In fact this is not really true, not any longer.

I’ve commented to a few people that GDC this year reminded me of entering high school, and I didn’t mean this as a criticism, exactly. It was more that the feeling in the air reminded me of when the social structures of one’s classroom, amorphous through the elementary years, really start to become sharply defined– when you realize that hanging with a certain group means cutting yourself off from other groups, not because they implicitly hate each other, but because their world views are incompatible. 

There have long been “indie versus mainstream” arguments, of course, but they never really amounted to anything meaningful. Partially this is because indie itself is an overburdened word, used to describe twenty-person startups as much as a solitary dabbler. More importantly, while indie implies an absence of corporate funding and influence, indie certainly did not deny itself capitalist influence overall. The most famous indies are now self-made millionaires, and the definitively-titled Indie Game: The Movie celebrated this fact. Many of the developers today who self-identify as “indies” clearly hope to follow those footsteps precisely. 

Thus, if indies really did mean to break with the mainstream industry, they did so incompletely, and quickly began to recapitulate some of the structures and patterns that made the mainstream so undesirable in the first place. At the IGF awards, host Andy Schatz quipped that indies used to be The Clash but were now Green Day (and with the actual punk movement thoroughly digested and regurgitated in the form of lush coffee table books and a costume show at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, this comment was at once resonant and dismaying).

A new broadside against both this and the mainstream can be found in the form of what at least one person termed the “zinesters,” and in the last few weeks a loose, sloshing argument formed on blogs and social media about… well, it was difficult to determine exactly what it was all about. Part of my unease with that “formalists versus zinesters” “debate” was how unnecessary it seemed (beyond providing some personal edification to the instigators); it was as if a faculty member from Juilliard had expressed a desire for “a dialogue” with Sid Vicious about chord progressions. It’s not that these two don’t see eye to eye on matters of music theory, which is what the professor thinks, it’s that the punks have arrived on the scene with such a completely different set of values that they might as well be from different planets. 

There is also little fruit to be found in having a “dialogue,” I think, because it doesn’t seem particularly hard to see where the “zinesters” (if I must use that word) are coming from, and the idea that they need to explain themselves is confounding. This group consciously and deliberately rejects indie’s failed split from the mainstream and its poorly-concealed capitalist underpinnings, and instead upholds personal expression as the highest ideal, the only goal that matters. And in order to do that successfully, they must break off completely, not at a branch somewhere on the tree but at the very root of the established order. This cannot be papered over or explained away; no amount of hemming and hawing over the definition of the word “game” will fix the fact that there are games out there now that willfully abnegate other games.

That refutation is necessary and inevitable. It is both thrilling and, for me, tinged with a little sadness. The image of high school cliques I brought up earlier has negative connotations, and it would be understandable to wish that we could return to the prelapsarian niceness of thinking that everyone should hang out with everyone else. Wouldn’t it be great if we could all still be in this video game thing together, eventually agreeing on a universal definition of game, or art, or whatever else? But there is no going back. We try to come out of our teenage years with a slightly better sense of ourselves, but there is an element to defining the self that is made out of forsaking something else. That’s just something that happens as you grow up.

This is a difficult process. In many ways, it’s like naming a band: technically, you can do anything, but if your idea is at all clever, someone else has probably done it first. And really, the name shouldn’t be too clever, otherwise the joke gets in the way of what, ultimately, should be a desire to express the group’s ethos sincerely.

Some people will say that the name “doesn’t matter,” and that you can pick anything as long as it’s unique. A nonsense word or a weird combination of words can work inasmuch as you start from a blank slate that you have the opportunity to build some meaning around (“Infinity Ward”). In some sense this is true. I know of no correlation to how good or bad a studio name is with its success or failure.

At the same time, we should not forget that words hold meanings and associations, sometimes very deep ones rooted in thousands of years of human culture and civilization. A more mystical take on names would inform us that a name is, in some fundamental sense, a spell– the most basic type of spell. So why not take advantage of this? The name could evoke the power of those ancient connotations and place them in service of your enterprise.

The very best kind of game studio name might be memorable, meaningful, powerful, and let people know what to expect before you have to explain it to them.

Naming can become excessively complicated and political if there’s a group of opinionated people who are all expected to agree on a single name. Someone is always going to pick on it or be dissatisfied or worry that it isn’t cool enough. If you think about a name too hard you can always find something wrong with it– it is either too bizarre or too generic, it always seems to make your brother-in-law laugh, or, there is a way to interpret the name as to suggest a sex act that, once imagined, cannot be unseen by the mind’s eye.

Finally, all the good names are already taken.

* * *

In my own case, picking the name Shadegrown Games took an entire year of restlessly mulling different ideas (thankfully, I was not in a rush). During that time I kept notes of words that I liked or found interesting, even ones that had no relation to games or my work (here are a couple of them: boule, pellicle). I also noted general concepts with which I felt a certain affinity, like wit or adaptability or self-reliance. The final name uses none of those words or those concepts, but going through that process was what got me to my destination.

“You look so pale,” his aunt said.

Dylan felt his cheeks flush. “Well, I’ve been working hard on my game. Making sure it’s great.”

“That’s nice. But don’t forget to go outside once in a while.”

“I won’t. It’s just been– there’s been a lot to do. And you know how they say not to trust a skinny chef? Well, you shouldn’t trust a tanned game developer either. The pasty ones are the ones you know really care about the end product. Right?”

She laughed. “If you say so. Dylan, please take care of yourself. Okay?”

“I will,” he said. “I totally will.”

But Dylan could not let go of that question, so sincere and out of nowhere. He repeated it as he lay in bed: Was he okay? He looked so pale.

He imagined his sickly skin puffy like uncooked dough and felt disgusted. One time, years ago, he decided that he would make a pact with whatever powers there might be to trade his physical form for success within the virtual world. The way he treated his body– in front of his computer as long as he was awake, his muscles inert and wasting away– would be understood as a kind of ascetic practice, a mortification of the flesh where his corporeal form would sublimate into the brilliance of his creation.

But Dylan could not have anticipated what a terrifying prospect it was to become once that atrophied frame of his began to unsettle the people around him. He closed his eyes and imagined the wan glow of his monitors brightening beyond possibility into sunlight, beaming radiant upon his face, restoring the health to his colorless cheeks.

A silly dream. The universe he was working so hard to create would never be bright enough to darken his pallid skin. It would always be limited by the luminosity of the screen that conveyed it. Compare the weakness of those monitors at their brightest to the real sun, a celestial force so powerful that it could even kill those who failed to take precautions against it from a hundred million miles away.

Or to think of the opposite example: the total absence of light. A television screen at its darkest was disappointingly still there: the dust on its surface, the oily spots, the unwelcome reflection of one’s own earthbound face.

Dylan Cassard felt small and powerless. How could anything he create in the closed world of his game compare to the dynamic range of the world itself? The obvious answer was that there was no way at all. His colleagues (he hesitated to call them friends) sometimes laughed at his earnestness, his artistic ambition, his wide-eyed expectations.

“Why would anyone play a game that actually hurts their eyes?” they’d say. “People enjoy games precisely because they’re safe: even the most difficult and punishing game is still an escape from the world– not an evocation of it.”

* * * 

As the clock approached four in the morning, Dylan realized abruptly that what he wanted more than anything was someone with whom he could discuss these things– things like the dynamic range available to games. Someone who could listen to him and guide him from a position of hard-won knowledge and experience. He often felt that there were no true father figures in his line of work; those who possibly qualified were less than a handful, and were too busy in any case still creating their own titles to make the sacrifice necessary to teach others.

Instead, one’s “mentor” was usually someone ten or, if one was lucky, fifteen years older– someone who had shipped three or four big titles and who suddenly knew all about how to make them; someone who would confidently pronounce half-baked, intellectually lazy theories about good design or good production that sounded plausible but did not hold up to the real, searching, scrabbling, desperate scrutiny that Dylan seemed to have made his specialty over the course of his five-year career. He tried to take what he could from these so-called teachers, but he knew he needed more.

Around five, during the first rumblings of the awakening city around him, it occurred to him that he might address the void the same way he had addressed the other blank spaces in his life. Dylan had solved for his parents in this way, and sometimes for his very existence. It was his one real trick, the one he was actually good at, and what had sustained him into the job he had now as a video game designer of moderate success and means. He would summon a creature of his imagination.

Unfortunately, the only thing that came to him that morning was himself. Twenty– no, thirty years into the future. The elder Dylan regarded him with bemusement and sorrow and a little envy. 

“Young creators always run up against the limits of the medium and naturally want to expand beyond them,” his wiser self said. “We always talked about how ‘games can’t do this now, but these problems will be solved once we get better graphics or better machine behavior,’ and talked about the coming day when we could finally make games something that they weren’t… as I got older, though, I started to see that the medium is not what limits you– not at all. All of the great games of the past thirty years, from your time period to mine, have been created with the tools of game design that you already have available to you now. Do you understand what I’m saying?”

“No, not really,” said Dylan, feeling the struggle against his own absurdity. 

“What I mean is this: you need to stop thinking that some technical breakthrough is going to solve your artistic problem. Forget about ‘evolving the medium’ and worry instead about how to work within it– how to best use the grammar you already have. You worried about how the power of the sun could be conveyed: well, think about how you would approach the same subject in another medium, like the novel. Books are just words on a page. You cannot hope to compete with the unbelievable power of the sun’s reality on a sheet of pulped wood with ink on it, can you? Well, maybe you can– if you use your symbols to summon its shadow, its ghost, its evocation. The image of the thing instead of the thing itself.”

Dylan Cassard snorted a little half-laugh. “But for all anybody knows,” he thought, “The image of a thing is exactly it.”

Soon after this thought, he fell into an uneasy sleep.

At Seattle’s 2012 Decibel Festival, I was honored to be on a panel about creating music for video games with Kirk Hamilton, Danny Baranowsky and Austin Wintory– three extremely talented and gracious composers.

I continue to work on more new things.

…I think there’s a subtle racism in the business, especially on the journalists’ side, where Japanese developers are forgiven for doing what they do. I think it’s condescending to do this.

Seriously?

Yeah. Just think about how many Japanese games are released where their stories are literally gibberish. Literally gibberish. There’s no way you could write it with a straight face, and the journalists say ‘oh it is brilliant’.

Then Gears of War comes out and apparently it’s the worst written narrative in a game ever. I’ll take Gears of War over Bayonetta any time.

It’s patronising to say, “oh those Japanese stories, they don’t really mean what they’re doing”.

You feel there isn’t a fair universal standard?

I just think the simple question should be; is the story any good?

These questions and answers indicate that Hutchinson feels that there exists a global universal standard for good storytelling, poseable in the form of “a simple question” that applies to all cultural products. He also implies that Japanese developers are not particularly good at achieving that standard, and that game journalists exhibit a “subtle racism” for not evaluating the Japanese games’ stories under the same rubric that they would evaluate the story of a Western game.

I would argue that it is not the games press in aggregate that is advancing the racist notion here, but Hutchinson himself: that it is indeed racist, and somewhat tragically imperialistic, to assume that one’s Western tradition (Hutchinson possesses a master’s degree in “English / Writing”, according to his LinkedIn profile) can universally answer the question he poses: “Is the story any good?” His answer appears to exhibit ignorance of the existence of non-Western storytelling– a tradition of literature that emphasizes very different qualities than the kind one might be exposed to in, say, a Los Angeles screenwriting workshop.

To talk in this manner is to express not only ignorance, however. It also expresses contempt for one of the pillars of the Assassin’s Creed series itself. An important reason I appreciated and enjoyed the first four installments (I, II, Brotherhood and Revelations) of the series as much as I did was the fact that each game was reasonably successful in evoking a culture different my own. The ability to do this is, in fact, one of the series’ great strengths, and one that distinguishes it from its peers. Why, then, would a person in a leadership position on an Assassin’s Creed game reveal such shallow thinking about the products of cultures other than his own?

Hutchinson does not have a credit on any of the previous Assassin’s Creed games; his most recent credit is having been the creative director of Army of Two: The 40th Day (which, ironically, Game Informer criticized for “lacking a cohesive story”), so perhaps the wording of his comment is simply the result of inexperience in matters outside of his own intellectual sphere. Or perhaps he is actually familiar with those traditions, but simply doesn’t personally like them. There is of course nothing wrong with failing to connect with certain kinds of stories, or even admitting you feel those types of stories amount to “gibberish”. Such matters are the province of opinion.

If that’s the case– if he was trying to express a preference of opinion– then I certainly understand what Hutchinson actually wanted to say in the interview, even though I would respectfully disagree. To help him out, I will try to capture what he said, but in a better, less problematic way:

“Sometimes I think the press gives Japanese games a free pass on story,” said the ghost of a more thoughtful, more well-spoken Hutchinson. “Game journalists almost expect the stories of Japanese games to make little sense, praising them regardless of their adherence to what I understand the Western tradition, and particularly the Hollywood tradition, defines to be ‘a good story’. Personally, however, I prefer just those kinds of stories– the kind that often get derided as being too simple or too stupid, like the one in Gears of War– to the stories in games like Bayonetta, which I am unable to really understand as a story.”

For people of a certain sensitivity, it’s difficult not to come up against that desire sooner or later when they work on these kinds of games. To be an artist (or a craftsperson) and make something about today’s wars that’s corporately antiseptic and palatable, you often have to purposely leach the commentary away; you have to dance around the fact that there’s a lot of war in your game and that you have nothing at all to say about it.

Activision’s Call of Duty series is a virtuoso at this dance, and the only time the series really seemed like it might be attempting to dip its toe into the waters outside of its usual boundaries was a moment in Modern Warfare 2 called “No Russian”. In this much-discussed and criticized sequence– a small part of a larger level– the player occupies the consciousness of a double agent planted into a group of Russian terrorists as they attempt to incite a war between their country and the United States. They accomplish this by shooting civilians at an airport. The player stands next to the terrorists as they indiscriminately fire into the crowds; he or she can contribute to the fire if he or she chooses, or stand idly by. Either way, the scene is horrific and disturbing: in the mayhem, you watch as a middle-aged man in a purple shirt tries and fails to crawl away from a pool of his own blood. He was not a combatant. He could have been a bus driver or an accountant or a teacher.

Most of the critics I tend to read seem to have agreed that No Russian was not a success. They felt it was needlessly shocking, and many (including me) assumed that it was thrown in cynically to grab headlines and greater sales. The lead writer of Spec Ops: The Line (which, three years after Modern Warfare 2, featured more scenes of civilian massacre but generated far less controversy) suggested that even the optional nature of the event detracted from it:

Williams said that the team worked to avoid the clumsiness of “No Russian,” and that the easiest way around that was to make the civilian killing integral to the story they were trying to tell. “The thing that got me the most [about “No Russian”],”” Williams said, “was that you could opt out of playing it. And that struck me as saying, ‘We wanted to do something that would cause controversy, but it’s actually not necessary to the game, which is why you don’t have to play it.’”

But did the team at Infinity Ward really seek to cause controversy? Ever since it was released, nobody has actually known what the people who made No Russian were thinking, or what the authorial intent for that moment really was. This is partially because Infinity Ward (and subsequently Respawn) employees tend not to speak in public about the work they do, preferring to leave on-the-record interviews to a designated spokesperson. The story was further obscured by a lawsuit between a subset of current and former Infinity Ward employees and their parent company, Activision; anyone involved was advised to avoid talking about the game at all. Now that the suit has been settled, though, the gag on the creators of Modern Warfare 2 has been lifted.

 * * *

“For that level we were trying to do three things,” says Mohammad Alavi, the game designer who was chiefly responsible for designing and implementing the sequence of events in No Russian. “Sell why Russia would attack the US, make the player have an emotional connection to the bad guy Makarov, and do that in a memorable and engaging way. In a first person shooter where you never leave the eyes of the hero, it’s really hard to build up the villain and get the player invested in why he’s ‘bad’.”

Alavi has created some of the Call of Duty series’ most memorable moments, including the taut, tightly paced ghillie suit sequence from Modern Warfare. He has since left Infinity Ward, along with many of his co-workers, to join Jason West and Vince Zampella at Respawn.

If he is a master of his domain– the high-budget first person shooter setpiece– his reasoning in this case strikes me as nothing so much as workmanlike. He makes no mention of a desire to plumb the depths of the human capacity for violence, or make a statement about the nature of violence in shooters. He expressly disavows the theory that it was a ploy to attract media attention.

Instead, Alavi saw that he had a storytelling goal, and the tools he had to reach that goal were the tools of Call of Duty: “The first iteration of the level only had the ‘massacre’ at just outside the elevator door. Beyond the first set of escalators, the combat would begin… [I]t felt cheap and gimmicky. It felt like we were touching on something raw and emotional and then shying away from it just as soon as it became uncomfortable.”

“I’ve read a few reviews that said we should have just shown the massacre in a movie or cast you in the role of a civilian running for his life,” Alavi continues. “Although I completely respect anyone’s opinion that it didn’t sit well with them, I think either one of those other options would have been a cop out… [W]atching the airport massacre wouldn’t have had the same impact as participating (or not participating) in it. Being a civilian doesn’t offer you a choice or make you feel anything other than the fear of dying in a video game, which is so normal it’s not even a feeling gamers feel anymore.”

Alavi wants to focus on the fact that there is attention and emotion, as opposed to the exact mechanism by which it was created, or even what the qualities of that emotion are. “It isn’t really relevant whether that makes you enjoy the entertainment experience even more because you’re being naughty (à la Grand Theft Auto) or it engrosses you further into the story and makes you resent your actions. What’s relevant is that the level managed to make the player feel anything at all,” he says.

“In the sea of endless bullets you fire off at countless enemies without a moment’s hesitation or afterthought, the fact that I got the player to hesitate even for a split second and actually consider his actions before he pulled that trigger– that makes me feel very accomplished.”

When he puts it that way, I feel like I understand Alavi’s reasoning up to the decision to create No Russian, whether or not I agree it was the best way to tell the story of the game. When one works in the medium of first person shooters, one must work with the forms the medium provides. Alavi simply wanted to “sell” (in his words) the story of the game and reinforce the badness of the bad guys to the best of his, and his chosen medium’s, ability. The choices that led to No Russian were choices along a series of logical steps followed to their inevitable conclusion: in a world where dozens of marionettes of human beings are constantly killed, something even worse has to happen to snap us awake.

* * *

Walt Williams of Spec Ops felt that what he terms No Russian’s “opt out” choice– referring, it seems, to a curt dialogue box just before the level that warned players about potentially disturbing content and gave them the option to bypass it– weakened No Russian. In a separate interview, Williams explained further why the massacre by the player’s character was mandatory to progress in his game:

“There’s a certain aspect to player agency that I don’t really agree with, which is the player should be able to do whatever the player wants and the world should adapt itself to the player’s desire,” he said. “That’s not the way that the world works, and with Spec Ops, since we were attempting to do something that was a bit more emotionally real for the player. […] That’s what we were looking to do, particularly in the white phosphorous scene, is give direct proof that this is not a world that you are in control of, this world is directly in opposition to you as a game and a gamer.”

There is, I think, a very deep problem with this statement. Note that in the design of Spec Ops, the philosophy of removing choice because “that’s not the way that the world works” leads to a massacre of innocent civilians.

I present a counter-argument: in the real world, there is always a choice. The claim that a massacre of human beings is the result of anyone– a player character in a video game or a real person– because “they had no choice” is the ultimate abdication of responsibility (and, if you believe certain philosophers, a repudiation of the very basis for a moral society). It is unclear to me how actually being presented with no choice is more “emotionally real,” because while it guarantees the player can only make the singular choice, it is also more manipulative. It is like the educational game that wears its assumptions on its sleeve in the name of “simulation”.

The protagonist soldier of Spec Ops could have stopped. He may have thought he had no choice, but only a brief consideration of the various plot parameters of that sequence is required to reveal numerous potential ways he could have escaped the situation.

To the point that the game uses this event to prove that it is in control and actively working in opposition to the player, I think that is actually a point that has already been made, perhaps by every other video game. It is simply a given that the game is in control when a player plays it; that is the very heart of a game’s own system and rules, and particularly in the scripted narrative events that most major games feature. Games can make us do things we wouldn’t have wanted to do before, and, by manipulating our senses, they often do. Spec Ops does indeed induce its audience to consider this fact– but that makes it more of a commentary on games, and quite less about “the way the world works”.

* * *

I played through No Russian multiple times because I wanted direct knowledge of the consequences of my choices. The first time through I had done what came to me naturally, which was to try to stop the event, but firing on the perpetrators ends the mission immediately. The next time I stood by and watched. It is not an easy scene to stomach, and I tried to distance myself emotionally from what was going on.

The third time, I decided that I would participate. I could have chosen not to; I could have simply moved on then, or even shut off the system and never played again. But a certain curiosity won out– that kind of cold-blooded curiosity that craves the new and the forbidden. I pulled the trigger and fired.

You’ve probably gotten a ton of those, like, overweight, adolescent boys just staring at you today. And taking photos and everything. I mean, with your body, and that outfit– they’re just staring at you, huh? They’re all, ooh, a girl. Ooh, a “booth babe”. You know these kids have probably never seen a girl, you know, up close. Not a hot one, anyway. I bet one of them couldn’t even come up and talk to you naturally. Like I’m doing to you right now. You know? Nerds. Haha.

Well, listen. Jane. I don’t know what your plans are for after the show’s over today. But, uh, me and my friends are headed to this really nice bar, in town. And you’re welcome to join us… no big deal, honestly, just me and three or four other guys, from DarkWizards Online. Dunno if you’ve heard of that– well I’m sure you haven’t– but it’s pretty big, in the, you know, game world. We’ve got close to a million subscribers, and we’re growing. We just got nominated for best F2P MMORPG by GameSniper.biz. That doesn’t mean anything to you, haha. Well it’s, it’s, um, a pretty big deal. Thank you. We worked hard on it. Yeah. Well, look, I’ve got to run to an interview– press thing, you know, pimp the game, woo– look, I’ll come by later, okay? Yeah? Jane, Jane Doe. Yeah. See you around. Okay? Thanks. Thanks.

For a long time I felt a similar frustration with this industry, wondering why we hadn’t addressed this yet. It doesn’t seem like an overly difficult thing to try to solve. How hard could telling a decent story possibly be? How hard is hiring a real writer?

After nearly ten years of working on the kinds of big-budget titles that Clark implicates, I’m less sure that there is a good solution. It may even be that there isn’t one.

* * *

The people who make games are not, themselves, dumb. Some of them may be emotionally underdeveloped, and very publically so, but for every negative example there are hundreds of intelligent, reasoned, well-rounded people who make video games for a living, whom we haven’t heard of because they don’t blog or Tweet or sit for press interviews. And artistic legitimacy matters to many of these people. There is no shortage of game makers who would like to prove that games can be complex, intelligent, nuanced and everything else we associate with goodness and highness in the arts. Which is to say that if games are “dumb,” it’s not for lack of trying to make them not dumb. So if it was really possible to make a finely-tuned, action-packed big budget video game that is also “smart” and not “dumb”, I want to think that we might have done so already.

Instead, we’re at what feels like a mysterious barrier. We have some of the world’s most talented people and a magician’s box full technical tricks, but something’s not quite right; something always seems to go wrong when we try to put that higher level of emotional maturity into our next big game.

In the course of my career I’ve seen some “real writers” come in to help a game put on a better, more mature face and not seem so adolescent. They prodded the developers to abandon the old stereotypes and helped them invent more complex characters— characters who had a life before and after the events of the game, who were of ethnicities outside the usual Hollywood handful, who mulled over realistic internal conflicts. We spent a lot of time on those elements. These games eventually came out, and while they were commercially and critically successful, they utterly failed in their mission to bring “good writing” to games. In the end, they were what Clark calls “dumb” games.

What was the point where it broke down? There was no evil executive coming in from on high telling us to make the game more lowbrow. The team was not a bunch of sniveling adolescent boys (a couple were, to be honest, but most were of the aforementioned good type). I think instead that the problem was structural— deeply structural to the product itself, at a level where no amount of “smart” versus “dumb” choices can really change things. One of those games centered around shooting aliens with guns and lasers. Another was about navigating an environment and punching people until they died.

The very second you try to wrap actions like those in a “good story” that does not somehow address what happens during the mechanical part of the experience is the second you fail to write a good story. The dissonance of the Uncharted series is a famous example: the experience implies two completely different worlds. One is where Nathan Drake is an affable hero, and the other is where Drake murders hundreds of fellow human beings and feels nothing. Though the developers took care to paint over the seams where they could, even the cleverest narrative design couldn’t change how completely incongruous that really is, on a basic, fundamental level.

* * *

At that point— with the model already broken, what can you do as a writer? Make your main character a sensitive man and he falls flat: he obviously isn’t sensitive to the fact that he just killed dozens of people. Make him a dangerous psychopath and he’s impossible to like, unless, maybe, he’s out for some lazily justified revenge (oh, look, we just stumbled on the plot of so many games!).

This point about dissonance has been made before in several “mechanics versus narrative” debates, though narrative versus mechanics, like art versus technology, is ultimately a false dichotomy. (Someone always points out that lots of games exist entirely free of narrative. To me this is like pointing out that some animals don’t need backbones. It’s true, but that doesn’t help us, because we are animals that happen to need backbones. Some games need narrative in order to work.) It’s the reason why games that explicitly exclude combat— Dear Esther, Journey, and others of their kind— seem so promising right now. As an industry, we still haven’t developed anything as mechanically complex as our combat, but at least we’ve figured out that we can remove it.

To return to Vanquish, then, I feel like you couldn’t really take its “mechanics” or “gameplay” and tell a sensible story around them, because those things are not some kind of discrete element that we can pluck out and place inside another context. A game is a whole system; the pieces that we like to dissect are its organs. You can take issue with and maybe even improve the components, but what you really want is a brand new animal, a new system where all the parts work together. By saying that Vanquish is a great game but could benefit from better story and characters, Clark implicitly proposes a mythical beast— the kind with the head of one animal and the body of another.

* * *

Another way of saying this is: it is extremely difficult— maybe impossible— to come up with a story and characters that, when placed within the context of most current video games, don’t feel inherently silly.

Explaining his choice of the word “dumb,” Clark references Tom Bissell’s thought about great art being “‘comprehensively intelligent,’ meaning that it’s intelligent in every way available to it.” This is a fine notion and I’m all for it. I’m just unsure that this kind of intelligence is truly available to most of the kinds of games we’re talking about here. 

What is an “Elbow”? As best-selling science journalist Jonathan Brainer explains, it’s a ubiquitous pattern that looks much like its namesake anatomy: a line moves in one direction and then– suddenly– in another. Brainer ingeniously shows us how Elbows seem to turn up any time we make a graph, no matter what data is used: stock markets, marmoset populations, even the contours of seemingly ordinary rocks. How should we manage the world differently knowing that another Elbow might come at any time? The implications for areas as diverse as global financial systems, medical insurance, and space colonization are discussed in eye-opening detail. Several chapters toward the end address how readers can learn to recognize– and take advantage of– the Elbows in their own lives. Starred Review.

Infectious Noise: A Brief History of the Snap

Why do we snap our fingers? In this entertaining and highly readable account, Preston Warner, the Roland P. “Bud” Lawson Professor of Social Psychology at Bellevue College, describes how snapping goes back to at least the ancient Romans, who would snap– not clap– to express their admiration for gladiatorial combatants. Asides into the etymology of derivative words like “snappy,” “snap-on,” and top Japanese boy band SMAP (widely thought to be a corruption of “snap”) keep the heavy subject matter from getting too bogged down in academic jargon. Warner argues that snapping is, ultimately, a democratizing force– the explosion of compressed air from the palm of the hand makes this signature sound a direct and forceful personal statement. Includes Index.