Author Archives: stephenbeirne

Two Minute Game Crit - The Role of a Menu

 

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Transcript:

Hi, this is Two Minute Game Crit and I’m Stephen Beirne.

I mentioned before when talking about Vagrant Story, how menus work as a form of introspection, since a menu always represents something internal to the character you’re playing. You can learn a lot by looking at what menus occupy your time and interest.

Persona 3’s a good example because its menus are very pretty, which helps when you spend so much time in them, and also, usefully, they’re quite poignant.

So, what are the menus where you spend, or I should say where I spent most of my time? You have:

  1. The social links menu, showing all the people you can hang out with and when in the week they’re available.
  2. The persona fusion menu, which is a recipe book for mixing persona.
  3. And the battle menu, where you select the attack options of persona you have equipped.

Each of these menus connect back to your use of persona, obviously, but notably they also represent the planning of these relationships across different frames of time: the long-term, when plotting out your week of social activities, the medium-term, when mixing up which persona to bring with you tonight, and the short-term, when strategising with persona in battle now.

It’s clear that time is a big theme in persona 3—clocks, calendars, the Dark Hour—but what about the mental act of planning? Well, planning is important because of NEETs.

In Persona 3 there’s an epidemic of something called Apathy Syndrome, which makes people so apathetic they stop attending school or work and just fall out of society. When you’re using your Persona to fight monsters, you’re doing it to combat Apathy Syndrome, the jeopardy of which relates the growing concern in Japan over the rise of NEETs and Hikikomori, terms used to identify a category of mostly young people who are falling through society’s cracks.

Some do so unwillingly for economic reasons, while others are disenfranchised with what they see as the oppressive, career-led lifestyle that’s socially expected.

Many Japanese games emphasise community and legacy to touch into this sentiment and rouse interest in social participation, and Persona 3’s no different. It wants you invested in planning for the future by asking you to get active in thinking about an allegorical long-term social crisis. In Japan it’s a population crisis and irresolvable pension schemes and collapsing industry. In the game it‘s Nyx coming along and eating everyone’s souls.

And the first step to combating this, is by opening your menu and getting involved.

 

 

Video description

Stephen Beirne talks for two minutes on how Persona 3’s menu system links the fictional epidemic of Apathy Syndrome to Japan’s real life youth crisis.

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Music: Blind Alley
Composed By: Shoji Meguro, Kenichi Tsuchiya
From: Persona 3

Footage courtesy of:
TaD6644, Auxiliatrixie, Drawer-sama, MoogleBoss, XxDeadlyViperxX, VisualOtakuStudios, AP Archive, Reuters

Further reading:
A LONELY LOCKDOWN: THE HIKIKOMORI PHENOMENON, Post Bubble Culture, March 2011

JAPAN’S POPULATION PROBLEM, Forbes, June 2010

YOUNG PEOPLE AND WORK IN JAPAN: FREETERS, NEETS, TEMPORARY WORKERS AND SHY ABOUT WORKING ABROAD, Facts and Details, March 2012

SHUTTING THEMSELVES IN, The New York Times, January 2006

Irish Travellers and American Blindspots

PAL testcard

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I’ve written several times in the past on what it’s like to be Irish in the midst of the loose amalgamation that is the culture of videogames. I’ve tried to emphasise my surprise and suspicion that comes in hearing an Irish voice, an Irish character, in a game, and my delight in finding something I feel sincerely speaks to Irish narratives or identities.

What little cultural background I gave usually came in the form of brief anecdotes about how little we see Irish folk in games, which of course is proportionate to the country’s contribution in the grand scheme of the industry. Through negligence I withheld the more substantial context of the lack of presence of Irish identities in media beyond that of only videogames. Since today I’m writing about ethnicity and whiteness and representation, and I’m writing from a perspective that I’m increasingly learning is distinct from the bulk of my peers, this context is kind of necessary. Continue reading →

Two Minute Game Crit - Weapon Degradation


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Transcript:

Hi, this is Two Minute Game Crit and I’m Stephen Beirne.

Weapon degradation. Lots of people hate it. This whole business of weapons having a durability stat that you have to monitor in order to stop them from shattering into a billion pieces. And this is considered disruptive. There’s the sense that, when weapon degradation is working it interrupts what videogames are normally for, which is hitting things with other things. And when it’s not working it’s because you’re putting in the busywork to keep the game from annoying you.

This is not universal. There are plenty of games that are remarkable for their use of weapon degradation, like Fallout 3 and Dark Souls and The Last of Us. You can see the trend there that these have narratives which centre on survival, and the world being banjaxed. We can tell when needless busywork or additional stuff contributes to a game on a whole or takes away from it. As always it’s all about what the stuff says in the respective context.

One of the best games with weapon degradation, one of the best games in general, is Vagrant Story, a wonderful, incredible jrgp dungeon crawler Square did between Final Fantasies once upon a time. It’s got this great big cast of characters but the protagonist, a peacekeeper named Ashley Riot, spends most of time alone as he’s a solo operative.

Instead of friends, he has weapons, lots and lots of weapons. Your life is consumed by the introspection of inventory management and stat planning.

For our purposes, look at the two bars on the top left here, DP and PP. DP is Damage Points, which decrease as you wear out the weapon, usual durability stuff. PP is where it gets interesting. These are Phantom Points, and they increase as you use the weapon. The higher both of these bars, the more damage the weapon does. When Damage Points reach zero the weapon becomes kind of a dud, but you can spend a weapon’s Phantom Points to repair its durability.

The narrative of Vagrant Story is all about themes of body and soul, balancing identity and power through self-sacrifice. So Ashley’s weapons are building up a phantom, a ghost, an identity, but the more of a sense of personality they get the greater the risk to their strength. They grow fragile.

This all contributes to the weapon’s other, highly important stats of class and affinity, which also change through use and also build up in each weapon a sense of character. And then you can make your own weapons out of parts and give them their own name to call them by. ‘Wand’ might not be the best example of that though.

So, Vagrant Story. A great example of how to do weapon degradation.

God’s Work

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Today over tea, Laura picked from my head with uncanny intuition the question most bothering me this week: “why do you write about games?” She didn’t need to clarify the peculiar thing about my writing about games, specifically that I only write about games. I don’t write about books or movies or cats even though I also enjoy these things, even though I am probably fully capable to that end. If cornered I call myself a media critic—sheepishly, because people expect it’s a euphemism—but the truth is, I don’t write broadly enough to encompass the generality implied. I write about one specific type of media.

I don’t know why, I said half-honestly. I could write about films, but I don’t want to. I like to talk about films the way I write about games, but that’s as far as it goes. I hope someday to actually sit down and write that article on Return to Oz that’s been in my head since 1986. I don’t exactly know why I relegate my writing to just games other than I enjoy writing about games.

The best proper answer I can come up with is that when I was very, very young, my Dad confided in me the secret cause of Arnold Schwarzenegger’s huge arms was from having played so many videogames (which he enthusiastically demonstrated with thumb movements). This might also account for my silly interest in Schwarzenegger movies, disproportionate to their quality. I was impressionable, so it was impressed on me that games were wow amazing.[1] Continue reading →

Two Minute Game Crit - The Absence of Is


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Transcript:

Hi this is Two Minute Game Crit, and I’m Stephen Beirne.

What can the act of dying tell us about the afterlife? This is the question underpinning The Absence of Is.

Spoilers, by the way.

You play as one of a team of researchers experimenting with recording the images that fill a mind as it edges towards death. The images come from your colleagues, and them locked in vats in the laboratory. It’s your job to sedate them right to the brink of death so your machines can do their thing.

When you play back the initial footage, it shows a kind of ‘life flashing before your eyes’, highly-symbolic near-death experience story. As the sessions go on, the visions veer farther and farther away from reality and become more abstract and hostile. Objects representing trauma – a door, a monument, a desolate home – recur as motifs and eventually consume each person’s mind.

So they all end up dead but even at that there’s a little trick going on here, because I think this game is actually more cynical than it lets on. It’s much more interested in themes of unknowability than themes of discovery.

Take its use of mechanics – you’ve to flick switches to alternately sedate or revive your teammates. It’s dreadfully cheesy and seems inconsistent with the game’s otherwise sombre tone. Like its just there to introduce the sense of challenge and a failstate.

But when you consider that the game‘s not interested in answering what seems to be the central question and instead leaves everyone else dead and you still no wiser for it until some unrealisable tomorrow, then the possibility of accidentally killing a colleague too early is valuable in highlighting the loss, and your inadequacy, when you hit the inevitable dead end.

It’s a framing device, and sure on a whole, The Absence of Is is framed rather oddly. It’s supposedly based on an unpublished novel of the same name written by one of the developers.

So players who want to look into the game’s underlying message have to pine after this inaccessible, perhaps non-existent source material. It puts them in basically the same place as the research team. Albeit, hopefully, a little bit more alive.