Games and emotions, part 3/3

Hello youse!

Hey, what time is it? It's time to finish up the three-piece series on games and emotions, that's the time! The last piece came out a handsome year and a half ago, and this one has been on the backburner ever since. Just waiting to boil over. :o)

Back then I was probably being a bit of a spoilsport in my take on modern best-selling games and their lack of the human element. I was being your resident lawful good social justice paladin or something. No matter, I still think I'm on the right track and will happily carry on for this last leg. ;o)

So, I was arguing that some of the most prominent games are made to take us right into their game worlds and world views, to let us experience and absorb another imaginary space altogether where we can be a hero who others look up to or fulfill other types of fantasies that would not be possible in our own world. That's a really, really good thing.

The flipside of that power and ability, however, is that those views and embedded assumptions and expectations can also be hurtful and alienating to some, when displayed as something accepted, or the norm, within the game world. This can sometimes be a bad thing. And that's okay, all games should choose their own story and narrative. We need different approaches, that diversity is crucial. Variety is, simply put, good.

But what if the range in the variety is really, really narrow? What if it's even converging on something familiar and reassuring, safe? Is that a move in the positive direction, or a lost opportunity?

Let's ask what Super Mario and Idea Channel's Mike have to say about the lack of inspiration and imagination, and challenging the accepted practices. The meat is in Mike quoting the French guy, near the 2:20 mark:


The earlier write-up did end in a bit of a minor note, so, looking outside at the Finnish Summer sky taking its last breaths, I feel this is the perfect time to spread some sunshine instead. 

The start will be rough, though... Perhaps it's best to jump right into the deep end of the pool, deep into the trenches. A bit deeper still. Okay, now past the Dante's neighbourhood. Let's say 'Hi' on the way (because everyone does that, and it's the nice thing to do.

Youtube channel Extra Credits made a fantastic piece on a game that most players most probably thought unspectacular and mundane - Spec Ops: The Line. It's a single-player modern military shooter, and at the outset might look like any other of its ilk. Guerilla Games introduces you to a realistic war-time setting, realistic graphics and shocking scenarios, and you'll expect gut-wrenching violence, honour and heroics. These things work, people love them. Until, perhaps, something starts to kick back...


Too long; didn't watch: This is a game that takes some of the ugliest parts of war and carefully, craftily shows them to you. Quite unlike pretty much any other action title before it.

I was taught how to play computer games in great part by Wolfenstein 3D, Doom, Duke Nukem, Quake and the like. They were the classics, built on solid gameplay and controls, dense atmosphere, horror or humour. The concept of the enemy was simple, they were either monsters from outer space or they were literally the Nazis. Let me tell you, for us kids these games were influential. In middle school I drew comics of the brave 'Risto Rohkea' saving the world from the Wolfenstein's various enemies - and I wasn't the only one doing it.

The blueprint worked. For the longest time there were no new ideas, no new approaches on the genre, and we didn't need them. We loved our wacky, horror fantasy first person shooters, thank you very much.

Our tastes for the shooter genre were set in stone, and our friends agreed. But, such plateau can hold you only for so long until, inevitably, the enthusiasm wanes. Over the years, our focus shifted to other games. Curiously, at one point nostalgia kicked in and we turned to older titles such as Colonization, X-Wing, Betrayal at Krondor and System Shock. Perhaps new games didn't have the punch, anymore. But it was in 1998, I believe, when we saw Unreal, or specifically, the first level of the game. It let us feel weak and vulnerable in a shooter, taught how we should avoid confrontation and look to your surroundings like a stranger, scared gutless in an alien world. It felt great.

Well, you know the story... After the confident start, the game swiftly crawled back to the safety of previous genre tropes. (There's a charmingly clumsy review from a punkster called "Blizzardic" from way back in 1999 or so, expanding on the topic.) The guns made less damage to the enemy than a really sore neck, and there were no mechanics in place to make up for the lack of pleasurable game feel. In contrast to the illusion created by the first level, you couldn't avoid the encounters either. Those first few minutes, however, were golden, and helped prepare us for the next stage.

The gears began trembling on one beautiful Christmas holiday when we got ourselves a Nintendo 64 and the venerable Goldeneye 007 (in their earnest enthusiasm, "Blizzardic" and his brother both wrote glowing reviews). The controls (boxy, yet super accurate) and enemy damage didn't allow for an all-out shooting spree. Instead, they persuaded you to take a different approach, that of a spy who would rather not find a single bullet hole on his Brioni suit. Perhaps it's an exaggeration to say that it changed everything about how we thought about shooters, but damn, I would like to say that.

Then, out of the blue, we saw a tangible, genuine shift in tone in the shooter genre. We were absolutely delighted to learn about Spec Ops: Rangers Lead the Way, first, then Rainbow Six, and finally Hidden & Dangerous. The games, published in the space of just over a year, adopted semi-realistic armed conflict settings and rules. One shot and you might survive, two and you probably won't. This dramatic change made the enemies and your team more human - you didn't want to lose any of your favourite fellows. We loved these games to bits. We came up with new ways to play just the demo of Rainbow Six, with three players hotseating. My brother abandoned his preference for inverted vertical mouse axis for this game alone - that's how much it meant to us.

Soon after, we began bouncing hard from new plain, regular shooters. It was simply more interesting and thrilling to feel the fears and anxieties of a single hostage or your own dear team-members during a scenario than to return back to the themepark of over-the-top violence, speed, force and hero-antics. Empathy for characters and the resulting investment in the game worlds became a much stronger craving than the ability to wield power and invincibility. We needed change.

Bring on games like System Shock 2, the Thiefs, Deus Ex and Splinter Cell, and all of a sudden it seemed like the action games had really changed for good.

With the power bestowed to me by hindsight, I can safely say that it was a plain misunderstanding. We were simply witnessing a new genre take form, today called the immersive simulation. (Mark Brown of 'Game Maker's Toolkit' will tell you a lot more in his video if you're interested.) These games comfortably adapted storylines and narrative tones that were more subtle and complex than payback missions "for shooting up my ride", because the gameplay supported and benefited from them. The shooters just carried on elsewhere.

Not only were shooters continuing to live on, they were actively blooming. Evolving from the aforementioned tactical simulations and their successors we saw hard-hitting titles like Call of Duty, Battlefield and Medal of Honor series. Later, we said hello to Halo, Farcry, Metro and Crysis. Online gaming was becoming the driving force for these games, spurring great number of players to compete against others in hand-eye coordination, dexterity, focus, improvisation, team work and situational awareness. I loved that this was happening, video games becoming a competitive sports. That was and continues to be a nice trend...

But wait. Now there's a fly in my peasoup and everything's ruined.

Most of these single-player military campaigns firmly stuck on to the black and white world view and sensibilities of Wolfenstein 3D in their narrative and tone. You're good, Nazis (and Nazi dogs) are bad, you do the math. This works great in a cartoon fantasy setting, of course.

The fly in the soup is that the shooter games no longer gave you cartoon fantasy settings. Some of these games were firing on all cylinders to transport us out of the imaginary sandboxes and into the most believable battlegrounds and real-life conflict locations. The presentation aimed to give you the sense that this was real. No punches were pulled when reaching for realistic character models, animation, voice acting, environments and choreographed set pieces. To see Wile. E. Coyote or a tragic Buster Keaton character fall down the cliff for the fourth time is fun and nostalgic, but the joke is not the same with realistic human characters.

The campaign settings aimed for realism, to make you think that somewhere in the world there just might be such a conflict going down. They relied on and tapped onto your world views, preconceptions and preferences that you build in the school and home, absorb from the papers, news articles and real-world coffee-table conversations. It's effective and useful because it utilises your existing emotional map and lets you play with it. You're a soldier for a nation, trying to kill others from the opposing nation.

These games reassure you that you can make a difference, that you're the good guy with a halo and it's your job to save the day and deal with the baddies. We now had real-life soldiers in real-life situations living to cartoon fantasy rules and laws. Suddenly the mixed, muddled and unrewarding notions about complex and confusing real-world conflicts became clear. Life was simple again - the game world rings true, it feels true, it feels satisfying.

I think it might've been this uncomfortable union of disparate elements - with a bit of haphazard pioneer spirit - that gave us the 'No Russian' incident in CoD: Modern Warfare 2 in 2009, for example. These folks understood how potent the combination of real-life feelings and game violence was. They only needed to strip away Team Red vs. Blue dynamic for a second to make the impact.

Around the same time, Atomic Games tried to go all-in into the subject matter of real war. They made a game called Six Days In Fallujah. Trying their best to depict what actually happened in a battle that took place five years prior in Fallujah, Iraq, apparently they got too close for comfort. They absorbed the source material and wanted to make players feel the war from the ground-level perspective. They talked extensively with the soldiers, seeking to understand and empathise with their struggles. The soldiers wanted their stories be told to people specifically as a game, which was now a familiar and important medium to them from not only their spare time but also training routines. Honourable goals, all round.

Meanwhile, the general public saw shooters and war games as child's play, a modern extension to plastic soldiers. As long as the true stories, ugliness, human loss and suffering were kept well hidden, games were free to play with war any way they wanted. But Six Days In Fallujah wanted to tell real stories, and that didn't go down well with the general public and army representatives, who didn't think games could ever treat human loss in a respective manner. The game, nearly complete, was shot down and was never published.

Game publishers got scared and pulled back. At least I haven't heard of another company trying to tackle the heavy subject matter, and apparently neither have the folks at VG247.

Military shooters abandoned the potential of narrative and remained content churning stories with the heft of a themepark rollercoaster ride. This is disappointing not only because I think these mainstream games could've been much more than this fluffy, spectacle-ridden pastime, abnegation, but also because of the missed opportunity to prove that games can evolve past the preconceptions. Game makers had a chance to re-evaluate a genre that increasingly took advantage of people's world views and the heightened empathy by using real-life settings and nudge it towards something that actually respected them... Well, back to square one.

Extra Credits ask why we, as gamers and game makers, don't stand up to the uninformed public who treat games as children's toys. And why we insist on using "yeah, but it's just a game" as a defense. None other than Six Days In Fallujah as the case example:

Damn, James, indeed.

Who's calling it's the risk-averse publishers playing safe in difficult financial times? Who's calling it's the players holding games to lower standards with regard to stories? Or lacking the courage to say that games can be meaningful, nourishing and powerful as well as "fun" and entertaining? Who's going to fault the ignorant public to whom we've given no reasons to see the medium as a constructive and meaningful passion even for grown-ups?

But I'm hopeful and without worry. :o)

The change will probably not emerge from within the genre, not from those aiming for realism and not from those grounded in fantasy either. I suspect we'll see changes when the landscape around the shooters has transformed. And we're already seeing just that.

Take a look at The Walking Dead adventure game series. When you strip away the action from a horror setting, you'll first ask if there's anything left. But what remains is, at times, more than you can handle with a straight face.

Life Is Strange will show you how the smallest things cause the greatest turbulence when you care enough. Gone Home is a story that doesn't show you much, but if you dig deeper and pay attention, you'll find thoroughly humane tragedies sitting beside a tale of love and warmth. To The Moon will first make you go "awww", then "hmmm" and then you cry, many times. It's a real bother, actually. Firewatch will make your heart flutter with immersion, suspense and unease. Oxenfree will make you sympathetic to teenage drama before shocking you with discomfort - the good Halloween kind, mind, stemming from a young person's fear of losing a friend from their life. Ico and 80 Days will make you slow down and appreciate glimpses of human kindness. Kentucky Route Zero will touch you in both mundane and abstract ways.

These games are unashamedly and honestly about emotions, feelings, which are all the more readily visible when only the game elements that support the narrative are kept. We now only need games that can weave meaningful and gratifying narratives, enjoyable game feel, and well-oiled mechanics into good combinations. Like Alfred Hitchcock's 'Birds', which grabs you and immerses you in suspense and horror, takes you into the town and community now rendered unstable by birds, but at the same time tells you something important in life that will stick with you... Umm... I'm just going to leave it there. :o)

And It's not just the independent small developers doing brave things. Just as we needed one the most, we got a new kind of hero to save our day. Only he's a familiar face, the good old B.J. Blazkowicz from the Wolfenstein: New Order (2014), finally showing us tenderness and humility in the middle of war. Here's a snippet, from 2:40 to 6:00 (or a bit beyond, for interesting ruminations on narrative cohesion and Edgar Allan Poe):


This is fantastic! Earnest emotions, cartoon caricatures and over-the-top violence can sit next to each other, it seems.

In time, let me make a wild proposition here, these seeds will blossom into not only more relevant and forceful action games, but engaging and encompassing games in general, across genres. But we've got got a small task ahead of us if we want to see this trend continue. We need to look for these seedlings and take good care of them. So let's not wait for the Steam sales when the right one comes up, what do you say? ;o)

Last time I promised you cake, but as it happens, I forgot to make it (I'm sure you know it's oftentimes a lie, anyway). I hope you're happy with the sunshine and daisies. Thanks for sticking with me on this trip. :o)

Take care!

-Janne

PS: That's a wrap on the Friday's Unofficial & Uncannily Unrelated Discussions on Games and Emotions! It really is true... :~) Well, now, onwards and upwards to new adventures and series!