I Argue Literature 101 with A Gamergater. I Am Correct.

I do not intend to write a piece about GamerGate for this blog. Others have written amazing pieces already, and the volume of good pieces is high enough that my contributions would be irrelevant, especially as someone who is largely not a victim.

Today on Twitter I argued with a 'gater about basics of literary analysis. Let me state this unequivocally: He is wrong. I am right.

This storify of that argument was compiled by Twitter user @Hacaplus (Display name: Count <3 Hacula)

Your Nanomachines Are Bad, and You Should Feel Bad

Hatred Is Fascist Garbage.

Also it uses the image of a heavy metal fan as it's protagonist and I'm not happy about it. Read about that here.

Water Temple Analysis: Part 1

Not twelve hours after I began this draft on August 11, I received the devastating news that Robin Williams, one of the most talented American film actors and a personal hero of mine, had taken his own life at the age of 63. Williams, on top of being an actor and stand-up comedian whose talents defy my own ability to describe them, was also a huge fan of anime and video games. Knowing that as a kid made me feel like a legitimate person for being so consumed by these things. Williams was in particular a fan of The Legend of Zelda and even named his daughter, Zelda Rae Williams after the titular character. This piece and more to come are dedicated to his life and his legacy.

Ocarina of Time is among the most beloved games ever made, arguably the most beloved, and yet it features also one of the most hated dungeons of any videogames as well: The Water Temple. And sure, it’s easy to accept the surface level criticisms that the dungeon is long, tedious and such, but what do those statements actually mean? What is actually wrong with the Water Temple?

I think I know why, but before I jump into analyzing the temple directly, I think we need to ask ourselves a few questions about how Ocarina of Time is designed.

PARTITIONING

The most recognizable pattern in the level design of Ocarina is a sense of partitioning. The dungeons are not linear in a traditional sense, but unlike the Water Temple, the other dungeons are designed in such a way as to insure that after Link has completed every task in a certain part of a dungeon that he need not return to that section. This makes it easier for players to parse out the dungeons and contributes to the smooth challenge curve that makes the game so pleasurable and memorable.

The first part of the Deku tree consists of ascending floors while collecting the dungeon map, the compass, and the slingshot. At the top, Link kills one of the big skulltulas then falls down the center of the dungeon and breaks a thick spider web with his weight and velocity. Then the dungeon becomes a fairly linear progression of rooms that circles back on the room you fell down in (which when completed do not require returning to), then Link solves a puzzle in that room to access a new set of rooms that lead to the boss.

(The original version of the above paragraph originally said it was impossible to escape the Deku Tree after falling down the center and breaking the spider web. This was brought to my attention by @Invisifool on Twitter, and I thank him.)

In Jabu-Jabu’s Belly, after Link picks up Princess Ruto and is able to carry her up to the entrance level of the dungeon, there is no reason to return to the lower floors where we found her. After we finish the set of five rooms that end in Link obtaining the boomerang and clearing out some of the nasty tendrils, there is no reason to return to that set of rooms either.

In the Shadow Temple, acquiring the Hover Boots is a self-contained challenge that, after completion, totally ends it’s portion of the temple. This leads into a middle section that has a forking path that eventually ends with Link taking a ride on something resembling a Hylian warship to the final section of the dungeon. Once Link jumps off that ship, there’s no returning.

It’s not so much that the dungeons in Ocarina are linear so much as they write a peace treaty between linearity and non-linearity by breaking up something of a linear progression into multiple smaller, linear parts. (Worthy of note: we can see a similar design philosophy in, of all things, the Silent Hill games that debuted only a year after.) This makes the temples flow really well. So how does the Water Temple contradict this design philosophy?

STRUCTURE

Put it this way: The Water Temple, largely as a result of using the rising/falling water mechanic (an element I despise far less than my fellow fans and peers,) ends up being something of a Rubik’s Cube dungeon. You can’t approach the dungeon in large chunks, you have to solve the entire dungeon/puzzle at the same time. The biggest parts of the dungeon you can ever leave behind after completing is basically individual rooms, and given the proclivity the temple has for locked doors (more on that later), even these individual rooms can cause one to backtrack very, very often.

Whereas the previous temples are all laid out as a sort of steady horizontal progression, the Water temple is laid out as four rooms in each cardinal direction on three different floors that have different types of accessibility based on where you have the water level at, and most of those 4 rooms branch off into complex sets of rooms themselves.

IRON BOOTS

This is honestly a minor problem that I think time has overemphasized because it’s easier to recognize than more severe design problems, but it is a problem nonetheless.. (It’s more “surface-level” as FilmCritHULK would say.) Using the Iron Boots to progress through flooded areas is tedious for a lot of players. Most point out how equipping and unequipping them requires a full pause to perform, interrupting forward progression, but to me, the more severe problem is that equipping the Iron Boots prevents Link from moving in any particular direction while we waits to fall to the ground, as opposed to being allowed to shift his weight forward to allow continuous movement while engaging with the various bits that require the equipping and unequipping of the boots.

The 3DS version of the game made a big step towards fixing this problem by allowing the Iron Boots to be equipped as a “quick item” a-la sub weapons like the Hookshot or Bombs, but I’ll have to find footage of the 3DS version to see if the game also fixes the problem forward movement while falling.

WATER LEVEL

This is another thing I don’t find nearly as annoying as many others. Resetting the water level isn’t the bad part to me, it’s that there are only a few places to do it. Specifically, there are only three areas in the temple where the water level can be reset.

Now this could be solved by allowing the water level to be reset to anywhere inside the temple, but this would likely require creating three new songs for the Ocarina, which would require, among other things, scenarios for those songs to be taught, and a redesign of the user interface to make room for those extra songs. This is ineloquent.

The problem to me is not so much that the water level can only be reset in certain places, but rather that requiring the player to backtrack to where the water level can be reset often causes the player to lose track of where they were in the first place. This could be solved with a system that allows the player to mark the map with personalized markers a la Borderlands, but again, that would also require a redesign of the user interface.

Both of these seem ineloquent when compared with the solution that would make the most sense: restructuring the dungeon to be similar to the other dungeons such that it was structured in portions. Make the dungeon such that you reset the level once when you enter to get to the bottom, then have the water climb and follow Link as he approaches the boss room. This would merely require reconfiguring a few rooms, and makes the dungeon much easier to approach.

LOCKED DOORS AND SMALL KEYS

The reasons that the Water Temple requires so much backtracking is in part because players who are unfamiliar with the dungeon often find themselves gaining small keys at one point or the other, and then progressing into parts of the dungeon with said keys that then subject them to more locked doors, thus requiring them to go back and find more small keys. A particularly egregious example of this is when I progressed into a large room with a waterfall that contained hookshot platforms steadily going down the waterfall that I had to steadily shoot upward. It was a small, fun challenge, but my reward for completing it was to discover that I did not have the small key required to leave the room on the other side, and thus I had to backtrack out, find a small key, complete the task again, which was now more tedious than fun, then enter the next room.

There are examples of this in other dungeons, but there isn’t nearly as much of it, and it isn’t nearly as egregious, seeing as to find the key one is looking for often requires backtracking through multiple rooms and resetting the water level.

Thus, the structure of the Water Temple varies greatly from the design philosophy that permeated the dungeons that came before. How did this happen? My personal guess is that there were small teams each working on the game’s individual content chunks and that the game’s somewhat rushed production schedule led to a possible lack of oversight. Because the thing is that the Water Temple isn’t even necessarily bad, but it is totally contrary to the rest of the game. Both in terms of design and enjoyment, it stands out for it’s unfortunate unique qualities.

So: the design of the Water Temple is incredibly flawed on both large and small scales. But perhaps this also achieves an effect that matches up with what the Water Temple is trying to achieve in the context of the game’s narrative? I’m going to cut this off for now, but I’ll try and return soon enough with some more on how the temple exists in the context of the game’s narrative.

Austin C. Howe, Maryland, 2014

Intertextuality

Narcissism in Games

“Games About Games”

If there’s anything in vogue in games criticism right now, it is to profess that one is tired of “games about games.” In a short section of mainstream game history, we got Bioshock, Braid, Spec Ops: The Line, and The Stanley Parable among others, all of which were focused around questioning the content of game narratives and the design dogmas around which certain types of games are built, and for a critical audience already largely aware of say, how fucked up it is that you shoot literally hundreds of living breathing people, or the problematic nature of the Damsel in Distress trope, enthusiasm for the niche “genre” as it were wore thin quickly. (For others, I emphasize. I am always excited when one of these games comes out.)

But to profess that one is tired of Games About Games is to say multiple things, both about that genre of games and about the medium as a whole, that simplify the topic:

1. That Games About Games are only “about games.”
2. That Games About Games are, in fact, about the medium of games.
3. That there is a strict binary between Games About Games, and games that are not critical examinations of the medium.
4. That most games do not speak through a language that is self-referential, and are therefore not at least somewhat concerned with themselves, and that Games About Games are unique in this sense.
5. That games do not speak through a language that references other games, and are therefore not at least somewhat concerned with the cultural context in which they exist, and that Games About Games are unique in this sense.

Each of these is false and I’d like to address them individually.

1. Games About Games are only “about games.”

Games that tend to be categorized in this fledgling sub-genre also have other thematic and design interests. Spec Ops: The Line is a critique of the shooter wholesale: of it’s design tropes and narrative tropes alike. By being critical of the narrative tropes of the shooter, Spec Ops becomes a critique of the subtext of western interventionism in western shooters, and as such becomes a critique of the ideology of western interventionism full stop, and this is discussed at decent length in Brendan Keogh’s book on the game, Killing is Harmless. The Stanley Parable is, in one of it’s many possibilities, critical of the idea of games as a form of escapism, and in doing so becomes critical of the capitalist reality that many are trying to escape when playing games. It points it’s finger away from the medium and towards the world around it.

Games About Games, in our rush to dismiss them, have become simplified as though self-reference is their only real point of concern. This is a broadly reductive viewpoint.

2. That Games About Games are about the medium of games.

And whilst #1 is reductive, the entire categorization of “Games About Games” is at the same time overly broad.

There is no detail that I can give here unless I take each game apart specifically, but Games About Games are not about “games.” They are about specific things that concern games as a medium. Metal Gear Solid 2 is about sequels. Spec Ops: The Line is about violence in games. The Stanley Parable is about games that sell the idea of “choice” as a mechanic. And of course, it should be remembered that this is only part of what these games are about, as they also have concerns with topics that need not be categorized, necessarily, inside of their critique of “games.”

In my eyes, there has yet to be a game so postmodern and recursive as to be actually concerned with or critical of what the actual limits of or problems with telling a story in games. Games About Games concern tropes.

3. There is a strict binary between games about games and games that are not critical examinations of the medium.

The Stanley Parable, a discussion of choice in games represented in a very abstract space and with very abstract mechanics. It represents choice as a movement through spaces. But to put it simply, not all games that discuss games as a medium play or look like Stanley. There is both various content in games to critique, and various ways to critique that content.

Thus, I ask that we consider, for example, the subtle differences between classifications of media that are based on critiquing media. To name a simple example that I actually feel qualified to discuss, let’s think about the difference between parody and satire. The most accepted version of what the difference is is that parody is most often made in humorous ode to the media it is referencing, whilst a satire has some teeth, and intends to take a bite out that media, to make a point, a critique of that media. But even this basic understanding does not have steady earth beneath it. For example, what say we of Mel Brooks’ magnum opus Blazing Saddles, which at various times makes a loving joke about the western (“Head them off at the pass? I hate that cliche!”), pointedly critiques the politics of the western (the conflict between the black sheriff and the white townsfolk), and in the ending deconstructs the western so viciously as to call the entire premise of a western a fabrication? What ratio of irony/sincerity precisely determines whether your film is making fun of something, attacking it, or just pulling it apart altogether? And what do we make of say, Yeezus, an album whose main point of interest is in taking that even further by at various points existing in states of complete irony (“Blood on the Leaves”), states of total sincerity (“Bound 2”) and various points in-between (“I Am A God”)?

This categorical confusion that we observe in other mediums exists in videogames as well. Spec Ops is broadly speaking a satire of the shooter, but in the early moments is it  not “just a shooter?” This is a tool of satire that is common across the practice, to make your work appear as the thing it later intends to critique. Thus, not every moment of something we might consider satirical actually is particularly satirical.

But leaving it there would be over-simplistic. Let’s hop back to Blazing Saddles momentarily. It’s worth noting that on top of having various moments that exist within the spectrum of parody and satire, there are plenty of moments where Blazing Saddles is just sincere storytelling, even if the story it’s telling is a comedy. For example, when the sheriff is attempting to convince Gene Wilder’s character to become his deputy. These scenes simply play out as narrative, there’s nothing about them or the jokes within these scenes that make any particular points about the western or film, critical or otherwise.

Back to games. We can use this as a lens by which to analyze, for example, Braid. Braid is broadly critical of the Damsel in Distress trope that provides the narrative basis of, among others, the Super Mario Bros. games, but this criticism, to the games detriment, only constitutes a small portion of the game’s actual playtime. Much of it is simply puzzle platforming, during which time the game’s satirical narrative remains stagnant. We are not experiencing criticism of the Damsel in Distress trope in these moments, we are simply experiencing system and designs.

This opens up an additional option. Not only are their Games About Games which are at various points not About Games but there are also various games not categorized as such that, in particular moments, are About Games, that are critical of the medium or, more often, the genre of games that that game is most easily categorized into.

KAIN

Locked. What a love of doors these humans have.

This is a line, for example, from Legacy of Kain: Defiance wherein Kain points out the absurdity of his predicament in a way that is a sort of in-joke for the audience about the nature of action-adventure games. Progress is impeded by doors. These doors are locked. We must find the various keys that go in the various locks. However, as a narrative, Defiance largely obeys the tropes of it’s series without subverting them (and in fact reiterates motifs of the series to reinforce their meaning), and does not really exist to question or criticize the series it comes from, but in a conventional understanding of parody and satire, this leaves the remark about the doors as largely a standalone moment of meta-humor.

This also must be considered when we’re discussing particular games that are revolutionary within their genre. I’d argue, for example, that Final Fantasy VII spends a lot of time pulling apart tropes and narratives that are central to classical Japanese Role-playing stories, but clearly FFVII does not easily fit within our understanding of what constitutes a Games About Games.

But that conventional understanding also falls apart because for this to remain true without alteration, we must consider games in a vacuum, and as soon as we acknowledge the existence of the world outside of the game and the influence that world has on the game, that assumption begins to fall apart.

4. Games do not speak through a language that is self-referential, and are therefore not at least somewhat concerned with themselves, and Games About Games are unique in that sense.

Games have a language they use to speak to gamers and that language is developed through consistency. Classical game design is reliant on a language of self-reference.

Self-reference is the basis of game design and architecture. When I complete a level in Castlevania for example, the set of mechanics does not switch out between stages. I do not go from playing a platformer with strict controls to playing a rhythm game. And when I complete a level in Castlevania the jump and whip controls do not change either.

On an even smaller scale, among the most basic tenets of game design is challenge escalation, the idea that games get harder as they go on, and challenge escalation already implies that we take old content and remix it into new content per James Howell’s terminology and criticism. A basic example would be the introduction of axe knights into situations in which medusa heads appear in Castlevania, after the introduction of both elements separately. For us to understand these moments, we have to understand similar elements from the game previously, such as in the Castlevania example where we have to understand how best to move around the Medusa heads and also how best to approach the axe knight, the dissect and recombine both of those understandings to be able to parse out this particular challenge.

5. Games do not speak through a language that references other games, and are therefore not at least somewhat concerned with the cultural context in which they exist, and that Games About Games are unique in this sense.

Think about how many games have a jump button, and how many games build challenges around jumping, or shooting, or improving characters by changing the parameters of what that character can do through statistics. The fact that we have common enough terms on which to establish genres, which in games are largely defined not just by narrative tropes, but by similar sets of system mechanics basically denies this outright. Some games are as simple as “This game, but with that idea instead of this idea” and that only reinforces that games are constantly existing in reference to each other.

Intertextuality

To me, the attempt to denounce Games About Games has the result of attempting to insist that games exist in a vacuum. This, of course, is not true. Games, like all media, exist in the contexts of culture, both the cultures in which those games were created and the cultures in which they are enjoyed, and criticism in many ways simply cannot exist without understanding pieces of media side by side, by doing intertextual criticism. Our understanding of how Final Fantasy often inverts and subverts religious myth is enriched by an understanding of how Dragon Quest tends to do the opposite. Our understanding of the politics of Metal Gear’s approach to action gameplay that attempts to de-emphasize violence are enriched by an understanding of how most military fiction games do the exact opposite. The idea that Portal is something like a “feminine” re-imagining of the shooter only makes sense by comparing it to the “masculine” shooters we perceive it as responding to.

I guess in conclusion I should say I understand why it’s easy to tire of the games that emphasize their intertextuality, but I feel like an opportunity is being missed to use these games as a way to rethink our understanding of the medium as a whole.

And for what it’s worth: Spec Ops and Stanley Parable are good games. Braid and Bioshock are not. Thanks for listening.

• Austin C. Howe.

The Bad Rock/Punk/Metal Music Writing Drinking Game

In case you haven't noticed, the writing people tend to do about rock-variant forms of music is almost universally awful. Here's a guide to a drinking game to make it a little bit better. Or worse.

Take a drink whenever the article invokes nostalgia.

Somehow, I miss the metal elitism of days past.

Take two if it invokes nostalgia for times that were only slightly not worse than now, in the writers esteem, just so they can establish curmudgeonly-ness.

The prototypical metal nerd was the type of person who wanted to push the boundaries of how crazy-fast they could play a song. These days, it seems so quaint, seeing that lanky pony-tailed dude in Guitar Center pull off overwrought arpeggios, telling everyone around about his new band. He was the archetypical punisher; if you mistakenly took the time to compliment him, he would somehow loop you into a 15-minute conversation ending with his critique of Devin Townsend’s latest output, and the production conceits found within the record. While it was a world I never spent too much time trying to explore, there was a comfort knowing that it was all out there if one ever wanted to engage in it.

While that track of metal went by, metalcore chugged along, capturing the hearts and minds of impressionable teens throughout the world. Also something easily ignorable, that scene relied on comparing dope 808 bass drop-drenched breakdowns threaded under dudes with really nice hair screaming at you in some dingy club in Orangevale, CA. Also, a scene of people you really never need to engage with unless you want to. But something terrible has happened. The streams have crossed, and a revolting freak of a genre has been unleashed onto the world. Instead of some compound word that takes two genres and fits them together like a puzzle, instead it takes form in the dumbest subgenre name to ever rear its head: djent.

Take a drink when an influential band is described as being somehow way better than the bands that supposedly copy them, as though the bands that are supposedly following so closely to their original formula are also somehow incredibly perverting it through what alterations they do add. And yes, that does mean you have to drink almost continuously through any article concerning At the Gates.

That’s why the idea of djent is such a fucking bummer. Even when Meshuggah had that one album that was literally one song extended to fit a full-length, they were able to employ subtleties in order to make a cohesive unit of an extended piece of work. But each band that plays the same down-tuned, lameass songs do so with very little care as to delicacy of a song, or even differentiating oneself from the rest of the pack.

Take a drink if Warped Tour is mentioned, as Warped Tour, in the eyes of Mature Adults™ is the venue for terrible bands that only teenagers like, and given that teenagers were responsible for propagating the popularity of acts like Black Sabbath, Metallica, Nirvana, Pantera, and At the Gates, they’ve clearly had an incredible negative effect on the history of metal music alone, not to mention punk rock.

The groups would love to be in the same conversation as other technical metal titans, yet the highest accolade they could achieve would be a spot in the Fleshlight stage at Warped Tour. In short, the genre is trite as hell, and it’s time for this shit to stop.

Take a drink if the writer blames a popular band themselves for less talented musicians copying them, as though we can genuinely blame Bathory for the existence of Burzum.

I retract my earlier statement of Meshuggah being to blame for all of this. Really, the fault lies squarely on the shoulders of Periphery. As soon as these dudes came out of the gate, every two-bit guitar player started copying the hell out of them.

If the article is about metal, take a drink when Emmure is namechecked as a negative comparison, as though a melodic prog-metal band with what amounts to a classy pop singer can in any way be compared to Emmure.

Upon first listen, you may think to yourself, “Wait a minute, what’s with that rhythm of boring, hum drum chug riffs? I thought I was listening to a technical band, not Emmure!”

Finish the entirety of your alcoholic beverage, whatever quantity of alcohol that beverage represents if Hot Topic is named in any way, for the exact same reason you drink when Warped Tour is mentioned. Also take a drink when writers suggest that when you remove definitive elements of a genre all you have is the generic stuff, because clearly that demonstrates how "generic" supposedly generic music is, as though you could call Yngwie Malmsteen a plagiarist by saying "Well if he wasn't playing it on an electric guitar . . ."

See, that’s the funniest part about this whole scene. If you remove the off-time guitar parts and the boring noodly bits, the track is reduced to your standard fare of Hot Topic-core scene metal.

Take a drink when mid-2000’s emo is mentioned, as though the writer missed their opportunity to rage against it when it was most likely to make them a respected arbiter of musical taste during high school.

Breakdowns, lame-o scream-sing tradeoffs, and not much else make this band sound like Saosin covering Meshuggah at a high school talent show. At least the new singer is pretty good when he’s singing? Too bad when he’s not fronting this shit-heap, he’s the new frontman of reunited old school emocore band From First to Last. A great feather to add to the cap of shit genres.

If the article is about metal, take a drink when Limp Bizkit is namechecked as a negative comparison, as though a melodic prog-metal band with a clearn singer can be compared in any way to Emmure. Drink even more when you realize that this means that writers are still trying to make fun of bands by connecting them to the legacy of nu-metal in 2014 long after the metal youth has so agreed that nu-metal was, in fact, quite enjoyable, that Slipknot's new album is an anticipated event and many metal bands are starting to incorporate elements of nu-metal, or are reviving the genre outright.

Anyways, Volumes is probably the Limp Bizkit of the pack,

Spit at the screen when the writer attempts to claim that Limp Bizkit have any kind of self-awareness.

though the LB at least has an aspect of satire to themselves.

Wipe off the spit and realize that the writer uses the word "dope" to positively describe something in 2014, and ponder how old an intern at a popular music site could possibly be.

At least the dog is pretty dope?

Take a drink when the article describes bands you listen to and/or enjoy that seem to indicate that they have no clue what they're talking about, as though SikTh's dual hardcore-styled vocalists, 2006-style breakdowns, or use of diatonic melody could ever be described as being in any way similar to Meshuggah.

Sikth (or SikTh if we’re being technical) has always been Meshuggah’s annoying-ass little brother. Take the shittiest elements of Deftones (and somehow not the 8-string guitar they employ)and  a little bit of grindiness a la Daughters, and you have Sikth. A true grandfather of the genre; being an inspiration for all other hacks to come together and have a fair shake at glory.

Ponder what parallel universe where the Deftones sound like Meshuggah.

Take a drink when the writer forcibly inserts Attack Attack! into the story years after the band has broken up just so he can link the much-maligned band and the other bands in the article he wishes to disparage and take self-congratulatory post-mortem potshots,  because ad hominem I guess.

In the band’s last breath, Attack Attack! attempted to also cash in on the subgenre, but fucked up royally.

Finally, take a drink when the writer suggests the inevitable, that this trend will come to pass (as though a genre named for a guitar tone will be the end of music history) despite the fact that some of the musicians talked about in the article have been major players in metal for well more than a decade now, such that the legacy of the big bands like Meshuggah, Periphery, and yes, Attack Attack! (with the countless follow-up bands that have emerged and gained popularity) are at this point, totally secure.

Attack Attack!’s fate should be a cautionary tale to all “djent” bands: this shit isn’t going to last. Jocking a band’s style so hard to the point where it creates a new genre, really isn’t anything new. We saw it in the early 2000s when tons of metalcore bands started using At The Gates riffs in their songs, and ten years later, people have moved onto a new band to copy. Really, djent looks to be on its last legs. There really isn’t anywhere else for the genre to move. So we ask of you, please just hang up the guitar and go back to the drawing table.

Take a drink, then take loudrock music writing back to the drawing table.

• Austin C. Howe, Maryland, 2014