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.

And though it’s about the lead character’s ultimately linear story arc, this framework subtly becomes about the player’s self, too.

Persona 3 and Persona 4 largely share the same main core gameplay concepts. Players begin as a nameless, faceless protagonist, and conduct that character through the events of a story as it unfolds across the calendar school year. The activities the player chooses in the simplicity of daily life come to bear on the gameplay just as much as more conventional dungeon runs and battles – if not more so.

Perhaps most characteristic of the series, though, is the way that the gameplay subtly encourages players to enter the protagonist’s shoes, to take on the lessons of his experiences, and to turn the lens on themselves.

The Malleable Protagonist
To some extent, this open-ended character experience is part of the established function of the silent protagonist. These heroes tend to possess few defining characteristics of their own, and the player selects each and every thing they say and do. The lead character, then, simply acts as a medium for the player’s own interaction with a game’s character and world.

But the recent Persona games take the silent protagonist a step further. In both games, the lead character is a teenage boy – that’s not the unusual bit. With his classmates, he uses alternate “selves” called Personas to fight an encroaching evil. This boy learns from the beginning he’s special – unlike his fellow Persona-users, he can employ not one, but many different Personas. In other words, he has a nearly-limitless number of possible “selves” he can select at will.

The ability to change Personas is a functional part of the core gameplay. The advantage in battle of being able to change out what essentially translates to combat skills for different ones, or stronger ones, is simply part of the game mechanic.

But thematically, the game’s lead character is an individual with an infinite number of faces. He’s told his ultimate nature, and the course of his journey, will depend largely on the choices he makes and the bonds that he forms. It’s true for the character – but even more so considering he’s at the behest of a player who will decide what sort of “self” the character has.

The idea that the silent protagonist will shape himself is illusory, of course – that’s the player’s job. But along the way, the game subtly demands players reflect on their own selves, too.

Three Versus Four
Although Persona 4 makes just about every appropriate iterative improvement on Persona 3’s design that one could ever ask for, many stalwart fans prefer the “darker” vibe of the third title, with its inferred undertones of suicide, depression and sexual deviance. P3’s distinctly forbidding feel, though, comes mainly from its almost negative take on the concept of the persona.

There’s a very subtle difference — P3 employed the multiple-persona concept to suggest a character who wore many different masks, but kept his heart hidden. Success in the game’s social relationships usually depended on telling characters precisely what they wanted to hear – even if it wasn’t the right thing, and even if it conflicted with beliefs and behaviors you chose to express with other characters. Underlying message? Starkly nihilistic in its own way, suggesting that all others ever really know of your “self” is the mask you choose to show them.

By contrast – and with a lot more clarity — P4 presents the idea that an individual may have many different “selves,” some public, some private, and yet the individual’s encouraged to embrace and accept them all, even when it’s difficult. In fact, in P4, denying one’s alternate self creates a mortal danger. A facet of the self that’s repressed can become a dangerous dark side – and that’s true for real-life humans, too.

P4’s social relationships are more complex and more genuine, too, and while this lightens things up a bit in contrast with P3’s darkness, it often encourages the player to do a truthful self-evaluation and to make an emotional investment – thereby building immersion, and making it more possible to adopt the protagonist’s journey as one’s own.

A Moment Of Reflection
Persona 4 also has an ingenious way of encouraging players to visualize relating to themselves within a video game. The game’s story hinges on the concept of the Midnight Channel , an odd TV show that can only be seen at midnight on rainy days. Initially an urban legend bolstered by the rising spread of rumor about it, it’s soon revealed to play a central role in the game’s story.

As the player watches the exposition of Persona 4 unfold, waiting to be drawn into the events on the screen, the protagonist is also being drawn into a television screen — literally. Early on, the character learns he has the power to enter the TV – to be immersed – in order to address its dangerous portents.

One of the most fascinating moments of the entire game is watching the protagonist’s first experience with the Midnight Channel, as part of the game’s introductory period. On a dark night, the protagonist approaches the smooth, black frame of his television set and stares into it, waiting for the show to begin.

At first, all he sees is his own reflection. The screen is dark enough that if your own TV screen reflects at all, you’ll be able to see your own reflection at the same time. Depending on where you’re sitting, your mirrored face may even transpose directly onto the protagonist’s.

You’re watching yourself watch your character watch himself in a TV screen, a superimposition as briefly dizzying as the spiraling, black and white transition that fills your own screen whenever the character enters his TV.

Seek The Truth
At the same time, one of Persona 4’s central narrative themes seems to be that because reality’s created by belief, one can never wholly trust what the eyes see. The protagonist and his companions become truth-seekers, of a sort, in their attempts to solve a murder mystery and figure out the Midnight Channel. This also becomes a central theme for the gameplay throughout, as the player is always rewarded for investigating beyond the visible.

The climax of this immersive marriage of gameplay and narrative is actually in the game’s closing sequence, after the central conflict has apparently been resolved. Without spoiling anything, the game’s optimal ending can actually only be achieved if the player picks up on a few unanswered questions – and then repeatedly defies and ignores the customary in-game text and menus to try to resolve them.

In that way, players of Persona 4 are always being asked to do the very same things, consider the very same big-picture choices, that its heroes are simultaneously confronting. The story is about a boy discovering his alternate selves – and who then becomes the player’s alternate self at the same time. Who says there are no good gameplay-narrative mergers?

What do you think your “Shadow self” would look like? What kind of Persona would you have?

[Leigh Alexander is news director for Gamasutra, reviews games at Variety,and maintains her gaming blog, Sexy Videogameland. Her monthly column at Kotaku deals with cultural issues surrounding games and gamers. She can be reached at leighalexander1 AT gmail DOT com.]

The key, of course, is to keep dialog short where it counts. And the hard part is in knowing when that is. Dialog that's in the environment, tied to gameplay mechanics, or that plays during game action really needs to stay short, clear, and direct. But that is never an excuse for lower standards of writing.

Very short dialog (under six seconds, averaging two) is critical for information that needs to be digested instantaneously. Merely short dialog (let's say as long as 15 seconds, but averaging closer to eight) has the flexibility of carrying a lot more information and character, but can't reliably be used while the player is fully engaged in intense, focused play.

Obviously, the pressure is off when you've got the player's attention and they are largely passive, such as in cinematics, dialog trees, and when they can safely listen to narration over their current task — that is, for untimed puzzles and nonverbal, visually centered challenges (as in Portal, for example). Still — I would argue that there are precious few cases where a single line of dialog should run over 20 or so seconds.

He pulls out some good examples of what works and what doesn't in many situations, and it's a nice meditation on the role of those short little snips in games — pretty necessary, but pretty hard to get right at times (pedantic prose is, after all, easier to write than compelling poetry).

Ode to Short Dialog: Reconsidering the Sound Bite [Gamasutra]

The way that videogames have dealt with failure, primarily through protagonist death and trial-and-error, has generally been more concerned with games as rule sets than with games as narratives. As a result, games which appear to tell stories often become incoherent, bringing narrative progression to a halt, eliciting frustration with gameplay rather than engagement with fiction. Despite what some may charge, however, this is not an inherent bias of the medium. The die-and-retry approach is a shortcut in game design, a holdover from an era when games were more limited in their ability to tell stories. This convention now imposes an artificial limitation, even as alternative methods of dealing with failure have been exercised in some games.

This argument should not be taken to suggest that all games ought to be narrative-oriented games, that trial-and-error has no place in modern videogames, or that all games should be so concerned with preserving an illusion of boundless choices .... This article simply seeks to argue that universal models of game enjoyment that would lump such a game in with Tetris fail to acknowledge that such games ultimately offer different appeals.

I don't agree with all of his points, but it's certainly a thought provoking article (if lengthier than the usual posted on Kotaku). The design-related conversation over the role of death in games is one worth having, and this is one of the more well-written pieces I've read on the issue. Eladumos in general is worth having bookmarked — it's a young journal, but a solid one.

“You Are Dead. Continue?”: Conflicts and Complements in Game Rules and Fiction [Eludamos]

In fact, the final theme may be semi-incoherent if you attempt to analyze it as a literary work. However, that doesn't matter because it provides the moment-by-moment scaffolding of feedback that helps the player learn their way through the game. As long as the game is fun and delivers value to the customer we can often toss the literary definition of theme out the window.

In fact, you start getting into trouble when you make the theme so rigidly defined that you can't adjust the feedback for specific game mechanics .... The hundreds of little trade offs that occur when theme coherence wins and gameplay loses diminishes the effectiveness of the game.

So you can't just 'skin' a set of game mechanics. When you do makes the attempt, a well executed iterative process of game design will often result in a game that is quite different than its source material. A poorly executed process results in a game that plays poorly.

He suggests that designers start working on 'vertical' slices early in the design process, so that they can work on merging themes and mechanics in a way that will make sense over the course of a game. As always, a thoughtful entry from Lost Garden and worth reading.

Theme and game design [Lost Garden]

Lest you blanch at the notion of Solid Snake lumped in with Days of Our Lives or Waiting to Exhale, I would suggest to fans of Braveheart, Lost, CSI, and virtually every sports movie ever made that you are also fans of melodrama. The Call of Duty series, the Final Fantasy series, Bioshock - even significant portions of GTA IV - all rely on melodrama to deliver their experiences.

And at the center of these tales is the classic Melodrama Hero - a man (sometimes, but rarely a woman) of strength and courage who must do great deeds in an environment of heightened emotional intensity; a hero who operates within a clearly defined world of good and evil, charged with restoring order and stability from chaos. Solid Snake and Dudley Do-Right are cut from the same cloth. One may be a conflicted hero with lots more backstory (and, okay, Dudley is a cartoon caricature), but dramaturgically they function in remarkably similar ways.

I have to say I would think most people would blanch at the idea of Solid Snake lumped in with soap operas ... but he's got a point. Melodrama is a hugely effective narrative style — and the reasonably clear dichotomies we see in many narrative-driven games is one critical part in labeling them as 'melodramas,' or at least as media possessing melodramatic elements. However, I don't think the world is quite ready for the Days of Our Lives RPG. At least, I certainly hope not.

We do melodrama [The Brainy Gamer]

Is it safe to say, though, that Japanese games are more fantastic while Western games are more realistic? What would a realistic Japanese game look like? Moreover, is Western fantasy doomed forever to Tolkien derivatives? If you prefer one to the other, what does that indicate about your personal taste?

My game shelf is mostly full of Japanese titles; I'm not sure it says anything deep, other than the fact I generally prefer what's coming out of Japan to what's coming out of America. I'm sure if I played more of certain types of games, that ratio of Japanese-to-Western would be reversed. But I don't delude myself into thinking that I'm drawn to Japanese games because the vast majority are creative and innovative little gems - they're not.

Stranger In A Strange Land (Part 2): West vs. East [Surreal Game Design via Sexy Videogameland]

Peter Molyneux could not attend his keynote today titled, "Life, Love and Death: Drama & Story Experience in Video Games." So instead, Staging Designer Georg Backer presented Lionhead's thesis on how games need to change.

What followed were somewhat classic Lionhead production examples—assets must change over time to tell the story (from your character, to things around you).

Backer explained that their Fable 2 dog and one-button combat system are both, hopefully, all part of games finding their unique voice, learning how they can share narrative as easily any other format. Because ultimately, Lionhead sees families talking over dinner about a movie they just saw, a book they just read and, without a beat, the game they've been playing.

Now all that is well and good, but it's their development process that's so baffling. While in search of this unique voice—something that could be a decade off they are quick to admit—Lionhead is waist-deep in Hollywood school: video editors advise better camera cuts in their combat system, and sword masters teach camera friendly movie combat.

And it's not that Lionhead partakes in interdisciplinary studies that so confounding, but that they talk about their "unique voice" and the tricks of Hollywood in a completely intermixed fashion.

The presentation was a developer's call to arms, but it was also a simultaneous cadence of retreat—instructions to regroup and learn from our Hollywood masters.

Less cynically, I think this is the message that even Lionhead has not yet said clearly and most game developers are afraid to admit:

Games, despite how often they emulate film's cliches, fall far short of the movie industry's time-tempered production methods. So games must first play a bit of catch-up before we can really begin the discussion of profound interactive narrative technique.

Rolston is referring to all of his writing philosophies —a lifetime's worth of genius or folly—being pumped into our open and willing/possibly-still-intoxicated-from-last-night ear drums.

He presents us with his BIG WRONG IDEAS, a deconstructionist approach that makes bold claims like theme is more important than character and paper is better than plastic to clarify point and purpose.

It was outright insanity I tell you.

He explains that linear forms like film and novels are better at telling stories than games—something that's looking to be flat-out true at the moment—and concluded that inference (such as the ruins in Morrowin) is the best way for gamers to experience compelling narrative which can, at peak, invoke an intangible melancholy.

In the Renaissance, melancholy was a sign of genius. We don't think he was necessarily referring to that interpretation.

Whether or not you enjoy Rolston's opus RPGs, he is certainly trying to accomplish new feats...other than that 50-person mouth spray. That's totally been done before (just check out the German primetime).

I hate that we spend millions of dollars designing our games and only 1 percent of people finish them...If they don't finish the game, it's like leaving the movie halfway through, so it's a rubbish movie to some extent, and that responsibility is on our shoulders.

A Fable for the Masses [nextgeneration]

Some of the first enemies James confronts resemble piecemeal jointed mannequins, naked, shiny and flesh-toned, jerking as they move. But while they may be composed of human parts, they're not even complete mannequins—instead, they appear to be two hips fastened end-to-end, thighs splayed...the immediate onslaught of these telltale monsters is like a sudden break with reality—and for James, one could theorize that might be exactly what's happening, thrusting him into a white-edged limbo state deep inside the self, wherein he has the opportunity to confront the truth about...his deeds.

Sure, paranormal walking hip mutants aren't exactly the epitome of subtle symbolic themes, but they can be a lot more effective at reinforcing narrative than yet another cut scene or instruction manual filled with unread backstory.

The Aberrant Gamer - 'Sundering the Mind' [gamesetwatch]

Seattle-based movie critic and editor of RogerEbert.com Jim Emerson dropped me a line over the weekend in response to my rantish blurb about the video games as art "debate" he took part in with Roget Ebert last week in Boulder.

While I still find it contemptible that Ebert didn't get someone with more gaming knowledge to debate him over the issue (Emerson says the last game he played was Myst), it does sound like the discussion they had raised some interesting issues.

Emerson points out (as we have covered in detail) that the debate has been raging on RogerEbert.com for sometime, but he also goes over his personal feelings on the matter. Hit the jump for his full letter.

Regarding the "debate" over whether video games are considered "art" at the Conference on World Affairs a couple days ago (somebody sent my your misleading blog post): The panelists were Roger Ebert, Leonard Shlain, and me. And, yes, Ebert said they weren't art. I said they question was stupid — like saying "Are movies art?" or "Are books art?" or "Is painting art?" — because, obviously, it depends on the individual game. I brought up Myst as an example of an older game that provided an immersive interactive experience that provided what I consider an artistic experience. Shlain talked about interactive video/web installations his techie/artist son-in-law has done, including one what was included in the Whitney Biennial. It was a game-like environment involving a Ouija board operated by thousands of users simultaneously. And, hey, the Whitney thought this web-based "game" was art.

If you want to know more about why I think video games certainly can be art (although, as a critic, I'd argue that Doom, for example, is nothing more than Astroids with blood), you may want to look at some of the stuff I wrote about the topic on rogerebert.com last year. I was chosen for the "Are Video Games Art?" panel not because I am Ebert's web site editor (or his "biggest fan," as you say, without offering any support for that assessment), but because I actually have written about why I think the subject is more complex than "art vs. not art." I published a lot of mail from readers debating this question on rogerebert.com. Here's one posting from my blog, Scanners:

http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20051206/SCANNERS/51206001/1023

Movies began to develop their own language and aesthetics (apart from still photography or theater) in the early part of the 20th century. And there have always been those who questioned whether movies — especially once they became industrial product pieced together by huge teams in "entertainment factories" called studios — could ever hope to aspire to the level of art.

I confess that the last video game I played was probably the first version of "Myst" — an immersive, otherworldly mystery that, I think, is worthy of comparison on some levels (though character development is not one of them) to mystery-driven narratives like "Twin Peaks," "Mulholland Drive," "Veronica Mars" or "Lost." The point is not so much to find all the clues and solve the mystery as it is to get wrapped up in another world where your curiosity keeps you engaged in exploring.

Web sites — like those for "The Blair Witch Project" or "Donnie Darko" — have already shown how the experience of a movie can be creatively extended into an interactive realm beyond the movie itself. Maybe that's where games are going, too...

Ps. Maybe you're not his biggest fan, but that message from the editor you wrote for RogerEbert.com in 2004 reads like a love soliloquy, it just needed to be written in iambic pentameter.

Ebert Debates Games as Art [Kotaku]

After writing the most dramatic lede in the game journalism history, scribe John Leland get his NY Times piece on video games and art moving in the right direction. The piece's thrust and best observation is found in the following: "Are they like movies, projecting the vision of an auteur like Mr. Spielberg or Peter Jackson, who recently collaborated in Peter Jackson's King Kong: The Official Game of the Movie? Or are they more like the song 'Frankie and Johnny,' which is performed in different ways by many people, and in which the art lies in the sum of performances?"

Leland points to graphics moving in more realistic directions as a path for comparison between film and game. The piece's second half tilts away from the video game as art perspective and focuses on the need for a change in game development, something I've come across in numerous postings on the web and in different meetings with developers. Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor Henry Jenkins points at a need for a "garage band aesthetic" in game creation. Realistically, games are so expensive to make, it's hard for developers to take a $10 million leap of faith on a game that might totally tank. Something's gotta give.

The Gamer as Artiste [The New York Times]

Curmudgeon Gamer is looking at "Story Vs. Choice in Konami Games," and it's pretty interesting. Author JVM picks different points in Metal Gear Solid, Castlevania: Symphony of the Night and Silent Hill where gamer-made choices change the path to the game's ending. MGS is the simplest, with the Ocelot event determine if you're walking out with Meryl or Otacon. Curmudgeon is going to dissect Castlevania and Silent Hill next, keep checking back.

Story vs. Choice in Konami Games (Part 1) [Curmudgeon Gamer]

In this week's Answer Man column, Sun-Times scribe Roger Ebert takes on a kiss ass respectful reader on video games being inferior to movies and literature. Ebert's reasoning: "There is a structural reason for that: Video games by their nature require player choices, which is the opposite of the strategy of serious film and literature, which requires authorial control."

You can, dear readers, see the flaw in this logic, right? More after the jump.

Why Did Chicken Cross Genders [Chicago Sun-Times]

Ebert is correct in saying that "by their nature [video games] require player choices," - games do require player choice and those choices often drive the game's narrative. Now, the authorial intent of a film is pretty strict. Barring various interpretations, a movie is made with a purpose, a message and it is a singularized experience. The film is a monologue, it talks at the viewer, there is no dialog.

Conversely, video games are a dialog with input and output on the part of both user and game. But, does the push-pull of interactivity negate the "authorial intent" of the work? Ebert says it does. But what about multi-narrative stories, where choice changes the outcome? Dynamic stories where your input as a gamer changes the output from the game? These changes, these dynamic shifts, were authored by developers. You, as the gamer just happen to have a front row seat to direct the action. Evolving storylines are more compelling than static, non-interactive media. Ebert overlooked the role of the developer and didn't factor in that each pathway taken in a video game is one the developers already expected you to take. And as a result they were prepared.

Via Academic Gamers comes a piece written by Rice student Amanda Phillips on Metroid Prime. "Behind the Visor" looks at the use of in-game texts that detail the lore behind Metroid Prime as the principle storytelling agents in Prime. These texts are numbered and scanned into a log book while the player adventures in Prime. They are optional, however, so much of Prime's backstory and narrative isn't forced on players, it's a narrative you have to seek out, scan, record and then read.

Metroid Article Online [Academic Gamers]
Behind the Visor [Amanda Phillips]