How The Battle Royale Gaming Experience Created a New Social Environment During the COVID-19 Pandemic

In the midst of my senior year of high school, the world shut down. As I recall, NBA star Rudy Gobert started the domino effect that lead to the COVID-19 national shutdowns. Quickly, my high school years came to an end (although I am not complaining). Like many people around the world, my friends and I suddenly had a LOT of free time on our hands. Being stuck indoors, there weren’t a lot of things for us to do together besides play video games. Not just any video games though, battle royale video games. More specifically, Fortnite and Call of Duty Warzone.

For those who haven’t played these games, the basic premise is simple: you and a large group of other players are dropped onto a map and must fight to be the last person or team standing. Along the way, you can scavenge for weapons and supplies, build structures, and strategize with your teammates. It’s a fast-paced, adrenaline-fueled experience that can be both thrilling and frustrating.

One of the things I love about these games is the sheer variety of experiences you can have. Sometimes, you’ll drop into a match and be immediately taken out by another player before you even have a chance to loot a single weapon. Other times, you’ll find yourself in a heated battle with multiple players, each one trying to outsmart the others. And then there are those rare moments where you’ll make it to the final circle, heart racing as you try to outlast the remaining players and secure the victory.

Even with the variety of good experiences, there’s nothing quite as frustrating as spending 20 minutes looting and scavenging, only to be taken out by a camper hiding in a corner. Or worse yet, being killed by a player who seems to have an unfair advantage, whether it’s due to hacks or simply being better than you.

Fortnite Gameplay Shot

But despite the frustrations, my friends and I kept coming back to these games. There’s something addictive about the rush of adrenaline you get when you’re in the thick of battle with your friends, knowing that your survival depends on your skills and a bit of luck. But there was more than just the adrenaline that made it fun.

What made playing these games with my friends so fun wasn’t necessarily the games themselves but the new social environment that was cultivated through gaming during the COVID-19 pandemic. Since we were all stuck at home, gaming was one of the few ways we could really connect with each other. What once was lunchtime banter soon turned into roast sessions over the mic on Play Station party. And battle royale games, like Fortnite, required constant communication between you and your friends to win. So naturally, my friends and I would talk and game for hours and consistently look forward to doing it all again the next day.

Because of the pandemic, battle royale games inadvertently became a new form of interactive social media. Everyone was always online playing. Even when my friends weren’t on, I would join a random squad in Warzone or Fortnite, only to end up chatting and joking with new people for hours. The games were just a new medium for social interaction with friends and random people from around the world.

Call of Duty Warzone Gamplay Shot

Since then, the new battle royale video games have not had the same pull as they once did. People are always complaining how they miss the old Warzone and Fornite and how they feel like the new battle royale games lack the “fun” and “thrilling” aspect of the old games. Personally, I think people miss the social interaction these battle royale games once had during the pandemic. Not the content.

With life back in motion, people don’t have the time to play games as frequently as they did during the pandemic. As well, people are back out socializing in person! So it makes sense why the thrilling interactive aspect of these battle royale games have died down quiet a bit.

While at times I miss the gaming and social culture of battle royale games during the pandemic, I certainly do not miss the pandemic itself.

-Diego

Morality: A Human Experience in the Realm of Video Games

“What are you doing? You can’t do that to the poor animals, Diego!” my sister would yell as I hunted livestock for food on Minecraft. In my eyes, I didn’t think I was doing anything wrong. I was simply surviving the harshest winter known to a pixelated game (yes, I ALWAYS played survival mode). 

As a young kid, Minecraft shaped my gaming addiction. The combination of creativity and adventure packed into an open-world sandbox was a breath of fresh air. You could build whatever your heart desired. From residential neighborhoods and farms to Yankee Stadium and Hogwarts. But what one doesn’t realize at such a young age is games indirectly immerse themselves in human experiences. One of the most frequent human experiences seen in video games is morality. Games like Minecraft, Red Dead Redemption 2, and Fallout 4 are excellent examples of games that implement morality. Each game uniquely approaches morality, providing players with a rich moral landscape to explore.

Minecraft gameplay shot

In Minecraft, players are free to create, explore, and build their own world. While the game has no explicit moral system, it provides players with the tools to shape their own morality. For example, I would either collaborate with my friends to build cities or simply use TNT to blow up their prized creations out of spite. This freedom of choice makes Minecraft fascinating as players can explore their moral bounds through interactions with nature, animals, and other people.

Red Dead Redemption 2, on the other hand, takes a more narrative-driven approach to morality. The game takes place in the Wild West, where players control an outlaw named Arthur Morgan. Throughout the game, players are faced with moral decisions that impact the story and the relationships they have with other characters. The game’s morality system is nuanced, with choices that are not always black and white. With Red Dead’s honor system, when players do good deeds, their honor level goes up as they are well respected. When players do bad things, their honor level goes down and they are seen as outlaws. Needless to say, my version of Arthur Morgan was always seen as an outlaw (stealing the train was too much fun). 

Red Dead Redemption 2 gameplay shot

Finally, Fallout 4 takes a post-apocalyptic approach to morality. The game is set in a world that has been devastated by a nuclear war, and players must navigate a world filled with moral dilemmas and ethical quandaries. The game’s moral system is based on a reputation system, where players’ actions impact their reputation with different factions. This reputation system creates a unique moral landscape, as players must consider not only their own ethical principles, but also the consequences of their actions for the wider community. 

Fallout 4 gameplay shot

Going back and playing each of these games made me question whether the moral choices we make in video games are aligned with the moral choices we make in life. Each of these games, to an extent, enters you into different realms of human existence with varying plots and roles. Everything that is experienced through the game, like farming in Minecraft or trading goods in Fallout 4, can be experienced in real life. Does that mean our morals influence how we play or does the digital escape into the Wild West alleviate us of our moral bounds? I believe both can be true at the same time.

These large games intentionally allow you the freedom of choice to explore not just the depths of the game but also the depths of the human experience. No matter how noble or how horrid your actions may be, in the world of video games, they are welcomed and accepted (to an extent). Each scenario presents an opportunity to either mirror your morals or do something out of your comfort zone. Hence, while I would never steal a train in real life, I damn sure will in Red Dead 2.

Additionally, the added freedoms of such games allow each player to experience every possible outcome associated with their moral choices. Just like in life, your choices have consequences. Through these experiences, players are more likely to connect with a game and uncover the unique details and side stories that would not be apparent if they stuck with the main storyline.

So, if you ever panic and question your morals when it comes to gaming, realize games like Minecraft, Red Dead Redemption 2, and Fallout 4 were built for you to experience both the moral and immoral implications of your choices. As much as I love animals, I had to survive the Minecraft winters somehow. Sorry vegans!

-Diego Gomez Lopez

Mental Health Stigma in Gaming

As you can probably assume from the title above, I’m a psychology major. While I don’t need to go into great detail for you guys today as to why I am a psych major, I do believe it is important to mention how fascinating it is that psychology can be relevant to many of our lived experiences. We know that things around us can affect the way we think, feel and process but our own mental state can also influence how we perceive and interact with information around us. 

One particular game that I first noticed a narrative structured around mental health was the popular horror game Outlast. The game follows the journalist Miles Upshur as he investigates Mount Massive Asylum in Colorado. The psychiatric hospital is overrun by homicidal patients that the game uses to create jump scares and creepy backdrops of the hospital’s dreary environment. Also, during gameplay, you can’t really see that well unless you use a flashlight or night-vision camcorder that depicts the space around you in a dark-green filter. It’s the epitome of haunted houses. 

Disclaimer: I have never actually played this game but you should watch the trailer. You might understand why I haven’t even dared to download it. However, I have watched my brother Whit play it a few times with his Oculus Rift (a VR headset). 

While watching Whit play the game, I noticed that he was presented with a ‘typical,’ horrific depiction of how mental health hospitals are displayed in popular media. Dimly lit hallways, general disarray as papers and syringes litter the floors, patients tied down to tables and chairs and evidence of not-so-ethical experiments meant to use patients as guinea pigs for a former Nazi ‘researcher.’ The depictions of the patients are even worse–they’re stereotypical monsters.

While Outlast is an extreme example in the gaming world, it nonetheless is a game that expands upon the stereotypes that used to surround mental health hospitals in the 1900s. Also, it exaggerates the stereotype of those with mental health issues being crazed, psychotic, deranged and terrifying. But this is so far removed from the truth of what mental illness is actually like. 

Here are some general facts on mental health before we continue:

1 in 5 Americans will suffer from mental illness at one point in their life

1 in 10 will develop a serious mental health condition

42 million Americans live with some form of an anxiety disorder (almost 20% of the adult population) 

60% of American adults with mental illness did not receive treatment in the past year for their mental illness 

As you can see from above, mental health conditions are pretty relevant in our country. With the pandemic, I can only imagine that these numbers have increased. The point of showing you these facts following my analysis of Outlast is to now highlight how the gaming industry has portrayed mental health. 

Mental health stigma isn’t just limited to games that depict stereotypical representations of mental health hospitals, it also extends to game characters. In the Sims games, an ‘insane’ character is one that has the attributes of dressing in “unsuitable or appropriate” clothing, rummaging “through neighbor’s trash cans,” “talk about conspiracies,” and “fish in swimming pools.” In other games, there are homicidal maniacs, one-dimensional characters created solely from mental illness symptoms like disorganized speech and paranoia in Cicero from Skyrim, and villainous psychiatrists as in Outlast. 

These characters provide nothing short of an incomplete, and more-than-likely erroneous over-exaggeration of well-known mental illnesses like schizophrenia or bipolar disorder. However, they fail to show these characters in roles of ‘good’ or ‘neutral’ and instead portray characters with traits of mental illness as ‘bad’ or ‘comical.’ 

While there are some games out there like Life is Strange where mental illness is a part of the main characters’ experience but their illness is not used to portray them in a negative way. Instead, as in Life is Strange, it adds to the narrative of the game. This game particularly is a good example of how mental illness themes can be used in a video game without adding to the negative stigma surrounding mental illness. The developers even included links to resources for those looking for help with their own mental illnesses. 

As easy as it may be to build off of the negative stereotypes of mental illness for gameplay experiences, it is incredibly irresponsible of game creators to do so. Call me the PC (politically correct) police all you want, but being a psych major has shown me the harms of mental health stigma on those seeking help and suffering from these conditions. Game creators can and should do better in the future going forward, and that’s just my two cents on the matter. 

Emma Catharine Fennell

YOU DIED. CONTINUE? [Y/N]

by Richard Zhang

The death screen of The Dark Souls.

Note: There will be warnings of potential spoilers.

Finally, your avatar made it here again. You knew exactly how many enemies you were facing and how many hits it took to kill any one of them. It had been way too many times. Your fingers had developed the muscle memory that your thoughts could barely catch up. You were like a pianist and the keyboard was your instrument. You nailed every move. Then it was the boss fight, you made it to the final stage and victory was only a few seconds away until, your phone rang and the monster cooperated perfectly with your mom to give you the final blow.

You died, and so was your keyboard on the ground…

After some time, you began to wonder, why did you have to die and, why you were still playing.

In real life, death is usually seen as the end, aside from the religious views. The concerns of mortality have been around since the beginning of humanity. Heidegger claims that death is the “most original form of the possibility of existence that threatens the entire universe,” so people must take charge of their own lives. When we witness death or hear about it, we grieve and feel a sense of loss and nostalgia, but death in game is certainly less final and not as serious. The death we are discussing here does not equal to “failing”, even though death in game typically results in failing. I want to use games across multiple genres to show that death in game may have many layers of functions that help construct a unique gaming experience.

Much like how death defines existence, death in games, to start with, gives the game meaning. In early arcade games like Space Invaders or Donkey Kong, the goal is straight-forward: to stay alive as long as possible. You play because your actions made in the game have actual consequences. To die is to lose the game and all you need to do is to start over. It also means that you are unlucky or have not got the skills yet. The death in the MMO RPGs like LOTRO, however, your avatar dies usually because their level is not high enough to challenge the monsters yet, thus requiring you to keep on with the quests with a hope at heart that one day you will be able to slay them. In this sense, the death is not an indicator of your skill level, but rather, it is a tool to make you invest in the game. However, in both cases, the death in the game feels nothing like actual death.

We can call this type of death as part of the gaming process, similar to the idea of Bogost. This means that the death is merely a mechanism or a logic that will bring you back to an earlier point of the game. It causes frustration but not grief, except probably when you realize how much time you have spent on this game. In modern days, game developers can immediately respawn the avatar instead of leaving this decision to the players, best exemplified by the game I Wanna Be the Guy. In the game you have to play a character who goes through unimaginable traps and every single action could lead to your death and when you die, you can immediately respawn to the previous save point. In this way the game both simplifies the process of respawn and the process of death. After dying several hundred of times, death is normalized and can even be cathartic. Like the old arcade games, the only way to avoid death is to have better skills, and better luck.

The first level of I Wanna Be The Guy.

The death, at the same time, becomes less human and eventually becomes a number on your screen. This dehumanized death is now seen in many games like the recent Ghostrunner. This kind of death is brought to a meta-level in games like Super Hot and Undertale (Super Hot and Undertale spoilers start here-). In Super Hot, the program is meta-aware of its existence and urges you to kill the symbolic representation of “yourself” in the game and hints that you are forever trapped in the game of killing. In Undertale, the final boss flower is impossible to beat without dying. Every time you die, the game shuts down automatically, and every time you die and restart, the game gets easier, literally, and it thus reverses the original relationship between the player and the game.

The protagonist kills himself to be the game in Super Hot.

(-and end here. It does not help does it. :))However, in other games where death becomes a story telling device, it intends to mimic the real life. Imagine after seeing the game’s world in the perspective of a character, and Bam! They are gone, and the story continues without them. It manipulates your feelings like Titanic, but different from movies, you have been with the character for much longer and you have made the character’s decisions. You “were” the character. You have seen their mental growth and now they are dead. Even though technically you can bring them back by replaying the game, the rest of the game without them now just feels … empty. You can recall this feeling when (COD:MW3, RDR2 and TLOU2 Spoilers start here-) Soap struggles and dies after saving Yuri; when Arthur Morgan lies on the mountain, seeing the sunrise while taking his last breaths; or when Joel… dang … I can’t… (-and end here) The powerlessness the player feels is effective to render the cruelty of the battlefield, the wild west, or the post-apocalypse world. The deaths feel drastically different from those that would simply reset the game, because they create immersion. Your skills are not necessarily getting better when deaths happen as storytelling devices, but these deaths help develop the plot of the games and create immediacy, or immersive experiences.

When directly putting these two types of deaths into a game, it creates inconsistency in logic, because, well, how could our hero survive so many bullets or zombie bites but dies to a bat so easily? One way to make sense of death, both as the process of the gaming and a part of the story, is to, well, make sense of it, by making death as part of the world-building. In The Dark Souls, the story is told by the obscure NPC dialogue, the intense atmosphere and the many collectables. player controls the protagonist, and the quest of the undead is to light the “fire” so that the world is safe from darkness. The protagonist is cursed to be the undead, so are the monsters. Like the game I Wanna Be the Guy, the avatar will die a lot of times before defeating the monsters and every time the protagonist dies, he goes back to the bonfire, which is essentially a save point. Sounds pretty much like the first type of death we discussed earlier. What is different though, is that they loses humanity every time they dies, and they leaves their souls at where they died last time. Before retrieving the soul, the avatar would be at a near-hollow state and it not only changes their appearance but also changes the way they interacts with the environment. Some NPCs also have memories of the protagonists’ previous lives.

• 

• 

Thus, death also becomes important part of the story. In this way, the game resolves the difference between the two types of deaths in games and creates more immediacy between the player and the world in the game. The undead carries their duty until the end. They lights the bonfire, but the fire will die out eventually, and there will be another undead rising to finish the same mission. Eventually, the player realizes that the decisions made do not matter.

So

… You picked up the keyboard and looked at the hero, realizing the connection between you and the character, and his death was nothing but a game’s design to consume your time. You realized you probably had better things to do. You started to worry about your own mortality.

You looked at the screen.

“You Died. Continue? [Y/N]”

You pressed Enter.

The Bonfire in The Dark Souls.

The Dark History Of Club Penguin (Post-Removal)

Ah, Club Penguin. The name itself brings joy to many who can reminisce about the days of their childhood spent gleefully clicking away within the brightly-colored penguin world.

The Town area of Club Penguin (Image courtesy of Club Penguin Rewritten Wiki).

This massively popular game came to its inevitable fall on March 29, 2017, when Disney finally pulled the plug on the site, citing a drop-off in the number of active users.

Interestingly enough, Club Penguin’s fall did not end its history there. The name Club Penguin today is associated with a much darker story owing to the online Flash game spinoffs created by people wishing to preserve the beloved game. They were (and still are!) run on private servers. The most notable examples include Club Penguin Rewritten, Club Penguin Online, and CPPS.to. For this story, we will concentrate mostly on Club Penguin Rewritten and Club Penguin Online.

Let me set the stage for you.

The Club Penguin Logo (Image courtesy to Club Penguin Wikipedia).

March 29, 2017 – the shutdown of Disney’s Club Penguin public servers.

March 30, 2017 – a new game by Disney called Club Penguin Island is released.

So you see one problem now. People were quite angry over this clear disregard towards the classic Club Penguin in favor of the shiny new successor, Club Penguin Island (which is nothing like the original Club Penguin except for the fact that it has colorful penguins. Seriously. It’s disgraceful).

Many people did not choose to play Club Penguin Island and instead flocked to the aforementioned private servers. There are many, but the most popular were Rewritten and Online. Disney, being the large company that it was, issued a few DMCAs against several of these private servers in the name of their copyrighted brand, Club Penguin, but most of the disputes were quickly settled with simple domain name changes.

January 21, 2018 – Club Penguin Rewritten suffers a massive data breach with 1.7 million users having their login data stolen.

It was discovered that this security breach was because of the use of an extremely simplistic encryption method by the Rewritten team. They used something called MD5 hashing, which is very accessible by even the most inexperienced hackers. This breach doesn’t seem like it’s particularly important, but consider the people who use the same login information for all of their personal accounts (I’m looking at you). Now, the hackers may have had access to all of their personal information, which could include bank accounts and more.

Rewritten came under fire for their lack of professionalism in protecting user data. It’s not entirely surprising, considering it had to operate under a non-profit designation to avoid DMCAs and was not run like a serious company; instead, much of its staff was relied on to be “good faith volunteers”. It certainly didn’t help that Rewritten was created by a group of teenagers with limited security and coding experience.

With the community’s faith in Rewritten shaken, some people turned towards other private servers. One of these is called Virtual Penguin.

The Virtual Penguin Logo (Image via @VirtualPenguin on Twitter).

What if I said that some smaller private Club Penguin servers were going out of their way to DDoS and hack other servers in an attempt to win in the face of competition? What if I said that this really happened by the owners of Virtual Penguin? Multiple scamming and hacking attempts proved successful, and later, screenshots were leaked of conversations of the Virtual Penguin owners talking about physically “destroying” the competition. Things were getting tense in the community.

The famed penguin dance – an international sign of peace (Gif from Tenor).

The Club Penguin world was absolute chaos behind the scenes, but the Virtual Penguin hacking scandal isn’t even the worst of it.

Someone who came under scrutiny all too late was a man named Riley, who sometimes operated under the alias ‘Anthony’. Riley was the owner of Club Penguin Online, a private server which competed closely with the highly popular Club Penguin Rewritten.

After months of allegations building up against Riley and several successful hacking attempts by Riley himself on his accusers, Riley was revealed to be a skilled manipulator, alleged predator, and an arrogant man who subjected many under-age female Online players to harassment and verbal abuse. Riley’s manipulation of children for sexual favors was documented on many instances on account of the victims and Riley’s staff.

The tension between Riley and his accusers was immense, and Riley’s attempts to silence his accusers was no longer persuading the community. However, the meltdown of the Club Penguin community was only just being noticed by a larger figure – Disney themselves.

The might of Disney comes swooping down to clean up the scene (Image from New York Daily News article).

On May 14, 2020, all private servers operating with the Club Penguin name were given DMCA take-down notices by Disney, warranting the prompt shutdowns for those unable to escape Mickey Mouse’s wrath. Additionally, a man associated with Online was reportedly arrested on suspicion of processing child pornography; it’s believed that this was Riley. Disney’s shutdown of the bootleg Club Penguin servers was cited under the banner of preserving child safety, and they expressed a firm stance against the “unauthorized uses of the Club Penguin game”.

So there you have it. An overview of the incredibly dark and complex history that followed the original Club Penguin’s fall in 2017. If you’re interested in learning more of the nitty-gritty of this expansive history, I highly encourage watching What Happened To Club Penguin? The End Of A Childhood Gem | TRO (ft. Internet Historian) by The Right Opinion on YouTube.

It’s crazy, right?

Who would’ve thought a game about penguins could cause all this mess?

Make (AAA) Video Games Great Again

Being a business-minded person (ironically majoring in English), it hurts to me to see the state of AAA titles, or titles that have major (designer) studios and massive budgets behind them. I’m not going to try to make this a nostalgic, grass is greener type of post, but there has been an undeniable decay in quality titles. I attribute this to a variety of factors, the foremost being the push of financial interests overwhelming any sense of artistry for designers and storytellers. Many famous studios since the seventh generation of consoles (Xbox 360, PS3, Wii) have become “sell-outs” pumping out sequel, after sequel each year, releasing incomplete, glitchy games and selling them for $60 a pop. Why, you might ask, do they have the audacity to release half-baked titles? Because the seventh generation of consoles introduced the ability to PATCH games. Patching means they essentially offer online updates that you download straight to your console. In its best use, it fixes gamebreaking bugs that play testers missed, at worst it allows developers to meet their deadlines on products and just update it later.

From a studio standpoint, tension has grown between “hey, we’ve got this $100 million dollar game brand that’s super valuable, lets leverage that and sell it again, slightly different, for the full price!” and “hey, lets create something new and original, and see where it goes!” The operative term for this phenomena is risk.

Risk has always been an important facet of success in game development, people conceptualize all kinds of unique, wacky ideas, and generally if their team was behind them, they would get to work. Now, most big conglomerate video game companies have acquired these studios and have essentially told them to take far less risk, and to design titles that encourage the customers to spend even more cash on downloadable content. My favorite example of taking a unique idea and injecting old fashioned corporate greed is Evolve. Evolve took a unique concept, one player plays as a massive powerful monster trying to evolve (lol) and destroy the planet or kill the hunters. 4 other players pick hunters, categorized by roles, in order to combat the titanic beasts. Sounds interesting right? Check out this cool screenshot:

It’s a AAA title that had a lot of unique promise to it. But then, on day 1 (yes, ONE, UNO, EINS) of its release, it launched with approximately $136 in buyable, downloadable content for players in the form of new characters and monsters…

Developers all started out in the same place, getting into game development either out of the interest in the challenge, or true love of creating stories and entertaining the masses. As soon as the sixth generation of consoles, that is, the PS2, Xbox, and Gamecube era, each platform had incredible AAA products come out, these games were complete because they had to be, you couldn’t issue software updates to any game-breaking glitches. Releases had multi-year gaps between them, meaningful space to respect their current offerings, and to properly develop their newest titles. Now, we have this:

You really gotta ask yourself: what’s going on?

-Tom

Pokemon GO(ing down)

This may or may not be another controversial comment on my part. Either way, they’re my opinions on why Pokemon GO has probably peaked and won’t see anywhere near their huge rates of play again.

First, the game was very much a beneficiary of the bandwagon effect. It easily would not have been as popular if it were just based on individuals taking to themselves, but with public spaces with multiple stops having from tens to hundreds of people hanging around, talking in groups about their Pokemon and what they were seeing, and some people getting into it having never played any Pokemon game before because their cousins, siblings, children were. But that’s a scary marker if you’re interested in longevity – crazes end fairly quickly, and Pokemon GO’s certainly has.

Second, the game is having trouble even with users who at least were fairly dedicated previously, as the lack of promised features like tracking make finding rare Pokemon much more difficult. The existence of PokeVision made life easier for a lot of people – they would be able to search their areas for the rare Pokemon they saw on the broken tracking feature, and then go out to find it. Yet Niantic has requested these third party groups to take down websites like these, to “prevent cheating.” Given there is no real high-risk/reward competition in Pokemon GO (the design of gyms causes them to change hands incredibly frequently), cheating is fairly irrelevant in any case.

My last point is that Niantic doesn’t seem as capable to efficiently handle these issues and push past their scheduled releases. The Buddy system was apparently released yesterday (though I don’t seem to have it active on my phone yet), but the majority of users are still without a tracking feature – something that has been an issue since two weeks out of the game’s release. Given that it’s been now two full months and they still haven’t implemented their fix universally, and have had the third party workarounds for it shut down, it almost feels like they don’t care. I won’t say that’s true, but with something that increased so much in size and was instantly profitable, it surprises me that they didn’t allocate more resources to have more timely releases for fixes, etc.

I won’t say that I don’t like the game. I do, and my hours and hours of play time can attest to that. I wouldn’t have gotten all the way to level 22 without enjoying it, but it is frustrating trying to be patient with a game that isn’t necessarily broken but is certainly not complete. When Niantic fixes the game, I’ll probably come back and put many more hours into it, but until then I’ll be another user that’s moving further and further from the game.

Gone Home

Earlier in class we had to play a game called “Gone Home.”  And it’s a bit of an interesting beast I would like to reflect more upon.  Once again, this is an independent game (I know, I have a bit of an obsession with them, but they always seem to turn out so amazing).  It’s developed by the Fullbright Company.  I would suggest that you play it before you read this blog post.  Seriously, it’s a beautiful, amazing game that deserves praise, and its developers deserve the money for creating this work of art.

SPOILERS BEGIN NOW

The game is a love story.  Simple as that.  It presents itself as a horror story at the beginning.  A hastily scrawled note on the door warning you not to search for your sister, a stormy night, and hints that the house might be haunted by a crazy and/or vengeful ghost.  Lights flicker, televisions are mysteriously turned on, and an intense loneliness permeates every single fiber of your being.  Yet, following your gaming instincts, you examine the first note you can interact with, and a soothing voice-over, that of your little sister, begins to calm you.  You continue to explore the house, following the plot-hook of what happened to your sister, in the hopes that perhaps this story will have a happy ending despite all of your senses yelling at you that “No, this does not have a happy ending!” And how could it?  You find hints that your family has fallen apart.  Your mom appears to be cheating on your father, their marriage seems to be falling apart, your sister is left alone and struggling with her burgeoning attraction to a girl in an age where that was even less accepted than it is today.  You are forced to assume that the worst possible action has occurred in that attic with the “keep out” sign and ominous red lights.  And yet it hasn’t.  Your mom never actually cheated, your parents went on a couple’s retreat to try and repair the divide between them, and your sister ran away with her girlfriend, hopefully finding some form of happy ending.

So what makes this game so great?  I know in my earlier blog post, I argued that gameplay and narrative should intertwine, yet how does it in this game?  This game is literally walking around a house and looking at notes.  Most people would argue that this doesn’t even constitute a game, let alone a great one.  And yet, it manages what most games never can.  It manages to make the player feel like they are living the story.  It allows the player to fully immerse themselves in the protagonist’s life.  You worry about the family as if they were your own, you root for them to overcome their demons, you explore the house hoping to find clues, you feel joy and apprehension when you discover the sister has run away to chase her happiness.  It uses the medium of video games to accomplish something that no other medium can.  No other medium can create the form of immersion that this particular story needs, and that is why video games need to be classified as an art form-  because of games like this; games that use their powers and limitations to do things that no other medium – literature, painting, film- cannot; games that make you feel and think and cry and reflect and hope.

~N. Edwards

Little Inferno, A Fiery Reflection

So, in class we had to do a report over a video.  We were supposed to play the game and analyze it and so on.  I was originally assigned Modern Warfare 2, a first-person shooter game that has done much to categorize an entire genre, and also has some very analysis-worthy moments (The airport section, I’m looking at you).  However, there was a distinct lack of Independent Games, which I felt was a great injustice to what is kind of my favorite group of games to talk about.   For the sake of this discussion, I’m going to assume any readers of this blog will know what an independent game is, or can at least utilize the magical search engine known only as “Google” for finding out.

                So, anyway, I decided to do my report over a wonderful game I had recently acquired. A little gem called “Little Inferno.”  To summarize the game quickly, it’s basically a virtual fireplace simulator.  Yes, a virtual fireplace simulator.  But that description does not do it justice.   Instead, it’s a far more varied piece of work; a piece of art I would even hazard to say. It deals with so many complex themes and ideas in a way that is both entertaining and informative and I just think that is great for a video game to be able to do.  In my presentation, my main argument was that the game is in fact a remediation of Plato’s Allegory of the Cave.  However, which my professor pointed out, in my overzealousness to present the game, I presented what was simply a reading of a game, as an actual fact.  Which is true.  While this game has no actual evidence that points towards its “authorial intent” being an allegory of the cave remediation, it is possible to present a very convincing reading of it being that.  However, what I want to stress in this short blog post is how some of the strongest evidence for this reading comes from the gameplay rather than the overarching narrative.  The gameplay manages to enhance the narrative, rather than being a simple backbone for the narrative to be built upon.  And I think that is how video games should function.  Gameplay and narrative should intertwine rather than one simply existing to act as a simple support structure for the other.

~N. Edwards

Braid- A Perfect Experience.

Braid is an incredibly noteworthy gaming experience. The first thing that you are greeted to when you start the game for the first time is the beautiful water-color title screen- A city bathed in warm-yellow light. This magnificent art style persists throughout the game, but it is not what I will be focusing on within this post. What I would rather focus upon is the blending of rules and narrative the game employs.

In the game, you travel to six different worlds, each one with its own time-related gimmick. The game never explicitly tells you the rules for each world, or even the game really, beyond some basic controls- leaving the player to suss out the mechanics themselves. However, each mechanic is intrinsically tied to Tim’s(the player-character’s) story. Before each world, you enter a region known as “The Clouds,” within which you read books that relay Tim’s story to you. Within each story, the mechanic is presented as a concept- the weight of a ring, feeling as though you’re going in a different path from everyone else, the wish to erase your mistakes. By utilizing this blending of mechanics, Braid is able to create a beautiful and poignant narrative which subverts all of you expectations out of a genre, by having you, the player, be the villain, the monster. (And yes, I realize there is a second ‘true’ ending, but it requires you to absolutely violate the mechanics the game has taught you, and is overall a much less satisfying ending in every way- in fact, there is much to be said about an ending requiring the player to defy the rules set by the game, but I am trying to keep this post short).

Overall, Braid provided a wonderful experience. It blended narrative, rules, and your preconceived notions about how a story should progress to create a beautiful and poignant narrative about time, obsession, and mistakes.

On a less analytical note, my experience playing with my partner, Amanda, was a great experience. Watching her play was fun, and she was very quick to learn (small analysis, this attests to the games strengths). Watching her play let me see the game through a new perspective.

-Nathanial Edwards