The personal blog 2-Bit Wasteland takes a sometimes irreverent, sometimes idealized look at the grunts of gaming's enemy forces. They're different that a boss and his motivation exists in a game either "to build sympathy for the protagonist and encourage the player to rally behind him," or "to flesh out the enemy and make him a more three dimensional character, often furthering the player's understanding of the hero's ordeal."

Waves of grunts? A different story. Or non-story. 2-Bit Wasteland seems to indicate they represent an opportunity - more characters through which a game may extend the narrative. In many games, I could see how integrating everyone into the story would make it prohibitively dense. But if only for the humor, let us consider what might motivate anonymous, ubiquitous cannon fodder like the goomba.

The Life of a Goomba: A Grunt's Motivation? [2-Bit Wasteland, Dec. 18]
This raises a lot of questions, for example why are Goombas working for Bowser? Do they simply obey out of fear? Does Bowser have some kind of mind control? Or does he offer a great BUPA health insurance plan with benefits? Here lies the major flaw with games today: bog standard enemies have no motivation for their actions, and players disregard this flaw as if it's ok. Perhaps it seems trivial to consider this when talking about Super Mario Bros but the fact is very few games have evolved from this extremely basic premise. If you stop to actually think about it does anyone else consider that Mario might be the bad guy? Almost every single creature in several different worlds seems to pit themselves against Mario and put their lives on the line. Nobody stops to deliberate that he might be the evil one. Just because Bowser looks a bit nasty everyone thinks he's a baddie. Maybe he was just trying to overthrow the monarchy, Perhaps Peach raised the taxes too far. Perhaps she sent all the Koopa peasants to live in the lava world whilst she got the nice castle off their hard working backs. Doesn't seem so unreasonable now does it? Perhaps Bowser was a freedom fighter and maybe Mario was a puppet knight of the monarchy who mercilessly went world to world slaughtering all who passed him. Maybe not, the point is we don't know.

Some people just never admit when they're in the wrong

There are games that do this right, Gears of War pits you against the fearsome Locust race who rise from beneath the earth to lay waste to humanity. The genius of this race is that whilst you don't agree with their motivation you can understand it. Humanity landed and ravaged the surface of their planet and then destroyed a large portion of their species when they emerged from beneath. Furthermore the race design paints them as some giant mutated insects - they all obey a "Queen" and think as a single mind. In a twist the bosses in Gears tend to have less motivation and are more often larger creatures often who The Locust cant control themselves e.g. The Berserker, a blind charging beast, who thinks of nothing else other than tearing you limb from limb. The genius of this and Gear's story is that it gives you just enough information leaving the player to speculate. This becomes particularly effective in the 'Sires' section of the second game. So why don't other games do it? Laziness? Probably not, it's more likely the design and time constraints of game creation naturally result in shortcomings such as these.

Worth note is Shadow of the Colossus which pits the player against large roaming beasts that traverse the land. The brilliance of these creatures is that they pose no direct threat to you and are simply there for you to kill for your own selfish deeds. Its a unique dynamic where the player's motivation takes a back seat as Wanderer destroys these creatures to restore life to his love. The complete lack of 'grunt' enemies gives the game a sparse feel which results in a lonely journey that is accompanied with a constant feeling of dread. A brilliance not paralleled in any game since. Anyway back to the task in hand.

Evolution is required. No longer can we face off against meaningless enemies without reason. And I know games are fundamentally about the gameplay and that is the most important factor but I feel insulted by constantly being fed character development that is surpassed in every conceivable way by The Very Hungry Caterpillar. Imagine a game where every enemy had an agenda, a back story, where no two were the same, perhaps they have a family. What if you came across a Goomba with a wife and kids? Would that make you think twice before so carelessly jumping on their head and crushing their skull into the pavement?

- 2-Bit Wasteland

Weekend Reader is Kotaku's look at the critical thinking in, and of video games. It appears Saturdays at noon. Please take the time to read the full article cited before getting involved in the debate here.

The blog One Dimensional Man deconstructs this kind of design, and comes up with another illusion - the illusion that the game isn't linear, and how the stage may be skillfully set for that. "Pseudo non-linearity," is the term the writer coins, and an expert example of it can be found in the opening sequences of Half-Life 2.

I agree that hamfisted mechanisms such as invisible walls sort of break the third wall, and at minimum are things working against immersion. But I'm not sure I ever felt that my freedom to explore anywhere in an FPS was part of the bargain in the first place. Hell, it's not completely part of the bargain in an open world RPG like Fallout 3. In Grayditch, an entire town, only a few buildings have doors that may be opened. The others have the kind of locked facades the writer calls a design flaw.

But we can't have everything. The key for a designer is knowing what we can have, and then how to discourage or prevent us from needlessly pursuing what we can't.

Freedom Is Dead, And Why It Doesn't Matter
[One Dimensional Man, Dec. 17, 2009]

The introduction to Half-Life 2 is a particularly useful archetype. The player (as Gordon Freeman), finds themselves trapped in the dystopian City 17, a living and breathing hell house of fascistic undertones (and a not so subtle reference to the dissolution of the Jewish ghettos in Nazi Germany). After a brief encounter with an old friend (Barney, undercover as one of the faceless Combines) it soon becomes clear that the mission is one of escape. As Gordon Freeman makes his way around the spatially imposing City 17, navigating its various alleys, back roads, and crumbling apartments, the sense of a genuine, living and breathing world is certainly palpable. Other ‘evacuees' offer small talk, ‘Combine' guardsman patrol the streets, while sinister public service announcements play on giant, dominating screens. The world conveys a sense of it pre-existing the player's arrival there, which is really, for all titles that strive for immersion, one of the apogees of virtual design.

What one may not be consciously aware of however as they navigate through this dystopian sprawl is that Gordon's escape route is quite immaculately linear; an effective straight line in the figurative sense. And yet one could be entirely forgiven for thinking this virtual City as fully, spatially unfastened, naked to the whims of electronic exploration.

This is due to the creative design principle of pseudo-nonlinearity.

City 17 employs several techniques to psychologically re-orientate the player in this way, all operating generally around this one principle. Perhaps most psychologically effective, are the Combine guardsman who ‘dynamically' operate to cordon off certain parts of City 17's various stairwells and pathways as Gordon attempts his escape. They are dynamic in the sense that they allow for a passing glimpse of the virtual world outside the player's immediate field of view, before finally forcing them back en-route (often by way of a hard whack from an electro-truncheon) to be left with only the tantalizing suggestion planted into their own imagination; that of a fluid world that only marginally pre-empts subjectivity. Simultaneously, a colossal barrier to immersion is shattered as the familiar constrictive sense of the ‘developer behind the curtain' ruthlessly chopping and cutting parts of the world from view is countered by effectively showing the world behind that curtain – if only briefly. This is sufficient however, as in the process an illusion of freedom, or rather of non-linearity, is actively cultivated in the player's mind; the world becomes actualized, feels more three dimensional, as the artificial barriers to exploration are, in turn, naturalized, effectively reshaped into actors of the story operating against the player. In the process, they are absolved of their essential artifice as agents of linearity.

Pseudo-nonlinearity may also be achieved without the aid of such dynamic tools (which, it is worth stating, cannot always be relied upon – owing to the context of plot or narrative) and this is certainly a more common approach to environmental design that one finds. In practice, the fundamentals remain largely unchanged as the principle barrier to exploration must still undergo the same process of naturalization; that is, it must be configured so as to maintain consonance to the inherited semiotic array of both narrative and environment. For instance, in introducing an obstruction into a particular environment, the environment must also be able to passively disclose the ‘story' of why that obstruction is present there. The closer fidelity is able to be maintained between the obstruction to individual progression and the dynamic motivation to progress (i.e. the narrative) the greater the linearity ‘deficit' is reduced. To use a common example from modern FPS design: a wrecked car or coach laying across a road or landscape forces the player onto a different path, effectively manipulating them into the appropriate, pre-determined direction. While this form of static obstruction may appear a rather brash imposition and unconscionable artifice, this hinges upon how effectively it is naturalized in respect to its narrative and environmental arrays. By ensuring that it conforms to the animus of these two factors, its symbolic charge as both artifice and bearer of linearity can be effectively neutralized.

To put it simply, the narrative should, either directly or indirectly, be able account for why the obstruction is there, while the environment (by means of inference) discloses how it got there.

These two environmental operators (static and dynamic) form the basis of environmental design from the principle of pseudo non-linearity. By deploying them, developers are able to mitigate the lingering problems associated with this shift toward a narrowing of exploration in favour of greater control. Of course, the ever-critical gamer will often be able to penetrate the façade, and readily deduce the reality of linearity on display. However, awareness, or pre-awareness should not detract from the overall effect, which like a magic trick, is able to retain much of its prestige despite knowledge of this basic deception.

- One Dimensional Man

Weekend Reader is Kotaku's look at the critical thinking in, and of video games. It appears Saturdays at noon. Please take the time to read the full article cited before getting involved in the debate here.

You've been a game publisher, retailer, and developer, but we've save the best (and perhaps the easiest) for last in our "What Will You Do?" series. Gamers. You can probably identify, and while heading out to your local retailer at midnight on a weekday might not make you feel particularly powerful, you're a part of the most influential group when it comes to what all three of those other groups do. If you don't buy it, it won't sell. Your voice has more power than any marketing team in the business. Change may come slow when you're part of such a large and distinguished group, but it will come, and your buying and playing habits determine which direction said change takes. What will you, the gamer, do to make 2010 a better year than 2009?

Press start to continue.

It's not all about tightening up the graphics. Game developers create the games we play, sure, but the choices they make while creating said games have a huge impact on the game industry as a whole. Do they focus on traditional games that are sure to pull in an established audience and secure publishing, or invest time and money on a new game concept that may or may not meet with success? Should your games appeal to a casual audience, or is it time to court the hardcore? So many decisions. Luckily we've got commenting space to spare.

Awwww, hurry up, the boss is coming in!

We've already explored the world of game publishing in 2010 from our reader's point of view, and now our second installment of "What Will You Do?" takes a look at the place people buy video games. How can retail video game outlets improve the industry in the coming year? Retailers are a powerful force in video gaming, having a say in what games will be stocked and in what quantities and how games are marketed to players, while also playing an important role as the consumer's direct-link to the games industry, giving newcomers their first impressions of the hobby we know and love. Retailers are also responsible for the used video game market, which grows larger and (some would say) more threatening every day.

Flip on the neon open sign and get to work!

Welcome to the first installment of "What Will You Do?", where we have our readers tell us what they'd do in order to ensure that 2010 is a better year for gaming than 2009. For this installment, assume the role of the head of a prominent video game publisher. You know, the ones that start with vowels and have been around for ages. You hold in your hands the power to determine what types of games get the triple-A treatment, which genres are focused on, and what sectors of the game industry your company should focus on.

You've got the big desk and the nice view. Someone will be bringing in your lunch shortly. Ready? Begin.

Doctor Professor, the nom de plume of the writer behind Pixel Poppers, assessed his sense of satisfaction in playing RPGs and found it a bit false. Challenges in RPGs could almost always be overcome with a character of a high enough level, and advancement within this genre is almost a given. Action games, however, required skill to complete successfully; either master the tasks or you'll never advance.

What did he do? He retrained his motivation. As a child, he was often praised for his intelligence, not his hard work, which he felt dovetailed with RPGs system of assured success. He quit RPGs and picked up a Sonic Adventure DX, seeking to improve his skills. And now he says, after a long journey with action games, he's a completely different gamer.

While I don't agree with the blanket depiction of all RPGs offering "false achievements," it is his experience with them, and that's what he's writing about, not mine. But it may explain why people can become so easily fixated with grinding and leveling up. And I do find his insight on performance and mastery orientation to be spot-on. I was the same type of student in school and sort of am to this day, delighted by doing something right the first time and quick to give up when I can't. I'd love to also retrain myself to be a better skilled gamer. Right after I make level 50 in Borderlands.

Awesome By Proxy: Addicted to Fake Achievement [Pixel Poppers, Nov. 23]

RPGs are many things, but they are almost never hard. As I realized in childhood, the vast majority of RPG challenges can be defeated simply by putting in time. RPGs reward patience, not skill. Almost never is the player required to work hard - only the characters need improve. Failing to defeat Zeromus might mean your strategy is flawed, but it also might mean your level is too low. Guess which problem is easier to remedy?

Yet while the player is mostly marking time, the characters are accomplishing epic, heroic deeds, saving lives and defeating evil. Even when the player is not explicitly praised for this, the game makes its attitude clear. "You're awesome!" it says, in essence. "You're so strong and noble and heroic!" The player is showered with praise for non-achievements. It's like porn for the performance oriented.

The characters make all the effort, but the player receives all the accolades. The game doesn't have to say "Wow, you must be smart!" to train the player to value impressiveness that was not hard-won - even when the praise is for effort rather than skill, it is a lie. The player has expended only time.

When I learned about performance and mastery orientations, I realized with growing horror just what I'd been doing for most of my life. Going through school as a "gifted" kid, most of the praise I'd received had been of the "Wow, you must be smart!" variety. I had very little ability to follow through or persevere, and my grades tended to be either A's or F's, as I either understood things right away (such as, say, calculus) or gave up on them completely (trigonometry). I had a serious performance orientation. And I was reinforcing it every time I played an RPG.

I could point to characters and story as much as I liked. But I couldn't lie to myself - not anymore. Most of my enjoyment of Super Mario RPG, of Skies of Arcadia, of Kingdom Hearts - came from illegitimate sources. It came from overidentifying with the heroes and claiming their accomplishments as my own. It came from abusing them for fake achievement. I felt sick.

After panicking for a while, I came up with a plan. There was no point blaming anyone else for the state of things - I was the only one who could turn it around. So I would do so. I would instill a mastery orientation in myself.

The first thing I did was stop playing RPGs. I was addicted and I had to quit. Then, it was time to retrain myself. I started small: I began playing action games. If RPGs had reinforced my bad habits, then action games could reinforce good ones.

Sonic AdventureSonic Adventure DX didn't take long to beat, but I didn't let myself stop there: the game had an achievement system, in which the player was awarded with "emblems" for reaching various goals - like speeding Sonic through stages with impressively quick times. Many of them were very difficult, and I couldn't accomplish them on the first, second, fifth, or tenth attempt. But I kept trying. And when I finally had all 160 emblems the game offered, I knew I'd crossed a milestone. I, not Sonic, had improved until I could pass these challenges. I had developed actual skills, even if they were objectively useless ones. I had done something I could actually be proud of: I had built a habit of not giving up.

It's been a long road since then - it's not easy to reverse a way of thinking so deeply ingrained for so long. And I still have to watch myself, and not let myself be too proud or self-congratulatory when I accomplish something quickly and easily. But I feel good about how far I've come. And Sonic will always have a special place in my heart for the role he played in starting me down the road to recovery.

- Doctor Professor

Weekend Reader is Kotaku's look at the critical thinking in, and of video games. It appears Saturdays at noon. Please take the time to read the full article cited before getting involved in the debate here.

Warning, this discussion will contain spoilers of "The Ballad of Gay Tony," released Oct. 29.

"Club life is the central focus of The Ballad of Gay Tony, which brings us back to the sex act as a central concern of this version of GTA," Williams writes. "Gay" Tony Prince, not the player protagonist but certainly the game's "most crucial character," is the proprietor of two clubs, one gay and one straight, but it's the straight venue where the story is largely told.

But despite the game's title, and the dating/booty call mechanic of Luis' encounters with women in the club, where the story ends up is not about sex, homosexual or heterosexual, promiscuous or monogamous. It's in an "Oedipal drama" about two men coming to be a father and son, both men lacking the other family role model in their lives.

The Ballad of Gay Tony is the Straightest Grand Theft Auto Ever [PopMatters, Nov. 11.]

[...] Luis's promiscuity is complicated by his own background, which is as a son whose own father abandoned him. Curiously, this complication also connects him more closely to Tony. At several points over the course of the story, Luis suggests that Tony has been like a father to him, having been the one to get Luis employed and on the straight and narrow (or at least out of prison) after running afoul of the police in his younger days. Tony, too, mentions that Luis is like a son to him. Thus, the game is less than retrograde in presenting a rather daring and progressive version of a father-son story, one in which the "father" is a homosexual.

The Oedipal drama that would normally ensue in such stories is inverted, though, perhaps as a result of Tony's homosexuality. Luis is not especially threatened by his "father's" power as neither one compete with one another over a mother or any woman for that matter. Freud would suggest that such competition is a necessary part of the psychology of becoming an adult. The symbolic act of killing the father becomes foundational for becoming a mature adult capable of taking on the authority of being a father himself. However, when faced with the dilemma of having to literally kill Tony near the climax of the game (which is a result of some mobsters needing the head of one of the two men because a diamond heist has put the two into bed with and in the cross-hairs of several criminal organizations), Luis chooses to save the man (as Tony did the younger Luis) rather than to destroy him and take his place (as the mobsters offer Luis the opportunity to do). Indeed, throughout The Ballad of Gay Tony, Luis spends much of his time caring for this adopted "father" whose addiction is leading to some really bad decision making on the part of the elder of the two men. This curious re-structuring of the Oedipal conflict with a homosexual and a heterosexual father and son removes conflict from their relationship altogether and offers instead a co-operative version of the relationship in which one man brings up and nurtures the other and then the other likewise returns the favor.

Thus, despite Rockstar's frequent employment of stereotyping ethnic and sexual identity for the sake of parody, The Ballad of Gay Tony actually becomes a rather different kind of discourse on the development of human beings and their relationships to one another because of (not in spite of) their differences. Social deviance becomes a means of uniting very different people rather than in dividing them from society. Instead, Tony and Luis manage to form the most fundamental of social units out of deviance, a family.

- G. Christopher Williams

Weekend Reader is Kotaku's look at the critical thinking in, and of video games. It appears Saturdays at noon. Please take the time to read the full article cited before getting involved in the debate here.

Second Correction: Seraphina Brennan is in fact the transgendered identity of the writer and is the byline she now uses for all of her work. Our commentary on this excerpt has been changed to reflect this.

Moreover, Brennan seems to ask why disproportionate weight is given to a woman's physical appearance and not the role she occupies in a game? Incorporating jiggle physics. How is endlessly commenting on it - and not the fact it belongs to a playable female character in a strong, assertive and in many cases nontraditional role - helping the issue instead of reinforcing the character's physicality and perpetuating the objectification?

I have a couple problems with the argument. She acknowledges the obvious double-standard - that physical representations of men are more likely to connote themes of power and heroism, whereas with women it's almost entirely about sexuality and desirability. But it's not given much treatment in her final point, which is simply that video games aren't expected to provide realistic depictions of anyone's bodies. The logical extremes of that position are obvious but I won't point them out because I don't want this to get off topic. And the piece does raise a valid point: Beauty might be in the eye of the beholder; what else might it be overlooking?

Boobs and You [Massively, Nov. 20, 2009.]

Very few of our protagonists (Nathan Drake and Alan Wake to name a few exceptions) depict men in what I would call a non-degrading manner. Honestly, how many of you readers out there right now are as ripped as the guy from Blade & Soul? My guess is very few.

While our interactive media may have started with a slightly overweight plumber as the titluar hero, we've certainly turned to making sure all of our character models feature strong, burly, and oversexed men who's muscles can give a woman's breasts a run for their money. I mean, look at World of Warcraft, for example — a game that we normally don't consider sexually charged. How realistic is their depiction of men compared to the average guy?

[...] Finally, I really believe that I have to take this one on - the notion that video game women degrade or defame real women because of their depictions. In my honest opinion, that's only really half true.

While VG women certainly may have overblown proportions and tight clothing, many of them aren't exactly weak or stupid. They're usually also not just there to be saved by some handsome, burly man. Many of these women are extremely dominant, going out to take care of things instead of waiting around for someone else to do it.

Off the top of my head, Lara Croft is a world-renowned archaeologist/historian, Joanna "Perfect" Dark is a highly trusted secret agent, Sniper Wolf is a trained military expert, Antonia Bayle rules Qeynos with a strong passion and intelligence, Jaina Proudmoore strains herself keeping relations between the Alliance and the Horde in check, and Bayonetta is someone who can and will kick your ass.

All of those women may have questionable outfits/fashion taste, but their positions aren't exactly "degrading to women." These are all highly respected and highly trusted women in positions of power, and that's not even including the characters we create in our games who end up being heroes of the land. If anything, video games have a history of keeping a very level field between men and women, sometimes even flipping the traditional power roles to favor women.

- Colin Brennan

Weekend Reader is Kotaku's look at the critical thinking in, and of video games. It appears Saturdays at noon. Please take the time to read the full article cited before getting involved in the debate here.

"Being granted the opportunity to be friends or adversaries, games allow us to act out the worst of human pathologies and encourage behaviors that would get us yelled at, arrested, or killed in the real world," writes Jamin Brophy-Warren for Slate. This is hardly a news flash. But it's depressing to consider that, in a Mario's return to a 2D platformer after 20 years, we still haven't progressed much further than adolescent brothers taking advantage of the game to antagonize each other.

I'd argue that the reason he had a bad experience with it is because he didn't know his co-player. That made the guy completely unaccountable, and his provocations would stand unless and until the writer called him on his bullshit, which would be more uncomfortable to do face-to-face to a stranger in a "fun" environment than just walking away.

Brophy-Warren ponders why multiplayer is an inherently brutish or uncouth pursuit, and I think he answers it in his last paragraph: When you game with people you know and respect, you're more likely to actually cooperate. Otherwise, "Most cooperative games lie in a vast middle ground, however, a no man's land between altruism and gaming Darwinism that offers up a host of ways to misbehave."

Et Tu, Mario? [Slate, Nov. 13]

Jesper Juul, a video-game researcher and professor at NYU's newly minted Game Center, argues that multiplayer games give us three things to balance. Players want to win and they want the game to be fair, but they also need to navigate whatever relationships they have outside the game-that is, if you shoot your friend in the head in Call of Duty, you'll have to answer for that in the offline world. My brother and the jerk from E3 were solely concerned with winning. I mostly cared about the game being fair. None of us, though, sat down and talked about the third factor-what we were planning to do during our journey as in-game teammates.

This planning comes up most frequently in massively multiplayer games like World of Warcraft. In that game, players create guilds and go on quests in pursuit of gold and weaponry. Defeating an enemy yields goodies that guilds must choose how to distribute. In a perfect world, everyone would work together to give the appropriate items to the most deserving players. There is a breed of WoW player, however, known as the "loot ninja" or "greeder," a scoundrel who steals items from fallen comrades or takes more than his share after a battle. (There are also more flagrant modes of sabotage. In the infamous Leeeroy Jenkins video, an overexcitable player decides to take on a difficult boss single-handedly, sabotaging his guild's meticulous plan. The results are predictably surreal.)

This type of stuff was happening long before World of Warcraft. In side-scrolling brawlers such as the early-1990s title Streets of Rage, power-ups appeared along the way that could heal your wounded party or give players special abilities. Bleeding-heart video-game liberals like myself would argue that health packs should always go to the weakest member of the party. This would often lead to discussions about who "deserved" the triage, which begot a lot of petty bickering, which begot fistfights. This Photoshopped box art for Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II-which includes the tagline "It's My Turn to Get the Pizza You Asshole I Need it More!"-is a perfect encapsulation of the phenomenon.

Part of the problem (and the joy) of playing games is that such behavior isn't explicitly condoned or condemned. Looting and friendly fire aren't forbidden by most games, which leaves us to figure out our own rules. This is the right decision: Good game designers allow players to be whoever they want and trust they'll come to their own consensus about what constitutes "fair play." That's why the New Super Mario Bros. Wii was more enjoyable when I played it as God intended-with a good friend and copious amounts of beer. There was no back-stabbing, and no one's feelings were hurt.

- Jamin Brophy-Warren

Weekend Reader is Kotaku's look at the critical thinking in, and of video games. It appears Saturdays at noon. Please take the time to read the full article cited before getting involved in the debate here.

Guido Pellegrini at Playtime Magazine raises that point, among many others, in examining not just the meta-narrative of Portal, but also that of Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty. Portal gets a deeper treatment, but both games deliberate puncture the illusion of control game players feel they have. In the end, Pellegrini writes, we are still following commands, taking cues and completing tasks in order to ultimately complete the game. Sons of Liberty in its way, and Portal to a much larger degree, are completely open about such manipulation.

If you haven't played or finished Portal and feel like you might want to some day, this essay should be treated as one long spoiler (the same for Sons of Liberty). Ultimately, Pellegrini raises this question: Within games is any restriction antithetical to one's freedom to act, or can there still be freedom within those boundaries? It is a question that extends well beyond the immaculate walls of Portal's test laboratory.

Portal and The Meta-Narrative Maker [Playtime Magazine, Oct 23.]

GLaDOS, then, is part adversary, part game-designer, guiding us across levels in an effort to finish the game of portal gun assessment. This antagonistic artificial intelligence is a diegetic representation of the creator or director, shaping up a fiction for the players to complete, providing context, giving orders, outlining our path, introducing complications, playing around with our expectations, intentionally misleading us, and so on. GLaDOS is our ruler and general, our boss. Meta-narrative elements are not terribly common in video-games, although they are not alien to the medium. We need only look at Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty to find an especially blunt and grandiloquent example of meta-narrative. In that game, a video-game player - a covert operative who has been trained solely through virtual reality simulations, or so he believes - ultimately realizes that his first official field-mission has been yet another simulation: every battle, death, and confrontation has been meticulously planned by an advanced artificial intelligence hiding behind the human façade of an iconic military general whom the protagonist has only communicated with through Codec, a sort of radio coupled with images of talking faces. The end of the game is infamously weird, culminating as it does with the advanced artificial intelligence commanding us to finish the game by killing the final enemy in a sword-fight atop the Federal Hall. Being coerced into finishing the game by the evil, back-stabbing computer that constructed the narrative we have been playing for the past twelve hours is surprisingly repulsive. We do not have a choice to do otherwise, unless we prefer to shut off our game system. But is this lack-of-choice a departure from other video-games?

Every video-game compels us to complete certain actions in order to reach the finish line. Every video-game controls us and directs our behavior through strict parameters. Even an open-ended video-game is not completely open-ended, only open-ended in the manner and to the extent decided upon by the game-makers. Our immersion into the fiction veils our status as prisoners. Yet we are no more than prisoners, forced to do what the dictator-storyteller demands of us. Now, this admittedly makes the whole business sound much more sinister than it necessarily is - we willingly pay money to be manipulated and led by the game-makers, after all - but it is interesting to note how foreboding and uncomfortable it can be when a video-game opts to make our dependency upon the game-makers a literal part of the plot. In most any game, we would not mind having to accomplish certain feats, and more importantly, we would certainly not complain about having to kill the final enemy, since that would bring upon the much-desired denouement. Alas, in the vast majority of games, these commands are gentle, imperceptible, implied through environmental and contextual cues. Thus, we receive the commands without protest. What Sons of Liberty and Portal do is to actually tell us these commands out-loud, through an in-game director, and suddenly the conceit of freedom that video-games tend to propagate is destroyed. Most games force us to do this and that. The above two games are honest about it.

If there is one divergence between Sons of Liberty and Portal, it is that the former provides no true escape from the fiction of the in-game director. To the very end, we are following the commands of an artificial intelligence. The closing cinematic (a movie-like animation that furthers the story using film language) suggests future freedom only for the fictional protagonist. As far as our interactivity is concerned, we never oppose the computer's authority. Our last action is to kill the final enemy, just as the computer has ordained. Portal, on the other hand, gives players the opportunity to walk backstage - to view the machinery behind the fiction - in order to confront the neurotic puppeteer.

[...]

We must constantly observe the architecture that traps, annoys, hinders, and informs us. Only by doing this can we find the opposite end of the labyrinth. Just as the architecture might facilitate our flight, it is also a participant in our entrapment. This double-edged quality makes our interaction with the environment a passionate endeavor. Equal parts savior and jailer, the environment is the middle-man in the tug-of-war between computer and human guinea pig, as each uses the same landscape to claim victory over the other. It is this battle that is the soul of Portal. The game-designer and the player are constantly at odds with each other. One tries to control, while the other hopes to achieve independence. One tries to dominate through a precise architecture that delimits movement, while the other explores his or her possibilities within this supposedly constraining architecture. The player's performance can flower inside a confined milieu. This happens in every video-game, but this one makes it literal and readily visible thanks to GLaDOS. We wake up inside a game and subsequently form a hostile relationship with its designer. Walking beyond the walls of this game, we find a parent game with more objectives and more puzzles. We wonder if the hostile relationship does not continue, despite our perceived escape. We turn off Portal. We play something else. We keep wondering about the hostile relationship, now in a new context. Video-games allow freedom of movement while restricting its degree. In a sense, Portal is about whether this restriction is enough to stifle any sense of freedom or whether there can still be freedom within restrictions. It is a dilemma that expands to the medium at large, if not beyond even that.

- Guido Pellegrini

Weekend Reader is Kotaku's look at the critical thinking in, and of video games. It appears Saturdays at noon. Please take the time to read the full article cited before getting involved in the debate here.

Halpin, the Entertainment Consumers Association's president, deployed the lightning bolt with ruthlessness on fellow racers attempting to jump the gorge on the stadium track. "Like my character [Wario], I rarely hesitated in sending other racers off the cliff," Halpin answered.

Todd Howard, the executive producer at Bethesda Game Studios, came up with a failsafe against his men getting mind-controlled by aliens in X-Com. Since they dropped their weapons under an alien spell, he equipped them with live grenades that, when dropped, went boom. No more mind control problem. No more soldiers, either, but that's their problem.

Of course, there's a lot of evil done in the Sims (a franchise with a capacity for cruelty unlike many others), Knights of the Old Republic, and plenty of RPGs, for that matter. One guy even gratuitously shot up all the cows in Call of Juarez. Check it out. And tell us about all the innocent people you've wasted with a headshot, down in the comments.

The Evil Things We Do [Bitmob]

Matthew Kaplan of GameCritics thinks games have a lot of growing up to do, especially as the median age of gamers inevitably gets older. His essay argues that games, which often involve superhuman or at least athletic protagonists capable of amazing feats, rarely deal with the issues of aging and if so, typically as a limitation only.

But placing a game in the context of someone's advanced age would deepen both its story, its characters, and the relationships players form with them, Kaplan argues. He goes so far as offering Prototype as a theoretical example, and it wasn't at all as silly as it sounded at first.

This isn't an issue of inclusion to the degree that ethnic diversity is; the elderly, right now, don't game in huge numbers, of course. But there is a difference between growing old and evolving, and for games, including the elderly more would be the latter.

Ah, to be OId and Fragging: Roles for the Elderly in Video Games [GameCritics, Oct. 27, 2009.]

As the median age of gamers continues to rise, I wonder how this will be reflected in the character creation choices made by players. I can only speculate that concern over the seeming physical disconnect between the actions demanded of that character and those we consider typical of the elderly will cause even the oldest players to mold younger, more "able" characters.

Yet this is precisely why we need to re-examine what it means to be "able" or an active agent in an escapist fantasy. I ask that aspiring designers consider the following questions with regard to roles for the elderly:

1. Why can't physical trials reflect the obstacles inherent to growing older while still maintaining their end result of power in addition to experience/success? For instance, why couldn't Prototype's Alex Mercer be an elderly man or woman who must wrestle with the newfound power brimming inside them as it conflicts with what they previously considered to be an aging body? Certainly, that is a far more interesting set of physical boundaries for the player to immerse himself/herself in than simply playing as "generic, muscular young male X." I think the only game that did this even marginally well was Metal Gear Solid 4, but that game addressed age as a constraint more than as a natural characteristic of its protagonist (which makes sense, given that Snake's aging between Metal Gear Solid 2 and 4 was mostly artificial).

2. Why are the objects of desire in games typically younger males and females? Isn't an older man or woman worth fighting for? Relationships don't simply stop after youth.

3. What sort of interesting introspection and character development can come from the dilemmas faced by older men and women? Why can't a journey of discovery be just as compelling if the character doing the discovering is elderly? More pertinently, why is growing older considered the end of a journey rather than the beginning of one?

Of course, there is always the question of whether an idea for a video game is marketable. However, I ask that creators and storywriters not fall into the trap of stereotyping for the sake of pushing what the nebulous and questionable "market" considers "attractive." What I have found is most often attractive to gamers is that which most pleasurably defies their expectations.

And when it comes down to it, the word "pleasure" is at the heart of this issue. For all the patronizing glories we confer upon the elderly, we often associate growing older with a descent of condition, away from pleasurable activity and towards death. Surely the process of growing old is not always a pleasurable one, but there is nothing about old age that makes growing up and having fun mutually exclusive.- Matthew Kaplan

Weekend Reader is Kotaku's look at the critical thinking in, and of video games. It appears Saturdays at noon. Please take the time to read the full article cited before getting involved in the debate here.

Writing for PopMatters, G. Christopher Williams picked up on an interview with Quantic Dream, the developer of Heavy Rain, in which the writer confessed he felt uncomfortable being forced to perform the striptease. "Fantastic," Quantic Dream's David Cage tells Game Informer. "You know what? That is exactly what we wanted. ... Yes, it's a strong moment for the character. But if we managed to make you feel uncomfortable it is because at some point we made you believe you were Madison."

This is a departure from other gameplay-based depictions of sex, Williams argues, where the object was either to reveal skin or engage in a mini-game that "reduces sex to the stabbing motions of button mashing." He says the breakthrough lies not necessarily in a mature depiction of sex, but in delivering a new perspective on how it is understood, even if it means forcing someone in an opposite gender role to see its more degrading side.

The Gleam of Electric Sex: What Video Games Might (or Might Not) Teach Us About Sex [PopMatters, Oct. 14.]

If I am interpreting Cage's thinking correctly, he seems to be suggesting that Heavy Rain is moving beyond the voyeuristic simulations of sexuality offered by countless other forms of more passive media and also beyond simply making a participatory simulation of sexuality into a mere simulation of the "‘ol in-out, in-out". Instead, what seems to be offered here is a potential simulation of some of the psychology of the sexual experience.

In this particular instance, the psychology is particularly fascinating as it is likely a rather novel experience for the largest demographic of video game players, males. If feminist theory concerning the tendency for women to become the object of the male gaze holds any credence, the experience of being made object to that gaze may be an entirely new experience for many players. Indeed, it may also be an uncomfortable one as traditional gender roles and perspectives may be tested and reversed as a result of being made to "believe you were Madison" because players will participate in this humiliating act rather than merely view it.

Certainly, Cage and Quantic Dream's efforts are not entirely new. Many video game players have toyed with gender bending experiments such as playing avatars that represent themselves as the opposite of their own gender. I have played female avatars in online games and have noted differences in the ways that I am treated when playing as a female character as opposed to a male character. Largely, my own experience had led me to observe that I seemed to receive a lot more gifts from other players when playing as a female (which may suggest something about cultural norms and expectations concerning male-female relationships).

However, this limited sort of experience was not placed in the context of a story or a character whose entire personality is coded as female (my avatar was always driven by my own personality as I am not one to play "in character" in games, not attempting then to specifically act like the character that I am playing in the context of the gaming world). Adding layers of storytelling and the more objective, dramatic qualities of scripted and directed behaviors into this mix may produce more focused statements on sexuality than we have seen in gaming thus far and may push this participatory art in directions that the passive arts are limited in exploring. Because we may have to reconsider who we are as we play out the experiences of someone else. Games have the potential to create empathy with characters rather than the sympathy that film or books might evoke in watching someone else suffer or experience pleasure.

- G. Christopher Williams

Weekend Reader is Kotaku's look at the critical thinking in, and of video games. It appears Saturdays at noon. Please take the time to read the full article cited before getting involved in the debate here.

Tutorials common to the early days of PC gaming followed an expository model of learning that bordered on information overload, writes G. Christopher Williams at PopMatters. Williams was reminded of this when he played Hearts of Iron 3, a military/diplomacy simulation set in World War II. It gave a decidedly old-school tutorial, barraging him with instructions but at no point allowing any practice of them. Williams gave up in frustration.

Contrast that with the active learning model of many game tutorials, especially for console titles. Tutorial or early levels commonly take a player through the control and combo schemes, identifying them and then asking the player to repeat them in practice. But by itself, the same as exposition without practice, it too is not a perfect form of pedagogy, Williams says.

Active Learning: The Pedagogy of the Game Tutorial [PopMatters, Sept. 16, 2009.] I was reminded of the more traditional expository method of conveying information that game manuals used to provide gamers a few weeks ago when I tried booting up a copy of the World War II simulation, Hearts of Iron 3. Not only is Hearts of Iron 3 a game that is built in a retro style with pared down visuals of maps and charts rather than fancy battlefield graphics, but it depends on a retro style of tutorial. While an in-game tutorial exists for this political and military sim, the tutorial is presented as a series of lengthy texts overlaid over the user interface that explain how to build troops, a national economy, participate in diplomatic efforts, etc.

While my response to Hearts of Iron 3‘s pedantic approach might imply that us old fogeys should shut the hell up and join the rest of the world in the 21st century where games teach the player through the more effective pedagogy of active learning, one might consider that the value of active learning has been challenged as well. For example in a 2006 study, "Why Minimal Guidance During Instruction Does Not Work: An Analysis of the Failure of Constructivist, Discovery, Problem-Based, Experiential, and Inquiry-Based Teaching", Paul A. Kirschner reviewed the shortfalls of a number of efforts to put active learning to work in practical settings. While not all of Kirschner's criticisms of active learning may be applicable to video game tutorials, some of them are interesting in regards to the problems that some games have in providing only "minimal guidance" when actively training players.

[...] Which I suppose is my point, that I am neither opposed to exposition or active learning, nor am I sold on either one as a proper pedagogy for video games. Quite honestly, I want a good and reasonable amount of both in my game tutorials as they each have there use in learning a game. However, don't overwhelm me with a novel length description of play before letting me try out a few basics. Likewise, don't assume that I already know enough or that I have used all of the skills available in a game enough before letting me sink rather than swim into action.

Oh, and for the love of all that is good, allow me the option to skip it altogether if I really, really want to. Everybody knows that school sucks.- G. Christopher Williams

Weekend Reader is Kotaku's look at the critical thinking in, and of video games. It appears Saturdays at noon. Please take the time to read the full article cited before getting involved in the debate here.

Not everything has to be quick-hitter, incremental developments and snarky takes on the week's news. The weekend's longer news cycle is a good time to prop up your feet and ponder how you view the world of gaming, and how the rest of the world views ours, too.

This week, National Public Radio's All Things Consider examined The Path - the choice-based horror narrative about the dangers of a adolescent girlhood, specifically encounters with strangers. It's a moody, murky game in which players confront their own fears, and the consequences of their curiosity.

On 'The Path,' Everything A Big Bad Wolf Could Want

The game is nothing so much as a rumination on the vulnerabilities of girlhood.

"In some ways, the girls are all one girl," observes Auriea Harvey, The Path's other co-designer. "Or one girl at different stages of her life. In some ways, this [game] is about the various stages of life a girl has to go through in order to become a woman."

This is seriously unusual terrain for a video game, says Brenda Brathwaite. She's been playing video games for 20 years, and she says The Path is the most emotional game she's discovered.

Brathwaite was particularly struck by a moment in the game where Ruby, the 15-year-old sister, stumbles into a deserted playground in the forest where a young man, sitting on a bench, offers her a cigarette. Then he sits back on the bench.

"He's just sitting there," says Brathwaite. Still: "The actual thought that ran through my head at the time was, 'Oh my God, am I going to be raped?' "

Brathwaite says she herself was violently attacked when she was younger. Playing The Path resonated deeply with her life experience; it allowed her to think about being a victim of violence in terms that felt safe to her.

"I think we've succeeded in making a game that's about the player," says Samyn. "What's frightening about it is the confrontation with your own interpretation of things, and probably realizing that they're your own."

Before playing The Path, Brathwaite had talked about her experience with just a few close friends, no more. She said playing the game somehow made it OK for her to speak publicly about it.

"The vulnerabilities of girls - it's something that people don't deal with much in this particular format," says Harvey. She observes that most games for girls are about pink or ice skating or horses - things that are safe and unchallenging for them.

- Heather Chaplin

This past week our lunch and dinner conversations centered on video games, because one naturally talks about work, and this is mine right now. But I also sense that he's increasingly curious about them - maybe from a big-picture standpoint. The guy's a Harvard MBA after all, and video games are an enormous, multibillion-dollar business.

So I've done my best to keep this in contexts he understands. I talked about Nintendo, and its strategy of exploring growth among casual demographics - unsaturated markets, in other words. There's a Wii bowling league in the retirement community club down here. He was especially fascinated by the back-and-forth between movie studios and game publishers, how one project will become an adaptation of the other, and why. We talked about military games - he was appalled by the concept of Six Days in Fallujah. A Marine colonel, he is familiar with that operation on a different level. I deliberately didn't tell him of Atomic's claims that they'd consulted with insurgents.

Granddad's never played a game in his life but he looks like he might be interested in seeing what one looks like. He was amazed by the complexity of the PlayStation 3 controller I showed him, especially when I told him about the tilt control and rumble feedback. I told him I was playing The Godfather II - an exceptional movie he enjoyed greatly - for a review. That clearly intrigued him, but I didn't show any of it to him Had it been a better game, I probably would have at least shown him some of the cinematics.

The longer I stay here, the more inevitable it will become that he's going to watch me demonstrate a game. And that brings up a question I'd like to put to you:

If you were showing someone the first video game he had ever seen in his life, and you wanted to show him the very best the industry had to offer, what would it be?

Call of Duty: World at War, or really any military game, is straight out, because this guy was a first-person shooter on Okinawa, and it wasn't entertaining. But what do I show him? Bioshock? Do I try to impress him with the depth of a world in an MMO or a sandboxer? Do I keep it simple with something like Braid?

Would it only be a cutscene or an introduction? Would it be actual gameplay? Bear in mind my grandfather is an extremely intellectually curious man. But he's also, with a gentle smile, said that the hobby "sounds like an enormous waste of time." But he is genuinely fascinated that people would spend so much time and money with it.

Apple has the infrastructure in place through iTunes to create a real value proposition for those that want to extend the capability of their console beyond gaming and has the cash — about $20 billion — to not only invest in the best components on the market, but in an online gaming experience that could rival Xbox Live. That cash could also be put to good use by acquiring major developers (did someone say Take-Two?) that could go from third-party powerhouse to Apple's first-party publisher."

Having just bought an iPod Touch last week despite having a perfectly functional Zune with 10 times the storage space, I can see Don's point. Apple has gone beyond making products. Now they simply create things people want. Would you want an Apple gaming console?

Apple is the only other company that can release a game console [The Digital Home]

Is this an isolated case, or have you folks ever found yourself eating, drinking, or doing things a certain way after seeing it in a game? I'm not talking purchasing large baskets of Axe deodorant due to an in-game ad here - we've all done that. I'm talking more subtle things here. Going on a fresh fruit kick after a Pac-Man marathon, or getting really into curry after watching the marathon curry cutscene in Xenosaga II? How much power do video games have over our daily habits? If only we had a comments section in which to discuss such things.

We've covered a bit of the reaction against the game, a strategy title that's a little bit capture-the-flag — except in this case, the "flag" is a very fat girl, made difficult to move because her captors are tasked with feeding her cake. Reactions have ranged from the constructively mild — Feminist Gamers wonders why fat chicks are considered "cute" and suggests a heavy treasure chest instead — to the bilious.

Shakesville writer Melissa McEwan writes, sarcastically, "I'm positively thrilled to see such unyielding dedication to creating a new generation of fat-hating, heteronormative assholes," and completed her protest with a photo dubbing herself "The Fat Princess of Shakesville Manor" — and flipping the bird, presumably to Sony.

The angle that the majority of the media seems to want to go with is "Feminists cry foul over Fat Princess," though whether someone is fat or thin is truly a feminist issue is debatable, one supposes. So shall we debate?

It's unfortunate that society has such a narrow range of figures that people are allowed to have in order to be considered attractive, and the general conception is that a fat man is somewhat more empathetic a creature than a fat woman, as unfair as that is.

But what's wrong with a fat princess?

On one hand, obesity is a serious health problem, and it's understandable that those who confront it might not wish their issue to be relegated to a video game mechanic, a source of laughs. Fat Princess ostensibly intends to be cute and funny, and perhaps it's offensive to think of fat girls as "cute and funny."

Instead of what, though? Princess Peach isn't fat, but she's cute and funny too, isn't she?

Complicating the issue is the fact that the concept of overweight woman as comic relief has been part of our culture for quite some time; we have quite a few femme comediennes who embrace their fat as a form of beauty and independence from social pressure. They prove that being fat needn't be some great, offensive social secret.

So what's the alternative for the princess? Should she not be fat, because thin girls are cute and funny while fat ones are not? Would it have been better to make her a typical, idealized female? Or must we be so sensitive that we are no longer allowed to rescue the princess, as we have done in our fairy tales for centuries, at all?

Is the problem with Fat Princess the fact that making her fat is something of a form of torture by her enemies? Because getting fat is a beautiful thing, or because getting fat is a terrible thing? There are, to be fair, reasons for fat girls, thin girls and feminists to be a little affronted by the game, but it's really not clear what the specific reason is, precisely, or what the solution might be.

James Green, lead art director on Fat Princess, told Yahoo! that the game's concept artist is female. I'm female, and when I first saw screens for Fat Princess, my only reaction was, "It looks cute."

I hate when we as an audience dismiss debates on issues in video games by saying "it's just a game." But I don't think that the things we see in games are necessarily reflections on ourselves or about us; the fat princess is not a spokesperson for all women, or even all fat women, and I'm most curious about the critics who chose to see her as a statement on themselves or their role as women in the real world.

Ultimately, though, wouldn't removing the fat girl, or the issue of obesity, from the game because they bring too many issues into play be precisely the wrong message to send to women?