Where is The Line?

Preface: This was originally split into a three parts, but was intended to connect into one big discussion cohesively, so I won't note the splits this time.  My 'text' posts were petering off at this point to smaller blurb-ish things, indicating I was getting a better handle on how tumblr worked.  T'was around this point I realized I'd need to start thinking of setting up shop somewhere else for these blog-like posts.

Original Post: August '12

Yeah, you know what this is about.  I won’t give plot spoilers, but there will be…thematic spoilers I guess?



So all the gaming culture can’t shut up about how awesome Spec Ops: The Line is at ripping the Modern Military Shooter (why isn’t MMS a commonly used abbreviation by now?) conventions a new asshole.  It’s apparently the new coming of Christ to those who were tired of the ‘dude bro’, x-box live brood that now drive the business decisions of the AAA world of videogames and I can’t blame them for the sentiment.  It bugs me too, so I can see where they’re coming from.  If this seems like a setup to a contrarian opinion, it isn’t.  Weeell…it might be…?  I’m honestly not sure.  Allow me to e’splain:

First off, I haven’t played the game and now, I don’t really intend to.  At first, I didn’t want to because it looked like a generic MMS and I’d had my fill, but after I found out that the story apparently revolved almost entirely around deconstructing the narrative problems with the genre…I still couldn’t care less.  See, I don’t have a real personal beef with the MMS and their ‘dude bro’ pandering because I never allotted the genre enough respect to actually give a damn either way and since I didn’t care, I had no problem reading all the spoilers for The Line.

SPOILER ALERT: You do bad things in the game and are called out on it.

But after hearing Chris’ take on the issue (God, I’m such a fanboy of this guy, also spoilers be all up in dat video!), one particular topic really stuck in my craw:

Choice.


See in the game you do do bad things which the game then turns around and chastises you for, but the key sticking point is that for a good majority of these acts, you don’t have a choice in the matter.  You either play as the game intended or quit, and when actual meaningful choices do arise, they are not created dynamically, but are completely engineered by the game.  This a modern shooter that railroads you into being an asshole so it can point out how modern shooters railroad you into being an asshole.  How…meta, but in all honesty I’m actually fine with that.  I played all the MW games and didn’t have a beef with them forcing me to do stupid things for a stupid story, I have no reason to grouse on this game for doing the same thing for a smart story.  I only bring it up because this game has created a question for me that I have yet to see answered or discussed.

The whole reason I brought the issue up is not because of The Line so much as when the Spoiler Warning crew did a lil side step into playing Modern Warfare 3 and were uncharacteristically level-headed regarding the nature of its restricted game design as a method for delivering a narrative.  Watching the episode, it became clear to me that there’s this very distinct cost-to-benefit ratio between player control and artifice.  To make this clearer: Skyrim…and other open world games:

Skyrim’s open world is more genuine that almost any other videogame series I've played.  The people that inhabit it are created completely separate from the player.  People in towns live their own lives, going to work, coming home, sleeping, repeat etc and they stay that way, living their lives outside of your influence, yet are completely reactionary to player input.  If you strike them with a sword in the town square, all the townspeople who saw you become terrified and the town guards will hunt you down and arrest you.  This is an emergent narrative brought about completely through gameplay rather than restricted game design expositing an external narrative, something the Elder Scrolls is well known for since at least Marrowind as far as I’m aware.

What the ES series is also well known for (all Bethesda open world games really) is their complete failure at hiding the artifice of these characters.  The peoples of Tamriel are not people at all, but unfeeling and unthinking golems pretending to be people.  They don’t cry, they don’t laugh, they don’t show fear or loathing or any emotional range even approaching geniune.  Certainly nothing on the level of Alyx or Captain Price.  It was the price that needed to be paid in order for the world to allow so much player control and provide so much internal cohesion, but it leaves the player with narratives provided by the game (the quests) that leave no meaningful impact because the character aren't capable of carrying the emotional weight.

And forever is this back and forth being tugged at in videogames.  GTAVI has a city full of random people who react in a far more emotionally convincing manner than anything in Skyrim…because they’re not citizens of Liberty City.  They’re extras…actors playing a small role, who then disappear once out of your view so they can change costumes and become a different extra as you wander into another section of town.  You can’t talk to any of these people directly, and if you follow them all day, you’ll find they never go home to sleep.  GTA trades off geniune internal cohesion in order to better imitate a living breathing world and so it’s artifice is less apparent visually, but more apparent mechanically.

Now for somewhat of a middle ground, there’s Human Revolution.  The people inhabiting the hub worlds of Detroit and Heng Sha aren’t randomly generated like GTA, but neither will you see them ever move from the section of the world you find them in because in Dues Ex, time literally does not pass until a cutscene demands it.  And in this world, you will see the same canned and rigid fidgeting animation being played when you talk with characters you’ve met in the game world…except during the conversation ‘boss’ battles, where player control is severely reduced and the animation of the character you are speaking to takes a noticeable bump up in quality.  This game, more than any other I can think of, strikingly exemplifies the tension between these two seemingly opposed goals of artifice vs. player control.

And yet no one appears to be talking about it.  A lot of discussion is being made about the consequences of extremes like Modern Warfare and The Line, but I haven’t heard anyone talking about the underlying cause.  Everyone’s discussing the symptoms, no one’s discussing the disease…

Okay, so I’ve ranted about both ends of the spectrum, but for what? What does this all lead to?  What’s the point?

Well, it all kind of comes back to The Line.  I see all this praise being given to the game’s narrative and it’s almost singular purpose of chastising the modern military shooter…by indulging in the exact same mechanics and design.  Take away the story and it’s one of the most generic shooters being released.  A polished shooter, but entirely uninspired nonetheless.  It’s one unique aspect has nothing to do with the ‘game’ part of videogames.  This leaves me with a bad taste in my mouth.
For one, it’s unhelpful.  Pointing out modern military shooters are simplistic and somewhat irresponsible isn’t exactly worthy of wikileaks and since the game uses the exact same game mechanics to point out these problems, it doesn’t offer a solution.  Sorry, but you can’t rant about the evils of drugs while shooting up and not have your point be compromised, no matter how sincere you are.

Videogames offers a unique opportunity for subtlety and subversion in a manner no other medium I can think of offers.  It can use it’s interactive nature as commentary.  A well known rule for film is ‘show, don’t tell’ because that’s where that medium’s strength lies.  The reason this very obvious rule is so ingrained is because film is still - after a hundred years - fighting against the thousand plus years of rules we’ve set for the last narrative medium…the written word.  So too now do we have videogames using film rules instead of its own: do, don’t show.

And here we come to the big apple: games are doing that.  The open world games I mentioned earlier allow enough player choice to provide genuine moral quandaries, and yet fail because the artifice of the world is too distracting to allow those scenarios to have meaning, while Spec Ops succeeds specifically because it controls the scenario almost entirely.  So does that mean it’s isn’t possible to achieve both?  Is the only way to provide complex issues in a game is by way of the abstract?
I don’t know.  Seriously, I don’t.  But someone needs to talk about this, and frankly, it should be someone a lot smarter than me.  I want to know where the line is videogames.  Find it and show me.