Critical Switch: Shovel Knight and Interrogation

So hey, new microphone! I've had episodes with good sound before thanks to my friends like James and Solon, letting me borrow their mics, but I now officially have my own Snowball mic! So audio quality should be lovely and consistent from now on. Thank y'all for helping make this happen.

Critical Switch is of course supported by patient listeners like you at http://Patreon.com/CriticalSwitch

Nostalgia means more than – hey, hey, sit down. I'm going somewhere with this. Nostalgia means more than people tend to think it means. In common usage it tends to mean a fondness for the past, but it can also mean “a fondness for a past that did not exist.”

In the recent wave of retro genre revivals, we see some of this concept in practice, in many particular ways. Pillars of Eternity and Divinity: Original Sin look and sound lot better than the isometric Baldur's Gate/Planescape: Torment CPRGs they are formatted on. Likewise for 2D platformer revivals like Castlevania: The Adventure Rebirth, which preserves the pure 2-directional whipping of it's side-scrolling predecessors but tampers down on the need to commit to one's jumps, as well as having the aforementioned technical upgrades.

A trend becomes noticeable wherein designers are choosing to buff out what were generally considered “flaws” in their original designs when updating them for the age of Kickstarter and reminiscence. And why shouldn't they? The history of commercial game design is mostly of slow-moving iteration wherein certain things that are disliked about a particular design are either removed or replaced, and in theory these games are merely picking up on where their predecessors left off.

But there's also something to be said for established traditions as well. I've run up and down the halls screaming at my listeners and followers about how if JRPGs so desperately needed change then why do none of the late-90's classics of the genres really play in any fundamentally different ways? And in many ways, the same sense of need for iteration is what arguably drove us away from these beloved genres in the first place, especially as we became focused on the progress of technology.

Now what I'm saying here is mostly some “the answer is in the middle”, “the mediator between the head and hands must be the heart” type shit. That's not useful. What is useful, is a work like Shovel Knight.

Shovel Knight is an immensely intelligent videogame released last year by Yacht Club Games whose ever design and narrative trope is, on a moment-to-moment basis, interrogating that space between nostalgia, progress, and the true past.

Aesthetically, Shovel Knight rides that particular “false past” idea of nostalgia quite hard. The game's color palette sticks almost religiously to the NES' own color palette, but they've admitted that in a few spots they had to use shades and hues not accessible on the NES. The music is neither puritanical NES chiptune or modern arrangement, but instead features music that was only capable of being played on a Japanese Famicom and certain games that made use of an expanded set of channels, most famously Castlevania III. Only a few games used that expanded set of channels, and none of them were ever released that way in the west. CVIII's western release uses only the regular 3 channels+noise for it's music. And of course, Shovel Knight is simply too large to have ever fit on a NES cartridge, being loaded with enough musical assets alone to fill an entire cartridge.

As well, Shovel Knight's particular design choices, while rooted in a genuine appreciation of 2D classicism, (multiple critics besides me have already analyzed the game's meticulous level design) also has a number of modern design choices, namely it's use of a Dark Souls-esque drop of money when the player dies. It chooses this system for punishment of death, which is barely punishment at all if the player can retrieve their money, rather than allowing the player only a limited number of attempts per level, thus opening up paths to repetitive mastery that, in older games, are mostly found through the abuse of savestates on an emulator.

So in some sense, Shovel Knight is already throwing on rose colored lenses about what the NES and what the games on it were like. In case it sounds like I'm stating this as critique on it's own, I'm really not. Each of these choices makes Shovel Knight more accessible than it's forebears, and choices made in favor of accessibility are nearly always justified.

Even then, in an intelligent and controlled way, Shovel Knight begins to subvert that modern accessibility. Specter Knight's stage's gimmick, for example, is that it will bathe the screen in darkness, but that the player can detect Shovel Knight and his movement objectives if they observe the blackness against the colored background. As well, sometimes lightning strikes and illuminates the path forward briefly. However, later in the stage there are a few sections that require seeming leaps of faith because Shovel Knight and his platform are bathed in darkness, and enemies are on his tail. One can only trust the designers here to have placed platforms in the way at exactly the right space to make these spaces practically navigable without putting Shovel Knight at risk. That trust is rewarded.

Slowly, as we move through the game, we see more and more design decisions in this vein. Instant death becomes more common, and the player is forced into awkward forms of movement and control like adjusting to the wind propellers in the Propeller Knight stage or the ice physics . . . the fucking ice physics in Polar Knight's stage. Some might see this as sloppy design as the game gets closer to the finish line, I'm more generous because in these decisions I see the boldest defiance of NES design this game has to offer: narrative and metaphor.

What is Shovel Knight about? It's about a Knight attempting to reclaim his former glory and save his girlfriend and his kingdom from the clutches of the evil Temptress. It's seemingly boilerplate videogames, but there's already a subtle and critical difference: Shovel Knight's quest is based on a loss in his fairly distant past, before his self-imposed exile. As he moves through and gets closer and closer to the enchantress, the Black Knight warns him that he is walking into great peril, and the various members of the Order of No Quarter, the Enchantress' servants, especially Treasure Knight, who tells us: “Even now, others are paying the price for your avarice.”

Still, Shovel Knight journeys on. After each level, Shovel Knight rests at a campfire, and sometimes he dreams of Shield Knight, desperately trying to catch her as she falls from the sky as he fends of hoards of fiends. It's a provocative pairing that I think almost suggests the unreality of the situation, not in an “everything that's happening is a dream” level, but more on the acknowledgment of the fantastical quality of games themselves, as well as living out this fantasy version of a NES game. We ultimately find that the Enchantress is in fact Shield Knight, under the control of evil magic. In defiance of the odds, Shield Knight is freed, and she joins Shield Knight and rests with him at a fireside. She limps to her place beside Shovel Knight, it is unclear whether she will awake from her rest.

This is, I think, a pretty strong metaphor for what it means to develop a 2D platformer in 2015. It is the struggle of searching for the past while accepting the present. And it's the constant question of whether the magic can survive in modern times. Overall I think the tone of the game, and of course the fact that the game exists, and is a beloved commercial success gives us a hopeful bend on that, and what were NES games if not optimistic, but what I appreciate most is that it's a topic that Yacht Club chose to struggle with not just in developing, but inside of the game itself. And after all, what is searching for answers, if not`` digging?

In this episode you've heard “Strike the Earth,” “The Requiem of Shield Knight” from the Shovel Knight original soundtrack by Jake Kauffman. Zolani Stewart will be back with our next episode.

From Seattle, Washington, I'm Austin C. Howe

Ronnie James Dio: 5 Years Later

Today marks 5 years since the shocking passing of Ronnie James Dio, and wallowing in melancholy I find myself writing an ode to him. The greatness of Ronnie James Dio is nearly impossible to describe in hyperbole, as much of his importance simply comes down to facts. The facts are these:

Born in 1942, Ronnie James Paladona (stories differ on how the name “Dio” came about, suffice to say it means “God” and the name is appropriate)  was first a trumpet player before being a singer. In a 1997 interview he claimed that he never once took a formal vocal lesson, employing merely the correct breathing techniques he’d learned playing the instrument. (Speaking as a friend of a number of formally trained singers, I doubt the story is facetious.) He fronted a number of unremarkable rock bands throughout his early career.

Often noted for his age after fame, Dio’s singles with early rock bands were met with only regional success, and he spent his 20’s in obscurity. He wasn’t even featured on a commercially released LP until Elf’s debut in 1972, when he was already 30. (According to wikipedia, his earlier band had made an album for Atlantic records, I can find no proof it actually exists.) Suffice to say, Dio peaked late, regardless of when one thinks Dio peaked.

That brings out the next astounding fact about Dio: not only did he record his most celebrated material at an age when some singers have already severely injured their voice, but in the process became one of the most celebrated frontmen in the history of metal.

In Ritchie Blackmore’s Rainbow, we first see Dio’s fascination with fantasy imagery. Some bands had toyed with these motifs before, but Dio made them his own. In adopting such a style he also thoughtlessly adopted some of the casual racism of 20th-century fantasy, such as on “Voodoo” from The Mob Rules or a song from his Holy Diver album titled after the well-known slur for the Romani people. These are some of his weaker lyrics, such that their titles end up being more offensive than the content contained within, but the archaic and outdated must be noted along with the innovation.

That fantasy imagery (when used responsibly) combined with an early musical experiment in what would later be noted as speed metal, “Kill The King” represents arguably the first example of what would become power metal in the late-80’s and 90’s. The song has become something of a metal staple, being covered by the thrash band Heathen, and power metal bands Primal Fear, and Stratovarius.

The vocal styles employed by power metal bands can be credited almost singularly to Ronnie James Dio. Surely noted singers like Rob Halford, Ian Gillian, or even Robert Plant sang high, but there timbre was still obviously deep within the realm of rock’s down-south blues influences. Dio’s style was based in a classicism and melo-dramatism that he pioneered and mastered within metal. Power metal masters like Hansi Kursch, in their adoption of dramatic affectation, borrow much more greatly from Dio than from any other great metal vocalist aside from maybe Iron Maiden’s Bruce Dickinson, who it should be noted wasn’t even recorded until 1980, and didn’t rise to prominence until almost a full decade after Dio. (As well, though Priest’s early material is now held in high regard, Halford wasn’t nearly the level of household name until around the same time.)

Presumably believing that fronting one of the most important metal bands of all time was simply insufficient, Dio left Rainbow when Ritchie Blackmore announced his intention to commercialize the band’s direction, and happened to run into Black Sabbath’s Tony Iommi on the sunset strip in 1979 after the latter band had recently split with Ozzy Osbourne. The chemistry between the group and their new singer was so instantaneous that they released Heaven and Hell within the next year, reinventing their sound in the process. It and it’s follow-up, The Mob Rules are such immensely strong albums that it is to this day a serious question whether Sabbath fans prefer the Osbourne or Dio albums. (For most of my teenage years, Mob Rules was actually my favorite Sabbath album.) Dio first left Sabbath in 1982, after a rather silly argument over the mixing of their Live Evil album. Dio, a notorious egotist, had supposedly been tampering with the mix to make his voice louder, though despite his reputation that accusation is dubious at best.

Though Sabbath’s early days laid down the foundations of heavy metal and the downtrodden pace of what would become doom metal, I would say that tracks like “Heaven and Hell” or The Mob Rules’ “Sign of the Southern Cross” are probably the foundational basis for what would become classic doom metal in the late-80’s and early-90’s. Listen to Candlemass’ Epicus Doomicus Metallicus or Solitude Aeternus’ Beyond the Crimson Horizon and notice the combination of mid or low tempo riffs, but also notice the insistent melodicisim and the vocal approach of Johann Lanquist (or his successor, Messiah Marcolin) or Robert Lowe. I’d argue the approach bears a much stronger resemblance to Sabbath’s early-80’s material than their early-70’s, and those singers owe much more a debt to Dio than to Osbourne.

Presumably fed up with being a hired gun for established performers, Dio decided to make the show his and form a band under his own name following his departure from Sabbath. While not as musically important as either of his previous acts, Dio found his greatest commercial success with legendary singles like “Holy Diver” and “We Rock,” and gave some of his great all-time performances as a singer. “Rainbow in The Dark” in particular remains a favorite of mine, an immense display of Dio’s often-derided talents as a lyricist.

I cry out for magic

I feel it dancing in the light

It was cold,

Lost my hold

To the shadows of the night

Dio’s best lyrics are filled with evocative images like these, and though sometimes the intent of his metaphors are lost in confusing jumbles, the power of his stronger lyrics certainly makes one forgive his many attempts to capture a similar magic. It was on songs like this where the power of Dio’s voice was uplifting by pure strength alone, a source of genuine inspiration for my younger self, mired in suicidal depression. Connecting with his voice and his words showed me a side of metal that could empowering, not just defeatist. And while I identify with the pessimism of metal, it is songs, voices, and stories like Dio’s that help me carry on in spite of doubt. I may be left on my own like a rainbow in the dark, but that makes me the rainbow, doesn’t it?

Even when his words weren’t powerful, his voice always was. Even as he aged, Dio was still giving shocking, thunderous vocal performances, as we can hear on 2000’s Magica or my personal favorite, on Heaven and Hell’s The Devil You Know, which turned out to be his final album. Listen to his control of volume and his ability to choose when to unleash the grit and growl of his voice on “Bible Black.” Dio was sixty-six when he recorded this!

The modern age begets cynicism and skepticism in needless quantities, and I’ve seen more than a few wonder if Dio’s performance on this album was the result of studio magic. I had the privilege of seeing Dio on his last US tour to support the album. It is still the most impressive vocal performance I’ve ever seen, and he hit every single note of his youth. Perhaps not with ease, but surely with command.

Fame came late and death came early for Ronnie James Dio, who died from metastasized stomach cancer on May 16, 2010 at the much too young age of 68, who earlier in the year was still looking forward to playing summer tour dates with the reunited Heaven and Hell lineup, who didn’t even cancel their dates until it became apparent how serious his illness was. Dio was still determined to live, and to sing. It has been five years since and I still cannot describe the shock at learning that even gods can die.

Austin C. Howe, Seattle, WA, 2015

Critical Switch: Republican Dad Mechanics

I was gonna go on this long tirade about Dark Souls and abuse and nihilism but honestly, I think I want to focus on something in particular, it's a design trend that Dark Souls has largely fathered and I'm concerned about where I see it going.

Dark Souls and the semi-franchise it emerges from and has helped popularize has brought on the rise of mechanics whose design intention is to get gamers to be more careful, and build skill, but also have least the potential to cause brash, irrational decision making.

These types of system designs I will designate: “Republican Dad Mechanics.” You could also probably call them “school bully mechanics” but, an election year is coming up and dammit, this country is on the line! You know how it is.

In theory, the Republican dad is someone like this: they want to teach their child how to hit a baseball, but they find that the child is swinging limply, missing, or losing grip of the bat.

Now what a sensible human being would do is give expert advice: plant your feet firmly, grip the bottom of the bat strongly in the palms of your ha- nah fuck that, what the Republican Dad does is throw the ball so hard that they might actually hurt the kid, the logic being “you're gonna swing the bat or walk away with a bloody nose.”

That is the basic root of much of a lot of Dark Souls core design, but it's probably best indicated by the Blood Stain mechanic.

A primer for the unfamiliar: in Dark Souls, when you die, you leave behind a stain of your blood, and on that stain is the Souls that you picked up before you die. Souls are extremely valuable, as they are both the currency you use to buy things from merchants and blacksmiths, but also the experience points you use to level up. Even to gamers hell bent on the ultimate challenge of beating the game at Level 1 will use souls to upgrade their weaponry.

This creates this extremely common situation: I just died to a horde of ene mies while h olding a not-insignificant amount of Souls. Given that I am likely to die if I try and combat those enemies again, based on previous results, I would like to rush in, grab my souls, and escape the room as soon as possible. Thus, I begin my bum rush back behind enemy lines and within a moment I've died to the same horde. Thus, by the rules of Dark Souls I've lost my opportunity to ever get those Souls back. This logic applies to any other type of enemy, obviously, since enemies you've died to once are almost by definition enemies you are likely to lose to again.

Thus, the game has given me something that should encourage me playing better, that is, the loss of my souls, but it's also made those things the carrot on a stick that forces me into nonsensical loops of actions. I have played at least 200 hours of these games, I cannot shake the feeling that regardless of how good I get at them, the fundamental psychology of that mechanic will not change.

Bloodborne, From Software's new game in much the same style, has actually doubled down on this parental conservatism with it's new Regain mechanic. In Bloodborne, a certain percentage of damage taken within a certain time frame can now be regained if the player quickly strikes back at their opponent. The psychological punishment is actually even more severe here. As . . . I can't believe I'm citing this man, but the quote actually is pretty good, Tim Rogers writes:

 If an enemy hits you, doing damage, you can get your health back if you hit them soon enough after they hit you. This is idiotic. This is insulting! This is a huge, dumb punch in the face of a perfect combat system. It's filthy and it's gross. Wow, it's so great; I love it a lot.

With the Regain System, Bloodborne begs you to take tiny risks. I say the risks are "tiny" because that's how it feels: just one more button press. That button press is highly likely to get you killed, because for the length of that button press — the first few dozen time s, anyway — you're not thinking about position, timing, or stamina. You're thinking, "Hey, I can get that health back, so let's see if I can get that health back." Ten seconds later, the enemy is dead, and you have half the health you had during your initial engagement with the enemy. You feel like the biggest sucker in the world. You've seen the Wizard of Oz behind the curtain. The Wizard of Oz was flipping you off.

The weird part is, in case you missed it, Tim Rogers likes this part of Bloodborne which you can list off as reason number 9001 about why I don't get that guy. Or maybe he's being ironic, I don't know y'all, New Games Journalism was weird.

So again, the game is shoving this obvious carrot in your face, but the only real answer is to just let it go, man. That could be a lot of things, but for a game as ludically focused as the FromSoft games tend to be, I'm just gonna call it misguided design.

Now of course other designers are preaching the Miyazaki gospel. Lords of the Fallen, one of the first major-studio Souls-likes adds an experience multiplier so that the longer you avoid resting at a checkpoint and spending your experience the more experience you build . . . which is bizarrely reflective of modern financial economics: “You've invested in some good stocks and made some smart decisions! Now make the decision whether you want to retire early and die rich or GO FOR MORE” even though there's no real reason to do that except maybe to buy that second Bugatti.

The idea of course is simple enough: let's put in mechanics that encourages gamers to more consciously engage with the interactions at hand. But in these cases, we have system upon system built to encourage wild and often unrewarding risk-taking. So how do you avoid being a Republican Dad designer?

This is the easy part: the solutions have always existed! But in particular I want to point out the tremendously smart decisions made by Platinum games, in particular how the parries work in Metal Gear Rising.

Parrying is exceptionally important to scoring high in Revengeance, or even just surviving on the high difficulty levels.

Parrying is attached to the same keys as both movement and attack, and that makes it inherently risky, because if you screw up the parry you're swinging at an enemy or running when you need to block.

Now granted, this can still happen, but unlike Dark Souls, Revengeance has got your back. What Revengeance does to mitigate possibly misguided player risk-taking is implements two types of parries.

The better kind, the kind you want, are often referred to as “Perfect Parries”. When a parry is executed within frames of an attack landing, Raiden will riposte, for enough damage to outright kill a low level enemy, and often to do 20% or more of a bosses health.

It would've been easy for them to look at player inputting those parries too early and say “git gud scrub” and walk away, but Platinum actually wants people to enjoy their videogames so they don't do that. Instead, they offer a version of the parry that can be activated much earlier, but also doesn't offer the riposte reward, often not resulting in any player reward other than not being hit. This is on top of having an invincible dodge move as well, for moves that cannot be parried, and that you can also use instead of a parry when you really need to get out of Dodge.

Bayonetta does something similar where when an invincible dodge is activated within the right time frame of an enemy attack, Bayo enters Witch Mode and gets to shell out massive damage, but you can still execute the regular dodge at a lower level of risk.

How would you implement those kinds of risk-mitigation mechanics in Dark Souls? Well . . . you don't. Because the fanbase would never shut the fuck up about it. Because remember, the most important thing you can derive from a hard videogame is being self-important about being able to beat it.

This week you'll've heard the Majula theme from the Dark Souls 2 original soundtrack and the Firelink Shrine theme from the Dark Souls original soundtrack composed by (I am definitely going to screw this up) Motoi Sakaruba, and “Stains of Time” from the Metal Gear Rising OST, music and lyrics by Jaimie Christopherson.

Zolani Stewart will rejoin you next week.

From Seattle, Washington, I'm Austin C. Howe.

On Commercial Altgames

A quick disclaimer: I want to defuse the idea, immediately, that this is any kind of angered “response” piece to Soha Kareem’s excellent, brief discussion of #AltGames and her creation of the Support AltGames Twitter bot. I want this to be viewed purely as supplemental article, one that covers a particular angle of the #AltGames idea that is particularly important to me, and that I feel I have some expertise in.

Kareem’s article focuses largely on the work of independent developers and critics whose work is definitive of modern #AltGames, an idea that is described as being largely new, as a response to and critique of establishment and status quo. While this is true, it should be noted (as Kareem does in her description of the interactions present in She Who Fights Monsters) that ideas and games that inspire #AltGames developers and critics have long existed in the niche corners of the commercial games industry. Thus a historical picture of #AltGames is, I think, obliged to note the work of developers whose work is, as Kareem describes, “experimental, autobiographical, or political” that has also been released for consoles and through large publishers.

Thus, some notable games developers who are often called “AAA” whose work easily fits the bill for #AltGames, in my humble opinion.

Yoko Taro

His works have been published by Square-Enix, but rarely sell well. He writes games that often deal with taboo narrative subject matter (including the ultimate taboo of videogame narratives: tragedy), as well as tease the player’s prior knowledge of videogame genres through experiments in ludic structure. Drakengard pulsed with tense, dissonant music and brutal, primitive combat, NIER was a graveyard of long-irrelevant genres, as well as  predated deconstructed 2013’s “Dadification” of videogames, and Drakengard 3 openly concerned the sexual interests of various women, a sexually submissive man, and multiple queer characters. He has been hired recently to make a new game, but a name or any details have not been announced. I await news with baited breath.

Amy Hennig

Hennig’s unapologetically talky Legacy of Kain games were some of the first games of such extreme narrative focus in the west to be developed not as systems-intensive CRPGs, but action-adventures for consoles. Her stories starred immortal, unhuman creatures and considered ideas as extreme as theicide, and lend themselves well to interpretative allegorical readings. As well, her team at Crystal Dynamics regularly prioritized space, architecture, and aesthetics instead of overthought combat or puzzle design.

Masato Kato

As far as I’m concerned, Squaresoft in the late-90’s developed games I would exclusively call “alternative.” Each of them fits at least one of those criteria Kareem notes in her article: “experimental, autobiographical, or political,” and not in ways that are shallow or easily written off. Final Fantasy VII was deeply anti-capitalist, Final Fantasy VIII an empathetic investigation of masculinity and masculine suffering,  and Final Fantasy IX concerned itself obsessively with death and existential purpose. (Even moreso than VII and VIII which were themselves obsessively existential.) They don’t tend to get remembered that way.

But no creative person at the company was as dedicated to tearing away at convention, experimenting with structure, and telling outright weird stories as writer Masato Kato. He got his start at the company writing the notably dark Zeal sequence in 1995’s Chrono Trigger and writing a few scenes for Final Fantasy VII. (I’ve never been able to find out which ones they were, but based on his style I’d hazard a guess that at least one of them was the Cloud’s Subconscious sequence.)

Then, he and the equally experimental duo Tetsuya Takahashi and Soraya Saga (birth name: Kaori Tanaka) launched into prominence with Xenogears, a (tragically unfinished) tale of reincarnation, history, Nietzsche, and evocative, charged imagery. The game is as intoxicating as it is confusing and frustrating, and it’s something everyone should play at least once.

After that, Kato was given complete control to write and direct Chrono Cross. Do not listen to anyone say otherwise, Chrono Cross is a messy masterpiece of sun-baked island scenery and deep self-doubt that deals in short vignettes, with no easy endings that leaves the player always marinating in a sense of defeat even as they push ever onward. And, to the misfortune of it’s legacy, it’s also a vicious deconstruction of Chrono Trigger. That works fine for me because frankly, I can’t stand Chrono Trigger.

Many of these figures are well-recognized, even financially successful on a massive scale, but I also find it incredibly important to celebrate their contributions to gaming outside of the nakedly commercial, and note that their games can be seen as alternative. I hope I’ve shed some light and opened some eyes, and in general I will continue to take note of historical examples of altgames released commercially.

In particular, I’m within a month and a half of finishing the drafting for my long-delayed book about Final Fantasy VII that does not yet have a title. Unlike most writing on the game that exists, I see this as a reading of the game from an alternative perspective.

• Austin C. Howe, Seattle, Washington, 2014

Critical Switch: BBSD, Ludocentrism, and Abstraction

Kept you waiting, huh?

Yeah, the beginning of my April was pretty rough, not to go into too much detail now, but suffice to say that one of the results of my stress was having zero inspiration to write a new episode of Critical Switch, Which Is Supported By Listeners Like You At Patreon.com/CriticalSwitch!

In any case, that phase has passed. Two weeks from now I'm going to be talking about the Souls games (yeah, that'll be fun) and this week I'm talking about Lulu Blue's new game, Bunny Bunny Smackdown.

Full disclosure of course, Lulu is a good friend of mine, I live like a mile up the road from her . . . but none of that actually matters to you.

Anyway, Bunny Bunny Smackdown is a game about bunnies having group sex. You have a Pounce button, a Kiss button, and a Smack button.

The game has a fun multiplayer mode where each of those mechanics shine brightly somewhat in abstract, but I think the single-player modes express the ideas a lot clearer.

You start off and everyone's more or less cool with everything, but as you progress through, you need to keep check of which bunnies have what rules. Some bunnies don't like to be pounced, others don't like to be paddled. So while you're jumping around and keeping track of this high paced action, it also keeps you in check by making you consider what people enjoy and what peoples boundaries are. This, of course, already makes it a far more mature systemization of sex than most that exist in videogames.

But something that makes it equally genius is that these mechanics are all borrowed wholesale from our existing understanding of action mechanics. The “Smack” button lets you swat the bunnies with a paddle that looks . . . familiar, in the context of a 2D action game, the “Kisses” are projectiles that just look different from most game projectiles.

What this means is that Blue understands how to use aesthetics and narrative context, even in a minimal sense, to recontextualize sets of interactions and make them mean different thing. Interpreting this as such falls to us as an audience of course.

Some have already said that they're disappointed to see that the game is “just swordfighting” because of the admittedly familiar look of the Smacking implement, but we can only call it “just swordfighting” if we acknowledge that textually what we see on screen is not a sword fight, but simply borrows hitboxes and frame data from games that actually have swords according to their own contexts.

That actually goes beyond ludocentrism into something even more insidious (and sadly typical) : it is not just that the narrative context of a game object becomes irrelevant, it's that people will tend to revert to the original contexts of these sorts of in-game objects and in-game verbiage. There are people who seemingly refuse to actually let the narrative context of certain hitboxes and lines of code be changed, and I think that's ultimately because they don't want them to.

Alternatively, it means they think new narrative contexts always demands new mechanics, which is obviously horseshit. If Square in the late-90's proved anything, it's that even the most minor alterations to the ludic structure of the Japanese Role-Playing Game provides fertile ground for games about anti-capitalism, spirituality, quiet moments of being in your bedroom alone, and even gorey monster schlock horror.

Now, granted, there's something else to think about: perhaps for a game about sex the interactions could feel more like sex? Well, for one, it's about bunnies, so it's not exactly a 1/1 relationship from human sex to this (not even for furries), but also I'd argue that what we might call the “abstraction” does more important things here. For one, it creates distance between our minds and something that tends to make our minds work . . . let's say “differently.” In this case, abstracting the sex away from a narrative context that would put the audience “in the mood” allows them to be more reflective on the thing the game values most, that being respect for partners boundaries during sex, and the idea that what you do is in service to the mutual pleasure of the both of you.

This is a small game, so I guess I should've foreseen this being a short episode.

I guess if I had to be critical, and I really feel like I'm nitpicking here, I think if the idea were developed more I'd like to see the ideas about consent, boundaries, kinks and such, being put back into the multiplayer. Those elements really shine in single-player, but multiplayer is as of now mostly a freeform romp which, though extremely fun, would probably benefit from both the mechanical and thematic depth we see in the single-player.

Other than extremely trite gripes like that, I still feel like Bunny Bunny Smackdown is an exceptionally coherent, clever, and insightful game, especially given the speed with which it was developed. Blue is a very talented game developer, and given this I'm especially excited to see what she does with her upcoming 3D revamp of Fantastic Witch Collective, which was itself already excellent.

In this episode we've heard, twice, a song that has no title that plays in the background of most of Bunny Bunny Smackdown composed by the also-very-talented Christa Depken.

Bunny Bunny Smackdown can be purcahsed at the Alpha Six website at a6productions.itch.io, and I'm told that Blue's older games are likely to appear there soon as well. The links will be posted in the description.

Critical Switch is supported by patient listeners like you at Patreon.com/CriticalSwitch, and any amount that you donate really helps. We're at a point with donations right now where I can afford to feed myself with what we're doing here, maybe I can eventually pay utilities this way!

In any case, Zolani Stewart will be with you next weekend.

From Seattle, Washington, I'm Austin C. Howe.

Briefly: On Racism in Wrestling Fandoms (Storify)

https://storify.com/AustinCHowe/brief-comment-on-racism-in-wwe-fandom

Critical Switch: Rest in Pain

I realize that what you came here for, what a good 37 of you pay $163 a month for, is to hear me talk about videogames. But I'd like to think that, for the most part, what that really means is “here's a good game I'm gonna talk about, and here's why it's good, about 90% of the time or more. You can get my personal brand of cynicism on Twitter. If people listening right now trust my taste in videogames, I hope that means you also trust my taste in music, in films, and in television. So from time to time, you'll hear me do an episode on a medium that isn't videogames. For your pleasure and mine.

This week I'm going to be talking about Twin Peaks. If you haven't seen it, watch it. It's on every major streaming service, I'm sure it's pretty easy to acquire one way or another, and it's quite possibly the best show to ever air on American television, a reputation that precedes it and whatever statements I may make on it.

Take note: Twin Peaks is a detective story whose primary plot thread involves multiple instances of sexual assault, it can be deeply disturbing. This episode also has significant spoilers for Twin Peaks. I'm serious, I tell you who the killer is, if you don't want to know, turn back now and watch the show first.

Without further ado:

I feel like all of my favorite scenes from Twin Peaks don't make anybody else's list. The ones that have resonated most strongly with fans are the scenes that are the weirdest or most Lynchian: the red room, or Audrey Horne tying the cherry stem with her mouth. Those can be a bit . . . surface-level(?) for my liking?

I mean, they're good scenes and all (a show with two seasons on the books doesn't get remembered for being inconsistent,) but they're also somewhat self-explanatory and they can tend to be obfuscant of the totality of what the show is. The red room is weird, David Lynch is weird, Twin Peaks is fuckin weeeeeeiiird man, but that surface level weirdness acts mostly as a premonition for the murder mystery, it's not the kind of weirdness that exists in most of the show. Sherilyn Fenn is astoundingly hot but reducing her to that one quality or that one scene covers up her independent side, for example, the fact that the reason she's there in that scene to begin with is because she's doing independent investigative work on the murder of Laura Palmer.

There's at least one scene in the show, however, where all of the things that have surface-level appeal to Twin Peaks and where so much of it's subtext comes together just beautifully.

The funeral scene in Season 1, Episode 4, “Rest in Pain,” written by Harley Peyton and directed by Tina Rathborne, for which Peyton was nominated for the primetime drama writing Emmy is probably my favorite moment on the show and that makes it a pretty strong contender for my favorite moment in any television program.

That the funeral itself is even happening, at least in this particular moment of time, is an indicator of the town's old-time values, and even a sign of resisting outside forces.

I'm gonna represent events in the episode out of order here to create a sort of thematic progression. Laura Palmer's funeral is scheduled for the day of her autopsy to be performed by Dr. Albert Rosenfeld, played by Miguel Ferrer. He's arguing with the local police coroner so he can continue investigative work on Palmer's body while the locals, in this case represented by the Richard Beyman's slimy businessman Ben Horne, demand he release the body for the funeral that day. Rosenfeld is foreign to the audience at this point, and his verbal disregard for the town and characters we're already familiar with is meant to make us dislike him.

However, he's also completely right: allowed more time with the body he might've found, just to name an example, DNA evidence of who violated and murdered her. Cooper, in his empathy for the town and it's values, demands Rosenfeld to cut his work short. Cooper, the townspeople, and presumably the audience, make an utterly damnable assumption here, that Rosenfeld's vulgarity is a lack of sympathy. This is plainly false. We learn later in the series that the man is a pacifist, which is perhaps why he tries to contain physical violence through acerbic verbiage, but it's also why he investigates crimes, and he thus brings the full weight of personal interest into his work. This, I think, reflects nicely in Ferrer's performance in a later scene where he presents his findings to agent Cooper and Sheriff Truman. He's dry in presenting the evidence, but mournful that he was only allowed so much time.

DR. ROSENFELD

A couple more days with the body who knows what I might've found.

SHERIFF TRUMAN

Excuse us, we have a funeral to attend to.

In making this assumption of Rosenfeld's cynicism and shall we say “Yankee-ness,” we also ignore something about the town: that they have something to hide in all this. While many townsfolk are unconvinced they played a role in Laura's death (we'll get to that), we also know that Palmer was a walking monument to the night culture of the town that it does not want outsiders to see: taboo sex and hard drugs, the sort of thing centrists might call “alternative lifestyles” as though there's some inherent normalcy to the missionary position or drinking beer instead of smoking pot (or snorting blow.) We should note in the earlier scene at the morgue that the representative of the regular townsfolk is Ben Horne, the slimy businessman, a guy with a lot of dirty secrets himself, the closest thing the show has to a legitimate villain at this point in it's run.

BEN HORNE

Mr. Rosenfeld, please! Now, uh . . . Leland Palmer couldn't with us today, but I know I speak for everyone, the Palmer family included, when I say that, uh . . . we appreciate . . . and understand! The value of your work. But as their representative I must insist that we consider the feelings . . . of the Palmer family as well.

Ben reveals his true colors right before the funeral. We overhear him discussing with his wife about how best to get their son, Johnny, who has what are described as “emotional issues,” to remove a Native-American headdress he constantly wears so he can appear respectable for the funeral. There is little compassion in his words. His mentally disabled son is not able to easily conceal what he truly feels like the rest of the town, and Ben is ashamed of him for that, for his son's disability. Ben Horne has other, more human moments, but I think in this moment he also speaks as a representative for the town, revealing their inner cynicism, and their wish to conceal truths they don't want to engage with, like his son's disability, or Laura Palmer's life.

As Cooper leaves the autopsy room, having ordered Rosenfeld to release the body, he places Laura's limp, dead hand flat on her chest. The limp hanging wrist is an honest image of death. By replacing that hand, Cooper takes part in a narrative that wishes to preserve an image of Laura of beauty and supposed innocence. The sad thing is, she was both, but the narrative that the people of Twin Peaks want to preserve about her life is, to them, unable to be reconciled with the life she lead. This, I think, becomes especially pertinent when we recognize that Laura Palmer was not only murdered, but raped multiple times before so. In attempting to privilege the details of what we might call Laura's “day life” the town is participating in a sort of silent victim blaming. It was Laura's fault she was raped and murdered because, in the eyes of the town folks (some might say in the eyes of the show's creative team), Laura's lifestyle choices are inseparably linked from the cause of her death, and that those who live more puritanically avoid such fates.

That's a bit heavy. Let's take a short break and enjoy some more of the music of Twin Peaks, shall we?

Earlier in the episode, we then have Bobby Briggs performed by Dana Ashcroft with his father the Colonel played by Don S. Davis, both of them just immense fucking talents shining brightly in these roles.

The Colonel, a soldier by trade obviously, has had his run ins with premature deaths just like Laura. Bobby is a fair bit like Laura: hes always walking on the wild side, selling cocaine, occasionally drinking while he drives, smoking, and dating Laura before her death while also having an affair with a married woman. But while he's danced with death, he's always taken lead.

Laura's death represents the first time his mortality is ever really apparent to him. As his father sits back calmly attempting to explain how funerals allow people to come to terms with death and accept it, Bobby plays with a lighter. At first, he opens it, flicks it, lets the flame burn briefly, and then shuts it, extinguishing the flame. This is a process that Bobby Brigs has probably performed countless times until this point, as have people he associates with, those who walk with him on the wild side. As quickly as life begins, so suddenly is it gone. Now he opens it again and leaves the flame, standing the lighter on the table, cupping his hands around it to preserve it. The flame diminishes quickly, but we see here a greater appreciation to preserve things that can so suddenly end. As the colonel finishes his monologue, Bobby closes the lighter again. We can see it on his face: Bobby is angry. He is disgusted. He is afraid. But this may perhaps be the first time he has ever felt these things so deeply in his life, and he turns that anxiety into a performance.

COLONEL

Son, don't be afraid. We'll all be there together.

BOBBY

Afraid of what?

COLONEL

The funeral.

BOBBY

I'm not afraid of any damn funeral. Afraid? . . . I can hardly wait!

AFRAID?! I'M GONNA TURN IT UPSIDE DOWN!

Now we're at the funeral. The funeral has this clear progression to it that I think represents everything Twin Peaks is about in a really, just utterly gorgeous way. As the funeral starts, the preacher gives a sermon, a pretty heartfelt one, about Laura's life, but the camera tells us the real story. These people aren't really thinking about Laura, they're thinking about themselves. That's fine and all, funerals are for living, not the dead. Donna Hayward has one of the more genuine expressions of grief as she looks down at the coffin. She legitimately was one of Laura's close friends. Bobby Briggs looks down, but his face is contemptuous. He holds this entire event in contempt. Agent Cooper looks at the preacher, I'd say in respect for a faith that is not his, as he has shown respect, maybe even envy, for this culture he does not belong to. Ed Hurley looks at the preacher as well, but, perhaps filled with guilt at his wife's undying love and his adulterous affair, looks away, purses his lips, his gaze shifting. The camera shifts back to Agent Cooper, always on the job, now looking at the other mourners: Bobby, still contemptuous, getting more annoyed as he breaks his gaze on the coffin and silently, but visibly, sighs. Cooper's gaze then finds James Hurley, who had spoken of his intent not to appear at the funeral, but is here now. James' eyes are fixed on Bobby, who he thinks is responsible for the murder. Donna's eyes then find James, who she is slowly falling in love with, before guiltily shifting back to the funeral. Audrey Horne, engaging her own infatuation, shoots a flirtatious look at Cooper. Cooper returns the favor. These people are losing focus, but it was never really on Laura to begin with.

As the preacher ends his sermon, Johnny Horne sincerely intones.

JOHNNY
Amen. Amen!

And out of nowhere Bobby fucking loses it.

BOBBY
AAAAAAMMMMMEEEENN!!!

He's tired of this charade. He knew “the real” Laura Palmer, and he lives her kind of life. He knows these people don't really care about her just like they don't care about him, that they're trying to cover their tracks by appearing respectable. And he has had enough.

BOBBY

What're you lookin' at? What are you waiting for? You make me sick. You damn hypocrites make me SICK!!! Everybody knew she was in trouble! But we didn't do anything. All you “good” people. You wanna know who killed Laura? YOUD DID! We all did. And pretty words aren't gonna bring her back, man, so save your prayers! She would've laughed at them anyway.

The artifice is exposed. As is the nerve. James furiously leaps at Bobby and they begin fighting, people pick sides or try to hold the two back, and the funeral comes apart.

Leland Palmer, struck with grief, jumps on to his daughter's coffin, and the scene begins to take on a tone of incredible awkwardness that has been slowly bubbling beneath the surface. The reasons for this are threefold:

1. Leland's landing screws with the very loud mechanisms by which Laura Palmer's body is to be put in the ground, and people have a hard time getting Leland off of the coffin as well as just putting the damn thing in the ground and getting this over with so people can go home.
2. His wife intones, bizarrely, “Don't ruin this too!” As though the funeral is . . . what it really is: a social performance of grief. As though Leland had ruined something else in their family and was then an active embarrassment. This is all of course true because
3. Finally: Leland Palmer, who is expressing this incredible grief, as a father might? Is the one who repeatedly raped and murdered Laura Palmer.

Thank you for joining me, I know it's been a heavy and unusual episode. In this episode we've heard the “Twin Peaks Theme,” “Audrey's Dance” and “Laura Palmer's Theme” from the Twin Peaks original soundtrack by Angelo Badalamenti. Critical Switch is supported entirely by listeners like you at Patreon.com/Criticalswitch, and that'll be linked in the description. Next week you'll be joined once again by Zolani Stewart.

This time from Redmond, Washington, I'm Austin C. Howe.

COOPER

Do you believe in the soul?

HAWK

Several.

COOPER

More then one?

HAWK

Blackfoot legend. Waking souls that give life to the mind and the body. A dream soul that wanders.

COOPER

Dream souls? Where do they wander?

HAWK

Faraway places. The land of the dead.

COOPER

Is that where Laura is?

HAWK

Laura's in the ground, Agent Cooper. That's the only thing I'm sure of.