Category Archives: Notes

Job-readiness is a lie

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On Friday, the federal government announced it was going to drastically change how it funds tertiary education. Effectively, they want to raise the price of humanities and arts subject areas to redirect students into more “job-relevant” sectors. There’s many reasons this is very bad. First and fundamentally, there’s the ethical and democratic issue of pricing people out of tertiary education. This move effectively means individuals will now pay practically half of their tertiary education out of their own pocket (via HECS), a crucial tipping point in consecutive governments’ slow destruction of free, or at least affordable, tertiary education—a basic feature of any functioning democracy. Beyond this fundamental attack on a bedrock of our society, it’s also bad policy for more straightforward economic and job-creation reasons. It won’t create the increased skills in the desired areas anyway (a grade 12 student doing English and History isn’t suddenly going to enrol in Medicine because its more comparably priced); the identified job areas, such as agriculture, don’t actually align with the skill areas the government itself has identified as lacking (which are themselves humanities areas); humanities students are crucial for subsidising the far more expensive science and engineering and medical degrees, so reducing enrolments in these areas will negatively impact the very disciplines the government claims to be supporting. The whole thing is a mess for a whole range of reasons, frankly.

Other people will write smarter things about the economic failings of this plan, but here I want to particularly discuss the government’s focus on ‘job-relevant’ educations versus, implicitly, ‘job-irrelevant’ educations (such as the education minister’s own Arts degree supposedly). This falls within a broader rhetoric espoused by governments and repeated by students, parents, media, and university management and marketing alike that universities must increasingly focus on producing ‘job ready’ graduates with ‘job ready’ skills. Not that artsy fartsy theory and history and critical stuff but the hard skills that you actually need in the work force. (The skills that, historically, was the responsibility of the companies to invest in so as to teach graduate hires, but which companies have now convinced universities is their responsibility, that graduates should be perfectly formed workers and able to slip into their company-specific pipelines).

Here’s the short version of this post: Job-readiness is a lie that only works to produce graduates less capable of dealing with the world they find themselves in, less well-rounded as human beings, less able to think on their feet, and less employable.

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Wolfenstein 2 and Mending Broken Things

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Expect spoilers.

Wolfenstein 2: The New Colossus is about the ultimate fragility of two types of bodies that underpin Western values: the male adult and the liberal state. Each is a conceptual object that we expect to function perfectly—right up to the moment that they break down completely when confronted with something they were never built to deal with. The New Colossus is interested in what it would take for either of these to fall apart.

William “BJ” Blazkowicz is the quintessential videogame protagonist: a large, rectangular slab of white man-meat whose very shape belies how he has been a part of videogames since his flesh was square pixels. In the previous game, The New Order, he was an unstoppable hero—right until he was stopped, at the end of the game, by a lone grenade. That game saw this relic of the past of both his own world and videogames, revived after 20 years in a coma, left behind for dead. But sequels do what sequels do, and BJ was rescued, if not salvaged. When The New Colossus starts, his body is still destroyed. The opening stage has you pushing BJ’s heavy body through the level in a wheelchair, shooting Nazi’s with one hand while the other is on the wheel. Stairs are inaccessible and when the wheelchair inevitably gets tipped over, BJ is helpless. For a significant portion of the game, you are stuck with 50 health, instead of the typical 100, in levels that feel like they were balanced for a character with 100. It’s frustrating. It feels like it shouldn’t be this hard. It’s the frustration of a perfect, white male body encountering something unfair that is just a typical day for anyone forced to live in this society with any other form of body.  Continue reading →

Notes on Titanfall 2

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1. Titanfall was very good. Considering it was made primarily by former Infinity Ward members, it very easily could’ve just been Call of Duty multiplayer but with giant robots. But it managed to be more than that. Respawn thought carefully about the game’s balance. They had to. The giant robots couldn’t just be an instant win. Counterintuitively, if the game was to be about how amazing these big robots were, there needed to be advantages to not being in a robot. The obvious way to deal with this was level design: doorways and building interiors that a titan can’t fit into. Each Titanfall map had a mixture of wide roads and open areas for the Titans and twisting corridors and rooftops for the nimble Pilots. Make it so the player has to leave the titan sometimes. Easy.

The less obvious approach: make not being in a titan feel really good. If the titans are giant, clunky, invincible machines, then the pilots have to be the opposite of that. This isn’t just the default Call of Duty first-person controller. You can auto-dash, wall-run, slide, double-jump. The repertoire of your character opens up Titanfall’s maps in exciting ways. When you are clomping around in your titan, pilots could be anywhere around you while you are stuck in your little area. Titanfall didn’t just make the robots feel good. It ensured the robots and the humans felt polemically different, each contrasting and accentuating the strengths of the other.  Continue reading →

Notes on No Man’s Sky

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1. No Man’s Sky is a small videogame made by a tiny, indie studio that, like most small indie videogames, is clearly trying to achieve a very specific experience for a very specific audience. No Man’s Sky is a massive, triple-a videogame being released by Sony on a disc for a full sixty bucks that, like all triple-a games, has to please everyone who plays triple-a videogames. Both these statements are true, which, if nothing else, mostly highlights how categories like ‘indie’ are constructed more from a perceived sense of performed ‘indie-ness’ rather than any quantifiable factors. How you perceive No Man’s Sky is intricately tied up in whether you think it succeeds at being that particular thing for a particular audience, or whether you think it fails to be the next big triple-a open-world game for all gamers that it was set up to be (in part by marketing and in part by those gamers).  Continue reading →

On Brutal Doom

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As a rule, I am generally skeptical of fan remakes. Often, the rhetoric around them can perpetuate the already problematic discourse around videogames that conflates ‘more’ with ‘better’. The kind of discourse that assumes if a game has more polygons or more gameplay or more features or more levels or more stuff then it must be better than a game with less stuff. This is the games-as-content-buckets approach mixed with a technological progressivism that sees game design on this linear trajectory of continual improvement where new games will always be better than old games. Fan remakes often fall into this discourse uncritically: what if Link to the Past came out on the WiiU? What if Super Mario Bros was made in the Unreal engine? It’s this general idea that games are continually held back by the technology we don’t have yet, and with better technology we can finally fix these games. Of course, this is also the source of the excitement behind Final Fantasy VII’s official remake: now, at last, we can see Midgar for what it really is.

But somehow Brutal Doom avoids this. A mod for the original Doom that adds kicking, mouse movement, iron sights, new lighting effects, and a whole range of other features, somehow Brutal Doom doesn’t feel like an attempt to make a ‘newer’ Doom. Instead, despite the addition of all this extra stuff, it feels like an amplification of a core Doom-ness. This is Doom made Doomier. Continue reading →

On Firewatch, Gone Home, and the Oppressive Terror of Loneliness

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Spoilers for both.

On the first day of Firewatch, you are walking back to your tower after chasing down some irresponsible teens when a shadowy figure shines a torch in your eyes. You are in the middle of the Wyoming wilderness and no one is meant to be around, but now this man is looking right at you. Henry, your character, is startled by it, but Delilah, his workmate-cum-friend in another tower is nonplussed: it’s the wilderness, of course there are going to be some other people around. Sure, okay. But at the same time, the reason there might always be someone around is because, for the overwhelming majority of the time, there is definitely nobody around. That is why my reaction to the man was the same as Henry’s: I was startled. I was expecting, moment-to-moment, to be alone, to be that one human who happened to be in this particular bit of wilderness. Then suddenly there was movement. That was terrifying.

For most of Firewatch, you don’t see anyone. But the fact you did see someone that one time kept me constantly on edge as the game progressed. What if someone else just jumped out from behind a tree or walked down a distant path? “We can animate humans in this game,” that first reveal seemed to say to me. “We can do it again whenever we want.” That would be terrifying to see that movement. The absence of animals in this national park only amplifies that terror not of being alone but of potentially suddenly not being alone without any warning.

This is where I think Firewatch is most enticingly like Gone Home. There are easy comparisons to make between the two games: each is a walking game set in a semi-open world where you walk around and inspect objects and a story progresses. Each is a game about difficult personal relationships set in the late 20th Century. But these are easy comparisons to make. More interesting for me is how each game is about making you feel very, very alone, and then playing on your imagination to make that loneliness feel oppressive and terrifying, and then, finally, making you feel like an idiot for letting your imagination get so carried away. Continue reading →

On The Beginner’s Guide

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I didn’t spend too much time with Davey Wreden’s previous game, The Stanley Parable. I felt like I got it pretty quickly. I did, however, spend quite a lot of time watching students play it and listening to game scholars talk about it. While thematically I found it pretty to-the-point (all choices and agency in videogame play is an illusion), it was quite spectacularly put together. Just really beautiful and clever environment design.

What I couldn’t stand about The Stanley Parable was most of what was said about that game. I have an issue with analyses (especially academic analyses) of games whose themes are incredibly obvious. Suffice to say, I could live the rest of my life without seeing another conference presentation on what The Stanley Parable says about choice or what Papers, Please says about ethics or what This War of Mine says about war. It’s not that I think any of these games are bad, but more that they are games that I guess I don’t think require any thematic analysis. It’s pretty obvious what they are doing! Analysing how they do these things is still worthy (the difficulty of desk space in Papers, Please, for instance) but simply pointing out that The Stanley Parable is about choice just seems… boring and easy. To stress: this isn’t a fault of the games themselves.

I would rather analyse games that aren’t so obviously about a specific thing. Perhaps this is why I end up writing more about blockbuster titles than indie or amateur titles despite the latter two almost always doing something far more interesting. Writing a critical analysis of a blockbuster title is more difficult and thus (for me, anyway) more rewarding.

So on the one hand, writing about Wreden’s second game, The Beginner’s Guide, seems like a pointless thing to do as the game pretty explicitly tells you what it is about. The Beginner’s Guide is games criticism so to analyse it would almost be an excruciatingly meta exercise. My three favourite essays on the game so far (Cameron Kunzelman, Laura Hudson, Cara Ellison) all kind of circle around this challenge in different ways (and each has far more interesting things to say about the game than I do). It is an incredibly meaty game for a game critic to latch onto, but I’m also wary that perhaps that is because it is just too obvious what it is doing and, thus, any further analysis might not even be necessary. Continue reading →

On Super Mario Maker

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I didn’t grow up with Super Mario. My experience of Mario games is for the most part fragmented and third-hand. A friend owned a copy of Super Mario All Stars so I would see the first few stages of each Mario over and over again every time I visited. In high school, when I was getting into emulators, I would load up the same games, play for five minutes sitting stiff-backed at a keyboard, then never play again. In the last couple of years, I played both Super Mario Bros. and Super Mario World to completion on my WiiU and felt like I finally understood why these games were significant beyond the fact that many of my peers played them as a child.

And despite my frustration with the narrowness of videogames’ accepted canon (“Oh wow you’ve never played Super Mario World before??”), these are important games. They’re elegant, clever, well designed, imaginative. They’re the kind of games that if I played them in the late 80s or early 90s I would have been absolutely captured by their charm and the way they suggest through hidden paths and invisible blocks the existence of countless mysteries to discover.

Most crucially is the movement. The “sticky friction” of Mario’s inertia that makes momentum so crucial and movement constantly fluctuating between frustrating and fluid. While other platformers see movement as just the baseline on which ‘real’ interactions are developed, the Mario games understand that movement itself (of fingers, of avatars) forms the base pleasure of videogame play.

It’s for this reason alone that Super Mario Maker works as well as it does. Outsourcing level design to players was always going to result in an overwhelmingly number of mediocre levels. But that’s okay, because each and every level give you a new environment to move Mario through and a constantly new environment to explore. Movement and exploration have kept Mario fresh for thirty years now, and Super Mario Maker taps into this. Continue reading →

On Everybody’s Gone To The Rapture

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I think it’s fair to call ‘walking sims’ a genre now. The term started as a snide quip towards those exploratory games where the player ‘does’ nothing (in lieu of any attempt to understand how the player actually does engage with said games), but it does adequately describe (mechanically, at least) a collection of works. I think this is an important point to start this post with as I think Chinese Room’s Everybody’s Gone To The Rapture was most impressive for me in the way it forwarded the walking sim genre into new territories.

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Chinese Room’s earlier game, Dear Esther, was an explicit attempt at mechanical minimalism. Dan Pinchbeck said in multiple interviews (including one with me for an Edge feature on walking games) that he wanted to remove as much gameplay as possible to see what the bare minimum requirement for an interesting engagement would be. So they threw out everything except looking, listening, and moving.

Dear Esther would find itself centre stage in the incredibly boring and reductive debates about just what counts as a videogame. This is something I found ironic as, for me, Dear Esther is an exercise in videogame formalism. It is an exploration of just how players meaningfully engage with videogames once you move beyond the marketing promises of surmountable challenges and consequential choices. It provides a space to explore and the means to explore it. It challenges narrow understandings of what counts as ‘interacting’ with a game, putting to the fore the interactions had with eyes-on-screens and ears-at-speakers.

(In one of my favourite essays of his, David Kanaga says:

We can move or play in videogames—not much more can be said definitely. I am interested in a formalism […] that builds from this premise, that regards this movement in much the same way that musical movement is regarded, which has meanings, but meanings which are unspeakable, which are living in the material itself, and which mean very little divorced from the context.

I think walking sims exemplify this. Especially Dear Esther with its strict commitment to walking, listening, and looking as the only possible engagements.)

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After and around the same time as Dear Esther you have Journey with its focus on graceful movement and companionship; Proteus with its musical and relaxing islands (a ‘sit’ button replaces the more typical ‘jump’ button); Gone Home provides a singular but intricate space to walk around, objects to handle in a more traditional style, and a clever play on horror conventions. No shortage of individual creators have created their own games that could also be classified as walking sims. Blockbuster games such as Alien: Isolation have included extended sequences where the player does nothing but walk and look and listen (and of course such sequences existed long before ‘walking sim’ was formalised as a name). The genre has come into its own to an extent that I feel comfortable calling it a genre. Continue reading →

On Appreciating Final Fantasy XIII

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I remember in the past how I felt the only correct response to “Are videogames ‘games’ or ‘stories’?” was “Yes”. That is, rejecting the false dichotomy of the question that implies videogames can only be one or the other. More recently, however, I feel like my answer to this question (if anyone still asked it) would be “No”. That is, still rejecting the false dichotomy of the question that implies videogames can only be one of the other, but also expressing my feeling that neither existing category of ‘game’ or ‘story’ is really capable of encompassing just what the videogame form is capable of. Each has come to feel like convenient ‘close enough’ categories in lieu of actually understanding the particular (but not necessarily unique) engagements we have with videogames.

This felt particularly vivid while playing through Final Fantasy XIII these past few months. On multiple occasions I went to write a tweet about just why I was enjoying this much-derided game so much (and enjoying it I certainly was). I wanted to say that it wasn’t because of the story that I was finding it so satisfying, but I knew that if I said that then people would instantly assume that I am enjoying it for mechanical and systemic reasons. But these weren’t necessarily the reason I was enjoying it either. Neither category of ‘game’ (in the traditional sense) or ‘story’ (in the strictest sense) could adequately function as a shorthand for what I was finding so satisfying about this game. Words that would more adequately fit would be rhythm, style, pace, audacity, flamboyance. None of these really stand on their own as shorthands in casual game discourse, though. For that we have game (gameplay/mechanics/systems/rules/etc) or story (narrative/character/themes/lore/etc) and that’s about it. Box one or box two.

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