Video Games

Okay, so, I'm a big fan of video games. I think they're a wonderfully immersive form of storytelling at their best, and at their worst best, a shitload of very fun zombies/nazis/zombie-nazi hybrids that you can explode with your friends, although at their worst they can be

just.

plain.

bad.

And expensive. Expensively bad, because if a game is good, it's not expensive, simply because it doesn't feel expensive. You're, getting your money's worth, one might say, if one was so inclined. And then one might ask if one had grey poupon if one were speaking in a british accent. ARG. Enough.

Money's worth. Most people (who aren't douchebags) do a reasonable amount of work for their money- and in that I mean they provide some sort good or service useful to other people and are recompensed in a social contract that acknowledges their stored effort and energy in the form of money by other people who have similarly provided a good or service in exchange for that same money. It's our way of valueing our own and each other's works, and ultimatley the way we spend our lives.

Thus society clunks along, and it becomes societally beneficial to be ETHICALLY self-interested. And by ETHICALLY I mean you provice a good or service USEFULL TO OTHERS so that you yourself can have money to buy goods and services. The more usefull the service you provide, the more everyone else benefits, and the more money your given for it. That brings up a whole question of necessity, etc. and who judges the amount of benefit in a piece of, well, anything, but I want to talk about video games right now.

It's almost as if this is the language which our consumer based/ democatrically free market / zombie-nazi hybrid culture of ours speaks (horse dead yet?). Money is the universal language, much more so than music: (R Kelly, anyone?) or for you Star Trek fans / virgins/ not gonna make the joke again fans out there, math: (Calculus, anyone?). (Answer: if yes, die alone).

How about this: Money, anyone? If you heard that in a bar. Eh? Eh? See??? Know why? Because you can trade it for things you WANT or NEED. It's useful! TO EVERYONE!!! Now, it's not necessarily a perfect system; most of it is actually debt that everyone owes to the banks at this point, and for some members of our little tribe it's become some sort of hungry-hungry-hippos-esque game as apposed to a usefull and facile way to exchange goods and services, but nevertheless, we speak the language we're taught.

So, you begin to degrade our very means of communicating with one another, come what may, when you put brightly colored dog shit on a stick and sell it as a lollypop.

By this I mean: when you sell something that people will BUY just becaue they'll BUY IT, even though you're not actually giving them new or interesting, or really even intending to do anything other than sell something that is actually in some way useful, it makes you a DOUCHEBAG.

This is my problem with shitty, shitty, sequels. Especially in video games, which I love.

And I'm back to where I began. Now. I will preface my about-to-come specificity here by saying the sequel I played wasn't that bad. It just was nothing new. It was in fact, something old dressed up prettily and touted as something new; as if my old high school girl friend put on a new, colorful, very very high resolution dress and wanted to pretend as if we'd never met and start all over again, even though she's gained about 30 pounds and herpes (sorry insert-name-here everyone knows already anyway) and there are newer, better models out there than can actually give decent oral sex.

Now this doesn't mean that I don't still have fond memories of my old relationship, or that I can't say it wasn't one of the most fun and enlightening experiences I'd had at the time, however, it doesn't mean that I'm going to knowingly exchange my hard earned 60 dollars (or 40, used, for that matter) which I made bringing food to rich people who didn't feel like standing at that particular moment to walk to the kitchen, but would rather pay me 15-20 % of their food costs to do it for them, but, I digress (deep breath)

To take it out to dinner and fuck it again just because it's gotten 30 pounds fatter and put on a new dress. Now, that doesn't mean I won't, out of nostalgia, or boredom, or because all the other video games don't get out on Christmas break for another like, four days or something, but none of these are valid reasons for me to fuck cette video game (whoa...getting...dizzy...) that fit into the whole exchange-of-money-earned-by-something-socially-beneficial-for-something-personally-beneficial model outlined above.

Because inevitably after I have my way with my old video game and find it, though it may be newly waxed, not nearly as fun as my memories of it were, I will inevitalbly find that I've exchanged my hard earned cash for not for the anticiapted hours of enjoyment, but rather a sour taste in my mouth and an itching feeling simply because it LOOKED alot like my old beloved, not because it was actually WAS.

It's a way of tricking your audience into buying something they've already bought before simply because they liked the first one and it has the same name.

Now Wait! You, the internet, may be saying, what about my favourite movie sequels! They use the same conventions and characters, and I still love Aliens/Die Hard/ Star Wars (the real ones) 2!

Yes, you're right, that's fine. Because you're actually getting something new: Plot. The fact that they use the same set pieces you know and love doesn't actually matter, because you get to find out what happens to your beloved Sigourney/Bruce/Mark Hamill (conspiracy theory: numbers 1 and 3 are actually the same person. Think about it). That's what your exchanging your work for. It's enjoyable. Work for enjoyement. Fair trade.

Now, if they released a movie where Bruce Willis wore a questionably effeminate hat and was more of a smarmy douchebag, that had the same conventions of a Die Hard (terrorist, ex-wive, blah blah blah) but had essentially no plot whatsoever, and there was no possible way for Bruce Willis to die at all and it's called Die Hard 5: Rigor Mortis Erection; you'd finally have what I'm talking about:

The new Prince of Persia Game. Now, like I said, it's not THAT bad. It's just that it's literally NOTHING that's both new and worthwhile.

In the Sands of Time, you got to pretend you were a de-throned Prince who is far more acrobatically AWESOME than is fair by the grace of God, who was also niave and likeable, since he learned how to be a better person believably, AND BECAUSE he did, he totally got to BONE IN A HOT TUB a very hot Persian Princess named Farah, also likeable, in fact way too cool for real-life-me to ever actually bone in a hot tub.

In the second one, you got the new fighting system to enjoy. You lost alot of other good things, like likeable characters and hot tubs, but you had something new. Work for being able to pretend you were a human cuisinart. Fair trade.

In the third one Farah came back, although she was lamer, somehow, probably because the lack of a hottub, but she was still there, and you got the best parts of the first 2 games smashed ungracefully but enjoyably together, and you got to see the prince be a little bit less of a douche than he was in number two- which was DEFINATELY worth waiting tables (or whatever it is you, the internet do, to make money) since in number 2 he was a huge tool.

By contrast, in the new one: There's no plot. There's a rough plot about healing different parts of the free-roam land and collecting floating light bubbles from from improbably placed pillars and such to re-imprison a God of darkness. Fine. There's lots of detailed BACKSTORY (def. things that have happened previous to the story) about all the baddies you have to track down, but that's different than PLOT (def. things that actually happen during the story)

It's slightly cell-shaded or something, the music is beautiful and catchy (I was humming it at work), and the views are absolutely gorgeous all over the game-world.

You have a new companion, named Elky or something, I forget, who is a magic girl who's life depends on the light seeds, who's never had a boyfriend and is about as emotionally complex as your average middle school female friend who you never hooked up with because neither of you quite knew what that meant yet.

You have a claw-hand thing which is never even remotely explained, that allows you to drag yourself down walls and such when you'd rather just fall cuz it'd be quicker and less boring.

And you can't die. Because every time you do, Elky saves you. And that's while jumping around with the same goddamn platforming system that was really super cool when it came out, oh about goddamn 8 years ago, and also in combat.

In combat, if you're about to have your head sliced, Elky saves you with her magic and the enemy regains some (read: a whole fucking lot) of its health.

Let's examine this. If you fail in battle, the game punishes you not with a tearful Elky, beating on your corpse as the dark thing looms in on her (though if she has so much goddamn magic why doesn't SHE just do the annoying fight sequences), or that the Dark God wins and the land wastes away, no nothing relevant to the story, but rather it PROLONGS THE FIGHT. THE GAME PUNISHES YOU BY MAKING YOU PLAY MORE OF ITSELF.

And you begin to ask yourself what it's trying to say.

But the key reason this sucks it that it robs the player of the most important thing in driving a story forward: STAKES.

Stakes is when in the beginning of Star Wars the empire blows up a whole fucking planet so we, the audience, go, "shit, we'd better get rid of those guys."

If the bad guys can't actually hurt the protagonist, it becomes like placing bets on a Harlem Globetrotters game in favor of the Harlem Globetrotters. You know you'll win, so unless you're very high or somehow haven't heard the jokes before, there's not alot of reason to sit through it: it becomes an exercise in patience. Which is not what a video game, i.e., any time of media should be. Or at least not the kind you charge for.

If the protagonist can't die, and the more horribly the better, we don't actually care to watch the game, because we KNOW that our guy will be okay, and in fact, WIN in the end, so long as they just keep at it. The game is rigged, in fact ANYONE can win, so then it's no FUN, because then you might as well hand over the controller to your thirteen-year-old cousin, make a pizza, and be back in time for the final cutscene.

It also robs us of that narcisstic "special" feeling of doing something hard, that we fool ourselves into think that not everybody could do.

We watch competitions and stories so we can vicariously and safely experience and overcome DANGER. We want to tell our caveman brain that we could still cut it, and in fact allow him to take control for a little bit just to prove it to the rest of ourselves. It's almost as if that's the experience we're, say, trading our time waiting tables for.

Secondly, the protagonist himself wears a a red and purple pair of scarves around his head, which cover one eye (no wonder the fighting mechanic is so fucked- no depth perception) and talks like what I imagine Hugh Jackman would if he were a 25-year old douchebag, who, for no reason related to the brightly colored scarves, is very keen on telling everyone just how many women he's been with while making virtually no moves on the one who's actually right there in front of him.

This may fall into the VH1-crowd value system, however, it fails to captivate the average gamer, or indeed, most people. The reason why the original Prince protagonist was so cool is that he didn't come off like a color-blind Whitensake bassist with an ego the size of Rupert Murdoc's because he didn't have to; his flair came from his awesome and brave acrobatics, his special tools (time-knife!!!), and because he went from fighting for personal glory to fighting for people he cared about.

Same thing in Half-Life. The reason the original is still one of the best FPS (Filthy Pig Sucker) ever is that Gordon Freeman is someone I wanted to be or at least could associate with- he's a nerdy scientist, and he's charactaristically silent, has a really cool gadgety suit and awesome guns, but mainly by the end of the game the WHOLE U.S. ARMY IS AFRAID OF WHAT HE MIGHT DO.

There's not a person alive who wouldn't want to acrobatically trounce those who stood in between you and your loved ones, or have the US army afraid of them personally because of how many gun-battles you've come out on top in.

Now these are EXAMPLES (def. Something that proves a point) not TEMPLATES (def. Something to be shamelessly stolen) because we've played these, we'll recognize them, and if you repeat them then you've just dressed up our old, fat girlfriends again.

So, for you video game designers, I, along with every other jerk with poor social skills and a internet connection will lay it out for you:

1. Your job is to provide an enjoyable experience for me to buy, plain and simple. Your job ETHICALLY is to provice the MOST enjoyable experience you can think of, not the most lucrative game (if you build it, they will come). This is how:

2. HAVE STAKES. VICARIOUS DANGER. If we can't die, we don't care. We're paying for vicarious adventure: Danger from the safety of our living rooms/gaming lairs. Also make the bad guys really bad guys- it's better for us if we're saving everyone else, especially every developed character our protagonist cares about, from being killed. It makes it more enjoyable and less morally questionable offing so many minions.

3. Here are some likeable protagonists patterns:

Unique way of expressing self that adds to gaming experience: (innovative acrobatics/ characteristic silence / a lightsaber) that's unique to your game, intuitive and helpful, and a new idea.

Special Gadgets/ armor that gives superpoers: (time-knife / hazmat suit / a lightsaber (It's almost as if we too have some sort of special device that allows us to be more awesome than we normally are in regular life, like a gaming console or something, so that we can ASSOCIATE WITH THE PROTAGONIST. Also I would like a lightsaber.)

A woman that loves us (seriously, gamers are lonley horny people, and make her cool, cuz if she's not we don't wanna in-game bang her and write really nasty fanfiction about it, and you'll lose your skeezy, 40-year-old-gene-pool-reject audience)

Some sort of an arc that advances THROUGHOUT the game, not just at specific plot points. If you can make the plot points make sense with that arc, so much the better, you've actually provided something worth waiting tables for.

And finally:

DON'T MAKE THE LEAD UNRELATABLEY DOUCHEY. GAAAAAAH!

If all this seems like alot to ask, please remember: FUCK YOU. DO YOUR GODDAMN JOB.

And for that portion of you, internet, who says: why don't you do it, asshole: Fuck, if you know anyone who will let me write for video games, please drop me an email at NightFire08@gmail.com, because would fucking LOVE to.