On Madness and Pixel-and-Code Men

As this is a gaming blog and not a political one, we don't often discuss politics here. However, I felt that this time, we could make an exception.

Anyone who has been following the news lately will know of the current military crisis occurring in the Gaza Strip between Israel and Hamas. Now, I do not wish to discuss which party is right or wrong here. However, regardless of who I believe is right or wrong, or even if I believe there can be a right or wrong in this situation, I couldn’t help but feel disgusted at both sides involved in the conflict. Even with Israel “mulling” over the possibility of a 48 hour ceasefire, I am shocked at the Israeli official who earlier declared that Israel “would fight to the bitter end,” at the Israeli citizens who felt that their government was not being heavy-handed enough against Hamas, and at the Hamas vow to avenge the more than 300 Palestinians killed by Israeli ordnance. Their entire cosmology seems to be one of absolutes – some delusional world of black and white.

What I find troubling is not the sense of justification and blamelessness that both sides seem to embrace. Instead, it is their inability to see the humanity that lies behind the rockets and the F-16s, the insurgent’s scarf and the Israeli tank. Members of both sides seem to hold the illusion that Hamas insurgents are born with bombs strapped to their chests, and that Israeli soldiers develop with fighter jets and assault vehicles en-utero. They forget that every rocket is a cry of protest and for help against the treatment of the Palestinians of the Gaza Strip, and that the scream of jet fighters overhead is the echo of a voice of an Israeli citizen or child forever silenced.

What shocks me even more, however, is the ability of the current conflict to shock me out of my usual apathy. Those of you who know me know that I am, in no way, a bleeding heart utopian advocating some fantastical notion of world peace. I am one who sees humans as naturally predatory creatures whose only sources of true competition and danger are each other, and I believe that this should not be shunned but embraced. I am one who is not troubled by the concept of war, not even one motivated purely by expansion or a desire for resources. I grant that this worldview is the result of my existence as an American, fortunate enough to have been born into the most powerful and prosperous country in the world, and that my stance might very well be different if I were born in, say, Israel or Korea or Africa. I am a privileged person, part of the global ruling elite, and my views are a product of that. However, removed elitism and madness are two different and disproportionate evils, and the blind demonization of Hamas militants by Israeli officials and citizens or of Israeli soldiers by the extremist Muslims is the latter of the two.

This makes me wonder if demonization is necessary for combatants to partake in combat. In video games, and particularly in shooters, there is an unquestionable tendency to demonize the party or group that is in opposition to the player. The common trend is to reduce the player’s enemies to inhumanity behind overriding personas of “Mercenary” or “Nazi,” or “Red Team” or “Blue Team,” or to even remove the human aspect altogether using robots, aliens, true demons, or other sorts of intrinsically inhuman characters. The Call of Duty series, especially its most recent installment, is a notable exception to this. Activision’s commercial for World at War is narrated by a Japanese soldier who states his motive as the defense of his homeland – a commendable motive that can be appreciated even by elitist assholes like myself. The game’s single-player campaign builds upon this, using the brutalization of German soldiers at the hands of the Soviets to call into question the true motives behind some of the player’s allies, including the man who has stood by him since saving his life in Stalingrad. However, even these attempts stop short of showing the true humanity of the opposing force. The human is lost behind a high-resolution façade of Swastika and banzai charges. Ultimately, you are left fighting the usual Nazis and an interesting and new but ultimately equally inhuman Japanese infantrymen.

I can remember only one kill that I found to be truly difficult and jarring. It was the first soldier I killed in Goldeneye 007, the first shooter I ever played. Since then, I have mowed down millions of polygon men regretting little more than perhaps wasting more ammo than was necessary. RPGs like Fallout 3, to be fair, presented scenarios that have made pulling the trigger difficult. However, these do not strike me as being as poignant as shooters. For every potential murder in an RPG, there is the possibility of sparing the person’s life and playing the game a different way. Even when pursuing the evil path, I found it too easy to avoid the most difficult and sadistic tasks by simply slaughtering a town of rifle-toting do-gooders. Shooters, due to their linear nature, do not offer such a multiplicity of possibilities, and as such may offer much more jarring and poignant moral dilemmas to the player in preventing him from avoiding to make the undesirable choice. In Goldeneye, I could either kill the guard, or blow the mission. I killed the guard, and stood over his corpse with jaw ajar and PP7 smoking. I wish to stand there again, staring from the edge of morality into the maddening abyss of necessity, and to see with innocent eyes the humanity of a faceless guard and yet be demanded to pull the trigger. Only then will the pixel-and-code mask be pulled away to reveal the true human hidden underneath, who is too often forgotten in the world of reality.

- Mike

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I Want to Get Away

In case you haven't noticed during the last decade or so, the internet has changed the way anyone with regular computer access communicates with their friends and family. Like the telephone, airplane, train, and mail carrier before it, the internet has managed to once again shrink the distance and time between two people - although now that distance seems so small it's almost as if our friends live in the same apartment building. We may not see each other all the time, but it's never hard to know what's going on in their life if we're interested.

In many ways, that's a great thing - we feel closer to our geographically distant friends and relatives. With email and instant messages we have the response time of a telephone coupled with the opportunity to carefully word our statements - an opportunity previously confined to letter-writing. With social networking sites like Facebook, we can even keep our social circle apprised of where we are, what we're doing, and who we're with at all times. In fact, with Facebook it's actually somewhat difficult not to know what's going on - we're notified of breakups, of new jobs, new pictures, new favorite books and movies and music and friends. More than ever, a social "sphere" is truly that - a group of people whose very lives are broadcast for their chosen friends and family, who in turn broadcast their own lives right back.

But what about situations that call for a decrease in communication? A breakup, or a dismissal from a job. The internet has turned these things into situations far more difficult than we were once used to.

When a relationship ends, it's rarely a purely mutual agreement - and even when it is, the concept of moving on is much more difficult to do than it is to talk about. Sure, we may "break up" with a girlfriend or end a long term friendship, but often we still care about the other party on some level - even if it's jealousy, paranoia, or insecurity. We want to know what's going on with them after we leave. Did our ex find someone? How is she handling the breakup? Did ending a friendship force our friend to confront anything? Is it affecting their mood at all?

Questions once answered only by imagination or direct confrontation are now answerable with just a few simple clicks. Many times we're able to gather intel - who he's dating, what she's thinking, where they're at - simply by examing their myspace page, their livejournal, or barraging mutual friends with instant messages. On the flipside, they're able to gather the same information about us - forcing us to carefully word and even lie about what we're doing and how we're feeling - which really makes the whole point of these sites somewhat moot.

The "easy" alternative, of course, is to simply disconnect - from AIM, from MySpace, from your blog. But with a generation brought up with these devices as extensions of their communicative skillset ("When I get home I'm totally blogging about this!"), asking a person to unplug their ethernet cord is at best comparable to asking them to turn in their cell phone and unplug the landline.

The resulting fact is that the existence of the internet has forced our social relationships into recursive loops - breakups and ended friendships are hard to truly break away from, and even when we do, it takes very little to get us involved again. How many times have we marveled at the fact that elementary school friends have found us online? If it's that easy to reconnect with someone you haven't seen in decades, imagine how quickly someone you just stopped speaking to can nudge their way back into your life.

Some may argue these second chances offer opportunities to "patch things up" or "get closure" and that can not be denied. But for those out there who find themselves being drawn in again and again to people whose lives you tried to avoid, I can offer no solutions other than a firm exercise of willpower and a sturdy support system. Perhaps in another decade we'll have a better, more permanent solution.

-- Matt

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Reflections on Playstation Home

During my hiatus, I've pondered the launch of the Playstation Home. Having owned none of the Playstation consoles, I've never developed the love for Sony and the Playstation brand that grips much of the gaming community. As such, I've treated the failures of the Playstation 3 as a source of amusement, and initially dismissed Home as but another ill-conceived abortion to mar the Playstation name. But as I heard more and more people discuss their lackluster experiences on Home, I began to reconsider this dismissal.

Despite Microsoft's attempts to sell the Xbox 360 experience as "gaming with friends," the experience is rather solitary. While text and voice chat allows for a great deal of social interaction, I'm always struck by how incomplete the interation feels. There is something inherently physical about socialization, one that cannot be approximated in text and voice alone. It is the reason why we may miss a loved one dearly when we speak to them over the phone while we may form a bond while in physical proximity without ever muttering a word. Though their voice may dominate our audial sense, it is but a constant reminder that they are not here, but merely a disembodied voice emanating from a speaker.

It is here that I see Home's potential glory. Xbox Avatars and Nintendo's Miis are attempts to compensate for this physical disjunct. Yet, I find them wanting in this task. XNE Avatars do little more than wave innanely as you scroll through your buddylist, while Microsoft's attempt at showing players "gaming together" by having avatars of players in a party clumped around each other does little more than ask the player to imagine a genuine social interaction. As for Miis... well, I wonder if Wii owners even remember those poor creatures. Home, with its personal "apartments" and three-dimensional spaces, has the potential to actually bridge the disjunct. Off the top of my head, I can imagine a number of social features that would easily excite me. Imagine renting a movie on the Playstation Network, and being able to invite friends to your "apartment" to watch it with you. Imagine a party lobby implemented as a bachelor pad, allowing you and a friend to play retro games like Pong or Pac-Man while waiting for other members of your party to arrive. Hell, I was excited by the simple suggestion by an IGN editor that Home be set up like a college dorm, where I could walk up to a friend's door and see what he was up to or at least leave a message on his whiteboard. Even if virtual reality can never compensate for the physical, Home has the potential of offering a level of tangibility to everyday interactions over Live or PSN.

And that is what irritates me the most. Home has the potential of being something revolutionary, yet its implementation seems to be dooming it to a destiny of dancing idiots, griefing, and lackluster discussion rooms. It is like watching a monkey fucking a coconut - I am left stunned, bewildered, and profoundly confused, and I wish someone would stop it.

--Mike

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Gears of War 2: Chainsaw of Guilt

With all the praise and acclaim being flung at Gears of War 2, one can't help but feel obliged to like the game. It is as if Cliffy B. and Epic Games had somehow created the messiah of video gaming, and any perceived fault with the game was either excusable or the result of the player and not the game itself. It was under this pretense that I purchased Gears 2, despite my lack of enthusiasm for its predecessor. I was convinced that I had simply not given Gears 1 enough of a chance to win me over. Even after playing the game exclusively for a full week, I still felt some guilt as I listed it for sale on Playswitch.com, as if my dissatisfaction were caused by a lack of skill or refusal to allow the game to win me over. Admittedly, I find the ongoing matchmaking problems plaguing Gears' multiplayer a source of shameful satisfaction, as providing a form of justification for my tastes.

To their merit, Epic Games created one of the most polished games in Xbox 360 history and one of the most satisfying and consistently entertaining single-player experiences I've encountered in a shooter. However, one does not purchase Gears of War 2 for the single-player experience, and it was the multiplayer's inability to capture me that sealed the fate of the game. To be fair, I am partly to blame for this. I'm a relatively anti-social gamer, only willing to play co-op with individuals I actually know and like. While Gears offers some solid, and perhaps even epic, cooperative gameplay, the appeal I find in multiplayer is the idea of the online gladiatorial arena, where I can spill the blood of pre-teens too young to legally play these games.

To this end, I find Gears lacking. Its multiplayer maps, for the most part, are claustrophobic, forcing both teams to engage each other in medium to short range. This causes the fairly impressive amount of variance between each map to dwindle, as the battle is often reduced to a series of duels between line-backer sized space marines firing off shotguns. This in itself doesn't break the game. In fact, this is laudable, as the game's high health bars and close spaces break the traditional mold of shooter gameplay by transforming each encounter into a Herculean clash worthy of Homer. What defeats this attempt is Epic's failure to provide players with controls responsive enough to handle such close-quarter combat, forcing players instead to rely on the game's spastic dodging mechanic for reliable close-range maneuvering. With most mid-range battles resulting in a stalemate until one combatant decides to close into chainsaw or shotgun range, most battles result in an odd and nonsensical dance of rolls and shotgun blasts that I just didn't find appealing.

Even as I bring this entry to a close, I feel a swell of guilt at my condemnation of Gears 2, as if my opinions were the result of not investing enough time to "understand" the game. But really, if I can't understand the game after playing it exclusively for a week, is it really my fault for not liking the game? I really wanted to like Gears 2, but the most enjoyment I've had with it was selling it off to purchase Rainbow Six Vegas 2 and Battlefield: Bad Company.

--Mike

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The Deal Hunt: Some Holiday Deals for the Discerning Shopper

With the holiday season in full swing, and with the economy in more pain than a WoW addict finding her server down, I thought it might be useful to post a few video game deals I've stumbled across during my lunch break today:

Amazon.com, in its long tradition of providing fantastic deals, has recently listed Left 4 Dead for the Xbox 360 and the PC for $39.99 and $29.99, respectively. This discount is part of Amazon's 15 Days, 15 Deals holiday sale, where they will unveil a new deal on new games each day for 15 days starting on December 2. I'm not sure when this will end, as there should be six deals listed but only four appear on the sale page, but be sure to keep an eye on this for some great holiday discounts.

For those of you looking to forgo the recent blitz of new releases and snag some older titles you may have missed out on, Playswitch.com and Gamefly.com both offer used games at highly discounted prices. Playswitch.com, a game-trading website I personally use, currently has a number of titles from earlier this year and last for less than forty dollars, including Soul Calibur IV for $35, Star Wars: The Force Unleashed for $30, Lost Odyssey for $33, and Tales of Vesperia for $35. Gamefly.com's used games marketplace also offers a number of discounted titles forgotten in the wake of Gears of War 2 and Call of Duty: World at War. Look for Grand Theft Auto 4 for $29.99, Burnout Paradise for $19.99, Sid Meier's Civilization Revolution for $37.99, Battlefield: Bad Company for $34.99, and Devil May Cry 4 for an astonishing $12.99.

I'll continue to post game deals as I come across them. Best of luck, deal hunters!

--Mike

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Fallout 3: The Empathy Bug

Bethesda's post-nuclear RPG, Fallout 3, is in many ways an excellent game. The landscapes are incredible, the stories are interesting, and the combat rarely feels stale. Though I personally have encountered a few problematic bug issues (Somehow, an in-game explosion was so destructive that it destroyed not only the saved game I working on - but all saves of that particular character), I have been informed that I simply have shitty luck and should still play the game anyway. In actuality, there's only one bug that prevents me from enjoying the game fully - and it's not entirely Bethesda's fault.

I think the bug is in my mind.

Like many other recent RPGs, Fallout has an in-game morality system and a wide array of opportunities to put that morality into action. Find a lost, scared little child? Poke around and learn why he's alone and what you can do to help. Find a town full of people and their businesses and homes? Nuke it. I've been playing the game for awhile now and I'm still finding new and intriguing opportunities to change the in-game world with words and deeds.

The problem is that, for some reason, I find it difficult (impossible in some cases) to choose the morally "wrong" decision. Yes, the opportunity to nuke a town exists. But for whatever reason, I can't bring myself to do it. This is a new feeling - in Knights of the Old Republic, you could usually find me in the cantina, choking bar patrons with one hand and fighting good, honest Jedi with the other. The Dark Side held the power and the appeal - who wants to run around in boring brown robes when you can burst through the door in a black cloak wielding a double-edged crimson lightsaber? No, this "ethical dilemma" is wholly new.

Is it because of the improved graphics? Possibly - humans look more human, the suspension of disbelief is easier to make - but there are opportunities for compassion or destruction towards non-humans in Fallout as well, so I don't think it's what's on the outside that counts.

Maybe it's the setting. KoToR was in a whole different galaxy, an exceedingly long time ago, and games like Fable retain too much fantasy and medieval wizardry to trick the brain into believing it is any sort of reality. But Fallout 3 prides itself on realism - Washington D.C. is indeed a real place, and even worse, the locations of important buildings and monuments are identical in-game and in real life. Yes, there are mutants and ghouls traipsing around, and robots that you desperately want to hear say, "Danger, Will Robinson!" but the humans are human and the destruction evident in and out of Washington proper is definitely within the realm of possibility.

Or maybe it's just me. Kotor II came out in 2004 - the same year I graduated high school. Fable 2, which I own and play, prides itself on being fantastical and somewhat cartoonish - it has a distinctive look and feel, and for the game that it is, I personally believe it's the right look. But I'm no longer a teenager - and though I sometimes try not to recognize it in real life, I think as we grow older we more fully understand the complexities of life and living in modern society - and are hopefully more loathe to cause pain and suffering to those who don't deserve it. This works well in reality, because I've yet to murder anyone for their computer passwords or Mirelurk Cakes. When it comes to Fallout 3, though, I can't switch it off.

Maybe someone else out there can describe the Megaton mushroom cloud to me. Tell me, is it very pretty?

-- Matt

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