Wittgenstein once observed that it is impossible to define the term ‘game’. Oh sure we all think we know what the word means, however, when you really sit down and think about it it soon becomes a hopeless task. Are games fun? Not always, certainly it would be hard to imagine how problem gamblers are having ‘fun’. Are games somehow the opposite of work? Not always, for professional athletes play is work. Similarly not all games involve rules, and not all games involve winning or losing. Perhaps one of the most complete academic attempts to define ‘games’ Juul’s Classical Game Model comes to the rather amusing conclusion that Sim City is not a game, despite the fact that it is regularly called a game, sold as a game and played by gamers.

We can not create a complete holistic definition of game which includes all of the things that people regularly and habitually label as ‘games’. What is startling is that we don’t need one. Despite the fact that it’s impossible to precisely define the word game, if I tell you I played a new game last night you would understand what I meant.

This is because of what Wittgenstein called family resemblance. Why do siblings look the same? Is it because they all share a single common trait? Or is it because of a vague and hazy hodgepodge of different shared or similar traits? We look at the siblings, notice that three quarters have blonde hair, three quarters have blue eyes and three quarters have the last name John. Not all the siblings have blonde hair, not all the siblings have blue eyes, but all things considered we can see the four people and intuitively understand that these four siblings are related. Similarly we can look at chess, DOOM, poker and yes Sim City, see the various shared common aspects and happily declare them all games despite not having a complete definition*.

Wittgenstein therefore concluded that the meaning of a word was not a ‘picture’ or a symbol of a factual thing but rather words are actions. Which is to say that words do not describe, they are used. We use words for various reasons, they are not representations of the world. ‘Game’ does not describe some platonic ideal instead we use the word game to suggest that something is a vague sort of something. The change is important. In the ‘picture’ model a word represents the thing it represents and can only logically represent that thing, in the ‘use’ model a word does whatever you can use it to do, which means that words can mean many things, in many different contexts to many different people.

Consider the word “Art”** Cultural critic Raymond Williams charted the usage of the term in his book Keywords and the way that the meaning of the word ‘Art’ has changed over time is fascinating. At one point astrology and maths were called arts. At one point any highly polished skill was an art. We can see the vestigial remains of these meanings now “The Dark Arts” in reference to sorcery, artisan as a name for an exceptionally skilled craftsman. At some point in the Victorian era the meaning of the word art changed to what we could consider the modern (although certainly not contemporary) definition of art as a kind of spectacularly powerful secular creative expression by an idealised genius creator. This is followed closely by the separation of high culture from low culture and the fervent belief that only truly exceptional works are worthy of the title “Art”.

Yet we should remember that words do not describe things they are actions. The word art does not describe a kind of perfectly platonic formed idea of “Art” instead it is used by people to achieve certain objectives. In the case of the modern definition of art I would argue that calling something art is a way of asserting worth or projecting dominance. I do not think it was a coincidence that the modern conception of art arouse during the period where a new wealthy bourgeois was rising in power. Picture this: you exist in a society with both money and power however you have neither the political legitimacy of noble birth or the spiritual legitimacy of the church. How do you legitimate your privilege? The answer is you spend lots of money on art and argue that art has both the transcendental properties of religion and the world changing power of politics. This is an over simplification of complex historical movements, however, keep it in mind the next time you ever feel superior to someone else because their taste in music sucks.

When we say “Games are Art” we are saying games are important, they are worthy of academic investigation, they can be transcendentally beautiful and maybe, just a little, we’re also telling the haters to go fuck themselves, that it’s okay to spend 20 hours a week pretending to shoot people cause “it’s art dammit”.

However, I don’t think we’re just using the term art for polemic reasons, it’s also because it’s probably the best way to describe the modern videogame. Remember the family resemblances. Modern games can tell moving stories, they are visually stunning, they can change people’s lives. Ebert said they couldn’t be art because they weren’t the work of a single author, that they involved the player too much. However that’s just because Ebert invented a definition of art which exclude games, much like Juul invented a definition of game which excluded Sim City. We can comfortably call games art because they bear a family resemblance to every other known art form.*** They may not share all of the same features that paintings and music do but I would argue they share more features with architecture and sculpture than film does. At this point if you don’t think games (all games) are art you either don’t know enough about art or you don’t know enough about games. Most people outside of gamer culture don’t know enough about games, sadly too many people inside the gamer culture don’t know enough about art.

Last year while studying at university one of our lecturers talked about her efforts to preserve old games which were in danger of falling into the digital dark age. Naturally, I thought it was a worthy endeavor. However, when it came time for class discussion there were students in the class that were angry that someone should try to preserve them. In shock I witnessed people argue that games should be destroyed, that these old games were worthless. “Oh sure”, they argued, “you should preserve old films because, they’re art but games are too simple to be art”. That’s an obviously ridiculous argument to anyone who’s ever made the simplest of games. I quietly put forward the suggestion that if they could demonstrate to me how Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat was art I would explain to them how Space Invaders was art. Sadly no one took me up on the challenge.

Point is, how do you argue for game preservation without invoking the A-word? By saying old games are worth preserving don’t you implicitly agree that they are art? For the most part in the gamer culture the dust in the “are games art” debate has settled,  but in the wider culture it hasn’t even started. It needs to start.

Let’s put this another way, language is a tool, we use words because they have effects. Saying games are not-art has an effect. If you wish to live in a world where historical games are preserved, or where game creators are given free speech rights then it makes ideological sense to evangelise them as art. Perhaps that’s cynical but to not call games art would be stupid and at this point in my life I’d rather be cynical than stupid.

* Consider this my rebuttal to this.

**Ha ha sucked in you’re totally reading another “games are art” essay. My apologies, hopefully it is interesting.

*** Incidentally, I’d suggest that the hazy definition of roleplaying games doesn’t prevent Baldur’s Gate and Final Fantasy VI from sharing a similar family resemblance. However, over time that difference appears to have widened just as it’s become more common to refer to Japanese roleplaying games as jRPGs. It seems so much speciation has occurred with the genre of Roleplaying games that there no longer exists a family resemblance between say Fallout: New Vegas and Final Fanstasy XIII or at least that resemblance is very weak.

I never let go of the run button

I sit 8 inches closer to the screen

I use a keyboard (because I am an idiot)

I chew my bottom lip

I swear constantly

I laugh constantly

I do trigonometry and calculus at the speed of light

I spend half the time on autopilot

I savor the squishy wet slap of my run

I get sick of ‘Princess in Another Castle’ jokes

I stay up till 4:00 AM

I sometimes wonder if I should be doing something better with my time

I use Jill (of Mighty Jill Off fame) whenever I can

My pinkie hurts

My eyes hurt

I get sick of all the retro-fetish

I rage quit.

When I’m not playing Super Meat Boy I kinda sorta feel like playing Super Meat Boy

Mass Effect 2

Meh. I really dug the first one and there wasn’t anything really wrong with this but it just didn’t grab me. “Streamlined” is now marketing speak for “We have fuck all ambition”. Is that too harsh? Probably but this was Bioware’s worst game since Jade Empire. Really that says more about Bioware’s high standard than the quality of Mass Effect 2 though. When you so consistently raise the bar it does make it easy to disappoint people.

Brutal Legend

I liked it more than most, especially the RTS battles which I honestly think were the best part of the game. I even played some comp-stomp against the AI for shits and giggles. Okay so the implementation wasn’t perfect but I’ll take something novel over a well worn idea any day of the week. However the story was a little disappointing. My main beef was that Eddie Riggs never really grows as a character. He starts the game as this tough talking roadie stuck in permanent adolescence and ends the game as a tough talking roadie stuck in permanent adolescence. Compare that with Pyschonaughts where Rez ends up confronting his daddy issues by helping the main villain deal with their daddy issues and Brutal Legend doesn’t seem nearly as ambitious from a storytelling point of view.

Brutal Legend comes across as an indulgent teenage fantasy, I would have liked it to grow beyond that.

Modern Warfare 2

You point a cursor at simulated men and explode them with the click of a button. It is quite satisfying.

Crackdown

Jumping was superfun, then I maxed out agility and realised I didn’t really care about anything else in the game. Oh well, it was cool while it lasted.

Street Fighter IV

I’m not a fighting game fan so I waited for this to drop in price before I got it. I really got into it though, playing it every day for a while there. It’s the sort of game you can play in thirty minutes bursts. We need more games like that, deep and complex enough to be engaged with on a hardcore level but short enough to be enjoyed in a casual manner.

The training modes need to be better though. The game manual doesn’t even tell you how long you have to push back to execute the hold moves. Is it one second or two? Honestly I just count to three and hope for the best.

The Club

You know I probably liked this more than Modern Warfare 2. You point a cursor at simulated men and explode them with the click of a button. The exploding is slightly less satisfying than Modern Warfare 2 but you get points for chaining kills. Clearly this is an evolutionary leap forward for the genre.

Left 4 Dead

A friend gifted this to me when it was cheap. Good times, Valve know their shit. I really like the way that the character’s combat barks communicate a lot of information to the players. You don’t need your team mate to say, “Hey stand still I’m trying to heal you” because Bill does that for you. When not everyone on the team has voice chat this is a god send. More stuff like this game writers.

Killer 7

You either love it or hate it. I hate it.

Okami

It’s ridiculous that this game still looks as pretty as it does. Eye-fucking-candy. Probably a bit too long for its own good, currently sits on my shelf unfinished.

Shadow of the Colossus

Deserves the hype. I just wished I’d played it when it first came out, the controls feel a little too ropey by modern standards.

Odin Sphere

I wish you didn’t need to unlock the characters one at a time. If I could pick and choose which character’s story to play and could switch between them when things got too hard I’d love this game. As it is I just can not be bothered. That probably makes me a bad person because this is a genuinely good game.

The Red Star

Pretty horrible really, but if anyone ever resuccestates that “Can videogames be b-grade?” meme I’m totally going to mention this. Shit was fun, shit was also kinda dumb.

Metal Gear Solid 2

lol.

Final Fantasy 6

Joins Chrono Trigger and Mother 3 in a select club of JRPGs I don’t hate. Probably does this by virtue of its dungeons being like potato chips, tasty and fun but short enough that you always feel like pushing on to the next one. The story is also not totally rubbish (well it’s a little rubbish).

Warcraft 3

Been playing this with my housemates cause it runs on their laptops. I sssssssssssuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuccccck at it though. There’s a mission in the single player where you’ve got to “cleanse” a town of diseased citizens. Except the bad guy is trying to round those guys up for his unholy army. It’s like a hungry hungry hippos holocaust. Uhmm yeah.

Just Cause 2

I’m currently playing this. It is okay, hopefully more thoughts later.

A picture says a thousand words and often they tell a story.

In a beautiful essay titled Knifers Elatia Harris describes the above painting like so

Margaret wants to chase a butterfly, Mary wants to restrain her — beguiled as she is by the butterfly herself. It is nothing if not big-sisterly to think how to keep someone barely younger than you safe — even from butterflies. Margaret is young enough to desire and reach in one moment, Mary old enough to desire and pull back.

That perfectly describes how the painting tells a small, simple and definitely poinagnt story. But consider for a moment that the painting does not tell us the story in the way we normally expect. It is basically a story without narrative.  We the people who think too much about games often talk about how they lack authorial control because as players we control how we interact with the game. Yet we forget that this is nothing new. Does it matter if when you look at this painting you look at Margaret or Mary first? Do you notice the butterfly before you notice the girls holding hands? Do you take note of the trees behind them? Do you get an inch from the canvas and really stare at the brush work? Everyone’s experience of this painting will be different so how does it manage to convey the author’s intent?

Certainly there are tricks of composition that can draw a viewer’s gaze to particular objects. For example we are naturally compelled to hunt out faces first and if those faces appear to be looking at something we’ll follow their eye line to see what it is. But they are not fool proof and we don’t have to follow them. Much in the same way that canny level design can make us look where the designer intended, it is not mandatory.

The reason this painting is capable of communicating its story is because it gives us time to explore it. You can look at a painting however long you want. Some may only glance, others will stare for hours but all are given the time required to notice the necessary details. Compared with film or literature where the plot continues moving forward, the experience is totally different. Narrative requires strict control to ensure no one has missed anything, paintings do not.

Now think about the opening of Bioshock, it employs a mix of storytelling techniques. To begin with there is a narrative film that explains that you are on a plane that crashes, then the game gives you control as you find yourself swimming amongst the burning wreckage of the plane. You can explore your location, swim around and notice the suitcases floating in the water. You may also note there appear to be no other survivors. When you feel like you’ve seen enough you head to the lighthouse in the distance. There are banners and murals you can read that begin to introduce you to the philosophy of Rapture but you don’t have to notice them. Of course you will because they are huge but that’s beside the point.

Again once you think you’ve seen enough you can head to the bathysphere. There the game goes back to a more traditional narrative mode as Andrew Ryan explains Rapture in a short film. Afterwards the window opens and you can see the underwater city for the first time. You can, to some extent, look where you like but you are not afforded the same freedom as earlier. Then upon arriving you see some kind of deranged lunatic who appears to want you dead. You cannot exit the bathysphere and fight the lunatic, you must sit and wait. Eventually you are permitted to leave but not before you’ve picked up the radio and met the first main character. Once you have your freedom back you can then explore the lobby where you’ll probably see placards scattered about with anti-Ryan slogans written on them. By now you’ve been introduced to Rapture, you understand the basic philosophy that built it, you know that something went hideously wrong and you’ve even made a friend.

Clearly games employ both narrative storytelling and (because I can’t think of a better word for it) painterly storytelling. When to use which kind is something game designers and writers will have to wrestle with but for now both appear to have their merits and uses. Final Fantasy games may use a lot of narrative techniques while Half-Life uses more painterly ones but I’m not really ready to champion either. I imagine most people prefer the painterly style but it’s not always practical. It requires players who are willing to take the time to explore and frankly it can get in the way when replaying a game. I have a friend who can never play Half-Life a second time because sequences like the train opening are boring when played more than once. Sure you’ve got more freedom than in a traditional cut-scene but at least cut-scenes are skippable (if they’re not then something has gone horribly wrong).

This more painterly way of storytelling helps to explain part of why games are unique. Jesper Juul has argued that you “cannot have interaction and narrative at the same time” because narration requires the events to have happened in the past and interaction requires events to happen in the present. I think this thought connects to something Tim Rogers has often said, about games being forever. Books and movies end, they have happened. The film did that. Games never end, they happen. The game does this. I think paintings are the same, the story in a picture does not stop or end it merely sits in an eternal state of the present, something you can come back to again and again to marvel at and stare. Constantly explore-able and always re-liveable.

Progressive opinion in the silent era tended to deny that film was a performing art, since that would make it a form of theatre. No, film had unique capacities. Cinema was essentially moving pictures.

But What Kind of Art?

It’s a silly position to take but there is some logic to it. If one wanted to watch quality acting then surely you’d go to the theatre, especially in the silent era when all the great performers treaded the boards instead of gracing the silver screen. I’ve mentioned it before but Man With The Movie Camera is what you get when this philosophy is taken to it’s logical conclusion. And frankly it sucks, sure there’s lots to admire but I don’t think I could believe anyone who told me they’d rather watch that than a bunch of Charlie Chaplin shorts. So the theory makes sense but it doesn’t really work, what do you expect from a group of people who made communist propaganda for the Soviet Union? This brings me to my point

The problem goes that if you have an interesting story, compelling characters, plot twists and allegory, that’s all fine and good.  But what you have are the ingredients for a movie or a book, not necessarily a game.

Gameplay is King Story a Distant Second

Without a doubt this is the prevailing wisdom and it’s wrong. I’ve heard this so many times sometimes I feel like I’m being brainwashed. Thankful I have two games that should de-program anyone.

Planescape: Torment

Planescape: Torment is a frustratingly broken RPG.  The core combat lacks any strategic depth, all of the interactions with NPCs involve clicking through flowcharts and the game is so unbalanced that by the end it’s a brutal repetitive slog just to finish. It’s also one of greatest games I’ve ever played. Chris Avellone crafted a wondrous moody and brooding tale about identity and the human condition. Without getting into too much detail, in my view, the point of the game is that we are all capable of great kindness and great malice and it’s only a matter of chance who we become. You may think that you’re a decent fellow because of some inbuilt moral code but really it’s pure luck that you were able to develop one. Certainly if your life was different who knows what you’d be capable of. It’s also about redemption and whether we can truly change. The ending is beautiful and if you haven’t played it you probably should.

Does the somewhat crappy gameplay make any of the story stuff less interesting? Of course not. Does the gameplay put people off? Certainly but then the same could be said for numerous indie films with terrible production values. What is absolutely true is that the gameplay isn’t bad because the story is good. It’s not like there’s some finite supply of awesome and you need to scientifically portion out how much awesome the gameplay is going to get and how much awesome the story is going to get. You’ve played Portal right? They certainly didn’t run out of any awesome there.

Shadow of the Colossus

I came to this one late but oddly I’d never actually heard anyone say what genre it is. Imagine my surprise when I discovered it was a Tomb Raider clone and not even a very good one at that. The controls are ropey and imprecise when compared to the latest third person climb-em-ups and it’s nowhere near as forward thinking as say The Sands of Time. Hell for my money Imagine Champion Rider is a better game if you’re after horsy thrills. Yet none of that matters in the face of the glorious spectacle of the Colossi and the bitter sweet fairytale it weaves. To say the mechanical parts are the important ones is to ignore the entire reason the game is amazing. I mean you could stand there and tell people that it’s over rated because from your committed ludogist position the game is nothing special but as Tycho from Penny Arcade said recently (in regards to the Bioshock backlash) “All it means is that you’ve mastered the unique gymnastics required to shit in your own mouth”.

At this point it seems like far too many people are actively not allowing themselves to enjoy something because from an intellectual or ideological position they don’t agree with what it’s doing. That is quiet frankly stupid.

My point here is not that we should all start worshipping at the altar of story, hell my current game obsession Neptune’s Pride contains none. Rather it’s that we should stop worshipping at any one altar and throw some love to them all. The art direction, sound, story, level design, mechanics and anything else you care to mention are all important. For some designers some of those elements will no doubt be more important than others. This is perfectly fine, if we have different designers with different interests it will lead to a diverse and fascinating array of games.

I’m saying have you ever actually considered that the phrase “Interaction is the most important part of the medium because it’s unique to the medium” doesn’t make any sense? Why should that which is unique be the most important thing? The techniques of editing are unique to cinema but would you seriously tell Hou Hsiao-Hsien to change the opening sequence of Millennium Mambo because it was done in one take? What this argument fails to understand is that storytelling as practiced in games is unique to games. A game story is totally different to a film story even when it borrows certain techniques because it must by necessity transform them. Film acting got better as actors learnt the unique requirements of the medium, just as games writers will. Or at least they will if you stop treating their craft as an after thought of secondary importance. You wouldn’t go round telling your lead artist that art assets don’t matter would you?

Here’s the conclusion to the article I quoted at the beginning. Seriously read the whole thing, it’s good and talks about cinema in a way that I think is truly enlightening:

Cinema is teeming with artistic possibilities, and each of these frameworks can illuminate certain areas of choice and control. We don’t need to pick a single creed to live by, but we deepen our understanding of film by being sensitive to as many as we can manage.

But What Kind of Art?

I suspect a more holistic approach would benefit game critics and designers as well.

I just got destroyed at Bloodbowl. It was an utter catastrophe of a game. By halftime I was down 2 – 0, three of my strongest players where injured, two of my line men had been sent off for penalties and my star thrower was unconscious. As the second half began I probably should have thrown in the towel then and there but I didn’t because the game was only just heating up.

In case you don’t know, Bloodbowl began life as a boardgame produced by Games Workshop. It’s a turn based American Football game set in a fantasy universe. The one defining feature of the game is that almost everything is random and even the simplest in-game action can end in failure. You want to pass the ball? You roll for that. You want to perform a block? Roll for that too. Even picking the ball off the ground requires you to roll. If you fail then not only does the action fail but it’s also the next player’s turn. Which can often mean they’re in prime position to exploit your failure to the maximum.

Failure is pretty much inevitable. No matter how you play the odds something will go wrong and if you’re really unlucky you can end up with matches like the one I described above. But the point of the game isn’t watching your plan go off without a hitch it’s the mad scramble when everything goes pear shaped. Almost every turn involves constantly adapting and thinking. When I started the second half I knew I was in for a hell of a ride. I must have thought up dozens of different plans, some of them even almost worked. Of course they didn’t, the game ended 3-0 and I was just happy that I managed to prevent it from being a total blow out.

Maybe it’s just me. I’m willing to admit I might be a little masochistic and I do tend to find peril more exciting than success. But for every game of Bloodbowl that has totally fallen apart there have been more that I’ve won and those victories were bought with slapped together plans emerging from the sublime wreckage of failure.

Clint Hocking might call this improvisational play. If it weren’t too depressing a thought I might even think of it as a life lesson.

In a slighty disappointing year for games, where few in the mainstream barely even bothered trying to push the goal lines, there were not many games that can be called hip. Canabalt is hipper than a cat wearing shutter shades.

Canabalt is a haute couture robot apocalypse about a man running for his life. With it’s crisp and delicious animations and bold monochrome colour scheme this is a game that would be equally at place projected on the wall of a gallery or in a grimy back alley. This is what 8 bit games would look like if they were made by art school layabouts who chain smoke and sneer. The big boys may have found new ways to render the wetness of eyeballs but outside of the quest for hyper realistic virtual pornography does anyone really care? Screw realism with a steak knife, Canabalt looks better than the real world. Do graphics matter? Of course they do, videogames are a visual medium after all, but at this point I’ll take a bold creative art direction over a clinically technical one any day.

Quick question how many games last year can you hum the music too? For me there’s only Canabalt. Is it just me or do most games try and make the music deliberately unnoticeable these days? I can sort of understand why, we’re supposed to be there to play the game not to listen to sick jams but the current Inon Zur-aration of videogame scores depresses the hell out of me. Videogame music used to be inventive and interesting. Other artforms embrace music as a way of explicitly enhancing the experience. Stars Wars isn’t the same without it’s signature pieces and Andy Warhol’s screenprints damn near need the Velvet Underground blaring in the background to make any sense. Canabalt’s music is in your face and sticks in your head.

But what really makes Canabalt exciting is how flawless the jumping feels. A good run is an adrenaline rush as you franticly try to control the variables. Obviously you’ve got to time the jumps but there’s more to it than that, you’ve also got to control your speed, the height of your jumps and, if you want to really master the game, the arc of the jump. That’s where the genius of the windows comes in. At first they can be annoying but once you learn to harness the decay of the jump they become managable and by manageable I mean do able. The windows separate the wheat from the chaff and clearing one is always a joy. Soon you’re deliberately only barely clearing the jumps because landing on a roof earlier means more time to reset and hit the next jump, which means you can go faster, which means you can rack up points quicker. That’s classic risk reward right there.

All of this is tied to smartly tuned procedurally generated level design. The obstacles may be modular but far from becoming repetitious the game’s focus on the importance of execution makes each one a challenge. I’ve heard people talk about Spelunky and how the randomly generated levels prevent it from growing frustrating. I can see that but I could never connect with it. Spelunky is too slow and too cruel, investing ten minutes into a game only to die for some slight mistake rubs me the wrong way. Canabalt on the other hand is an incredibly quick game, a score over 5000 may only take a minute or two to achieve yet it’s still a hell of an achievement.

It might be the perfect game for the millennial generation, it may be the perfect synthesis of casual and core, what I know is that it’s a stunningly elegant Tetris-like design. Except better because it’s got robots.

And yeah it’s controlled with one button.

I noticed this year a lot of whining amongst critics regarding the traditional end of year GOTY articles. Some people didn’t do one, others pussyfooted around and refused to call anything the “best” but would admit to having a “favourite”, heck even the people who actually named something GOTY were vaguely apologetic about the whole deal. Apparently it’s now passé to rate things as better or worse than each other, which strikes me as odd because that’s kind of the purpose of a critic isn’t it? Once you’ve given up on that then what is it that you do exactly?

I mean you don’t see the people involved in awarding the Man Booker Prize getting all worried about whether or not it’s possible to pick the year’s “best” novel do you?

Quickly a clarification for people who may have gone slightly insane recently. When you say that something is your “favourite” what you mean is that it’s the “best”. Favourite just means the thing you think is the best. Seriously that’s all it means.

But I mean that in my personal subjective opinion it’s the best but I realise that other people don’t like it as much. Something else is really the best because everyone liked that.

Then you are a coward. A coward far too likely to bend to peer pressure. Please do try and entertain the thought that everyone else is occasionally wrong. It will make you a more interesting person.

But the game that’s my favourite has obvious flaws that anyone could spot, how can I call it the best?

Look there’s a reason you love this game despite it’s flaws. Isn’t it possible that what is great about a game is so incredible that it makes the flaws irrelevant. Greatness is not about things being flawless it’s about them being great. Although flawlessness doesn’t hurt, a flawless but mediocre shooter is still just a mediocre shooter.

Anyway with that out of the way let’s cut to the chase. People appear to believe that it’s impossible to name something the best game of the year because “It’s just an opinion man”.

I hate that phrase. Of course it’s an opinion, that it was spoken or written by a human being makes it an opinion. You know what else? Just because something is an opinion doesn’t mean it’s wrong. Whenever you say that something is only an opinion this is what you mean “I think you’re wrong but I am incapable of explaining why that is the case”. To say to someone “Well that’s just your opinion” is to essentially admit to their face that you are incapable of debating them. Or you’re just too lazy to bother in which case why the hell are you taking part in the conversation in the first place?

But there’s no such thing as the best!

Look can a game be good? Then it can also be bad, otherwise there’d be no way to tell if something was good. Can a game be better than another game? Well if a game can be good and another can be bad then yes games can be better than each other. From there is it really such a huge leap of logic to assume that there are gradients between good and bad? Finally if a game can be better than others and there’s a wide gradient of different levels of goodness then it stands to reason that one game is the best.

But there’s no such thing as the truth!

If there’s no such thing as the truth then your statement must not be true, if it isn’t true then the truth must exist. Therefore the only possible option is that a.) the truth exists and b.) you are wrong. Hell even the ancient Greeks figured that one out.

Of course it’s almost certain that nobody knows what the truth is but the truth does not need to be known by man to be true. So yes my opinion may not be the truth but it might be and we’re never going to find out if, instead of challenging me on my assumptions, you sneer and say it’s just an opinion.

You know why people love this “it’s only an opinion” rubbish? Because they’re terrified of being wrong. By saying that everything is an opinion it means you never have to accept the possibility that the person you disagree with is right and if your opponent is right that probably means you are wrong. For a lot of people it feels far better to wrap themselves in this opinion blanket and pretend that they’re so enlightened because they know what the word subjective means. To accept that objective truth is possible is to except that you can be wrong, to refuse to do so is the most unbelievably arrogant and wilfully stupid thing I think of.

So to recap: Yes you can say that something is the best game of year, opinion can be true and saying favourite instead of best doesn’t make you clever. So next year when it comes time to pick a game of the year grow some stones and put your money where your mouth is. And for the love of god don’t pick a game you don’t personally love because you think it’s important, it shipped a lot of units, got a great metacritic score or because that’s what everyone expects. All that matters is that you love it and think it’s better than everything else.

And it’s in that spirit that I name Canabalt my GOTY. I’ll explain why next post.

Images for this piece were lifted from The Gaming Liberty,  Krapp’s Last Blog and Cluster Flock

If there are two things the internet loves it’s list articles and nerd rage. I shall now attempt to fuse the two into an unholy force of nature. Cower in fear as I present to you the top five reasons critical darling Persona 4 is totally rubbish and not worth your time.

5.) The combat

[Image Via Spectacle Rock]

I like turn based combat so my dislike for Persona 4 has nothing to do with some kind of action twitch preference. Give me a cup of coffee and a spreadsheet to paw over and I’m normally a happy camper. The problem with Persona 4 is that for about the first 15-20 hours the combat contains almost no strategic depth.

Once you know which attack a given enemy is weak to, you can use that attack to knock them down which will allow you to score a super-mega-attack. This will almost always kill your adversary. It’s basically a win button. This would be bad enough but keep in mind that you will be fighting wave after wave of the same enemies. Hit the win button, watch shit die, repeat till you run out of mana, leave and come back to do it all again.

It does get a little better as you progress but it’s hard to be bothered getting that far when the game fails to be interesting in the first 15 hours. Hell most games these days don’t even last that long.

4.) Teddie needs to STFU

Oh really Teddie did Yosuke just get knocked down? I didn’t see that because I’ve been playing the game with my eyes closed for the last half hour. Oh I’ve just killed one of the monsters and there’s two left now?  Thanks I could never solve a mathematical problem like 3 – 1 = 2.

For some reason your companion Teddie decides to narrate in painstaking detail every thing that happens during combat. At first I figured it must be some sort of annoying hand holding tutorial thing but it never stops. I don’t know if Teddie thinks I’m an idiot or what exactly.

By the way this is not a minor complaint, you will hear each of his stupid combat barks roughly a million times, and they will piss you off. Shit like this ruins otherwise decent games.

3.) The save system is nonsensical

[Image Via Game On! 2.0]

The optimal point to insert an autosave is after every single combat encounter. Basically if I’ve overcome a challenge I shouldn’t have to repeat said challenge. Of course this is not normally practical because saving that often would slow the game to a crawl. That’s fine but the absolute minimum you should be autosaving is at the beginning of every single level.

Persona 4 only offers two save points per dungeon one right before you enter and one right before the final boss. In a 13 level dungeon this gets to be a problem. Oh yeah and the mid level bosses (who are sometimes capable of one hit kills) don’t have a save point before them.  This throws the entire flow of the game under a monster truck because instead of just relaxing and enjoying yourself you need to act like a paranoid wreck constantly backtracking to the beginning of the dungeon just to save your game. The only other option is to cop a cheap kill every once in a while and replay two hours of tedious dungeon crawling.

2.) The dungeons are stale and lifeless.

[Image Via Silicon Era]

Part of the excitement of a good dungeon crawl is exploring and uncovering new things to loot, admire and kill. Persona 4 does manage an interesting menagerie of monsters to kill but the dungeons themselves are utterly dull. Enter any random room in any of the dungeons and you’ll have seen everything there is to see. Each room looks the same, each hallway looks the same and the only things you can interact with are monsters and chests. By the time you’ve cleared three levels of a dungeon you’ll be fed up with it. But don’t worry there’s only another ten to go.

1.) The storytelling is pathetic.

[Image Via Dark Zero]

Persona 4 isn’t just slow paced it’s damn near glacial. The game goes for two freaking hours before it’ll hand over any significant control to the player. Some people may try and defend this as a neccesary evil. I disagree. If Persona 4 was a movie and it took 2 hours to establish it’s premise it would be a horrible movie. The slow sense of unease that Persona 4 builds is nothing compared to what the friggin remake of The Ring does in seven minutes.

Every plot detail both major or minor is repeated constantly just in case you’re too thick to get it the first time. Plot turns are foreshadowed so heavily they’re impossible not to guess. And characters in the story wander around like the most obvious things are freaking revelations.

Here’s an example, there’s a boy named Kanji who is a tough street thug. At some point in the game you’ll see him in a bathhouse speaking with a rather exaggerated lavender lisp. You, the player, will go “Oh okay they’re saying that he’s gay.” Then as you explore said bathhouse looking for this guy, Teddie keeps dropping ‘subtle’ hints that he might be a bit odd. And it’s like “Jesus man I got it okay? Your thinly veiled shit is not exactly difficult to decode”. Then Teddie is all like “Oh so you’ve figured it out, aint you clever”

No I’m not clever you stupid cutesy piece of shit, I just happen to have a working bundle of synapses still firing in my head.

Persona 4 has a lot to like and I do understand why people love it but for me it isn’t nearly the game it could or should have been.

A 2008 Pew survey says that 53% of American adults over the age 18 play videogames. In comparison during the same year only 50.2% of American adults read a “novel, short story, poem or play”. That figure is an actually an increase on previous years. That videogames are now a more popular past time than reading literary fiction for adults is fairly interesting, if shocking stuff.

Perhaps even a little worrying.

Most people would agree that a novel is a more worthwhile way to spend your time than playing a game. I think for a lot of people merely finishing a book is an achievement. How many people would rather wait for the movie version of a popular novel because it’s easier? Equally how many people are so snobbish that they absolutely have to read the book? I know I’m a little like that.

And I’m not just picking on the Yanks. 65% of British people have lied about reading great works of literature just to impress people. The point is that while the majority of people value being well read not many can actually be bothered with it. Even then a lot of the fiction adults do read is written for children anyway.

There seems to be this attitude that games will become respected once enough people play them. I believe this is far too optimistic. The sad truth is that a lot of the people who regularly play videogames don’t see any great value in them. At this point we should probably just accept two facts a.) The majority of the population are philistines and b.) Philistines are unlikely to recognise great art. Therefore there really isn’t much point trying to convince them of anything.

Now I understand that’s an elitist position to take and I’m only really half serious when I suggest it but it’s worth keeping in mind the next time you show a non-gamer Braid. We can make games approachable and friendly as much as we want but at the end of the day the really important games are probably going to alienate people. The trick is to recognise when it’s the fault of the player and not the game.

But if nothing else this was the decade that gaming became a mainstream form of entertainment. In the next decade game creators will have an audience at their disposal larger than Shakespeare’s. Here’s hoping they can say something worthwhile to them. I think they may even have a responsibility to do so.

And if it goes over the heads of some folks then so be it.