Games of the Year 2014

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Usually a Game of the Year article is a list of the best games that came out that year. This, however, is a Games of the Year article, which I am taking to mean games I played in 2014 in general, regardless of when they came out. Partly because I am a rebel. Partly because it’s a ton less interesting to only talk about games that came into the world this past year when I could be talking about games that were important to me, a human being who exists at this point in time. Even if they were made twenty years ago, and even if they were only important insofar as they were shite as all hell.

So without further ado, here is a list of whatever games I can remember having played this year together with a few short words on why, perhaps, they were memorable. Continue reading →

Final Fantasy VII: Camera and Composition - Part 2

Final Fantasy VII Camera and Composition

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In Part 1 we went over some of the basic ways Final Fantasy VII uses camerawork and scene composition to thread its themes throughout your playthrough by relying on almost invisible cinematic techniques. We talked about how the ramshackle slums are represented compared to Shinra-designated areas to illustrate a gap between the classes of Midgar’s capitalism, and how positive, navigable space differs from one to the other in how they ask the player to relate to these areas in the intersection of mechanics and composition.

And we touched upon a theory about the use of symmetry as a signifier of existential contentment. We rounded off the piece by suggesting Shinra is commonly represented as existentially harmonious, fitting into its role as an oppressive capitalist organization which currently organizes the whole world according to capitalism and oppressing its people. Its existence suits its essence. Likewise, a clear early location of Aeris’ existential harmony is the Sector 5 church, Midgar’s sanctuary for the lifeforce of the planet and the one area that best encapsulates her narrative arc.

Now, we could spend another million words viciously dissecting every single camera shot to enjoy their juicy semantic innards and all without leaving Midgar. But it’s time to move on just a little bit to look at a particularly exquisite narrative sequence that I’m sure is fondly remembered by all who played FFVII in their childhood: the flashback to Nibelheim.

And where better to begin this analysis than… back in Midgar.

Final Fantasy VII Camera and Composition

Okay, we’re actually on the very outskirts of Midgar. Cloud and company have just escaped the clutches of Shinra and rescued Aeris from her gruesome fate as a lab specimen, during which President Shinra met an untimely end at the hands of one ‘Sephiroth’. Along the way we picked up fan-favourite character Red XIII, so that’s good. We’ve ridden our crazy motorcycle and beaten the armoured tank boss, and now stand on the cusp of the great wide world beyond Midgar’s literal walls.

I quite enjoy this shot because it deviates slightly from what would become a tradition in Final Fantasy games: the beginning of an adventure into unknown territory. Typically you expect such a shot to occur on the brow of a cliff overlooking a beautiful expansive landscape, giving you a glimpse of the journey to come.

But here the party rests with their backs to the city of Midgar and we’re looking towards their faces (well, all except Cloud in this screenshot—he’s player controlled right now). While we can’t see the big open world they’re looking out towards from this angle, we can see them very clearly, which makes it an ideal angle for situating the characters as the focus of the scene and highlighting their past, here represented by an increasingly distant Midgar. Their future is unseen and unknown, whereas the past is accounted for as overcome (or at least escaped) ground. A bit of dramatic irony for returning players, here.

So in the fore- to mid-ground we have an abundance of positive space, for perhaps the first time in a non-Shinra-designated area, breaking off in the distance at Midgar’s looming, unassailable form. Even the colour palette suggests the future as brighter than that capitalist fortress.

As it happens, we actually do get a shot on the brow of a cliff (well, a highway) overlooking a beautiful expansive landscape just after the boss battle.

Final Fantasy VII Camera and Composition

It’s actually a wonderful environmental shot in spite of a few odd characteristics: it doesn’t really show us what’s beyond Midgar specifically, since the horizon is obscured by the trio of Midgar scenery, far-off hills and an as-yet young sunrise. Instead we get a general idea of what’s next in the journey, which is to say, not-Midgar. And secondly, although this is the bit where Cloud and Aeris state their intentions for the adventure, they come across on-screen as insignificant.

To be honest I’ve a more lasting memory of the alternative ‘Leaving Midgar’ shot so maybe it’s a personal whim of mine to find more to recommend it.

Anyway, moving on, the player organizes their party and exits through the foreground. If you make a party full of boys, Tifa and Aeris will both comment on your unusual choice before they set off together. Hopefully they’ll find something in common to talk about.

The next area is the world map but it’s compositionally dull so let’s go straight to Kalm.

Final Fantasy VII Camera and Composition

Kalm is a nice enough town. It adds a lovely shade of indigo to our encountered palette which is nice on the eyes. The architecture is rather distinctive but since this is a composition analysis I’ll leave it be. It’s somewhat of a well-to-do satellite town of Midgar, having profited off trade from the Mithril Mine further to the south-east as evidenced by through the shops’ inventories and various rare-ish items you can find about the place. And although the people here will never be the sort to join AVALANCHE they’re a hospitable enough bunch.

Anyway, this is the first place outside of Midgar we visit but we can see right away that it’s a townspace by the layout and the distancing and angling of the camera on the scene. The player can enjoy some downtime before meeting up with your party on the second floor of the inn to continue the story.Final Fantasy VII Camera and Composition

Aside from the reception area the inn only has one big room, which can’t be convenient if another party of adventurers were to show up. As luck would have it they never do. There are also only three beds but five party members. The game leaves their sleeping arrangement up to our imaginations.

This is the room where Cloud recounts what canonically will come to be known as the Nibelheim Incident, which he has decided is the best way to tell everyone about his relationship with Sephiroth.

You’ll notice the room is bisected by an awkward tangle of pipes running along the ceiling. It’s a common feature for indoor areas in Kalm, although this room might be especially bad for how they intrude into the scene. The pipes separate the room into two rough portions: the right side, where everyone has gathered to hear Cloud’s story, and the left side, from where Cloud enters the scene. It’s possible that the pipes are a total accident but this could be an attempt to discretely division Cloud from the rest of the cast, perhaps in apprehension for their present expectations of him. What’s a bit of trauma between friends.

I mentioned this in the last post but I’ll repeat it here because it’s a nice bit of choreography: when Cloud begins talking to the group he’s situated centrally on-screen, but as he sets the scene for the flashback he turns around and paces away from the group, stopping here:

Final Fantasy VII Camera and Composition

Now the pipes somewhat obstruct him on-screen, so the distance he has placed between himself and the party is mirrored in our own relationship with him through our diminished visual contact.

We have been given reason to suspect Cloud’s mental state at previous occasions where he has spoken confusedly with an unknown other, usually in times when unconscious or asleep, but this nugget of composition goes quite a way to specifically colour Cloud as an unreliable narrator in the tale to follow and foreshadow the twists in his arc much later.

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Consquentialism begone

Consequentialism begone - Morality in BioShock and Final Fantasy XIII-2

Words and artwork by Stephen Beirne. This piece is community funded – if you enjoyed this article or would like the header image for a wallpaper, please support my writing by visiting my Patreon and becoming a patron.

Endgame spoilers for Final Fantasy XIII-2 and The Walking Dead‘s season 1.

A group of friends, one of whom is a consequentialist, have gone out to the pub for the night. Once the first round is bought, the consequentialist sits staring at his pint intently, fully aware that if he gets to drinking he’ll wake up the next morning with a dreadful hangover. So he gets up, turns around and runs head-first into the wall. His mates, knowing the drill, pack him into an ambulance and resume with their craic, eventually retiring for the night each of them in some bloody state.

Anthony Burch posted this playthrough of BioShock where he restricts himself to certain rules as sort of an experiment. The idea is, it’s not much of a difficult decision to pick between killing Little Sisters and saving them, so maybe if we tweak the circumstances to a point where the decision becomes pertinent it will mean something. His rules are:

  1. He can only spend ADAM obtained through killing a Little Sister.
  2. Permadeath, for impetus.

His conclusion is that he found himself well able to get through the game without the need for ADAM and plasmids because the system empowers players to excel with firearms. Well, presumably he could complete the game this way; he eventually died from boredom. The closing sentiment seems to be there was no difference brought about by his self-imposed rules, and although the fact that he admits it was a lot less interesting to play without plasmids seems to contradict this, it’s not addressed. From a critical perspective, the experiment peters off in a really sad, unreflective way.

What does this have to do with consequentialism? Burch is of the opinion that the moral dilemma presented in BioShock goes nowhere because the amount of ADAM you get from killing Little Sisters is pretty much equal to what you get from saving them. All consequences being the same, there is no tangible difference between the two actions, so the dilemma collapses.

This is a pretty common reading of BioShock among some big-name developers and designers. It is horrible. It comes from a place of ludic fundamentalism where games are ‘about’ their mechanics and so games must show reflection through their mechanics. By this line of thought, a change in the narrative that is not represented by a change in gamestates is existentially deficient. A moral dilemma that does not branch off into two mechanically (or systemically)-differentiated paths is not a dilemma, so therefore cannot speak of morality.

Worse still, this vein of thought is a capitalist consequentialism that can only view states in terms of the rewards and prizes they offer (more or less ADAM), since narrative distinction of an action of consequence is removed from consideration. Which is a pretty evil worldview from my perspective, if I’m being honest. The way to have an impactful, meaningful game is to offer divergent rewards for whatever divergent paths have been presented. This is how meaning is generated through the medium of videogames, it is the only manner through which games can affect players, which is why no-one cried after the first season of The Walking Dead.

Now, as I mentioned Burch’s conclusion is to point to his lack of impetus to harvest Little Sisters as proof of the game’s failure to provide any true dilemma. Frustratingly, he doesn’t plug the result of his experiment back into the text to see how it creates or created narrative. One could posit his lack of impetus to slaughter Little Sisters actually substantiates the Objectivist tones of the game’s cosmology since Burch found self-sufficiency without needing to contradict his personal moral code, and that the game is made more powerful as a text by accounting for this approach/reading/playthrough. Perhaps that is outside the scope of his article, but the fact that he seems to think the experiment bolters Jonathan Blow’s reading of the game suggests it didn’t occur to him.[i]

To get to my point, Burch indicates his playthrough reveals the absence of any real dilemma within the game as a text (i.e. narratively). This in spite of the tautology of the moral dilemma (‘Save the Little Sisters’ versus ‘Harvest the Little Sisters’) as a narrative framing device in the game beyond the mechanical or gamestate effects that might or might not follow. The fact of the dilemma as a (effective[ii]) framing device establishes it as meaningful, as impactful on narrative, regardless of consequences. Consider it in terms of this more overtly illusory moment of choice in Final Fantasy XIII-2.

At the arse end of the story, heroes Noel and Sarah finally appear victorious over Caius Ballad, the main antagonist, who has been pissing round with the timestream to try to save a mutual friend, Yuel, from eternal torment. Caius has just realised his own death can put an end to Yuel’s cycle of rebirth and death, so he goads Noel into killing him. Noel is now faced with the crisis of having to decide between ending the tragic villain’s life, thereby fulfilling his mission and letting Yuel rest in peace, or upholding his own respect for the value of human life and sparing his old mentor. As Noel’s sword plunges towards Caius’ heart, the player is given the on-screen prompt: ‘Show mercy’ or ‘Kill him’.

Whichever one you chose Noel will decide to spare Caius’ life (and Caius will go ahead and kill himself anyway) but the moment the choice of input is presented to the player facilitates reflection and inquiry into the circumstances. The dilemma inspires meaning regardless of the single possible consequence.

 

[i] Why Jonathan Blow is made an authority on moral narratives is beyond me.

[ii] Very important to note that narrative and meaning are self-identifying. An effective plot point conveys meaning and affects the player’s experience, whereas an ineffective plot point fails to achieve anything. I can only rely on my own experiences in this regard, but as an example of an ineffective, on-the-face meaningless dichotomy/choice moment in a game I would personally suggest choosing heads or tails in BioShock Infinite, or deciding between the cage or the bird in the same game, as moments that were intended to frame narrative but at the time felt utterly empty. Of course, we can then feed this back into the text hermeneutically to get something else out of it and have it produce meaning that way, chasing our tails until the end of time.

Final Fantasy VII: Camera and Composition - Part 1

Final Fantasy VII: Camera and Composition

This piece was originally published exclusively to patrons on the 29th of November 2014 before being made available to all readers one week later. I intend for this to be the custom for one of my articles every month. To gain access to such patron rewards and to help make sure more articles like this exist in the future, please consider visiting my Patreon and becoming a patron.

A few weeks ago I gave a compositional walkthrough of a single room in Project Zero 2 – the projector room of the Tachibana House – illustrating how the game’s use of camerawork depicted an environment which is subversive of safe spaces.[i] Since Project Zero 2 is a horror title this meant highlighting the strengths of its use of perspective within the context of the game as a whole, which is to say how visualized or represented space translates to perceived dangers and securities.

Another game that uses a second-person perspective[ii] to wonderful compositional effect is Final Fantasy VII, with a ‘cinematic’ reputation that’s lasted the nearly twenty years since its release. This longevity is justified—even as children most of us wordlessly understood how its stellar use of cinematography contributed to the experienced narrative.

What I’d like to do today is revisit FFVII with this particular mechanism in mind, to glance composition off against storytelling for perhaps previously unnoticed nuances (at least, unnoticed from my own perspective). It’s worth stressing that it is a mechanism: the use of camera to frame and juxtapose characters, actions and scenery relates conscious decisions on behalf of its creators. Simply the very nature of modelling its pre-rendered backgrounds[iii] establishes how fused they are with intention—our visual relationship to the world is so fixed to narrative design that camera and scenery nearly become one thing.

Since it’s best not to assume everyone has played the game, a little bit of exposition is warranted. The story of Final Fantasy VII focuses on Cloud, an ex-military mercenary who at the game’s beginning is working for the eco terrorist group AVALANCHE in Midgar city. Nearly the entire world is under the rule of the Shinra Electric Power Company, owing to its monopoly on Mako energy, an oil analogue. The corporation/world-government’s highly industrial and capitalistic structuring has lead to widespread social oppression, together with its mining of Mako, the planet’s lifeblood, informing AVALANCHE’s resistance. Initially Cloud is only in it for the paycheck but before long the fight against Shinra connects back to an old personal adversary and war buddy, Sephiroth, whose own designs for humanity spell catastrophe.

Final Fantasy VII: Camera and Composition

Figure 1

 

So two fairly clear-cut examples of FFVII’s deliberate camerawork occur quite early on. The first is not ten minutes into the game: Cloud and co. are infiltrating the Sector 1 Reactor on a sabotage mission, and after Barrett tells the player-through-Cloud what’s what [fig. 1.1], the resistance group continues toward the reactor while Cloud remains immobile [fig. 1.2]. The camera descends towards him from its isometric position before swooping around his back and tilting upwards, showing us AVALANCHE’s looming destination [fig. 1.4]. Cloud then hurries on to catch up with his crew.

This simple camera movement does a couple of things for us quite effectively. The most obvious is that it shows us the reactor we intend to send sky high, the enormity of which conveys magnitude and severity onto AVALANCHE’s terrorist action, while conversely characterising the group as rather minuscule.

A second effect is to approximate the player to Cloud’s position in relation to both AVALANCHE and the reactor (and implicitly Shinra): the motion of the camera towards Cloud offers intimacy and insight into his perspective. Bearing in mind this occurs right at the start of the game when we know nothing about anything, this slight connection with our character, however briefly, has a lingering effect on our perspective into the narrative. Continue reading →

Kuchera’s Fraying Seams

Kuchera's Fraying Seams

Art and words by Stephen Beirne. This piece is community funded – if you enjoyed this article or would like the artwork as a wallpaper, please consider supporting my writing by visiting my Patreon and becoming a patron.

“So a very odd thing was happening in the middle of this economic crisis, which was that capitalists had begun to talk about capitalism. It’s not often they do that because ideology resists an unmasking.”

Terry Eagleton - Why Marx Was Right, Dublin 2014

I am that much of a fool that I read Ben Kuchera’s recent article about the latest Assassin’s Creed. In spite of the fact that I more or less knew what I was getting into beforehand given how I plainly accept I am, to put it lightly, not a fan of his work, I still found myself in a rather unkind state of mind following the piece.

In it, Kuchera expresses the relief he feels at discovering Assassin’s Creed: Unity to be an unplayable buggy mess, such that it no longer binds him to go out and buy the game. It’s an unburdening, a release from one’s unspoken, self-imposed obligation, shared, Kuchera notes, by many fans of the series. The supposedly preposterous thing here and the reason it’s being presented as a curious twist of nature is people are glad they don’t have to buy a game from a franchise they’ve come to enjoy. They’re pleased to be able to write it off. It means they can move on to the next enormous franchise, as if a Metacritic score is the magic word to break their curse.

Now this isn’t a particularly original phenomenon nor is it intriguing in this case by its severity—there have been bigger technical and commercial failures in recent enough memory. Kuchera isn’t breaking new ground. What grabbed me is how he is describing a real social exhaustion with the status quo explicitly through concepts built to empower its continued existence, in that many people do feel stress and are actually relieved that they don’t feel compelled to buy Unity, but the explanation grasped here is the one most accessible to their projected mindset: a capitalistic solution to a problem inherent with capitalism.

So Kuchera glances over the frustration people are feeling to address it as an opportunity, using language friendly to a familiar capitalist framework: the issues we’re facing are budgetary (he has the dubious sense to attribute time as a resource but frames it as a currency to spend); the danger in buying a bad game is wasted money; our ‘identity’ as hobbyists informs the rate at which we must participate with media; our duty as “dedicated players” is to comply with mass consumption of media; the underlying assumption that we are responsible, by our own pleasure, to purchasing games as close to launch as possible; we ought to organize and schedule our leisure to justify keeping up with new releases to appease this responsibility; alternative games we could be buying are xyz from other equally hyped highly lucrative franchises. He conciliatorily frames this in the benevolent facsimile of consumer advocacy, an increasingly common way to present as progressive while pleasing one’s free market sponsors, or in other words, to say much and do nothing.

If this is the solution, the problem seems to be people are not yet epicurean enough. Not too terrible when put like that, except that the prospect of becoming more decadent, of achieving the objects of our desires (in this case, buying Unity), isn’t supposed to be daunting in and of itself.

Rather, in my experience, the sense of frustration isn’t solved when sated or when the item of affection is made redundant. It’s actually a condition of the very act of purchasing, which we are told from a very young age and all throughout our lives to be an intrinsically enjoyable act. It’s an economic deed to be treasured, to thrive off spiritually. The more prestigious the goods bought the more thrilling the exchange for its ownership—hence the importance on day-one purchases, and hence the crises of embargoes and pre-orders and Collector Editions and Elite Collector Editions, which stymie or galvanize the prestige. Normalization of this economic is instituted alongside a network of values also culturally ingrained to promote and safeguard its continuation, first by endearing the act to our worldly human existences, and second by convincing us of its necessity.

Thus the ideology is made self-fulfilling. Pursuit of the joy of purchasing is itself a wonderfully cyclic process in that all that’s required is to suddenly come into possession of an item to satisfy the Pavlovian conditions. To get this thrill from the purchase we don’t even need to consume the item, which is to say devour it and destroy it, although the language we use in describing that particular and distinct act is also deliciously capitalistic—we assimilate our possessions, they become a part of our spirituality, and therefore materiality breeds completeness.

Like language informing thought, thought informs reality. For those of us reared on the value of the act of purchasing, the simple act of it can have a soothing effect, observable in the wild and everything. We can enjoy it and we often do enjoy it; that’s why levelling up is so enjoyable in spite of its propagandistic connotations; that’s why it’s effective as propaganda. Just because it’s artificial doesn’t mean it’s not real, and just because it’s real doesn’t mean it’s natural. It is a fragment of the dominant ideology, and dominant ideologies are notoriously allergic to making themselves known, since in admitting themselves as constructs they acknowledge an alternative world without them. The lull we experience when faced with overindulgence and overconsumption (consumerism placing ‘consuming’ as synonymous with ‘purchasing’, as if the latter act itself is consumptive) reveals this artificiality—it’s a discomfort of cognitive dissonance, a seemingly spiritual emptiness when our acceptance that purchasing is fulfilling is unmet, when the promise of the joy of buying more and owning more fails to correlate with delighting more, and we cannot rationalize it as otherwise without contradicting a basic part of ourselves.

Which is why Kuchera’s article is compelling, because you can see he’s acknowledging a problem inherent to his ideology and the loops through which he jumps to resolve it in a compatible way without veering too close to pursuing the underlying thought. It is painful to tread that route, especially when it’s so much easier to grasp at air for opt-outs pre-installed in the status quo. If you track Kuchera’s work over the past few years you might find a gentle trend towards this level of self-reflection, perhaps ebbing toward substantiating his ‘changed man’ narrative since his shift to Polygon. As I wrote this post and left it to settle, hasn’t he gone and published a piece on ideology as a way to describe the Gamergate mania, complete with a video by Marxist philosopher Slavoj Zizek. But only after it’s safe to do so. He’s still bang smack in the capitalist mindset himself but it’s an encouraging sign.