Super Nerd Sundays Presents: There's Something About Assassin's Creed IV!

Amidst the torrent of new titles cluttering my Steam list and my rare free moments of thought, I've started playing Assassin's Creed IV again.  I put it down months ago in favor of endlessly repetitive Mechwarrior drops and the odd daily quest to work towards working towards the next loot drop in Neverwinter, suddenly bereft of the free time I'd once had to aimlessly sail about, pausing on to pillage whatever local establishments were available at the moment.  Now that I've come back, the pattern of things came almost too easily to me.  The natural, flowing control of AC4, paired with its well arrayed host of grind-y subplots, made slipping back into its contours easy.  I've been doing all the things I put off, things I felt took me out of the game proper for too much time.  I've been digging up treasures and capturing forts, only starting up the storyline again when I run out of space to explore.  Now only a handful of areas of ocean are covered by the forts still out of my control, and my treasure maps have gone from an overwhelming heap to a paltry handful, linked to areas that are either inaccessible, or simply don't exist in the game yet.

That's great, because I've obsessive compulsive and the more loose ends I see in a game, the more I want to tug at them until I see the whole thing come undone, but it's not why I'm writing about AC4.

See, AC4 came back into my life alongside a bunch of single player games and some action heavy summer movies.  It came back into my life at a time when I was exposed to a nigh appalling count of action sequences, occasionally sublime, far more often baffling in their composition and construction.  As I watched those action sequences, I realized something: Assassin's Creed 4 is actually better at composing action sequences than action movie producers, and it does it all procedurally.

I'm being a little hyperbolic, sure.  Assassin's Creed IV is just as often clumsy and infuriating as it is sublime, but those sublime moments, through their very presence, are a sort of victory for games as an art form.  There's been a long standing quest to make games more cinematic, something developers all too often try to do by removing player control for the sake of injecting "cool" stuff into the course of play.  You'll lose control of the solider you're controlling so you can witness a particularly grand explosion.  The RTS will cut away to a quick cinematic interval so that I can understand how cool these characters can be when they're not just repeating a single attack again and again.

The sensibility behind making games more like action movies has always been that the player is the problem; that is to say that player input of any kind will ruin the cinematic genius that the developers had in mind.  It's an old mindset, one that developed in an era where players really couldn't do anything but watch story unfold, but in an era of in-engine cutscenes, it feels a bit silly to still be cutting away from the sake of exposition.  Half-Life 2 took that sort of business entirely in house, making it all the more appalling that purportedly cinematic games only decide to live up to their lofty claims when I'm not around to ruin everything.

Assassin's Creed IV certainly doesn't ditch the cinematic cutscene as a means of exposition.  In fact, it relies heavily on them still, a strange occurrence considering the first Assassin's Creed's approach to storytelling.  And even then, the cutscenes aren't actually that cinematic.  There are more bombastic, and more interactive games out there; AC4 couldn't shake a fist at anything Telltale has put together on those fronts.  No, I'm not extolling AC4's capacity for cinematics.

I'm extolling its ability to portray its own action.

See, when AC4 is firing on all cylinders, it's something to behold.  Suddenly the awkward, stuttering momentum of the game is gone, replaced by a fluid, gorgeous stream of purposeful movement from kill to obstacle to kill.  The way AC4 unfolds makes me feel the way those cinema-grade action sequences are meant to: like I'm a part of some sublimely violent ballet, like I'm both witness to and participant in an event that is, in a phrase, objectively cool.  AC4 better renders those moments than any game I've ever played, contextually generating responses with a variety and tactility that most games can't dream of mustering.  It's one thing to see an enemy flail realistically.  It's quite another to watch the game render double assassinations or context specific combat moves in response to my inputs and the game's capacity to puzzle them out.

The end result is something empowering and spectacular, in the most literal senses of both words.  It makes you feel godlike, and distracts you with its raw, abiding coolness.  It mitigates the layer through which I control Kenway, so much so that I find myself slipping into the flow of play and, for a few seconds, controlling his movements unselfconsciously.  As someone who plays a shitload of games, this is far too uncommon.  Most of the time I find myself playing a particular game, I find myself overwhelmingly aware of the input system I'm engaging in.  After all, my mastery of it will determine how well I can perform in the feedback/reward environment of the game's structure.  Encouraging me to ignore that relationship is akin to asking me to stop thinking about elephants; it should be an impossible task.  And yet, Assassin's Creed IV has done it, which is probably for the best, considering how sloppy its controls are and how clumsy its action can be when it isn't being sublime.  If it were any less adept at making my flailing motion into something watch-able, any less fantastic at making those actions simultaneously seem action-movie-esque and like a direct result of my influence as a player, AC4 would be conspicuous in every way.  But when it fires on all cylinders, I find myself forgetting, not that I'm in a game, but that the inputs I enter into that game come through the mitigating structure of a controller.  In those moments, I'm thinking in the language of the machine.  The controller might as well just be a part of my hand.

Super Nerd Sunday Presents: Mechwarrior Online's Attempted Revival!

Mechwarrior Online was, for a long time, an exemplar of how to alienate a loyal player base.  A general lack of transparency, insane, apparently exploitative business decisions, mixed with content gating, that most pernicious of video game sins, leading to a structure that actually showcased that most fundamental of complaints against freemium games: the play to win structure.  Mitigated by an unappreciative corporate structure that misled its players and prevented any kind of long term forecasting, MWO was a great game run by a group of people who seemed to be hellbent on exploiting, and as a result alienating, their core community until only a few thousand hardcore fans remained.

Since its release a year ago, MWO has had its ups and downs.  New content had, until recently, slowed to a trickle, as Clan mechs, dumped in a massive single release and then slowly bled out to the general population, occupied the space of the once progressive update structure that PGI had employed in the past.  But then something incredible happened.  PGI took control of its company back from Infinite Games Publishing, its publisher and one time partner and, at around the same time, some key changes began to occur.  New material began to trickle out.  Player events, giving out free stuff to players who sank real time into the game over weekends and holidays.  New content began to emerge, including mechs once postulated to be long lost to the charnel house of development hell.  Most recently, a large scale content update was revealed, which included some serious changes to the game overall, the galaxy map, which the postulated Community Warfare meta-game will be played on, and a second wave of Clan mechs, including the vaunted Mad Dog, a storied mid-weight LRM boat sorely missed from the game in its current era of LRM heavy play, and the first Clan light and medium mechs to top 100 kph without speed tweak.   This alone would've been something to celebrate for the player base, but there's more: PGI also revealed a loyalty rewards program for their players, giving some pretty solid freebies out to people just for playing their game regularly over the last year, and giving a bevy of free hero mechs out to new players, based on how much they'd invested in the game over their time with it.  Players who shelled out almost three hundred dollars on Clan mechs would get exclusive content, and people who invested in earlier, less ambitious programs (like the Pheonix mech funding) would still get exclusive content, well worth their while.  Paired with some minor tweaks to the bonuses Founder mechs received, it was a perfect storm: PGI actually made a real conciliatory gesture to their core player base, the people they'd been slowly bleeding out over the last year, and mixed it in with a big sale and a major double experience event.

It's impossible to say just how effective this has been for PGI, or how effective it will be over the months to come.  Companies don't tend to publicize statistics like player migration or attrition, or when they do it's always with spin in mind.  MWO is also small enough that buzz, as a means of measuring impact, is going to be negligible regardless of the outcome: gaming press won't get perks for covering a game the size of MWO from a company the size of PGI, so even if it is the only horse in a given fight, and even if it is doing some incredible stuff to restore the faith of its users, it seems unlikely that it'll appear on say, the IGN home-page any time soon (which, hilariously, consists almost entirely by Destiny news, ranging in granularity from actual reviews to server outage notices to raid wait times, showcasing just how severely a player base can be abused by a developer and still come back for more, if said developer has the fiscal clout to push around gaming media).

Still, the friends I have who decided to stop playing MWO (mostly as a direct result of the Clan mech package announcement, and the batshit prices associated with it) seem to be genuinely excited by the announcement.  One of them reinstalled the game the moment I sent him the link, the other had a thirty minute conversation with me about Clan mech builds after a six month silence.  One of my buddies logged in to make sure he could get his reward for playing 100 games by running through a few with me.  I've seen faces return to the game that haven't been online in months.

And the quality of games has been improving. Where teams were once hilariously mismatched, I've been playing through solid, well balanced matches where people play their roles, and move as a team.  Perhaps this is a by-product of the double experience weekend, a trick that PGI has used before to great effect which, to be fair, is a great low cost way to get people to play more and try new mechs.

But I'd like to think that it's a direct result of PGI's announcement.  Video games, especially free to play multiplayer games, are a fundamentally social medium.  A developer who acts anti-socially, the way, say, Beamdog has to astute complaints about their netcode failing across the board, by suppressing speech and waiting for people to stop trying to use their game as advertised, is far too commonplace and acceptable.  In the era of pre-order bonuses, day-one DLC, and Season Pass packages for people who want to play "the real game," actually sitting down and thanking your fans for keeping your game alive for nearly a quarter decade is something to be celebrated.  PGI has made a number of missteps in the past, and while my experience with MWO is still mitigated by some technical issues (I experience framerates the like of which I haven't seen since Tribes, while running a game in an eight year old engine) I do really love their game, and I want to see it continue to thrive.  Moves like this loyalty reward program, and the recent flurry of faction-related play-based rewards,  are all steps in the right direction.  I hope it works for MWO, I really do.  With Community Warfare coming down the pipe, and hope still strong for another UI overhaul, there's plenty to be optimistic about.  I say, cautiously, that this could be the first step down a road to video-game redemption.  I'll keep my fingers crossed for you, PGI.

Super Nerd Sundays Presents: Furtive Game Spaces!

Tabletop game stores are strange places for me.  They're social places, dedicated to board games, that most social of gaming media, and while I love board games, I am fundamentally not a social creature.  When I play board games I play them a small group of close friends, people I already know.  I'm not necessarily opposed to playing board games with strangers, but the idea of hanging out in a shop designed primarily for that purpose doesn't appeal to me.  Even so, there's something that strikes me as wrong about a poorly constructed board game store, one that doesn't have space for play, one that focuses solely on shuffling out products.  The Compleat Strategist chain is especially bad in this regard, featuring lavish, surprisingly well stocked, impressively expensive stores bereft of social spaces.  It carries through every aspect of their being, right down to their churning, anti-social customer service.  I've never had an experience in a Compleat Strategist that made me want to come back, I've just had experiences that didn't seem quite so bad.

All this, despite loving the spaces, the sense of purpose and unity that a board game store provides.  There's something about board games in particular, about how they are simultaneously objects of nerd fetish and objects demanding social interaction, that appealed to the part of me that never quite belonged.  A good board game store is a place for people who don't quite fit that mold, who may or may not in fact fit another mold at all.  It's a space for outsiders, losers, and loners to be none of those things, to be normal people who love a thing in a space that thoroughly enshrines it.

I write this as someone who has lived in New York for about three years now who has just now actually found a legitimate gaming store.  It is, as is often the case with board game stores, incredibly inconveniently located, but it is, all the same, an incredible space for shared nerd-dom.  The wall of dice, sealed D&D books from the 80s to the present, sealed AD&D player manuals that hold within them scale models, sexist verbiage and overly complex tables that, for so long, made tabletop gaming into an inaccessible cultural construct.  The games, oh god, the games, stacked on top of one another, spread out so that one can actually browse through them, peruse them, and do so without blocking passage through the entire god damn store.  And the gaming section: in the back, always in the back, an array of cheap wood and metal ringed by the same chairs I buy at Target to fill the common areas of the apartments that I continue to sequence out of every few months.

It took me less than a year to find Guardian Games in Portland.  I'd visit them once every few months, usually to buy something small: a set of dice, a pack of Magic cards.  I'd glance at the taps next to the folding tables they set up in the back of the store and ponder how many people actually used them, how many people decided to drop by Guardian Games on their Friday night to sit down, drink a beer, and play a hand of Magic with the guys.  The idea of doing that in a shared space seemed absurd to me, though a microcosmic view of that same imagined scene played out in reality time and time again across town in a rotating sequences of friend's homes and other bars, places where a game of Dominion was well out of the norm, but still taken in stride by the well-adjusted Portlanders.

The store, in a real sense, made that kind of tolerance possible.  Not in that it changed people's minds in some thorough, tangible way, but in that its existence presented a framework that allowed Portlanders to perceive these games as social experiences.  I would never drive into Guardian's nightmarish warehouse neighborhood, struggle to find parking, and then throw back a few on my night off.  It's just not something I'd have in me, the same way I'd be loath to play a game of Magic the Gathering with a stranger, or ask to cut in on a game of Catan.  But the magic of that social space, of the game store as construct, projects itself outside of the structure itself, and into the world at large.

I cannot imagine this phenomena radiating out of The Twenty Sided store.  While it's an amazing space, it's located in Williamsburg, Brooklyn.  It holds up as a sort of bastion against the pervasive irony and layered, postured disinterest that saturates that part of the world.  You cannot be a true, full blooded nerd and couch your love of The Thing in irony.  It just doesn't compute.  You can be shamed, in fact you may very well be constantly shamed, by your relentless enthusiasm, but there's never any kind of disinterest behind your play: you want to win, where winning could mean actually winning, or where winning could mean playing an interesting, complex game, or where winning could mean making a story together.  I'm glad that a space like that exists in a place I'd rather never be, and I'm glad I got a chance to visit it for the first time.  Its relatively remote location, at the intersection of a predominantly Hispanic neighborhood and a rapidly gentrifying storefront, made for a strange sort of madness, one that I cannot imagine the raw positive energy of The Twenty Sided store radiating out into.  Perhaps I am wrong: perhaps I could go into any number of $14 plate bar/restaurants serving gourmet hot dogs and five dollar cans of PBR and see a hand of four way Magic being played.  Perhaps I could go into a designer burger shoppe staffed exclusively by waifish men with comically large mustaches and eavesdrop on the table talk for a Catan game.  But it seems so unlikely.  The magic of the store is contained.  Perhaps this is for the best.  There's something special about that energy when it's pressed into a small space.

When I visited PAX East with my friends we spent relatively little time on the showroom floor.  There simply wasn't that much we could do as a group.  Most of our time was spent in the tabletop gaming area.  In truth, the area was little more than a series of extra long event tables, the kind you'd usually see in a church basement, ringed by folding chairs.  There were vendor booths surrounding the gaming area, but the areas itself, with its raw simplicity and huddled groupings of nerds arrayed around one game or another, was incredible.  We picked a spot on our own and a handful of us played an overlong game of Munchkin together.  At first, it felt a bit like theater, like we were performing for others.  We fudged the rules, argued over minutae and experienced those delightfully interminable delayed turns as players eased in and out of paying attention on their phones.  But after a while the magic of the table started to take hold.  Instead of fumbling through turns, players started to get into it.  The theater became real as players spoiled one another, pushed towards victory only to be torn down in a single brutal maneuver.  At one point Jerry Mother Fucking Holkins sat down next to us at the very same table to playtest some sort of Adventure Time looking product, and while we all noticed and nodded among ourselves, he didn't act like he was any different from us, and it didn't feel like he was any different.  That was the magic of the table, the magic of that space, where we were all just nerds playing out our tiny little dramas, relishing our little victories, lamenting our more frequent defeats.  That space couldn't exist outside PAX.  It likely couldn't even really perpetuate itself within PAX amidst the ambient noise, marketing, and ham fisted play-by-play announcements.  But that corner of that conference hall conjured the magic that I'm talking about, ringed it in the same confines good game stores do, and managed to make Boston feel like a safer place for a nerdy kid from the suburb, a kid who grew up knowing for a fact he should be ashamed of loving board games and card games as much as he did who still does today.  It was a shrine to something I'd always loved, and to sit within its limits and play a board game with friends was sublime.

Super Nerd Sundays Presents: Knowing Your Role!

Amidst the chaos of attending weddings, traveling, and teaching classes, I've been left with little time to actually sit down and play games, especially new games, the games I want to sink into and explore.  I'm sure this will change soon enough: once teaching settles into a routine punctuated by furious feedback distribution and the blur of travel dissipates, a bevy of amazing titles will drop on the PC, including Dragon Age: Inquisition, one of the few games in a long while to make me genuinely excited (Mass Effect 3 style multiplayer slapped on to one of my favorite RPG franchises of all time?!  Sign me up!) and I'll be compelled to play them and, in turn, write about them.

It's a wonderfully vicious cycle I've been disconnected from for a while, between seeping depression and the queer, creeping miasma of unemployment, which manifests itself partially by pushing me away from seeking new experiences.  But now that that's resolved, I've been getting back into the swing of things, so much so that I'm working to re-boot my D&D campaign with some new players.  That means rolling new characters and, in keeping with the composition of my group, which is made up almost entirely of people who do not come from gaming backgrounds, explaining the mechanics of Dungeons and Dragons, and games in general.

See, Dungeons and Dragons takes the notion of class roles and makes them very, very explicit, dictating how classes, generally, should be expected to interact.  That could potentially stymie player input into how the game can be shaped, and how combinations of those classes (or different members of identical classes) might interact, but the marvel of D&D's design is how different each class actually approaches their role in question.  Rogues and rangers, for example, both draw from the same power source and fulfill the same role, that of the Striker, dealing large amounts of damage to a single target.  But the way each of those classes engage with those roles is very, very different.  Where a ranger will just do massive amounts of damage from the outskirts of combat, a rogue will move in and out, stacking deleterious status effects on enemies and using combat advantage to sometimes out-damage the ranger, but usually doing a little bit less damage with each individual attack.  While technically operating in the same capacity, the two do two very different things: one works slowly and steadily to isolate and destroy enemies, the other moves around the battlefield, capitalizing on chaos.  And even those are just two possible conceptualizations of those classes: a ranger could just as easily build themselves as a secondary tank with a focus on dealing damage who wades into combat and draws attention to herself.  A rogue could pursue a ranged build and plink enemies from the side-lines, knocking them around the battlefield and forcing them to expose vulnerabilities.

This conceptualization of roles is something Dungeons and Dragons does particularly well, along with its ability to make the interplay of those roles truly dynamic for its player base.  There's a sweet science to seeing how various classes can fit together, and some of the fun of the game comes from watching it almost but not quite happen over the course of play.  But what's truly remarkable is how D&D, with a relatively simple set of role archetypes, has managed to generate a set of roles that can be applied to near any existent video game.

Bear with me.  I'm not just talking about RPGs, or RPG-like games here.  I'm talking about any multiplayer game with any notion of teamwork at its core.  Mechwarrior: Online, for example.  In MWO a number of weight classes are interacting constantly during the course of play, occupying various combat roles.  Brawlers, for example, are analogous with tanks.  But the difference between a Stalker kitted out as a brawler, who will stand in the middle of a fight drawing fire and drawing enemy attention away from smaller, better armed or better positioned teammates who can then strike vulnerable areas on the other mechs, and a Cataphract kitted out as a brawler, who might wade into combat, briefly deliver a set of fierce blows, and then drop back to a firing line, hoping the enemy will follow, is profound.  And we haven't even touched on medium brawlers, who play on superior maneuverability and moderate payload size to constantly keep enemy forces off balance, or my personal favorite odd-brawler, the tiny Spider light mech, whose strange hitboxing and incredible speed make it surprisingly resilient and highly capable of sowing chaos in engagements.

While it might seem a stretch, I invite readers familiar with the game to consider MWO in this light, where mechs may also take on the role of Strikers (by maximizing direct damage payloads and volley firing at enemy mechs), Controllers (by maximizing indirect damage payloads and dumping LRMs or special artillery or airstrikes on enemies), and Leaders (by utilizing support abilities to do things like tag enemies for indirect fire, or protect allies from long range weapons fire).  While it isn't a perfect parallel, the role paradigms themselves are foundationally imperfect, so I don't feel too sour about twisting them into a new shape a little.  Sure, your average brawler can still do quite a bit of damage, but his role in combat is to hold the attention of the enemy with his play style.  Other players will likely as not be able to out damage him.  Likewise, your leader might be supporting his teammates, but an Atlas-D-DC can both fit into a Leader role, and stands as one of the most robust damage dealers in the game (and one of the most intimidating bullet magnets as well).

I'd go so far as to project these roles on to other games, fast paced team games where these roles might shift fluidly.  For example, in chaotic shooters like Call of Duty or Titanfall, players might draw enemy attention so that another player can get a clear shot at a foe.  Or players might lay down suppressing fire on entrenched enemy positions or mine areas to control territory.  That fundamental interplay of attention holding defenders/tanks, hard hitting strikers, area denying controllers and supportive leaders all present themselves (though I will admit, the leadership role seems to fade in prominence in faster paced games).

Perhaps I'm simply, as I often do, perceiving a gestalt where none exists, an old habit that never seems to leave the hearts or minds of writers, literary theorists, and people with obsessive compulsive disorder.  It wouldn't be the first time, and it certainly won't be the last.  But it's fascinating to consider how readily we, as players, seem to manifest these roles, even when we're not presented them directly, and how we, as players, twist them and reshape them until they become something that we're engaging with fluidly.  That's the real power of these archetypes: by not merely presenting us with a familiar framework to engage with our environments, but codifying behavioral patterns we already engage in, we become more aware of these patterns and, in turn, more capable of shaping them into something new and different.