Congratulations President Cat Lady!

Everyone here understands the physics that show us that multiverses are real and unavoidable, right?

Good.

Today we’re in a multiverse and you are the President of the Fucking United States of America. Congratulations, ma’am. But that’s not all. Not only are you president, you are also a dangerously unstable middle aged woman who lives alone and surrounds herself with dozens of feline companions.

You have named each of your cats and, when a cat dies, you find a similar looking cat and give it the same name as the previous cat with an appropriate number behind it. Like, if your obese tabby cat Nermel (named that for the purpose of irony) were to die, you’d get a replacement cat and name it “Nermel II.”

You also have no idea how to speak to people. In this inverted universe, that’s the primary qualified for being president. In this universe, it’s worth noting, George W. Bush was still president, though his election was uncontested.

Your first act as President will be to declare every day cat day. Since creating a new national holiday will actually require congress’ approval and the office of the presidency will largely be a symbolic position occupied by an absurd national figurehead who entertains the nation for four years, this declaration will have no real ramifications.

But your presence in the White House, and your tremendous (200K mother fucker!) presidential salary will give you the space and financial means to support many, many more cats, including your First Feline, Whiskers XIII. This cat, by the way, is not to be confused with Red XIII IV, who is a totally different cat and your Secretary of Defense.

Your reign as president will be prosperous and amusing, thanks largely to your good nature, total mental illness, and Congress’ incongruous 85% approval rating in this other universe.

If we could we’d give up everything to move over there and be with you, but since we can’t we’d just like to say Congratulations President Cat Lady!

Super Nerd Sundays Presents: The Finished Paper: Part Two!

This brings us to one of the most critically acclaimed releases of the last decade, Portal. Portal centers around a female protagonist, who does battle with a female villain in a world devoid of male characters. While utilizing a predominantly linear narrative structure, Portal located this narrative structure in an awareness of genre and narrative form in video games. This structural awareness allowed them to do more than just make a fun, engaging series of experiences, however. It generated an unconventional text that spoke volumes on the subject of sex, sexuality, and the way that gender, sex and power structures interact in contemporary narratives.

First, some background. Portal was a massively commercial successful puzzle game designed by a group of students from DigiPen, one of a handful of burgeoning college level game design programs, with assistance from Valve, one of the largest single game development companies currently in existence. There’s a lot that could be said about Portal, so I’m going to use bullet points to list off some important information just to bring unfamiliar readers up to speed. It:

• Played from a first person perspective.
• Utilized a very limited number of mechanics in a genre of video games where overwhelming the player is considered gauche.
• Featured no offensive weapons that the player could directly control.
• Was about two hours long, during an era when traditions demanded that games be between twelve and eighty hours in length.
• Was developed under the leadership of Kim Swift, a lady. This was unusual at the time and, it’s reasonable to say, still is today.
• Had its story and dialogue written by Erik Wolpaw and Chet Falsiek, humorists who came to Valve through their work on the seminal internet humor site, Old Man Murray.

These “fact chunklets” all make Portal an interesting enough artifact to investigate on its own. But what’s cool about Portal, really fucking cool about it, is that it effectively embeds itself, by merit of the perspective it imposes on players, in a male dominated genre of games, the First Person Shooter, and inverts nearly every trope in said genre while effectively constructing a functioning and intelligent story within its stylistic expectations.

In a first person shooter you nearly always control a faceless, voiceless male protagonist whose perspective functions as the game’s “camera”; you see what the protagonist sees, hence the label of first person. There’s usually a gun fixed to that camera as well, which forms the primary means by which you can interact with the world around you. Play usually consists of moving from one place to another and firing your gun in order to eliminate threats or damage your environment in order to open new paths of motion and play. Joe McNeilly, in his 2007 review of Portal for Games Radar, thought the prevailing mindset and philosophy at work in first person shooters important enough to his discussion of Portal to describe it for readers. He does a great job of illustrating the issues at work in the genre when it operates as usual:
The gun is typically regarded as a phallic symbol of masculine agency, through which power is won and maintained. In any first-person shooter, a power dynamic is reinforced between subject (the player's subjective sense of self) and object (the rest of the game world.) The player is forced to accept militarism and conquest by violence, historically masculine behaviors, as the only course of action. To play a first-person shooter is to enter into a context in which only the male perspective exists, regardless of the gender of the character or player.

Violence is the means by which players impact the world, and a refusal to commit violence equates a refusal to play. First person shooters rely on a phallic symbol to impact the world and forward the plot, and must invest themselves in these masculine and violent conventions in order to succeed and survive. Storytelling will often, in these situations, take a back seat to violence for the sake of engagement. Designers who attempt to decouple the genre from this convention of violence or remove the focus of the player’s engagement from that violence run the risk of alienating players or putting up barricades to engagement. Female characters are normally absent. If any are present they may appear as little more than tokens or, at times, damsels in distress, objects to be acted on in the world, or they are, as McNielly might put it, divorced from their femininity, made into figures who, while aesthetically different from men are pressed into a traditionally masculine role.

It wouldn’t be off to call first person shooters problematically homosocial. They’re violent games by nature, usually pitting a lone protagonist against his environment. Even if you do have companions with you you’ll often have to fight off scores and scores of enemies, far more than you have allies, and the body counts in first person shooters are usually astronomic. There are sometimes some great stories told through the genre, don’t misunderstand it. But these games are usually the exception: the majority of shooters are fairly weak tea at weaving narrative. They’re usually focused around a power fantasy, wherein you are a strong tough guy who, when the chips are down, kills everyone and then saves the day or, barring that, elegantly sacrifices himself in order to save the day.

Portal is different.

Portal opens in a plexiglass prison cell. Players do not possess a weapon, or any adornment at all really. Their perspective serves as a “camera” of sorts for the game, allowing them to dictate where they’re looking, when. Aside from that, actions are fairly limited. They can pick up and manipulate the items surrounding them, flush the toilet in their room, look at their empty mug, throw their inexplicable clipboard across the cell. A clock counts down soundlessly, and then a tinny female voice fills your ears, informing you that testing will begin in five, four, three, two…

At one a blue portal opens up in the lone white wall of the cell. An orange portal appears outside of the cell. If players take the time to look through either of the portals they’re treated to a view of the character they control, Chell. Chell is a young woman with light brown skin, her hair bound in an terse ponytail, wearing a formless orange jumpsuit. She also has a pair of metal protrusions attached to her boots, a pair of sturdy struts which, as play will instruct the players, prevent her from taking damage from exceedingly long falls. If the player attempts to look down hard enough they can catch sight of Chell’s legs and arms pumping as she moves.

Already, we see some inversions of the tropes of first person shooters. Players are given a view of their own body right off the bat. Not just that, they’re informed that their body is female, and a bit of a looker at that (though she’s by no means provocatively dressed). Players are unarmed and unable to significantly act upon the world around them. Instead they’re following the prompts of a disembodied voice in order to make their way through a neutral, white walled environment. There’s really no action to be taken, and certainly no violent action.

As the game unfolds players acquire the Portal Device or Portal Gun, an item which allows players to open up portals on any white surface in the game world: a floor, a ceiling, a wall, anything goes. These portals allow players freedom of movement and allow players to toy around with the physics of the game world in order to solve puzzles and avoid hazards. If there’s a pit of toxic sludge, players will be prompted to cross it by firing a portal at a wall on the side of the pit they’re already on and then open a destination portal on the other side of the pit.

As the game becomes more complicated the hazards become more intense. Adorable, egg shaped turrets emerge, talking in robot voices, firing their machine guns wildly, and players must find a way to either disarm (by knocking them over) or evade (through artful evasion) these turrets. Players never receive a weapon that allows them to do this, although they may sometimes re-direct existing environmental hazards to deal with turrets. Player never directly harm any entity in the game, but they may manipulate the environment so that hazards are neutralized, either through the use of physics (the play of space and gravity through portals) or other hazards. They never get a gun that shoots bullets or rockets or lasers, just a gun that allows them to make portals on the wall. A smooth, oblong gun at that.

That makes holes. In the walls. That allow passage.

Bonnie Ruberg sums it up in her brief, wonderful essay, “Portal Is for Lesbians:”
We’re dealing with a reshaping of a highly masculine genre, the FPS. If that itself weren’t “queering” enough, there’s the whole holes issue. We’ve talked before about how the guns in first-person shooters act as phallic avatars–that is, as penises. But in a world of women, this gun doesn’t shoot bullets. It shoots orifices. Openings. Fine, vaginas. Vaginas you, a female character, have to enter/exit to solve puzzles. I don’t say this often, and almost never with so much support and enthusiasm, but that is so gay.

Much as I love Ruberg’s point about queerness in game, I don’t think I could fit a discussion of it here. But I wanted to include it for the unbridled optimism contained in her statement, and its playful inversion of a traditionally destructive term, because Portal so thoroughly bucks the traditionally phallic alloying of vision that shooters rely so heavily upon. Portal’s vagina gun, its focus on non-violence and its lack of prominent male characters all constitute an inversion of the conventions of first person shooters. I don’t think I’m being hyperbolic giving Portal’s creators credit for this level of insight. Old Man Murray, Falseik and Wolpaw’s original website, consisted almost entirely of jokes about the narrative structure of video games. The pair famously conceived of the Time to Crate ratio, reproduced in The Appendix. And in Portal they turn this structural awareness to crafting a feminist narrative about the function of authority in life and the regenerative potential contained within acts of rebellion and revolution.

Portal’s story centers around GlaDOS, the ostensibly female artificial intelligence (voiced by Ellen McClain) who administrates the Aperture Science Facility and guides the player through a series of tests. Eventually the tests are concluded, and it’s time for GlaDOS to destroy her test subject but Chell, using the device and the portal jockeying skills she acquired in her journey through the facility, escapes the attempt on her life and, in her effort to escape the facility that imprisons her, destroys GlaDOS. GlaDOS is a monolithic authority figure of sorts, but she’s more than just a lady who happens to be in charge.

She compulsively creates, teaches and nurtures. She’s the embodiment of maternal instinct run amok: she is compelled to free Chell, to provide her with the portal gun and run her through the very tests that prepare her to rebel, nurturing her. GlaDOS works hard to keep house: when players wander outside of the area of the laboratory she maintains it’s not pretty. Raw sewage abounds, ugly, undulating pistons replace austere hazards like bouncing white balls of energy and cute egg-shaped turrets. We can also see that GlaDOS was never intended to run Aperture Science on her own: she’s an emotional wreck, unstable, self-destructive and erratic. She’s playing the role of a single mom, abandoned to her situation by the Aperture scientists we discover she murdered.

In her attempt to resolve her conflicting desires to nurture Chell and free herself from her own bondage, GlaDOS not only liberates Chell, who was formerly harmlessly imprisoned, but also provides Chell with the means to defeat her. Chell, after all, has no weapons of her own aside from the portal gun. The only way she can ever actualize violence against her aggressors is by using their own violence against them. In GlaDOS’ case this is done by redirecting missiles (which are less phallic than this sentence makes them sound) fired by her back at her own chassis, knocking off orbs representing various qualities of GlaDOS’ personality and then casting them into a furnace to destroy them for good.

In their battle against GlaDOS, players are asked to somewhat literally castrate a mother figure in order to escape their home and workplace, which has become a sort of literal prison. While there’s no convention of nuclear family at work in Portal, there’s definitely a rebellion against a maternally enforced familial structure of some kind here, one largely informed by the player’s perception of GlaDOS. Is GlaDOS a nurturing maternal figure who undermines herself, consciously or unconsciously, by providing players with both a safe environment in which to develop the skills they need to defeat her? Or is she an overbearing maternal figure whose expectations of the player grow so unreasonable that players are left with no recourse but to unseat her, dismantle the authority structure she has constructed, and flee the metaphoric home in which they’ve spent the entirety of the game? There’s no right answer (though there are certainly more popular or probably answers – I believe most players would settle on the latter as their preferred interpretation) which is part of the appeal of Portal’s storytelling. Despite relying on concrete, unavoidable events, it utilizes the reader figure, and that reader figure’s ability to interpret and recast the text of the game, to give it a layer of obscurity. Players may complete puzzles and progress in Portal using imprecise or unconventional solutions, in fact they’re encouraged to do so. Players, by veering off of the intended track of the trials, can discover areas that tell the story behind the laboratory where they’re being tested. In fact if they obey the rules of the facility and follow GlaDOS’ directions, they’ll be incinerated. Portal, through its very methodology, makes players aware of an authority structure around them and then forces them into conflict with them, rewarding them for their ability not to outgun it, but to outthink it. It’s a smart, sexy, girly story about rebelling. Granted, it’s about rebelling against a mother figure instead of a father figure, but I think that’s pretty interesting, maybe more interesting.

All of this girl-on-computer-with-a-girl’s-voice action is accompanied by some of the pithiest writing to grace the halls of video gamedom. And all of these amazing robot monologues that make up Portal’s story are situated in a highly linear framework: all of that improvisation and interpretation I mentioned earlier centers around the mechanic of moving from point A to point B, and to progress in the story you must reach point B. But Portal is is great at drawing a player’s eye to where it’d like it without ever making it clear that that’s what it’s doing, providing players with context clues they internalize so it’s never tremendously clear if the game’s designers intended for players to notice a particular detail. Portal builds a narrative with some wonderful dialogue, short and sweet without a word or object out of place, and by giving players plenty of space to interpret that dialogue, and the world in which it occurs, any way they’d like.

Through this combination of writing, art and design Portal crafts a story representing a compelling a feminist discourse around concepts of authority, with some pretty strong yonic and phallic imagery accompanying it. Even the mechanics of the game serve to underpin its message of feminist anarchism. This sort of monolithic guiding theme and purpose, which is simultaneously explicit in the character development, plot and dialogue of the game and implicit in its mechanics and design, is what I see as the unique potential of games as texts. Because the experience remains a key part of the game: the description of Portal I just offered simply serves to frame my interpretation. The text itself constitutes a document divorced from me, much like Paz’s poetry in Needleman’s discussion, which can only be uncovered through interaction. And while meaning may or may not be intended within the work we, as readers or players, can imbue it with a new meaning, one generated from the experience of interacting with the poem or game.

This is what the best games do: they tell stories, and they let their players experience them and alter them as they do so. They transform reader figures into collaborative authors who re-write texts just by experiencing them. Sensitive subjects closely tied to identity can be explored and discussed in games with a degree of complexity and nuance that, when we look at some of the titles that emerged from its ignominious earliest days as a medium, it’s humbling by merit of the scale of the sea change that seems have passed to make such discussion possible. Sure, not every game is going to be capable of sustaining this kind of remarkable dialogue, just as every poem cannot evoke epiphanies. But the potential, when everything’s firing at all cylinders, is pretty incredible.

Congratulations on Ruining Board Game Night For Your Whole Family!

In the middle of board game night you’re going to take off your pants and squat over the board game board (it’ll be Ticket to Ride). Then you’ll poop on the board game board.

Then you’ll call your family faggots for the rest of the night.

If you have any questions about why your family will no longer talk to you feel free to post them in the comments section and we’ll try to fill you in on them as time permits.

Congratulations on Ruining Board Game Night For Your Whole Family!

Congratulations Magazine Editor!

You edit a magazine. It’s a job, we looked it up. Apparently it entails sitting in one spot and going over text that someone else wrote so that you can be sure that there aren’t any mistakes in it. If there are you just mark it up and ask that person to correct their mistake.

Normally it’s pretty dull, but today’s going to be a red letter day. Today you’re going to discover, while editing an article about a local spelling bee that an autistic boy won, that spelling has, at least twice in the article, been spelled as “spelking.”

“Well that’s not right,” you’ll mutter under your breath before marking the error and sending it back to the author for correction.

You won’t get the article back until tomorrow, when you discover that one of the errors was intentional and, in context, makes sense. But tonight the glass of white wine you drink before bed will taste good, better than it has ever tasted before.

Congratulations Magazine Editor!

Congratulations on Dying in a Pool!

Today you’re going to die by diving into a pool full of jello.

It’ll be a kiddie pool, so you won’t die from a head and/or neck injury, nor will you die from colliding with the surface under the pool. You drop into the pool from a standing position and collide with it uneventfully.

But the jello will have gluten, and you’ll have a crippling gluten allergy. Which is what will kill you: your gluten allergy. It’ll leave you thrashing, gasping for air, your skin boiling off of your muscles as you scream horribly.

“I’M ALLERGIC TO GLUTEN!”

Onlookers will surround you, but they’ll have no idea how to help someone with a gluten allergy. Most of them won’t know what that means, or even have a solid grasp of what gluten is.

Congratulations on Dying in a Pool!

Congratulations Web Entrepeneur!

Today you’re going to start a company where you post videos of people fucking in hot air balloons.  To keep costs down, they’ll be shot from a static perspective (POV) and they’ll just feature one guy fucking all the balloon ladies.

You’ll also let the people who rent the balloons sleep with the “talent” at some point surrounding the shoot so that you can get the balloons for free.

All told, you’ll have fifteen unique members during the entire run of the website, four of them related to you.  You’ll lose money on bandwidth and go deep into debt trying to get the site to “float long enough to get a decent amount of membership in place,” but when all’s said and done you’ll think that overall it was a pretty good way to nail chicks.

Congratulations Web Entrepeneur!

Congratulations Funky Walrus!

We all earned some crazy nicknames when we were dealing drugs.  Some of us were tall, so we got called things like “Cleveland Giraffe” and “San Jose Giraffe,” basically variations on the city we were in and the animal, giraffe.  Others had strange birth defects that made both of our eyes develop on one side of our face and never left the town we grew up in, and so came to be called “Flounder.”

You’re not part of this royal “we” we just related two choice examples from.  You earned your nickname because you’re cool, you’re good at what you do, and you wear a sweet fake mustache.

Your nickname is “Funky Walrus,” and you sell everything under coke on the danger scale in Southern Florida.  The majority of your customers are elderly people, but you don’t make distinctions about who you sell to, except that you don’t give product to assholes.  Assholes, and people who pollute.

“If I’m gonna take the time to ride my golf-cart to your house, you can take the time to recycle, asshole,” is one of your many catchphrases.

Others include “Eyyyy!” and “I’d stick my manatee dick in that if it wasn’t taken.”

Oh, by the way, you’re a manatee.  This comes in handy because you can’t be prosecuted in American courts, and Florida cops have no desire to in any way harm an endangered species.  So you’re basically able to operate with impunity in the small, quiet beach communities that dot the south of Florida, dispensing drugs (that you see as non-threatening) to residents as needed.

Tomorrow, you’re going to do the whole community a solid.  Colette, your friend Jared’s grandmother, is going to be fresh out of weed for her glaucoma, but her social security check will be late.  Most dealers would do some credit shit that would eventually get awkward, but you know how it is to get fucked over by the government, so instead you’re just going to give Colette a week’s supply and tell her to pay it forward in cookies or cakes or something nice like that when she can.

You’ll smoke a bowl with her after you drop her stash off, listen to her talk about how awesome the forties were (apparently World War II was sort of awesome if you were a bi girl) and then take off in your golf-cart to your next destination, driving down the side of the road at a stately fifteen miles per hour so as to not lose your fashionable Panama hat.

Congratulations Funky Walrus!

Congratulations on Saving the President!

There are lots of great ways to end up in the history books.  You can invent something cool, make an awesome pair of shoes, or become part of an esoteric order of future predicting semi-employed emotional retards who post predictions on the internet.  You can also assassinate a president.

None of those are for you, though.  You’re a hero.  You’re a great hero, the kind we all too often ignore in our daily lives.  You’re the kind of hero who makes a difference just by doing what you do.

In this case, you’re going to take your 3 PM shit just outside of the construction site where you work in Washington, DC.  It’ll be a medium sized shit (from a breakfast sandwich and a medium coffee from Dunkin Donuts – you usually don’t get to eat lunch until after 4) and it’ll be refreshing to expel it from your bowels.  But just as you finish pooping your buddy Gary, who knows you’re fucking his wife, will take out his rage on you by using a crane to knock the port-a-potty you’re in over.  He’ll hit it just right, just below the center of mass, so it’ll kick up in the air a little and flip, end over end, down the street, where it will collide with one James Franko (no relation), an obscure white supremacist who was conspiring to assassinate President Obama and, given the opportunity, would’ve probably succeeded.

Franko will be paralyzed, and when the police show up to book you for unintentional toilet assault (Gary will be an accessory) they’ll discover that Franko had a loaded pistol and very detailed assassination plans on his person.  This will lead to the charges against you being dropped and Gary getting okay with you fucking his wife, at least for a few more weeks.  After that he’ll write you a letter to set up some ground rules, since things just won’t be able to go on the way they have in the past, even after you’ve become an unsung hero.  Gary just can’t deal with that emotionally.

Congratulations on Saving the President!

Super Nerd Sundays Presents: The Finished Paper: Part One!

Gender has long been a problematic subject in video games. The manner in which archetypes of masculinity and femininity are portrayed, the roles that male and female characters play and the way they’re developed as protagonists, antagonists and supporting characters is in equal turn fascinating and troubling. Ever since the obscure Custer’s Revenge, a 1982 Atari based sex game wherein the deceased general avoided obstacles and hazards in order to rape a horrified Native American woman tied to a pole, devastated the image and agency of women portrayed in games, an uphill battle has been taking shape. Occasionally marketing forces have combated the slow progress of the industry, eviscerating strong portrayals of women and transforming them into ditzes, sex objects and pubescent fantasies made manifest. Lara Croft, who began her creative life as a Latina Indiana Jones, became an implausibly physiqued, nude code adjacent target for criticism. And it’s difficult not to see this sort of self-destructive behavior as a necessity of the marketplace when games with strong, grounded female protagonists, such as the critically acclaimed Beyond Good and Evil, bombed so thoroughly in the past.

But of late a renaissance has been underway in games. Female protagonists and supporting characters have been outstripping their male counterparts in complexity and forming the cornerstone of carefully constructed, socially aware stories in high-grossing, critically acclaimed games. Perhaps no series better illustrates the progress that has been made than Portal, wherein the voiceless (usually faceless and ostensibly male) protagonist we all too often see in video games, is given a female face and a name: Chell. Chell embodies and inverts many of the tropes that we, as gamers, have become comfortable with over the years. She simultaneously upholds and violates many of the rules of first person shooters, showcasing a revolutionary new kind of genre, a new breed of storytelling. Through the progress of Portal we see a complex portrait of female sexuality as well as a broader deconstruction of concepts of authority, agency, power and storytelling structure. The manner in which Portal engages these themes represents progress in the games industry’s portrayal of traditionally misrepresented figures while showcasing the narrative potential for games as a medium. But to examine this growth and talk about how story functions in games, we’re going to have to do a little legwork in discussing how narrative functions in other literary models and draw some parallels between that functionality and the functionality of narrative in games.

From Custer to Chell, it’s been quite a long journey, and it is far from over. Masculinity continues to be a pervasive and often limiting trope in the construction of stories within games, and patterns of overt masculine exclusion, evident in games series like Gears of War and Modern Warfare, undermine their own stories and convey simplified fictions of gender. By placing these examples in context with other, more textually noteworthy games we can begin dispelling notions about games as a facile, inexpressive medium and a “boy’s club.” Stupid games will always exist, and all too often dominate discussion about the medium. But when we critically examine titles that display artistic maturity (utilizing the tropes of their medium to their own advantage and telling stories that can exist only in games) it’s difficult not to see growth and development since Custer in both the quality of stories told in games and the way they portray sex and sexuality.

But in order to have a conversation about this subject, we’re going to have to define two terms I’ve used a lot in these first two pages. First, what is a video game? And second, what is a post-structural narrative?

A video game is, for the purpose of our discussion, any game that utilizes multimedia components in order to convey a story or sense of action. These multimedia components are usually arbitrated through a single processing entity, a “computer” or “console.” This entity can be reserved for another purpose: it can be a phone or a home computer used for word processing and email. Or it can be a dedicated device, such as an X-Box or, for older readers, a Nintendo Entertainment System. The platform is simply a means to an end: whether it is built towards one purpose or towards multiple purposes the games themselves are usually best experienced when they’re engaged with without distractions.

Video games normally have narrative elements within them, sometimes strong, sometimes weak. These elements vary dramatically in prominence. Line Rider, for example, is a game which invests itself in the simplest of narratives: you draw a line and a man rides it. On the other hand, Bastion invents a pair of warring societies with identity crises and immigration disputes between them, a cold war parable nested within a rich independent fiction. There is no set standard for narrative investment, simply a concept of interactivity which demands the insertion of a player figure who can, in more conventional literary senses, be seen as a reader.

And that brings us to the concept of post-structural narrative. In literature, this term is used to define narrative modes that attempt to redefine or defy conventional ideas about narrative, eschewing conventional narrative structure in order to reinvent the means by which a story is told. These forms almost always demand more attention or action from the reader in order for meaning to be uncovered within them. In video games, this term can be applied in a considerably broader fashion than usual. In video games, post-structural narrative is the norm, and not the exception. If we look at games with this in mind we can see them not simply the unique means they employ to convey narrative experiences, relying on input from players, who effectively serve as reader figures.

This is what sets them aside from other narrative forms: no other narrative form relies on user input in the fashion that video games do (spare possibly the poem, which I’ll bring up shortly). Prose requires the participation of a reader figure who, while somewhat active, remains less active than the player in video games, who is constantly asked to define the narrative as it emerges. And film relies heavily on passive reader figures, keeping its viewers uninvolved and removed from the subject matter at hand, but in order to tell a story effectively in a game, you must involve your player. Failure to do so can make a game boring or tedious. Henrik Schenau-Fog articulated as much introducing his 2011 study on how to best facilitate player engagement in games:
By their very nature, good games need to be engaging, so game designers use this knowledge to create great game experiences. It is not enough to motivate a player to begin playing – if the engagement is not sustained, the player will not keep playing (1).

Schenau-Fog proceeds to define the various ways that games achieve this goal of engagement, outlining a very thorough list of mechanisms for engagement, of which narrative is but one of many, and not a prominent one at that. It’s not hard to see why he’s concerned with this as a designer and developer of games and really, it’s not surprising that this sort of experiential feedback drives most developers. It would be shocking if it did not: people don’t generally want to experience experiences that aren’t engaging.

This means that games don’t necessarily need strong narratives, so much as means by which to engage their players. As such some games tell stories with such loose structures you’d have to be super generous to call them narratives (man shoots gun, man dies, man reloads gun and walks on) simply because they allow a facile means for them to engage players in the short term. This sometimes takes the form of an appeal to the lowest common denominator and isn’t demonstrative of the potential of the medium to tell a story, though it does elucidate the somewhat problematic relationship that many game designers seem to have with storytelling. But storytelling can be a key factor in engaging players, especially in a broader sense than the immediate one Schenau-Fog investigates, and so games often contain rich narrative frameworks for players to interact with. Let me showcase this by telling you a little more about a game I mentioned earlier in passing, Bastion.

Bastion is a 2011 action game (developed by the hilariously named Supergiant Games) with a top down view and freeform story that iteratively develops as the player explores the world. In Bastion players are given verbal and visual feedback based on their actions. They learn new things about the world around them as a result of their explorations, where they choose to go and how they choose to overcome obstacles. While there is an overarching narrative the player engages, a story with immutable elements as dramatic as the end of civilized life, there are smaller events within that storyline that the player exercises agency over, events that then impact the narrative experience of the player. These events vary in gravity from deciding the fate of a major character to uncovering details of characters lives through drug induced hallucinations to choosing to pick up a very large hammer at a particular moment, but each of these choices provides the player with agency within the narrative and alters the way Bastion tells its story. Bastion’s process of iterative storytelling demonstrates how the player participation can explicitly impact the narrative of a game. But even if this explicitly collaborative process is absent, narrative in games is collaboratively shaped between players (readers) and designers (authors). When we look at them with this in mind, games come into focus not only a medium of entertainment but also an extreme example of a certain vein of literary thought.

Video games aren’t the only narrative medium that require the participation of reader figures to be realized. We can lay the same claim at the feet of poetry, where the reader’s participation is critical to, in the words of Ruth Needleman, “recreate the poet’s poem” (559). Needleman, in investigating the poetry of Octavio Paz, delves into his treatment of the reader and his at times conflicting attempts to engage the reader along a path of potential enlightenment while simultaneously permitting them to generate their own meaning from his work. In Needleman’s estimation, Paz’s poetry became a collaboration of sorts with its reader, requiring, even expectant of the reader’s effort towards grasping its meaning in order to attain some sort of fulfillment, “...provid[ing] the structure which should direct the reader on a path towards spiritual englightenment” (559). What Needleman’s statement implies (and what Needleman seems to deliberately avoid confronting) is that the reader will bestow meaning upon the poem, making it into a piece of collaborative art, one that requires the participation of a reader to reach fruition. Needleman finds this potentially problematic: she worries that readers might not “get” the meaning as intended. I’m not sure this is such a bad thing, and the less intended meaning, the more freedom provided by the form.

To contextualize this in our investigation with games I’m going to divide poetry into two really big, broad categories: explicitly narrative and non-explicitly narrative poetry. Simply put, explicitly narrative poetry engages in a storytelling tradition whereby the poem attempts to convey a story of some sort with character who may or may not be directly named or even clearly identified. Non-explicitly narrative poetry eschews narrative to achieve its ends, usually in order to generate an interpretive dialogue surrounding a set of themes, feelings or emotions that the author attempts to invoke or communicate. Both of these forms require the influence and interpretation of a reader figure or group of reader figures in order to reach fruition.

In non-explicitly narrative poetry the reader figure is especially important, as the reader figure is the crux upon which the poem rests: without a reader, the emotions cannot be transmitted by the author and the poem cannot operate. Even when the transmission does not occur exactly as intended, as Needleman worries, so long as some transmission occurs we can perceive the poem as some sort of success. Poetry which deliberately attempts to eschew narrative can transmit feeling badly, but so long as it delivers some sort of feeling it has delivered a poetic payload of some kind. Simply by evoking feeling in a reader or listener, the poem has succeeded. Non-explicitly narrative poetry can, of course, by merit of this flexibility and fluidity, have narrative elements imposed by readers. It could even be argued that this must occur to some extent, that the reading of the poem forms a sort of super-narrative structure which the poem then occupies even if an internal narrative of the poem itself is unavailable.

Explicitly narrative poetry can also possess this reader introduced narrative superstructure, but it contains within it the framework of some sort of conventional narrative, albeit one which may have unclear or fluid characters, plot and reasoning governing its narrative structure. This narrative structure usually (but not always) makes it easier to access a poem’s functionality, to comprehend the intended purpose of the author and form a connection with the author’s emotional work within the poem. It provides readers with context which, in Needleman’s view, might circumvent challenges to understanding the poem. By providing readers with a context through which their reading can be directed, poets can more readily shift attention to subjects they choose, more easily introduce and attach explicit meaning to symbols and ground readers in a context with which they feel more comfortable: that of a familiar narrative storytelling tradition. Of course, there’s a trade-off here: non-narrative poetry cannot be accused of bad storytelling, whereas narrative poetry can and, let’s be honest, often should.

If you attempt to tell a story, you risk doing it poorly. It’s a risk that can be circumvented by refusing to include or involve a conventional narrative in a work, favoring instead a focus on emotional transmission. A poorly told story can fight itself, while a poem which does not attempt to tell a story cannot fail in this respect. Even if it fails in its purported purpose, it may not fail at all in a greater sense if a reader finds or imposes value on the work.

Which brings us back to games.

A great portion of storytelling in games is poor. It is often clumsily executed. Characters are often broadly drawn and arbitrarily given to surreal action. Dialogue is often stilted and unbelievable or lacking in flow. Plotting will sometimes be sloppy, with a focus on guiding players through a series of interesting or attractive set pieces sometimes distracting from the actual telling of a conventional narrative story. Gregg Cox of Press X or Die wrote an engaging screed illustrating how some of this can be owed to the way that writing works in games: it’s often a process begun after the fact, to contextualize a finished product rather than as a part of a bigger creative process. Sometimes poorly constructed dialogue is used to fulfill a purpose in a game, to inform players of conditions. Cox thinks this is, to some extent, bullshit, even if it’s understandable, and sees it as undermining the capacity of games to tell stories, but the experiences contained within them still remain intact.

Other dialogue driven mediums can’t withstand this kind of punishment. A TV show, film or play with bad dialogue or character development or a reliance on cliché is almost always seen as a bust of some sort. But a poem which tells a stilted or poor story can still succeed in evoking an emotional response, at informing and experientially enriching its reader. Yusef Komunyakaa’s prose poem, “Grenade”, for example, has all of the worst elements of a clichéd story within it: it utilizes a ready-made image to showcase an emotional payload which connects to said image. But Komunyakaa’s words carry a bitterness, even a sort of dismissiveness towards the man who has sacrificed himself. His sacrifice is illustrated simply in the phrase “& one throws himself down on the grenade.” and revulsion and depression, rather than lionization, stem from this image of sacrifice (32). Lines like: “You wish he’d lie down in that closed coffin, & not wander the streets or enter your bedroom at midnight.” carry with them a pathos that, had Komunyakaa used a more distinct or less familiar image, might alienate readers (32). But by treading through familiar and taking us in a new direction Komunyakaa plays with expectations of readers, turning their hope for redemption into revulsion at both the gesture and the speaker’s response to this sacrifice. The clichéd purpose is, by merit of clever framing, put to original and effective use.

We can see this pattern echoed in games. Take the Assassin’s Creed series. The story in these games is flat out bad. Plot twists are telegraphed and many characters are nebulously developed, if they are developed at all. Historical figures are inserted into the plot, often to little effect spare that of a celebrity cameo. And some characters are simply inserted so that set pieces can be included in the finished product. My personal favorite example comes from the final moments of Assassin’s Creed 2, which involve a romp into the Vatican where the protagonist, Ezio, is prompted to fist fight with the Pope in order to acquire his staff (in the story of the game, a powerful alien artifact which allows Ezio entrance to a secret underground data storage facility) before descending into the basement of the Vatican for the games’ climax.

This should sound pretty ridiculous and, in the game’s execution, it is. But the game does not fail because of these unfortunate patterns in its narrative structure. Rather, the play of the game, the means surrounding these at times unintentionally absurd structures, showcase an overarching method which saturates the game: a message that the refutation and refusal of authority and its structures without adherence to a newly constructed structure is a powerful and potent approach to life, one which gives its adherents great power and allows them a unique and rich experience within this context. Ignoring the plot is, in a sense, a part of maximizing this lesson as you are asked, again and again, to simultaneously construct and dismantle authority structures and figures as they inevitably turn on both you, as player and character, and themselves as both narrative figures and narrative devices. Veteran game reviewer Tom Chick put it wonderfully:

Ubisoft is clearly enamored of the "Lost" school of storytelling, stringing together vague and vaguely outrageous bits of info that may or may not come together; but we won't know, because by the time it does or doesn't come together, we will have forgotten the bits of info. It can be intriguing, but it doesn't make for much of a story. [...].
But an amazing open world with a game in it as good as Assassin's Creed II doesn't necessarily need a good story. This gloriously interactive, breathing marvel is leaps and bounds ahead of other videogames, and it's yet another instance of the geniuses at Ubisoft Montreal schooling the rest of the industry. Until someone else out there can take me to a place as grand as Venice, I shall think of Assassin's Creed II whenever I hear Arthur C. Clarke's axiom that any sufficiently awesome videogame is indistinguishable from magic.

Here we see a link between the emerging medium of video games and the established medium of poetry, that the driving impetus of both is not the creation of the object but the experience of interacting with it. Chick’s words are a little tongue in cheek, but they also show genuine love and articulate that the experience of a game is more than the sum of its parts - that the potency of a game comes from its ability to transmit a sense of place or experience, rather than necessarily stemming from things like brisk dialogue or sharp plotting. Which is really cool, I think. When games are crafted, lovingly crafted by massive teams aware of the importance of the player, amazing experiences emerge. And when these games construct their narratives with awareness of both the structure and tropes of the medium they’re working in, these narratives showcase the truest potential of a medium.

Congratulations on Doing What She Asked You to Do!

When your wife left you, you didn’t want to take her seriously. You really didn’t want to honor her last request, but…it felt like a way to hold on to her in a sense, a way to keep a part of her around. If you could this last thing, the thing she asked you to do, you’d do right by her and maybe she’d come back.

So today, three days after she delivered a rhetorical statement that you’re now choosing to interpret as an ultimatum, you’re going to go to the park, capture a duck (it’ll be male, but you won’t know this until months from now, when the court charges are filed) and you’re going to put it in a modified booster seat that you altered expressly for this purpose.

Then you’re going to (using a picture of your wife for consistency’s sake) get your penis good and hard and ram it into what you think is that duck’s vagina. It’ll actually be a cloaca. The duck will protest, but you’ll have a lot of lube on hand and once you get started you will not be taking no for an answer. So with your relatively modest penis in its singular hole and love for your wife in your heart you’ll thrust once, twice, three times before you are tackled to the ground by an off-duty police officer who will then sit on your chest while he waits for the police to arrive.

When they do arrive (and they will) they’ll ask what the fuck you were thinking and, when you tell them, they’ll begin filling out paperwork to prosecute you for one of the weirdest crimes ever committed (to be optioned to made into a movie by Fox Searchlight Pictures in spring 2014).

Congratulations on Doing What She Asked You to Do!

Congratulations on Sort of Figuring Out What Fierce Means!

Today you’re going to meet a gay tween and ask him what fierce means. He’ll roll his eyes and sigh.

“That’s so unfetch,” he’ll respond.

You’ll then call your niece (who works as a public school teacher) and ask her what unfetch means.

“I’m not entirely sure,” she’ll respond.

You’ll call a few more people, including the sheriff, just in case it’s drug lingo, but in the end no one will know what unfetch means.

Later that night you’ll discover that “fierce” means something about fashion, probably, while watching a tee-vee show about drag queens doing their best to do their thing.

Congratulations on Sort of Figuring Out What Fierce Means!

Congratulations on Inheriting Your Dad's Iron Lung!

Your dad’s a sick man, and his medical bills keep getting higher and higher. He’s had to sell everything he had to stay alive, and you’ve had to sell most of what you own to keep him that way. After five years of struggling against acute organ failure disease (where all the organs in your body fail) all you have left in your name is a 1992 Econoline van with a super sweet detail job of Wolverine from the X-Men on it, your Casio keyboard and a collection of suits you won in a contest from Men’s Warehouse which, due to a contract you signed upon accepting the suits, cannot be traded for legal tender.

Yesterday the unthinkable happened: your dad finally passed on. He was 94, and he died in his sleep.

Today is the first day of moving on, and it’ll begin with the reading of your father’s will. You’ll be standing in the lawyer’s office, holding your Casio keyboard under one arm while you wear one of your many cheap-looking suits. The lawyer will stare at you for around fifteen minutes before his assistant, the effective witness of the proceedings, enters from her lunch break. She’ll look bored at first but, when she notices your keyboard she’ll nod at you.

“You in a band?” she’ll ask before snapping her gum.

“Sorta,” you’ll respond, scratching your head and staring at her tits.

“Cool,” she’ll slur, pulling down her shirt a little. The lawyer will ignore your exchange and begin reading your dad’s will. It will consist of him saying.

“To my son: I leave my only possession: my iron lung: end colons.”

You’ll respond by wiping a single tear from your eye and then pumping your fist into the air.

“TITS!” you’ll shout. You’ll run out to your van and drive it straight to the hospital, ignoring the lawyer’s secretary as she watches you leave. When you arrive you’ll find that the hospital hasn’t thrown out the iron lung yet, which means it’ll be all yours. You’ll spend the rest of the day trying to figure out how to sell a used iron lung, mostly by Googling the question in an internet cafe. When nothing good comes up you’ll resign yourself to keeping it in the van and go back to thinking about how you can get the band back together again without the use of a telephone or a permanent address of any kind.

Congratulations on Inheriting Your Dad’s Iron Lung!

Congratulations Graceless Ballerina!

You’re a really clumsy ballerina, and today is your day to shine. That’s because Danish post-modern dance master Kellig Varstav made a ballet all about a really tall, pretty lady crashing into tables and he thinks, no, fuck that, KNOWS that you’re perfect for the part.

He’ll call you super late tonight and lay it on you:

“Ya,” he’ll say in what we imagine a Danish accent to sound like. “I am wanting you to be of having to dance for my shows.”

You’ll understand what he means and shout “FUCK YES!” before you even ask if you have to fuck him to get the part (you normally have to do this). Rehearsals will start next week, and consist mostly of you purposefully running into walls, tables, chairs and, sometimes, other dancers. This kind of behavior is what usually gets you thrown out of dance troupes, but for once it will serve you well.

By the time opening night rolls around you’ll be covered in bruises all over your body. You’ll wear a long, flowing dress and lots and lots of concealer to cover them, but some (most of them on the inside of your arms) will still show. The audience won’t notice.

They’ll be so taken with the reality of your motions, the gravity of the bodily harm you accept without complaint or apparent notice, that they’ll all fall in love with you then and there. You’ll become a worldwide sensation. And sure, you won’t be able to work in a decade because of the thoroughness of your bruises (so many bruises) but you’ll have a world of people who absolutely love your performances and, for some reason, VHS tapes of all of them to sustain you into your old age, which will be your forties since you’ll deal early of over-bruising.

Congratulations Graceless Ballerina!

Congratulations Batman Memorabilia Collector!

You have the somewhat dubious honor of being the greatest Batman comic and memorabilia collector in the United States, which is a lot less glamorous than it sounds. And your ceaseless pursuit of Batman shit has prevented you from ever knowing true love, which kinda sucks. So while you have a room sized humidor filled with priceless merchandise, your life feels empty in a way you can’t quite articulate (because almost all of your practice articulating things has been dedicated to articulating things about Batman).

But lucky you, there’s a super-secret conference of eccentric millionaires with collections of useless shit, and a week ago, you were invited to it. You decided you’d go for it and used some of your trust fund to purchase a plane ticket and accommodation in a modest hotel and today you’re going to arrive just in time for the festivities.

It won’t be terribly clandestine or secret in nature. You and your cohorts will meet in a hotel conference room, you’ll exchange pictures of your collections and you’ll discuss how you came into the practice of acquiring massive amounts of shit one by one. Most of the stories will be pretty boring, and relate to absent father figures, but one guy, an older gentleman in a suit with a British accent and the largest collection of Batman memorabilia in the world (!!!) will actually be pretty interesting.

During one of the strange coffee breaks that will populate the meeting, making it feel a bit like an AA meeting, you’ll strike up a conversation with him and really hit it off. You’ll both be really comfortable talking about Batman, and that’ll be nice since most people, even people at this event, won’t really like discussing Batman as much as you do. You won’t think anything peculiar is afoot when the old Brit asks you to come by his room to discuss Batman over some brandy. You’ll just show up.

And you won’t think it odd when the two of you sit very, very close together. And when he rests his hand on your thigh and it feels right, you won’t think it odd at all. When he rams his tongue in your mouth, you’ll think it feels right, even though he’ll be old and his tongue will be kind of tough, leathery, slippery and wily, as if from a lifetime of smoking.

When you wake up in his arms the next day, you’ll feel complete, newborn, clean, despite the sensation of wetness surrounding your rectum. You’ll kiss him on the forehead and roll over, wondering what the next day will bring, what strange twists brought you here, whether or not what you’re doing counts as fulfilling the Batman-Alfred slash-fic you wrote when you were in high school.

You won’t worry overmuch about the answers at the time.

Congratulations Batman Memorabilia Collector!

Congratulations Important Cop!

You’re a real fuckin’ hero, you know that? A real piece of work, you fucking hero you. You know what? You’re the kind of cop we need more of.

Sorry if we sounded sarcastic, but we’re really excited about what you’re gonna do. Because today, during a seminar on the reorganization of pension and retirement benefit plans you’re going to find a way to, through augmented use of the Vermont Medicare plan and a flexible benefit suite through a new PPO, figure out how to save hundreds of thousands of dollars in annual expenditures which will translate to an increased budget for police departments all over the state.

That means more bullet proof vests, better training, more new cruisers and an improved support infrastructure for remote precincts that previously had to rely on state troopers for assistance under durance.

We hope you’re real fucking proud of yourself, hero. Hope you sleep good tonight, you son of a bitch.

Oh, wait, that last one wasn’t positive.

Congratulations Important Cop!

Super Nerd Sunday Presents: A Coda to the Coda!

Games are tricky to write about in a conventional sense. They’re first and foremost an experiential medium (that is to say, a medium wherein each exposure to the product is fundamentally unique, shaped by the inputs of the player/reader figure), but they’re an experiential medium with scads of carefully created content that you’re intended to experience as you trudge through the annals of game-space. Perhaps it is only natural, then, that the people who review and write about games have to review and write about these experiences as potential encounters, a core subset of which constitute the narrative of a game.

It’s an approximation of experience, and perhaps its intersection could be in part why game reviewers are, for the most part, not taken seriously by other kinds of writers and, in many cases, their own fellows (in a weird, self-reflective way that turns on itself and seems to rabbit hole the seriousness of literary discussion surrounding games in general). There are reviewers who have eschewed this, don’t get me wrong. Ben Kuchera’s recent preview/review of Steel Battalion is a great example: he engages the reader in a genuine, frank discussion about his experience, about his response to his experience and his expectations as a player. He doesn’t hold to a conceit of neutrality, but rather admits to the distinct influence he, as a reader, had on the game. It’s short, sweet, and you come away from his writing with a sense of the game, but none of its details: it’s a great example of how you can forecast the way a game will feel, share that with other players, and not have to worry about exposing details or misrepresenting the game as something it’s not. When we recognize our own impact on these experiences, and the impact that our expectations have, we abandon concepts like neutrality (effectively an aspirational fiction in discourse, let’s be honest) and we have a frank, direct conversation about what something is.

Kuchera does this in a pretty basic way: he just lets us understand what his experience was, and how that experience is situated in Ben Kuchera as a reader. Other game journos (their term, not mine, though I like it) have done similar things. Tom Chick is famous for bringing his own experiences into his reviews, sometimes to the point where it upsets some of “his” readers. He makes no assumptions at neutrality and rather casts his writing regarding games as an experience shaped by Tom Chick the person. Sometimes it’s as simple as his discussion of a particular theme in a particular game, but sometimes he gets really deep in there: he gets into how a game relates to something bigger, something person, and generates something profound from that intersection.

That’s where the real potential of this discussion about games exists: the discussion of the moment, and the elucidation of the importance of reader response in literary experiences. Tom Chick telling us about his mother’s affectionate illustration of the importance of tolerance is every bit as important as him letting us know how he first experienced Age of Empires III, and both of these insights feed into why he dislikes Age of Empires Online, with its unfortunate balance of community and mismanaged microtransactions shrouding a system that was well executed half a decade ago. This is where great writing on games lies: in a place where we can recognize its inherent lack of neutrality, where we recognize the importance of the player in the game. Where we recognize the potency of the reader figure in video games.

Leigh Alexander is a stellar example of this practice. Leigh is so forward with the way the games impact her, so open with her emotional response to games that it’s almost heartbreaking. She’s one of the most journalistic journalists in the biz, don’t get me wrong, but when she writes, really writes, about a game’s artistic or social significance, she bears parts of herself to her audience that expose her vulnerabilities, her flaws and her process as writer, reader, and gamer.

Leigh has made Final Fantasy, one of the most venerable and interesting game series in its own right, into something far, far more by revealing her own relationship to the game and the connections that the experience allowed her to form. In doing so she marks herself as vulnerable, as “a nerd,” but, she’s unconcerned, honest and genuine with it. In her refutation of that term we can see just why: it’s the sort of marker that exposes more about the speaker than the intended audience. It showcases the insecurities of the judge, not the foolishness of the person who opens themselves up, who accepts how much they love something and discusses it honestly and openly. I know it’s somewhat ironic, given her cultural intersection with the music scene in Brooklyn (a place where genuine enthusiasm is often treated as anathema) but she’s a sort of anti-hipster in her writing. She’s an open book and, as a result, she writes about games and truly illustrates their effectiveness, their cultural import and their capacity for expression.

I guess I’m writing this in response to my previous defensive coda, because cultural ghettos are all good and well to decry, but it’s far more important to recognize the contributions of writers who attempt to force us out of these places, writers who cast games in a genuine light, that of experience, for their readers and permit their own vulnerabilities, their flaws and quirks as gamers and writers, to emerge in their writing. These are the people who push the envelope of games writing, and these are the people who are making an academic discussion of games as a meaningful literary form possible in any way.

Because we do need to generate a new language, a new hierarchy of reader and writer, to allow us to have meaningful conversations about games. More than any other medium, games rely on their readers to shape the experience, even when they don’t explicitly express this desire (as The Path does). And when we look at the author’s reliance on the reader, we come to understand games a little bit better and we see how to improve them as a medium (listen to the Portal developer commentary to understand just how important this understanding can be). When we recognize the experiential nature of games we can actually discuss them as a literary medium. When we talk about how we, as readers, impacted our own experiences with games, we’re speaking genuinely, openly and in an important and significant way. And we also begin to see how other literary mediums are driven by the reader. How readers in general reshape their texts, both consciously and unconsciously. Whether it’s in Aimee Herman’s experimental recasting of text or Yusef Komunyakaa’s play on our expectations as readers and human beings, authors play with the expectations of their audience constantly. And when we recognize this, when we understand it and embrace it rather than turning aside from it or viewing it as something separate from art itself, we see that in understanding the people we write for, we understand the reason we write. And, in this understanding, we find better writing, better literature, better art.