Pretending Emo Is Primo
Step one to appreciating Steven Kilpatrick (that’s me-lazy wave included) is to understand that I used to be bitter, then I became an idealist, then I got into graduate school pursuing my dream-and now I’m bitter and educated. Well-at least, I hope, a little more educated than I was before.
Of course, Flannery O’Conner would tell you that colleges haven’t stifled enough of us writers over the years, so take that education with a grain of salt. Either way, color me tentatively unstifled and let’s move on to the good stuff.
I’m still here to talk about video games. However, my take on gaming is directly influenced by those years of snooty pedagogical training about craft and fiction. Imagine Daniel Craig strapped to a bottomless chair being hit in the testicles with John Gardner’s On Becoming a Novelist and you pretty much know what grad school is like.
None of that may matter to you as a reader, but it has mattered to a few people I’ve spoken with about games, as gaming grows up to be big and strong. You see, gamers are very proud at the moment-very proud of how the industry, the content and caliber of games is maturing. The problem is that we hold this maturation to the standard of other video games and not to the standard of culture.
What the hell am I talking about?
This week I’m talking about Heavy Rain. It’s had its balls critically cradled and moistened for the last couple of months and I can only attribute this lapse in judgment-this appetite for the mediocre-to a starvation of style.
I’m going to say this as gently as possible: Heavy Rain is no good. It’s what hungry people see on islands in Looney Toons cartoons. Because there’s no other alternative, they see a giant talking piece of meat and they salivate for it. Sadly, when the boat comes, drags these people back to society and the real entree arrives, there are going to be a lot of critics wishing they could take back the praise they’ve given to this false idol of “Emotional and Mature Gaming,” which must, by now, be a registered trade-mark of game writers who don’t know what the fuck they’re talking about.
I suppose, if you spend your summers staring down people dressed as Cloud from Final Fantasy VII-or interacting with the people who still play Halo 3 online-certainly your bar for maturity has probably lowered over the years. Still, were we willing to step outside, let out eyes adjust to the bloom of a mid-day sun, and remember the world as it is-and not as we’ve created it-then can’t we all agree that we face tougher real decisions each day than the ones presented in Heavy Rain? That emotional weight that’s honest and has nothing to do with forced camera angles, mysterious slamming doors, plot twists and bleeding?
I’m attempting to discuss a very complicated issue without spoiling a not-too-complicated game. Every plot point feels like something they left out of a daily soap opera or maybe cut from the next Saw sequel. In fact, if I had to compare this game to anything it would be a really crappy spinoff of the Saw series-only without the immediacy or energy. This is especially unforgivable since this is packaged as a sixty dollar PS3 game. Yes, I know that the game director says not to think of it as a game-and certainly it isn’t a very good one, so I’m half way there-but he wants us to instead think of this as an interactive film.
I wouldn’t pay sixty dollars to own any single film-let alone a film that plays out like an off-off-off-Broadway production of Saw XVIII staring someone’s gym coach who always wanted to act-even if that play is presented in a Brechtian way (i.e. the audience is part of the show).
I’ve met a lot of younger gamers who seem enthralled by this game and I can only assume they respect the narrative because they cheated on all of their English exams in high school. I do this for a living and even I skipped out on The Great Gatsby and Heart of Darkness when I was in high school. There was a time, I must confess, when I thought Smallville was epic storytelling (forgive me Stanley Kubrick). I sympathize.
Still, it doesn’t help explain why so many of our older gamers fall into the same trap. I promise you, if you watched the narrative for Heavy Rain as a film alone-you would feel cheated of even a ten dollar theater ticket. The plot twists are predictable, heavy handed (ooh, look at that car circling the cul-du-sac five-thousand times when nothing else is going on-it’s probably nothing!)
Apart from that, the game doesn’t give us anything new. It is being hailed as ground breaking, but it’s actually a step back in many ways.
-Creepy Camera angles? We’ve been enjoying those since the 90s thanks to Resident Evil.
-Games as Interactive movies? Adventure titles have been paving that street for even longer (and with far more intuitive control schemes).
-Even the consequences have the feel of the old “Choose Your Own Adventure” books-only instead of holding your fingers between the pages so that you can go back, you just create a new save.
Speaking of that, you also don’t have to learn a new way to read a choose your own adventure book just to get from page to page. There are times in Heavy Rain when I’d be on my way to some destination, the camera angle would change (in a super artsy way I’m sure) and suddenly I’d be veering off like a drunk driver. Narrative is never as hard to keep in focus as when your characters seem confused about how to maneuver around their own homes.
Can you imagine any book where paragraphs repeated themselves based on whether you blinked at the wrong time? No? How about a movie that randomly rewound for three seconds? No? Ok, then this isn’t an interactive story-it’s a game and it isn’t doing the game part right.
I love the ambition of the creator to a point (though he seems to regard games in general as a child’s medium). I could pen an entire grumpy rant about his definition of gaming and gamers-but I won’t today. For now I’ll stick to what he didn’t-gaming.
Extra Lives:
Life One:
I wanted to try something different for my second submission (and future pieces should they arrive) and include two little tag sections to my column. Not everything has to be so heavy and important, so what I hope to do is include the extra lives section and then after that a “Continue” section with a closing about what I expect to form an opinion on soon. I think we’ll go with the traditional three lives and if I have something really important I might add a cheesy “1-Up” bullet.
Life Two:
I’m a trophy/achievement whore like anyone else these days. Usually I know when to put the controller down and say, “You know what, I don’t need that lame ass achievement.” I walked away from the Wolfenstein “Break 1,000 crates” trophy based on the, “if it’s not fun, I’m not earning it,” rule I created. Not exactly rocket science.
However, I broke this rule twice this week using the same method. The first instance didn’t earn me a trophy, but it did net me about 23,000 experience points in Borderlands. There’s a meta-achievement within the game called, “I Fired Every Bullet Ever,” which you earn by firing 100,000 times.
My second one was for the game Darksiders. If you ride your horse for 100 miles, you get a trophy called Dark Rider. Now-this is only a bronze trophy so it would be practically shameful to have earned it legitimately-though I imagine my shame is pretty resonant anyway.
I earned them both by taking one of my fiancee’s hair ties and wrapping it around my controller (if you know what I mean). In Borderlands I just hopped in a car (which has unlimited ammo) put the band on R2 and turned off my surround sound and let it shoot for a few hours. For Darksiders I found a giant area for my horse to run around in and had the hair tie hold down the analogue stick at just the right angle to run in circles. The
achievement should be called, “Why I Hate NASCAR.”
I’m not telling you this because I’m proud-I just think I should be held accountable.
Life Three:
I did end up with a little redemption this week. Despite the low resolution graphics, the lack of mature narrative and the complete absence of trophies or achievements of any kind (nothing at all to increase my E-Peen rating) I was able to enjoy Super Mario Galaxy 2 for hours. Turns out, if the game is good enough you don’t need to supplement it with bragging rights.
Continue?:
E3 is happening next week so there’s a lot to be curious about. I have to admit though-I’m especially interested in hearing about Screen Paper 2.0. EGMi publisher Steve Harris claims that they’re working on a non-flash version of their Screen Paper technology so that they can get EGMi going on the iPad. There’s supposed to be an announcement near or during E3 regarding this update. I know, I know, “what about Epic Mickey!?”
Warren Spector can take care of himself.
Until next time.
– Steven Kilpatrick
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