A Response to “Is Death In Games Cheap?”

I read a wonderful article by Richard Clark in Gamasutra.  “Is Death In Games Cheap” took an engaging look at how video games handle death and I enjoyed every bit of it.  I do want to expanded, however, on the last section of his opinion piece titled “The Most Powerful Death is Not Our Own.”  He writes there that games do not trivialize death.  I’m not sure I completely agree.

Clark correctly points out that the deaths which really matter in video games are those of non-playable characters (NPCs).  He uses Mass Effect 2 as his example.  Anyone who has read my posts knows how much I love that game and how it speaks to the Human Condition.  However the use of a player’s choices to dictate if a character lives or dies is but one option game writers can use to make us care about an NPC’s death.

Writers can also develop an NPC’s character to the point where we care enough to miss him or her.  To this day, I still feel sad when I think about the death of Eli Vance at the end of Half Life 2 Episode 2.  I cared about him and his daughter Ali and I hated how the game ended with his death, knowing I would have to wait until Episode 3 to find out how Ali will respond to his passing. I ask myself why I liked him so much and I believe it is because he helped me flush out my character in the game, Gordon Freeman. Since Freeman never spoke, I needed the words and actions of others to help me connect with my character. In helping me to get to know myself (Gordon) I got to know him as well.  Eli and Ali Vance allowed me move past Gordon being simply two hands and a gun.

A third way game writers can make us care about a character’s death is to attach him or her to another NPC we care about. While I interacted with Eli Vance, I only got to know Maria Santiago through the flashbacks of her husband,  Dominic. Through his painful search for her I found myself hoping they would be reunited.  I remember playing Gears of War 2 with a friend online and having to pause when Dominic finally found Maria.  Their agonizing reunion also caused me anguish and I realized that all my rooting for their happiness was an exercise in futility.  I never got to know her, but one of the reasons I look forward to Gears 3 is to see if Dominic can find peace now that she is gone.

These characters are the exception to the notion that video games do indeed trivialize death.  Do a few wonderful exceptions mean the whole medium takes a more serious stance on death?  I don’t think so. I’ve probably seen and caused a hundred thousand deaths over the years and I could care less about most of them. I still love Clark’s analysis even if I disagree with his conclusion but at the same time I find it sad that game writers and researchers spend so much time wrestling with a 40-year old medium that is still, for the most part, trying to figure out how to tell a good story.  With death, we have the one thing that makes us all equal being used as a tool for a “re-do” in gaming.  In single-player games, it is a weakness in narrative. In multi-player death is simply a pause in the action.

There is hope however.  Clark himself points out with his final words that all is not lost.  Video games can provide a richer view of death. Further still, one of the comments to his piece notes how death can also be the goal of a game and not just a simple annoyance.  The writer of that post called the idea brilliant. In truth it is a fascinating idea and perhaps as video game narrative evolves someone will be bold enough to embrace such a view.  In the meantime, I will enjoy gems like Mass Effect 2 and I will keep waiting for Half Life 2 Episode 3.

Framing My Online Game Experience Using Dynasty Wire

I’ve been playing college football video games for a long time, but from my memorable moments with Bill Walsh College Football (1994) until now, there has never been anything like Dynasty Wire.  Why am I so amped about this feature?  Simply put, it adds a new layer of depth to an already deep game.  It publishes the results of your online dynasty games (complete with stats, pictures, and video) on the web for others to see, but it also allows you to frame the events any way you want. That first part excites the gamer in me.  The second intrigues me as a media researcher.

For those who don’t know, Dynasty Wire (DW) is a new feature in EA Sports’ NCAA Football 11.  It connects your online dynasty with the EA Sports website thereby empowering you to tweak and fiddle with your dynasty whenever you can get to your computer, iphone, or ipad. Players now have the freedom to manage their online dynasty teams on the console, the website, or both. However not only can you recruit players, check your schedule, and see the results from all your games, but DW also grants you the ability to create stories from scratch or edit the existing stories automatically generated from your games.  It’s pretty good stuff, even if the website still has some hiccups and tends to give out too many error messages.

Now the researcher in me finds this fascinating.  For example, let’s look at my first game of the season. My team, the Texas El Paso (UTEP) Miners, lost a close game to rival New Mexico.  The story feature in DW allowed me to frame the game so that NM didn’t beat me so much as I beat myself.  Notice the language I used in the recap: founds ways to stumble, allowed them to win, place themselves in tough situations, and so on.  I gave no credit to the other team. With framing, I can downplay certain perspectives while encouraging others.  Now I have tools to slant the events in a way that benefits my team.

In addition, everyone else in my dynasty can read and comment on my game.  Add to that the ability to link to my Facebook and Twitter accounts and the connectivity between different media sky-rocket.  But let me return to my discussion about social media.  Gone are the days when you would play in solitude (or with someone else sitting on the couch) and could only reminisce about your glorious victories.  We have even moved past the days where you could upload an image or video to a website for a few people to see.  Now we participate in simulations where not only do you play, manage, and recruit, but you can now create and edit your own media as you see fit (provided you can get past EA’s nit-picky language filters).

Let’s think about that for a moment. Not only am I changing my game play experience, but I can also alter someone else’s view of the game (possibly) by writing a biased report on the event.  The site encourages you to “tell everyone  your side of the story.” There is no pretense of balanced journalism here.  Pure trash talking.  And while the games may not involve real players, the competition is most certainly real and the marriage of console and website only enhances the experience.  I get the same feeling looking at my dynasty sports page as I do from reading CNNSI on the web. My heart races as the page loads and I wait to see what’s new since the last time I visited my page.  To me, dynasty wire feels just as real as CNN or ESPN and provides the same inspiration to start a conversation or a debate as the mainstream sports outlets.

That’s the beauty of this new feature. In dynasty wire, you have the fanaticism of fantasy football and the connectivity of Facebook now combined to produce a service that is just too darn easy to access and obsess over.  For those gamers who love to tell a good yarn, the temptation can be too great to ignore.  I have already penned three or four trash-talking stories and the dynasty is only three weeks old (in game time that is).  Imagine when I have access to stories, images, video, and statistics from four or five seasons.  I may just become something like a sports journalist after all.  At least in the world of my online dynasty.

Cultural Hegemony Within the World of Mass Effect, part 2

Last time I wrote about how the organization Cerberus challenges the hegemonic rule of the Citadel Council in the Mass Effect franchise.  This time around we explore some of the finer points of cultural hegemony and how some different readings of ME point to inclusion of hegemony in these two BioWare games.

In ME mythology, the Council was originally made up of the Asari and the Salarians.  The Turians were allowed to join after they unleashed the genophage on the violent Krogan, thereby keeping them in check due to the new genetically controlled birthrate. Humanity joined the council after the Battle of the Citadel (as Sovereign’s attack came to be known).  Both times the race that saved the Citadel from demise  became a member of the ruling council. In the world of Mass Effect, the most relevant challenges to hegemonic rule are a) those great threats that come from the outside and b) an uprising so strong that the regular fleet cannot prevail.

In the case of the Krogan Uprisings, the Citadel nearly destroyed itself. After all, they enabled the quick-breeding Krogan to escape the confides of their predator-filled home planet and as long as they could defeat the Rachni and win the Citadel’s war, the hegemony prevailed. However with the end of the Rachi War, the Krogan population ballooned at an alarming rate.  Hence the genophage and the Turian seat on the Council.

Humanity of course took the lead in fighting the Reaper Sovereign. Again we see the Council recognizing that a race was now powerful and influential enough to pose a threat if left outside the political inner circle. And so humanity became the fourth race represented on the Council.  Any member of the human race might think that, like the Turians, mankind had now reached the pinnacle of galactic government and thus had “arrived.”  Not Cerberus.

Perhaps if humanity had gained its proper position in the power structure after that battle, Cerberus would have ceased its operations.  However the Illusive Man believed that human interests were still not being served.  Why would he think that?  Let me refer back to cultural hegemony theory for a few hints.  Specifically, I will reference the Artz and Murphy book Cultural Hegemony in the United States.

These two writers remind us that the messages, ideas, and ideals of the dominant class are transmitted to and adopted by the marginalized (or oppressed) classes.  If we apply that to Mass Effect, it is reasonable to assume the ideologies of humanity are not transmitted via the extranet (Mass Effect‘s Internet) and to the masses.  We only get snippets of information while playing ME1 and ME2, so we don’t know if Shepard’s interactions with reporters are for the human press or the galactic press.  Likewise, the brief reports the player hears via “galaxy news” in ME2 could be customized for just for Shepard, just like the advertisements on the Citadel are personalized ala Minority Report.

Second, we know that hegemonic concessions must look like real progress for the oppressed classes. Otherwise they have little or no effect.  Genuine interest is an illusion that often times is enough to placate the oppressed enough to quiet cultural, economic, or political unrest.  We know that in the real world that having women on the Supreme Court does not automatically mean fair and equal treatment for both sexes; nor does having Barack Obama as President of the United States ensure that African-Americans now have equal access to economic, cultural, and political power.  So can we say that (in the Mass Effect universe) having David Anderson on the Citadel Council guarantees all of humanity’s concerns will be addressed?

We still know too little of the Illusive Man’s motivations to be sure, but it could very well be that he has recognized the power of hegemonic rule and knows that humankind must still fight in order to gain power. And so he has adopted an “end justifies the means” mentality.  We know from playing the two games that Cerberus has raised some hackles with both the human Systems Alliance and with the Citadel.  We also know that many in the Alliance do not trust Cerberus.  Even Ashley Williams, a self-professed xenophobic, berates Shepard for joining the Illusive Man when the two meet on Horizon in ME2.

But for all that, Cerberus seems more of a nuisance and a headache than a threat to rule of the Council races.  In ideology, the Illusive Man and his organization appear to be conscious of humanity’s actual place in the galaxy. Yet in practice, Cerberus by itself cannot pose any true challenge to that order.  And whether the writer’s of Mass Effect realize it or not, that is right in line with cultural hegemony theory.