Detestable Presentable Liberty

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

Spoilers for Presentable Liberty, a game by Wertpol. You don’t have to have played it before reading on but it’s well worth your time.

Speaking to Abnormal Mapping on the devastation capitalism wrecks on labourers forced to exist in its spaces, Lana Polansky says of a friend working in the games industry:

“He said to me verbatim, ‘I know I sold my soul to the devil for a decent paycheque.’ […] I said to him, you know, I have no job stability and I had to fight tooth and nail to get a decent income. After four or three years of working I had to fight for an additional year to busk for the money I have now. But at least I have my freedom. I have no stability and no benefits.”

This came in context of, among many things, the banjaxed atrocity that was Assassin’s Creed Unity, and its predecessor Assassin’s Creed IV Black Flag’s modern day setting of Abstergo Entertainment, alluding to Ubisoft as a soulless totalitarian videogame company. Both were regarded by the larger games press with all the detachment of a contented dilettante, unable to connect their subtext and inoperability with the working conditions that inspired the end result.

On Unity’s release, many folks were more interested in lamenting ‘patch culture’ than in calling for labour unionization, despite the clue being in the title. As examples go, it is just one raindrop in a torrent. I have to indict myself in this too, because we are a culture bred to consume simply in order to fulfil ideals of consumerism. There’s no time to consider the human cost of our purchases; we must feast. Continue reading →

Final Fantasy VII: Camera and Composition - Part 3

[This piece was first published exclusively to patrons at Final Fantasy VII: Camera and Composition – Part 3. What was originally an excerpt of the piece here has been edited to contain the whole text as of 11^th February 2015. If you like what you see and wish to support my writing while gaining access to patron-exclusive articles (one per month) and artwork, zoom on over to Patreon and sign up as a patron.]

All throughout the story of Final Fantasy VII, Sephiroth taunts our hero Cloud over deep-seated uncertainty of his identity. Cloud is a puppet, a military goon, a freelance nobody. He is a lost child, a second-hand personality, a repressed psyche. Although Cloud tries to overcome it, he eventually crumbles under the truth of it all. And then he builds himself back up, by acknowledging these factors of his existence as a part of reality he simply must accept.

But Sephiroth is above this. He considers himself a transcendent being, the only one on the planet of true significance, the only one real. Sephiroth’s bliss is his folly.

In previous articles on Final Fantasy VII’s composition, we examined how its form is dedicated to the task of communicating its many interlocking themes. We saw how visual symmetry can signify the spiritual harmony of a scene’s key inhabitants, and how the past looms large on our heroes’ trials to come. We noticed the subtle ways Cloud’s identity becomes a subject of doubt and distance for us as players. And we met a great big dragon.

Now we’re knee-deep in the Nibelheim Incident. Cloud, Sephiroth, Tifa et al are ready to hike up to the Reactor on the nearby mountaintop, where they hope to discover what has been causing a sudden boom in monster attacks. We’ll find out soon how all these threads are drawn together in beautiful compositional affect. Continue reading →

Two Minute Game Crit - Walking Simulators and Phantom Rides

Transcript:

Hi, this is Two Minute Game Crit. I’m Stephen Beirne, you can find me in longform at Normally Rascal.

Today I’m going to be talking about a genre of games like The Legacy here. In The Legacy, you walk around this deserted wasteland and eventually come across a few things of interest. It’s wonderful for a bunch of reasons I won’t get into in this video.

Now, games like The Legacy are often uncharitably called “Walking Simulators,” or “First Person Walkers,” usually by people who want to dismiss them. My gripe is, it’s a way of looking at the genre that’s stuck in a limiting mentality of what games can do and how the medium works in general.

So I want to break down some of the underlying subtext of these terms and challenge their continued use.

First there’s First Person Walker, or the alternative wanky version, First Person Experiencer. Personally I don’t like these variations because focussing on camera perspective misses the forest for the trees. It’s a common shared attribute but it’s not really What’s Going On, you know?

Anyway, they’re far more often called by the pejorative Walking Simulators, which is a name that came about through a very literal way to describe what you do in these games.

You walk.

Walking’s not seen as something especially interesting for a game to have because millions of other games feature walking already. It’s boring and normal. Most players are able to go outside and experience the joys of walking in real life. Through this logic, a game that simulates walking is connoted as valueless.

Now, this all comes from a mentality which erases anything that’s not a game’s mechanics from consideration of the medium’s formal structure. But look it, what the player does mechanically in a game isn’t always a clear indicator of what a game does in general. We’re used to this idea with horror games, so it’s weird how it’s a problem with something like The Legacy or Proteus or Dear Esther.

There’s been some effort to reclaim the term “Walking Simulator” but it’s so rooted in this backward thinking, I feel it’s still a fairly wrongheaded way to describe these sorts of games.

Instead I think we should call them “Phantom Rides,” after the genre of early films where the camera was shlapped to the front of a train.

Back when people were figuring out how cinema worked, Phantom Rides pioneered the whole idea of moving the camera on a rail to give a sense of animation to the viewer. People used to go to the cinema just to be “transported” from the theatre to a journey on a railway line. But it wasn’t just the novel sensation of movement, it was an opportunity for them to experience local sights in new ways, or to visit faraway places they’d never be otherwise able to see.

These types of movies were popular for a brief period before phasing out and being incorporated as film techniques into movies as a whole.

So rather than thinking of The Legacy and all them as “games that simulate walking” or focusing on other coincidental aspects, I think it’d be useful to reframe things to reflect what they actually do: transport us to other places for new experiences. That way, we can find better ways to express ourselves and to understand these games, without the burdensome language put there by people who, to put it nicely, aren’t really interested.

So there we are. Phantom Rides.

I’m Stephen Beirne, you can find me at Normally Rascal and on Twitter, or support my work by popping over to Patreon and becoming a patron. Cheers for watching.

Two Minute Game Crit - A Mother in Festerwood

Transcript:

Hi, this is Two Minute Game Crit. I’m Stephen Beirne, you can find me in longform at Normally Rascal.

I’m going to show you a small flash game on Newgrounds called A Mother in Festerwood, made in 2011 by Austin Breed. It’s a little bit buggy but I love it to death.

So here we are, we’ve got this overhead view of Festerwood with our house in the middle and monsters all surrounding it. You play as the mother, you use the mouse to move her about the clearing but you can’t go beyond the dotted lines. It’s your job to protect your adventurer son from the monsters of Festerwood by blocking him from wandering outside the clearing until he’s of a suitable age.

As time goes by he ages, grows and becomes faster and more agile. Before long he’s fast enough to dart past you and then… that’s it. It’s up to the mercy of Festerwood what’ll happen to him.

Austin Breed writes he was inspired to make A Mother in Festerwood by his sympathy for mothers who suddenly find themselves with empty nests, which is a great indication that he knows what narratives of parenthood ought to focus on: your child’s independance, rather than your own power and control.

I think part of why I love A Mother in Festerwood is because I played it around the same time as BioShock infinite and The Last of Us, which basically view parenthood the same way a general views an army. But with Festerwood, here was a game that placed importance on the role of your child as an independent entity and threw away all this nonsense about player agency being the medium’s key factor by having the mother and son share the spotlight, by not letting you supersede the narrative here.

How the game progresses depends entirely on the boy’s whim in where he wants to move to – you have to follow him around to hem him in, and then when he finally gets loose the drama of his adventuring is all in where he decides to go while you watch on powerlessly. Although it’s likely to be the longest part of the game and the mother is basically just standing there, it’s the most nervewracking part because all you can do is fret for his safety.

You don’t perform “active verbs” but you still participate with the game in a full on way, even if you never touch the mouse again for the rest of it. Basically the whole heart-wrenching gist of the game, the part that makes it so compelling, completely defies verb-orientated design analysis, and the rest of it undermines the romanticism towards player agency.

So that’s A Mother in Festerwood. I’m Stephen Beirne, you can find me at Normally Rascal and Twitter, and support my game crit through Patreon. Cheers for watching.

Why I said Ludo-Fundamentalism and not Something Else

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.

I’m not terribly happy to be feeling the need to write this.

Last year was good for me, writing-wise. I put out a lot of articles of a sufficiently high standard on whatever topics I felt compelling. It was creatively fulfilling. I also continued to find and refine my voice as a critic, to practise my ghost and hone it into a more distinct shape with each passing month.

It was—it is—an on-going learning process.

Part of that involved routinely scouring my feelings to find a way to articulate what it is my beliefs are on the medium of games, or on the narrative of a particular game, or on the discourse surrounding one or the other. Especially when I find my ghost at odds with how other people say we experience this or that, or how this or that exists in the world or ought to exist.

This led, at some point, to my use of the term “ludo-fundamentalism” on a couple of occasions to describe things I felt about how mechanics are often considered and weighted. I am not the first person to have felt and expressed these things, and I wasn’t the only person whose writing drifted towards incorporating these criticisms into our on-going analyses of games. Continue reading →

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