The Ant Nest

Dec 5 2005

I’ve seen a lot of discussion recently about this Japanese fighting game. The fighters are young girls and the twist is that to make any damage permanent, you need to catch your opponent off-guard and take a picture up their skirts. Japanese and Western cultures differ in many ways, so I can’t profess to know what the creators’ intent is with this. Others seem more sure they know the answer, however, and are quick to either laugh or be outraged at the perversion that they feel is represented here.

But is it really that cut and dried? Consider an alternative explanation: In real-life fights, how many people get beaten to near-death? Fighting isn’t GBH, it’s a ritual of humiliation. The winner is the person who humiliated the loser. That’s why a “beat down” can mean no physical violence.

How do you express this humiliation in video game form? If you live in the ultra-violent West, you create Mortal Kombat and its infamous Fatalities. Perhaps if you live in Japan, without the fear of sexual deviancy created by paedophile scare stories and a dominant religion obsessed with “sex is evil” and the like, the act of taking a picture of your opponent’s knickers represents an act of successful humiliation, rather than an act of perversion.

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Ebert on video games, Part 2: Tomorrow’s Games

[This is the second part of a two-part post. The first part can be found here.]

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Ebert on video games, Part 1: Today’s Games

[This is the first part of a two-part post. The second part can be found here.]

Film critic Roger Ebert caused a stir recently by declaring “I believe books and films are better mediums [than video games]”.

It’s tricky to know at what level to respond to his comments. He readily admits to being “unfamiliar with video games” but sees this as no obstacle to holding such firm opinions because “if there were video games in the same league [as classic film and literature], someone somewhere who was familiar with the best work in all three mediums would have made a convincing argument in their defense.” Absence of evidence is proof of absence, it seems.

In a follow-up column, he further elaborated on his comments and expanded his assertion. Originally, he argued that as-yet there existed no games that could challenge classic film and literature. In this new column, he condemns video games to an eternity of inadequacy, arguing that the medium is fundamentally wounded by its interactivity.

There is a structural reason for [the inferiority of video games compared to film and literature]: Video games by their nature require player choices, which is the opposite of the strategy of serious film and literature, which requires authorial control. I am prepared to believe that video games can be elegant, subtle, sophisticated, challenging and visually wonderful. But I believe the nature of the medium prevents it from moving beyond craftsmanship to the stature of art. To my knowledge, no one in or out of the field has ever been able to cite a game worthy of comparison with the great dramatists, poets, filmmakers, novelists and composers. That a game can aspire to artistic importance as a visual experience, I accept. But for most gamers, video games represent a loss of those precious hours we have available to make ourselves more cultured, civilized and empathetic.

This is particularly tricky territory in which to manoeuver and, where appropriate, refute and argue against or concur and agree with. Direct questions like ‘are games art?’ lead onto ‘what is art?’ and other such philosophical questions that quickly lead you into a disorienting maze from which it can prove difficult to escape.

Nov 20 2005

A day in San Andreas

Since I’ve not played anything new in quite a while, I picked up a copy of Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas yesterday. Short summary: It rapidly proved just as intoxicatingly good as previous installments in the series and so it didn’t get put down until long after I should have been in bed.

While I played, I jotted down some notes - things I noticed about the game’s design, things I liked and things I didn’t, obvious things and subtle things - various thoughts provoked by playing the game. Some of these probably merit closer inspection in the future, some of them are pretty minor observations. For now, I felt like just throwing them out there in a relatively raw fashion and so, what follows are my observations from a day in San Andreas.

Nov 1 2005

First impressions of Trespasser

Trespasser was a game that passed me by when it was first released. Though I found myself aware that it joined the hall of fame of games that suffered from overhype and underdelivery, my knowledge of it was, until recently, best summed up as “that Jurassic Park game with the physics and The Arm”.

With the arrival of proper physics simulations in games (and specifically, their employment as gameplay devices rather than eye candy) in 2004, most prominently in Half-Life 2, I wanted to investigate the lineage of physics in games. A significant new feature like physics opens up a wide landscape of possibilities for its use, so I wanted to gain a better understanding of the feature by looking at which areas of that landscape had been explored before and how successful those ventures had been. Based on my hazy knowledge of the game, Trespasser seemed like a great place to start. A trip to eBay and a mighty £1 (+ shipping) later and my journey to the Lost World had soon begun.

My early experiences with the game have filled me with something approaching awe at just how far ahead of its time it was. Many of the ideas it was experimenting with in 1998 have resurfaced as unique selling points for some of the biggest games of recent times.