Why most Video Games get Cthulhu Wrong

I wasn't sure if Extra Credits was still active and current (when it left Escapist I sort of lost touch until recently), but it's a great show and I was delighted to find new episodes on Youtube. This particular episode does a great job of explaining not just what's wrong with the Cthulhu/Mythos interpretations we see in most video games today, but also in most fan media. Watch and learn! Feel free to share with your Cthulhu-hoodie wearing cohorts who feel that having a Chibi-Cthulhu is equivalent to having actually read Lovecraft.

More Spec Ops

Well, seems I can't quite stop writing about Spec Ops: The Line. Extra Credits posted up their spoilerific Part II to the discussion of this game and it had some interesting bits I hadn't realized in play (as well as a few bits I am in disagreement with). Go check out the video first right here (make sure you've played the game first, though) and then read on...

First off, as they pointed out in the video, you really do find yourself going downward, constantly, throughout the game....and when you think you've hit bottom you find yourself up high again, once more about to descend I felt this was an allegory for a sort of Dante-like descent reference, and supported the notion that we're experiencing Captain Walker's purgatory.

That said, I am surprised (and bemused) that I didn't try some of the bits they suggested in some of the moral choice scenes....and also perplexed that one option didn't work for me. Specifically, when confronted with the angry civilians I did try to force my way through the crowd, but to no avail. It did not occur to me to fire into the air....sort of wish I had tried now.

Second, when faced with the scene where you must choose between killing a soldier and a civilian while trained snipers wait for your decision, I did in fact try to shoot it out with the snipers. I must not be as good at this game as the Extra Credits guys, because I repeatedly got wasted when trying this. In the end, I settled for shooting the soldier (more culpability in his actions and responsibilities, I reasoned) and of course much, much later on when Walker is confronted with the truth about Col. Konrad a flashback reveals his memory of this scene....that in fact there was never a trap, or two men facing execution by Walker's hands, just two corpses long since executed. So....hmmm.

Another theory I have is that the Extra Credits crew are professional game designers, by and large....or at least, they're more closely involved in the design of video games than I am. As a result, when they are playing Spec Ops they are thinking, "What did the designers account for? What are my limits in this scene?" and as a result they push and prod and pull to see what they can get away with. I, however, am nowhere close to being a computer game designer, instead being very much a player. As a result, I come to these events in the game with a different perspective conditioned by years of play, asking, "What did the designers intend for me to do here? I've been killed by snipers ten times in a row...perhaps I really am not able to defeat them, and instead need to pick a hapless victim to kill; the designers intended for me to see Walker's fatalism as he plays into Konrad's game...that must be it." And so I played along, never realizing it was never just two choices.

Interestingly, while the game does provide a lot of narrative (chiefly in load screens) with dialogue that I personally felt was referencing Walker's state of mind (i.e. the cognitive dissonance being a reference to the moment he snaps when he realizes he not only killed a lot of the 33rd Batallion but evacuating civilians as well) ....I was very surprised to see that Extra Credits interprets this dialogue as being aimed at the player, with the intent of making the player uncomfortable at the dichotomy of "playing a shooter game for fun" and "this game is not fun." Interesting interpretation....and yet....I still can't quite buy into it. Does no one in video game land read or experience fiction that contains a disturbing or uncomfortable narrative? Is the idea that one can enjoy an otherwise disturbing and ethically ambiguous tale about war somehow not normal? I suppose maybe there really is a larger crowd out there for which this experience is novel....but for myself, I tend to demand this sort of thing, expect it, and was pleased to find in a game, a place you typically don't find uncomfortable or disturbing narratives (except maybe in Silent Hill). So perhaps that is why I simply didn't notice this....it's not so easy to feel the cognitive dissonance (I am enjoying this/I am not enjoying this or shouldn't be enjoying this) when you find that discomfort enjoyable on some level, or reasonable in the context the game offers.

Okay....enough of Spec Ops: The Line. Gotta stop talking about it before I try playing the game again. I admit, it's tempting....if only to push the limit on those moments where, apparently, there were more options than I realized. A second play-through might be comparable to, say, watching The Sixth Sense a second time to see if it all holds up to the reveal at the end of the first viewing....or Fight Club, another great example of films that touch upon the same literary hat tricks that I think Spec Ops: The Line is trying to pull from.

Propaganda Games and Gender Issues in Video Gaming

Extra Credits on Penny Arcade TV is all about video game design, but sometimes their discussions veer into territory that applies to other media, and other times its just generally fascinating and thoughtful shows. This particular episode on propaganda games (both intentional and accidental) is especially interesting. Check it out here.

In thinking about it, there were two points in the Extra Credits take that I am not sure I agreed with. First, I was amazed at the number of intentional games of such a type out there, but I tend to feel that those products, like the pamphlets, books and videos that accompany them, are usually speaking to the choir. However, the idea of unintentional propaganda was really interesting. On the surface, it seems silly, but on consideration, there's some interesting truth to it.

Take the Royo art I posted below. Royo and others like him have been doing scantily clad female fantasy art for ages, and are more or less typical of stuff I grew up with in my own generation. However, I (and I optmistically would posit most men of my generation) do not inherently feel that this has generated a sense that women must wear fewer clothes to be noticed/successful, at least not as a proper social norm. There are and have always been stronger social pressures at work influencing such beliefs within my generation.

There's a real temptation to suggest that such may not be the case for the current generation of gamers, however. I think it's incorrect, in so far as the show may be confusing the issue of correlation with cause and effect. It may also be confusing what could be a much larger cultural change in normative values and relations between men, women, and how they perceive both themselves and one another. This is a different issue from the idea of a sexual reward/stimulus approach to skimpy female characters in video games right now, which is part of a bigger problem in the video game industry, demonstrating that it has not yet caught on that both women and men play these games, and in increasingly even numbers as time goes by. Should we one day see a Gears of War game where Marcus Phenix (or his descendant) has a no-shirt flowing hair mod/achievement reward to go along with whatever skimpy female models are offered, then we will be seeing a developer that, while still disingenuously using the "sex sells" theme in the game, has at least aknowledged that sex sells to both genders equally well.

Anyway, the problem of over-sexualization/visual mysoginy in games is not the cause, but a symptom. I think this video misses that point, perhaps because the Extra Credits crew are (like me) prone to optimism. The part that is a real problem in video games is marketing, the so-called "marcom" divisions of these publishers and their willingness to exploit through careful metrics the portion of their audience that is ruled by baser instincts. That in and of itself belies the greater issue that there are plenty of young men out there who are increasingly spending more and more time indoors, playing games with virtual female characters therein, and spending less time actually talking to real women.*

When I think back to the late eighties and early nineties, I recall plenty of friends and cohorts with a fear, animosity, sometimes even outright hatred or disgust toward women. It was all a large component of their innate uncertainty and fear at dealing with the opposite sex, coupled with an inability to rationalize or cope with the instinctive processes in the male psyche, and the prevalent need to have women in our lives that is ultimately part of the biological process of furthering the species, a feature of our chemistry which doesn't give a damn how awkward it makes our artificial human social constructs. In any case, I have to wonder how many of these guys, back in the pre-internet and pre-quasi-photorealistic video game days, would have simply isolated themselves from the world at large, avoided women, and started developing their perspectives on the fairer sex entirely from these carefully tailored artificial stimuli and experiences? What sort of effect would that have had, back then? I think there's a huge test bed for that going on out there in the real world right now, a sort of global skinner box.

Anyway, food for thought. I'm really hoping that by the time my son is old enough to start noticing women, that he's comfortably balanced enough and has a strong appreciation enough for real women as equals that the lurid temptations of video games and the internet are easy enough for him to resist (or better yet, to understand)...FSM knows that even without these things it was hard enough for guys from my generation!




* I could be off base here, though, as admittedly my sample is skewed toward the gamer crowd I hang with, and always has; anecdotally however even the hardcore football jocks and decidedly "normal" guys I have known throughout the years appear to have a bewildering range of antipathy and trepidation (if not disturbing hostility) toward the opposite sex. Again, this is probably a byproduct of necessary biological conditioning or instinct, a residual effect of the need for competitive action through aggression to pass on our genes, manifesting in its traditionally uncomfortable way as we have managed to develop civilized, intellectual culture that transcends our inherent programming, yet unfortunately we're still many decades away from the singularity of proper transhumanism, that will allow us to wipe out such impulses and recode our genes to spec instead of our current only choice of default "factory settings" nature has arbitrarily chosen for us (for better or worse).