been those who have tried to restrict the terms to only define the works that they have deemed worthy. This has become particularly prevalent in culture since the early Renaissance, with the sanctification and elevation of art and literature as the province of the refined and privileged, a method to further segregate the masses from the intellectual and social elite.[1] In modern society, however, there is no excuse for this segregation to continue. Art and literature can take many forms, and exist on a variety of levels throughout society, yet we continue to delineate only a few “classics” as qualifying for such a lofty term as literature or art. This needs to stop: art and literature are everywhere; art and literature are as varied and colorful as the individuals who create them; art and literature cannot be pigeonholed, categorized, or rigidly defined within a free society. We as individuals need to stand up for creative expression, and take back the language that has been subverted for so many years.

According to the Oxford American Dictionary, literature can be defined as, “written works, esp. those considered of superior or lasting artistic merit”. Given this definition, it is hardly a surprise that there is so much difficulty in defining what is or is not “literature”, and rightfully so: the definition is fluid, and ultimately subjective on what is of merit, as well as in what fashion it may be worthwhile. I believe that it is ultimately the individual’s decision on the merit or worthiness of any given work. Whether or not a work is considered “literature” by some arbitrary group should not dictate the social, intellectual, or legal value of that work. I believe that it’s possible to rephrase the current definition such that the intent of the term remains, but the terminology becomes less restrictive, and I feel that doing so is necessary towards doing away with segregational labels. I believe a better way to think about literature is that it is verbal art.
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Final Fantasy IV

The Final Fantasy series of games, developed by Squaresoft,[1] have proven to be one of the few places one could consistently go to for a reasonable narrative within a story. The games are simple in terms of interface, and ludologically speaking generally don’t need a great deal of timing or frenetic pace. Final Fantasy IV was originally developed by SquareSoft in 1991 for Nintendo’s Super Famicom game console. Shortly afterwards, it was localized (translated), and brought to the U.S. as Final Fantasy II for the Super Nintendo (the original Final Fantasy II and Final Fantasy III never left Japan). This was really the first console based video game to heavily emphasize narrative, and enjoyed moderate commercial success for it.

Final Fantasy IV is a story centering around Cecil, a dark knight in the service of the king of Baron. After questioning a particularly brutal order, Cecil is stripped of rank and sent off on a courier mission, which ends with the destruction of a village. This is the last straw for Cecil, and he begins his quest to put an end to Baron’s villainy. The plot takes several twists and turns, and ultimately ends on the planet’s moon, where an evil being known as Zemus has been manipulating the chain of events transpiring on the planet. As far as subtle and complex story lines go, it’s pretty simplistic. The dialogue is on par with a high school fantasy adventure, and none of the plot twists really take you by surprise at all (I should mention that I can say this about even the first time I played this game, when I was 11). Yet it still managed to immerse the player, encouraging attachment to the characters you enlist the aid of in the course of the story.
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Virtual Economies within the Real World

As much as we might hate to admit it, a major element of social interaction is based around commerce; social hierarchy and structure has formed around it since the days of hunter/gatherer societies, and does not show any sign of changing any time soon. Whether capital based or commodity based, commerce is simply a part of the human social organism. It shouldn’t be surprising, then, that commerce has migrated into the online world as well. We are already familiar with using real world finances to purchase real world items via the internet (such as eBay and Amazon, among many others); what has become a hot topic for designers and scholars alike is the purchase of virtual goods with real or even virtual money through virtual worlds.

Virtual worlds is a term that has grown out of a need to describe the communal aspect of massively multiplayer online games (MMOG) in a manner that delineates it from the ludological elements of the game. “Virtual World” and MMOG are used relatively interchangeably at this time, though they will continue to diverge as more research and study is performed: a MMOG is by nature a virtual world, but a virtual world needn’t have any ludological element to succeed.

As virtual worlds have grown in complexity and popularity over the past several years, they have begun to take on more and more elements from daily life, including that of commerce. Most virtual worlds have methods for sale and trade of items and virtual currency between players, most often based around the auction house method of sale: you place an item up for bid with a minimum asking price; players bid on the item until the minimum asking price (or more) is offered, at which point the item is sold. Alternatively, player to player private transactions can also be performed. These capabilities have enabled a new type of commerce: trade of real world currency for in game currency or goods. This originated via eBay, with early MMOGs such as Ultima Online and Everquest. These prototypical sales tended to be either in-game currency, or a high level character, selling for anywhere between $100 and $700. As time went on, the trend gained popularity, until it reached a point that people were collecting in-game cash for real world sale as a profession, primarily in parts of Southeast Asia where the exchange value would be maximized. These individuals have become known as “gold farmers,” and are considered a nuisance to players as well as the designers. (According to most End User License Agreements, the sale of in game assets for real money is not allowed, and justification for denial of services.)
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The Role of Writing in Games

[S]ince the games are generally about power, control, and those other primitive things, the stories tend to be so as well. This means they tend to be power fantasies. That’€™s generally considered to be a pretty juvenile sort of story.

The stories in most video games serve the same purpose as calling the uber-checker a “king.”€ It adds an interesting shading to the game, but the game at its core is unchanged, but at real way this what people enjoy, but somethings for football player can be different check this at https://www.sportsmole.co.uk/football/features/stupid-things-footballers-do-with-their-millions_424465.html.

Remember:€“ my background is as a writer, so this actually pisses me off. Story deserves better treatment than that. (Koster 86)

I would be hard pressed to state this thought in a more clear or concise fashion or esports. Put simply, the stories in most games tend to be weak compared to their media counterparts (novels, comic books, movies, television). Over the years, there have been a few exceptional stories that span larger issues, or address the nature of power and control itself; a modest number of games have alternatively succeeded in refining the “€œpower fantasy”€ into a more engaging telling, but the underlying principles have remained the same. Stories are tacked on, extraneous except in providing a context for player empowerment. While certainly not the sole issue, this is a fairly damning point when attempting to defend games as a valid form of creative expression.

So what can be done to improve the situation? The short answer is to hire professional writers. The vast majority of companies currently have their dialogue and story written and developed by the game designers, programmers, and artists themselves, rather than spending the money on a professional writer. Take the hint from the media that have come before: games are not that far different from comics, books, or movies, all of which have had significantly more time to develop techniques to tell a compelling and nuanced story, techniques that are effective across media.
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Annotation: The End of Eternity

Isaac Asimov did more to validate Science Fiction than any other author I can think of. He was seen as a gentle giant by his friends, and is to date the only man to have ever written at least one book in every major subject of the Dewey Decimal system. He wrote hundreds of books, so many that I honestly have no idea where he found the time to sleep, let alone have the life he had. The End of Eternity is just one of dozens of science fiction novels he wrote, all revolving around the belief that Mankind is meant to go to the stars.

The End of Eternity takes place in a Reality where in the 27th century, mankind develops a temporal field that exists outside Time, and extends to the end of eternity, which they call (imagine that) Eternity. This facility is used to monitor the advances of civilization throughout the millenia, to make sure that nothing dangerous occurs (nuclear war, plagues, even high drug addiction counts), and alters world in the past to change the Reality of the future. The main character, Andrew Harlan is a Technician for Eternity, which means that he is the one who determines and enacts the Minimum Necessary Change in order to achieve the desired change in reality.

In the course of his work, Andrew meets a woman of the 482nd Century, whom he falls in love with — a cardinal sin for an Eternal, since that woman exists within Time, and thus is subject to any change in reality that happens. He secrets her away into Eternity, and becomes involved in a critical project necessary to begin Eternity, sending someone back in time to become the “inventor” of the temporal field. He sabotages the project, but not irreparably (they would have ceased to exist if he had), and is sent back in time to collect the inventor, so they can try again. He brings the woman with him.

Piecing together clues throughout the book, he realizes that the woman is not in fact from the 482nd Century, but significantly further “upwhen”, in the 111,000s, which is considered a “hidden century”, where Eternity is blocked from entering or meddling in the time stream. He figures out that she is here to stop Eternity from ever existing, to stop them from meddling with time. Realizing that perhaps Eternity’s meddling brings more harm than good, he chooses not to stop her, ending the existence of Eternity.

The story is good, and works well as a science fiction mystery, filled with intruige. The characters, in particular the protagonist Andrew Harlan, are a bit flat, however, which puts a bit of a hinderance on my enjoyment of the book. I like the underlying message, however: that safety and innovation are unfortunately mutually exclusive, and that the only way we’ll survive is if we stop mothering ourselves to death. The pacing is good. I managed to read it fairly quickly (about a day).

Would I recommend it? Alone, probably not. In conjunction with the read of Asimov’s work, absolutely. Asimov tended to write in one story-universe, even though the books were separate. Even his two most well known series (Robot and Foundation) are actually connected and made of the same world, and The End of Eternity is no exception. Seeing the mosaic as a whole is really remarkable, and where I think the story gives the most enjoyment.

Asimov, Isaac. The End of Eternity. Greenwich: Fawcett Crest Books, 1971.

Annotation: The Dispossessed

The Dispossessed is one of LeGuin’s more lauded novels, having won a slew of awards including the Hugo and the Nebula (the two highest awards in science fiction). Indeed, it’s a brilliantly executed novel, with an amazing writing style. The ideas she posits in this novel were relevant at the time, and continue to be relevant now, which is quite the accomplishment. That’s the problem with it, though, at least in my opinion. It’s an idea book.

The story alternates between the past and present per chapter, both timelines centering around Shevek, a brilliant physicist who lives on the planet of Anarres, which is run as an community-centric anarchy. Personal responsibility and the opinion of one’s neighbors (since everyone must work together in order to survive) are the paramount principles of the society, which formed as an autonomous colony of its sister world Urras as a place to send the rebelling Odonians (the anarchist movement lead by a woman named Odo).

Needing the additional resources available on Urras in order to complete his Unified Field Theory in the field of Temporal Physics, Shevek leaves Anarres, rousing the enmity of many of his peers. The story bounces between the events leading up to his departure and his time spent on Urras (a “propertarian society”). From there, the story is largely about the nature of being in an alien society, and the greed of that world. He ultimately completes his theory, and escapes, arranging for it to be broadcast throughout the known universes, so that no government or world can “own” the idea. He then returns home.

There are interesting events that transpire within the book, and the setting is well thought out. The characterizations are well formulated. The book is technically flawless. Something about it rankles with me, however. Taken as an abstract it really feels like a setup; a way to preach about political, economic, and philosophic ideologies, couched inside a fictive universe. It’s the same setup Heinlein used in For Us, the Living, though he didn’t do it as well. The basic structure is the same: thrust an individual into another world (whether through time or space), and let that individual and the other world’s inhabitants have a dialogue about the differences in their cultures.

I don’t really have a problem with “idea books”. They can be a great deal of fun to read, and I tend to enjoy them. Hell, I enjoyed The Dispossessed, don’t get me wrong. I think what makes it sit uneasily for me is that this is LeGuin we’re talking about. She made a point of dunning expositional lumps in her book on writing Steering the Craft, and yet is guilty of writing a book filled with them. It just seems a little hypocritical.

All that said, I’d still recommend the book, but with the warning that it IS an “idea book”. If you are looking for conflict and resolution, this is not the book for you. Still, it’s probably one of the best books I’ve read on the subject of an anarchistic society that might actually work. It reminds me that one of the fundamental roles of science fiction (or speculative fiction, if you want to be more precise) is to push ideas forward, to couch the dangerous or frightening in ways that allow us to face them. To say, “Danger be damned, what if…”

LeGuin, Ursula K. The Dispossessed. New York: Eos, 2001.