GateRunner
Bring your imagination
A bit of mental effort is required to get the effect of this one. It’s my attempt to establish a relationship to the mind more like the form used for reading books than for watching cartoons, in part driven by concern that the typical player-game relationship is framed more in the context of the latter.
It isn’t trivializing anything
Despite using inputs to drive programmatic events, there really isn’t a whole lot that’s “game”-like about GateRunner. It’s the message style of Steak, the mechanics of ShakeYaMouse, and the grave seriousness of Judgment.
Yet just as it has so often before, the word “game” comes along and screws up everyone’s expectations and sense of what’s appropriate. To describe this as a “game about… [anything it’s about]” would come across as disrespectful and careless. Because it isn’t - disrespectful, careless, or a game.
Let’s experiment with calling this a Situational Empathy Scenario, or ses (S.E.S., said “sehss”) for short. To keep things clean, let’s drop all this “player” and “play” jargon for the same reasons, leaving behind a sesser that sesses a ses. Although I think the source terms pretty well describe what I’m referring to, for sake of clarity: a ses is a program, or part of a program, that seeks to invoke empathy for being something in life other than who, or what, or when we currently are.
This ses is a serious one
In today’s example, not everyone in history - or for that matter still alive in the world today - has any real opportunity to “win.” The daily choices are between horrible or worse, sometimes with no choice at all.
It’s intended as a reminder for people without any real problems (what to wear today? what to spend the next big paycheck on? sports car or SUV?) that there are no shortage of real problems in the world to be solved. Lives continue to fall victim to chaos, and perhaps it’s time to consider uninstalling WoW to take a look at what else can be done with “free” time to help even a few more living things. There are many things in and about the world that we’d rather not think about; I think those things are among the most important for us to consider.
Note, for sake of comparison, that the overwhelming majority of commercial videogames are simply sesses built around extensive dominion and authoritative power. Speaking of which…
God of War 2 briefly tried a non-power ses
In the opening sequences of God of War 2, Kratos is bloody and wounded, crushed under the hand of a giant, yet must face Zeus in armed combat. The jump button doesn’t accomplish much, the walking animations stagger and struggle, the attacks are slow and weak. Zeus, in contrast, has his mighty wits about him, and the match is over for the player quite literally before it starts.
Which is precisely the problem with this scene in GoW 2.
The film-style dramatics - the animations, the voice overs - tell paragraphs ahead of the actual interactive mechanics, like poorly planned subtitles or amateur PowerPoint slides. Instead of struggling to beat Zeus (”Ok already, I get it…”), buttons are pushed in an effort to drag the game along. Loss isn’t a risk - but instead a certainty. Nameless NPCs in the crowd express wonder and curiosity that the player has no reason to share (”What power could possibly defeat the god of war!?”). Input doesn’t matter, except that some arbitrary amount of it is required to carry the game past this “interactive cutscene”.
In other words, it failed as a non-power ses. As the one millionth “extensive dominion and authoritative power” ses, it excels with flying colors, almost to the point of unintentional humor. As an incredibly long, pretty, violent animated movie appealing to children with content that’s chock full of rewarded power trips, wanton blood letting, and little to meaningfully challenge (”press triangle NOW” doesn’t count) or develop any audience old enough to buy it, well, it also deserves a few rewards for that (and probably received them, given the state of modern videogame criticism…).
Back to this ses, before I get carried away on why I prefer PS2 Rygar to its more cinematic copycats (GoW 1 & 2)
I opted to err in the opposite direction: minimal content complexity. And it wasn’t just a way to save time - although it certainly appeals to me that the fundamental nature of these things allows me to fit them into my nightly work.
No sound. The sounds of army boots crunching grass, shouting alerts, and general pandemonium (or winds whipping through trees just beyond the fences - the sesser decides) are infinitely more vivid in the imagination than the best of Hollywood can cram through any speakers.
No visual depiction of the horrors. I didn’t have the special effects team of Pan’s Labyrinth with me to depict acts of inhuman cruelty, but that’s just fine; depicting torture in view of a person is entirely different than prompting that same person to think about it happening to him or herself.
Nothing to distract or replace the imagination. The most important thing that I have learned from studying film in comparison to “videogames” is that the fancier the presentation, the easier it is for the viewer’s mind to shut off altogether. It is my aim to motivate thought, not to give it a place to hide.
Like an excerpt from a book
To a sesser with an active imagination, these effects are present and pronounced with such depth that attempting to present them literally would interrupt or inhibit these processes, in much the same way that a reader might prefer the Lord of the Rings, Jurassic Park, or The NeverEnding Story on paper instead of the silver screen.
And to that extent, I’m happy with today’s experiment as a tiny success, one yielding an important realization to the future direction for some fraction of my future R&D.
It requires a bit of imagination, or it falls flat
As does anything worthwhile. It can’t all be comics, cartoons, and candy. And I think that emulating film has done more harm than good to our understanding of the general medium…
Closing disclaimer
God of War 2 is, from an artistic and business perspective, brilliant. The team did an exceptional job of delivering something that people wanted to buy. I do not intend to call into question either the game’s “quality” in some objective sense nor its market relevance. My concerns are strictly with the higher level message and particulars of its delivery. To that end, God of War 2 is in the exact same boat as every other AAA title on the shelves… the aspects of the game that I’m critical of apply to many other games as well, and GoW 2 simply wound up in my sights for this journal entry since its overall focus as a ses is the opposite of GateRunner’s.