War or gaming fun? Spotting the difference

A week ago I wrote a piece about ITV's blunder in which video game footage taken from YouTube found it's way into a documentary about Gaddafi. Ofcom were less than pleased with the lack of due process and compliance breaches on display. A few days ago, a BBC picture editor (Phil Coomes) wrote a playful piece in which he stressed the blurring of real and virtual worlds given the popularity and success of increasingly photorealistic video games depicting war or conflicts.

I only came across this article after a colleague of mine forwarded me the URL devoid of context. I think he knew it would wind me up and the gist of my response to the article can be found below.

Photo/realism

I get pretty confused about these kinds of posts from journalists, in which they attempt to link the digital representations of (usually) fictional war-based games with real world combat. I get that still images can look similar but there's a world of difference between experiencing war first hand and picking up a controller or a mouse and playing in a virtual world with strangers on the Internet (as in Battlefield 3 or Modern Warfare 3). Granted, Coomes was responding to a point raised by the photographer John Cantile, who claimed that the level of realism was such that the "next sufferers of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) may not even have left their bedrooms". The rest of the article seems to give way to Cantile's experiences rather than being the work of Coomes.

What irks me about these kinds of claims is the easy at which the impacts of one experience (war) are neatly overlaid  onto that of another (gaming) at the level of photorealism. You'd think that there's never been a thing called cinema in which actors depict realistic events a la vérite. When reading through the Ofcom report into the ITV blunder it's almost understandable how the game footage form ArmA 2 made it's way into a documentary - a failure of basic fact-checking before running with something grabbed from the internet, but it's another thing entirely to compare gaming to the real experience of warfare. This should be apparent to Cantile as he has photographed battalions in Sirte, Libya.

Fatigue

I'm sure Cantile felt "drained" after playing Battlefield 3 for many hours - I do too, but I also feel really drained after playing FIFA or Fat Princess online for large periods of time. However, I don't make the mistake of thinking that I am at the Bernabéu of that I've ever really played there, setting up goals for Lionel Messi and basking in the cheers or boos from fans and oppositional supporters alike.

The sound mix for Battlefield 3 is phenomenal - you can get incredibly disoriented with rockets and explosions erupting all around your character. This really can be a "hellish cacophony"as Cantile claims. It sounds even better with an expensive pair of headphones but that can break the verisimilitude - it's not often soldiers storm battlefields with big headphones, a games controller or a mouse and keyboard. I note he was a playing on PC - the only real injury the contemporary digital soldier will experience is Repetitive Strain Injury?

I know what happens when a player gets gets shot in Battlefield 3 as I've been killed several thousand times. You get a kill-cam of the player who shot you, overlaid with stats about your 'nemesis' (eg their weapon, their class, their personal kill/death ratio) before being dumped to a character load-out screen to do it all again. Very real. And let's not even go into how bad the texture 'pop-in' is on the PS3, further heightening the supposed reality effect! The texture mapping and frame-rate hardly contributes to the replication of reality (neither does having an on screen radar or ammo count). Just witness the realistic text effects below:

Anxiety

Cantile has spent some time attempting to match real world images to those taken in-game saying: "In some cases it is actually quite hard to tell the difference between my photographs and the computer version, which is deeply worrying. The level of detail is so precise that the virtual war zone is as convincing as the real thing". I'm not sure how worrying it is. As I've alluded to earlier, there are many other media forms that "look" real, but are not - they are representational or, in the case of games, simulational (see Gonzalo Frasca on this point). I think this is the underlying anxiety in the article - a point that is hinted at rather than explicitly addressed, and one which has connections with other moral panics about media forms and their supposed effects.

So the essence of the piece can be summarised thusly: still images taken from some war-based video games look like real combat environments. And rightly so given that vast swathes of research money has been vested in making these products look similar to the actions they depict in order to ramp up the dramatic experiences of gameplay. But it's somewhat disingenuous to claim that we should be worried about the similarities between static images of two completely different experiences 

Can women in games ever be more than 'tits and ass in a steel bikini'?

A provocative blog post title? It's inspired from a quote by Tom Farrer, the producer of the recent first person 'parkour' inspired video game, Mirror's Edge. Farrer was responding to an MTV interview which referred to the different designs of the game's central protagonist, Faith.

The initial design, by the Swedish developers D.I.C.E., had the Asian character Faith looking quite distinct and supposedly orientated around Western concepts of beauty - a little bit edgy with facial tattoos and an athletic physique. The end result was a Western conception of Oriental beauty - something which is frequently criticised by gamers from different geographic regions. A few sites have carried series of contrasting pictures dealing with the idealised notion of beauty (see Kotaku, Joystiq, etc).

A different version of Faith appeared on a message board, produced by a Korean gamer, which depicted what he thought was a more appealing depiction of Asian female beauty. As you should be able to see from the images, the amended picture loses the facial tattoo, has a narrower jaw-line, larger eyes, a smaller nose and significantly larger breasts. The story is timely given the recent release of the latest Lara Croft game in the successful Tomb Raider series (despite the review scandal), no stranger to having been edited by fans.


The MTV interview with Farrer was quite revealing. He wasn't exactly overjoyed that the character design his team had worked on in an attempt to make Faith seem 'human ... more real' was rejected in favour of the new version. The following extract is taken from the MTV interview with Farrer:

“We really wanted to get away from the typical portrayal of women in games, that they’re all just kind of tits and ass in a steel bikini. We wanted her to look athletic and fit and strong [enough] that she could do the things that she’s doing.

“We wanted her to be attractive, but we didn’t want her to be a supermodel. We wanted her to be approachable and far more real. It was just kind of depressing that someone thinks it would be better if Faith was a 12-year-old with a boob job. That was kind of what that image looked to me.”

What is interesting about Farrer's comment is the focus on the increased breast size - it seems to sidestep the more pressing issue about the rights and wrongs of pandering to stereotypical depictions of ethnicity within representational forms. Lots of blog discussions followed the initial posting of the comparisons last month in which questions over which of the images was 'more real'.

We have to ask whether or not this visual preference of one Korean gamer is significant? Does it merely pander to juvenile concerns (inflated breasts) or does it raise more intersecting issues about enforcing ideals of beauty onto ethnic 'others' (part of a process which Edward Said referred to as 'Orientalism')? Can Occidental designers ever transcend their geography?

What does this tell us about the perception of women in games? Is it symptomatic of what Dmitri Williams refers to as the 'consistent pattern of male technocratic privilege' typical of gaming culture? In a conversation I had about the issue with a colleague, Dr Vicky Ball, she noted that the images were interesting in that they pointed to how the inescapable codes of femininity appear regularly in media depictions of the female form. The amended image almost seems to want to bring about a retraditionalisation of gender codes, in terms of the established binary divisions which seem to exist between Eastern and Western conceptions of beauty.

This seems to be precisely the opposite intention of D.I.C.E.'s initial design, however, when one culture attempts to aestheticise another there is always going to be some contentious issues raised about the legitimacy of the output.

Presentation inspired by Zero Punctuation

It's been pretty hectic at work the last few weeks, so apologies for not posting in a while. I've got the usual load of marking but a relatively tiny window in which to mark the material (as seems par for the course these days). Thankfully, I've managed to get rid of most of my marking from the Level 3 students (some excellent dissertations - 4 firsts out of the batch I've looked at!), and I'm about to start marking the essays for MAC281 Cyberculture.

It seems like quite a few students attempted the music industry's failing business model essay (11), a few tried pirate culture (8) and a handful tried the game design essay (7). I was amused that more people attempted the game design essay than bothered turning up for the seminar but what the heck...

Anyway, I recently discovered a few vids on YouTube by a guy called Daniel Floyd how appears to teach Art History/Media Theory or something similar at SCAD. They are a kind of homage to gamers favourite Ben 'Yahtzee' Croshaw of Zero Punctuation fame, and well worth a look. The first discusses the problems of games telling interesting stories.


The video below considers the problems game designers face when attempting to include material of a sexualized nature. Surely games as an art form should be able to deal with sex in a way which doesn't merely portray the fantasies of uber-geeks?

Games Studies: to theorise or not to theorise?

I spent a bit of yesterday morning reading a few articles and blog posts regarding the relevance and importance of academic courses into things like Game Studies with a bit of an arched eyebrow. It all started when one of my RSS feed readers (I have one for personal interests and one setup to specifically cater for the stories I talk about on this blog) picked up a story from the game site, The Escapist, by a certain Roger Travis. I suggest you take a look at it if you have ever felt that that studying courses in the arts and humanities is a complete waste of time (as seems to be inferred from the article).

Travis is an assistant professor of Classics at the University of Connecticut, so I presume his inference that I hinted at above was part of a specific stratagem to stimulate debate [note: I think this was actually a point picked up on in the comments section and may not be Travis' position at all]. Either way, debate it did stir, especially as he targeted a few well known figures in the emergent Game Studies fields (people like Juul, Aarseth, Murray, Bogost and Wilson).

His main bone of contention seemed to be that Game Studies, as taught on undergraduate degree programmes, is of little use to anybody. Actually another major gripe of his seems to be the attitude academics take to game players, but I might go into that in a later post if I can find the time. He claims,

'The problem with game studies ... is that the effort to create and maintain the discipline is keeping gaming from winning the respect it deserves. Against all appearances, scholars are pursuing game studies to the detriment of gamer culture.'

Needless to say, I'm not exactly convinced by this line of argument, given that it seems incredibly reductive. Also, I am aware that Travis was writing a short polemical piece intending to cause debate, which it certainly did. Ian Bogost replied to the piece via his own website and soon Travis entered into a dialogue which seemed much less hostile that the original piece seemed set out to be, which is quite an interesting read.

Now, academic disputes and spats are par for the course and shouldn't really always be taken at face value. After all, without provocation, issues can remain entrenched in safe harbours surrounded by mutually enforcing perspectives as Adam Curtis has pointed out here. At the heart of Travis' argument is that some academics within the emergent area of Game Studies are too heavily focussed on combining game design and game theory in a way which seeks to make gamers sidestep the pleasures and fun in games and end up becoming hostile towards gamers who do not want to get political (I think Wilson and Murray are his real targets here):

'Simply put, game studies' focus on design is what makes Wilson hate gamers. Gamers who won't get political, who won't be persuaded threaten to throw a wrench in the works of his discipline.'

This position of an audience for a media product who fail to engage in the politics of a text is not a new one. I see it everyday when teaching (old) Media and Cultural Studies. Many students view texts as innocent, or as individual works of art created with specific intentions (to entertain, to illustrate, etc), as value free or ideologically neutral. It can be a little frustrating attempting to get them to open up and consider something they may not be familiar with, but it is also very rewarding when it works. It's unfair to target all gamers/audiences for not wanting to get political as we are seldom encouraged to be political in everyday life. My position is that a game need not have an overt political agenda, but that will not prevent those seeking a stance from finding one. It is this dimension of theoretical engagement with media texts which forms the core of much of (old) Media Studies.

Now I don't have a problem at all in accepting the claim from some quarters that a knowledge of games (be that from experience of from study) may assist in the design stages of games. Indeed, by following the development of Far Cry 2 (Ubisoft) it is clear that people like Clint Hocking (Project Lead) and Pat Redding (Narrative Designer) often draw their experience from theoretically informed positions (although I'm not claiming that they had done Game Studies 101 courses!) - you just have to take a look at Redding's slides for GDA 2007 to see that. Likewise, I'm sure that there are plenty of game developers out there who have varied and different backgrounds which enable them to produce fine games or critiques of games without having had an education in 'New Media Studies' or whatever Travis wants to finger for criticism. But that kind of misses the point.

There are plenty journalists out there working for major publishers/broadcasters who didn't study journalism yet who are more than adept at their job. That is not going to prevent new vocation-led courses from appearing which seem to offer a tailor built route into a particular job. There was a lot of hostility to these courses when they launched in the UK, notably from established editors and journalists. To criticise Game Studies related modules or courses based on a handful of figures is a little unfair as it suggests lends itself to the suggestion that the discipline is unified and fully formed when it might be fragmented and disparate.

I have no issue with Travis highlighting the inappropriateness of some of the comments other academics have made but I wonder how effective a piece his article was when it inspires some of the comments found here, particularly this:

'Wow, just wow. Take away all the poetry and prose (aka "big words"), and these "academics" are no different than internet forum trolls, spoiling for an argument over a fight that is full of personal opinion and conjecture. I feel genuinely sorry for anyone who spends hard earned money on their courses. Don't be fooled, all this crap just tries to give the impression of being intelligent, doesn't mean it is.'

That being said, there are some genuinely interesting comments following the article and over on Bogost's website which are worth following up.

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Game design versus player control?

Gamasutra has an article which caught my attention today. I thought it might be useful for my MAC281 students who I will be meeting with tomorrow to discuss game design and narrative developments.

The article is by John Rose, a gameplay programmer at Nihilistic Software. He is also a contributing author to the 2004 book Software Engineering for Game Developers.

Converse to a recent lecture I gave which praised open-world games, (aka the 'sandbox' game) for their ability to allow player freedom, Rose argues that sometimes, simplicity and limited choice is better for the play aesthetic. I recently enjoyed reading Clint Hocking's thoughts on the problems of games like Bioshock in their offering the player a moral maze to navigate - one that might clash with the premise of who the lead character is actually meant to be.

Rose has claimed:

A recent trend in games is the ability of players to "play their own way." It's a design choice that includes more mechanics than any particular player will explore in a single playthrough. While superficially this seems like the Holy Grail of game design, the idea merely passes on the entertainment responsibility to the player. These games include a myriad of mechanics in the hope that the player will find some to suit him.

I argue that a few well-developed game mechanics in a strong play aesthetic will always be more enjoyable. Players ultimately want to learn and triumph over a system. But the inclusion of too many mechanics only serves to de-systemize the game.

It sounds a little like the utopian idealism of interactive fiction which Jesper Juul critiqued in his early work. Too often, the pleasure of the fiction lies in the progressive development of a coherent narrative, although it doesn't always have to be this way.

Rose goes on to suggest that Bioshock confuses players because it gives the player too much choice: choice over weapons, plasmid powers, hacking, stealth elements, etc. This is different critique to that of Hocking, which deals more with the 'Ludonarrative Dissonance' of either harvesting or saving the Little Sisters. I'm not sure I agree wholeheartedly with his assessment that Bioshock suffers from a diluted design strategy given its critical reception. I agree with most of his other claims about solid gameplay and logical gaming mechanics. I'm not sure quite what he would make of Far Cry 2...

Anyway, his article is well worth reading. You can view a counter arguement to his logic in Christopher Kline's presentation from IGDA 2007 below. It's entitled 'Saying "Yes" to the player'