Results of Ruminations

To be brief, Final Fantasy XV is a great game. Not without its flaws, of course, but it's a video game that deserves to be in the running for the best of the storied franchise's history. (Here I'll give some impressions, but I'm writing this without restraint on spoilers. It's likely a better read after having played. Oh, I will say, though, that you should play the game until you get to the point where you're supposed to get on the ferry to go to Altissia. Then start the movie Kingsglaive . It fits perfectly into the story at that point.) Then again, as I've said before , the Final Fantasy franchise is huge, with nearly 100 entries to date. So the fact that this is a "good" Final Fantasy  game means that it's unusual to be so good. While I would argue that it's not as good as Final Fantasy VII  (and some would through VI  in there, too, which I concede because of popularity, not personal experience), it returns to a lot of tried-and-true...

In 1997, my brother rented the PlayStation game with the largest hype that I had, in my 13 years on the planet, ever heard of. As this was pre-internet (which was there, but so nascent at the time that hardly anyone used it), I didn't have any connection to why people were excited or what made them salivate so much when someone mentioned Final Fantasy VII. My older brother, suckered in by the hype, threw down $4 (I would guess) and picked up a copy from the nearby Hollywood Video (probably; Blockbuster was the other option). I remember him running through the intro, changing the main character's name from "Cloud" to "CloudY" because he was simply fiddling his way through, fought a couple of enemies, and said, "Looks pretty cool." You don't have to watch the entire video, but it goes through those opening scenes which, with the exception of Resident Evil 2  (which came out one year later), is the game that I've played the most--though...

Out of curiosity, I googled "Why is Star Wars so good?" It gave me a lot of would-be think pieces about if the next Star Wars will live up to its hype. I had to tweak my search, and eventually I found a couple of articles that listed stuff the writer liked about Star Wars as an explanation for why it's worthwhile. Frustrated, I finally landed on an article from 1983 that actually talks about the film as a film. It didn't expand too much for me, but it was nice to see someone had tried to articulate what Star Wars does successfully. On a whim, I googled "Why is Game of Thrones so good?" and, within two hits, had found a thought-provoking, intriguing article that made a case for GoT 's success that goes far beyond "sex and violence". I don't really know what to make of this, since we've had decades to think about Star Wars and only six years to figure out GoT, but I think there's a momentum of fan ossification (mixed metaphor...s...

There is great difficulty when approaching the Everyman that is supposed to be Solid Snake. His appearance in subsequent games--most canonical, some not ( Super Smash Brothers Melee and the Ac!d games come to mind)--has slowly, almost reluctantly revealed the explosive past and personality of a character who was originally designed to be more transparent. Hideo Kojima explains in an interview: "When I created the main character [Snake], I knew he is essentially the player...I wanted the character to be vague. That way, players will project their own personalities onto the character, and form a stronger connection with Snake." This technique is not unique to games, yet the tropes of transparent characters rarely see such success. Few narratives can readily rely on a blank Everyman, though some do ( Moby-Dick is perhaps the greatest example). The result is perhaps crucial to Snake as an avatar. That isn't to say the character doesn't have personality or a past. The tr...

NOTE: As always, there's a standing spoiler alert for any game I discuss on this blog. Here, I will be talking about Metal Gear Solid for the first PlayStation. Most of the discussion will focus on and spoil only that storyline, but because the five games that comprise the saga (as of this writing, with MGS: Portable Ops taking a necessary place) are linked, it's important to know that some things may get spoiled if you haven't played everything. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ On Liquid In a certain sense, Metal Gear Solid is Liquid's game. Ever one to want to emulate the Patriots--albeit a type of radical, hate-twisted emulation, similar to the one that he has for Big Boss--Liquid takes it upon himself to manipulate, control, and twist Snake's progress. If anyone controls Snake, it should be Liquid, not the gamer. The controller in the hands of the audience is happenstance, for the entire ballet of Shadow Moses is...

Update time: Press Start has been getting fewer comments on my blog, which is only significant in that there are so few comments in the first place, so the disparity seems bigger than it actually is. I've been exploring Kotaku to get a bit of a pulse on what other gamers think, and though the site does a good job of making most of the comments worthwhile (instead of typical fanboy flame), it doesn't explore things the way I'm trying to do in the essays. This isn't a bad thing, necessarily, but it's something I've noticed. In terms of actual content, I've broken the 20k mark on the essays. Currently, the grand total for it is 21,382 words. I haven't received much feedback on my writing style for the essays, which is kind of a surprise. I thought that the language was a little more obtuse than I generally write. This stems from an attempt to be theoretical (so the verbiage is natural in that form), but also in trying to imbue more significance to what I...

NOTE: This one is best read as a follow up to the one about violence and the one about the next level of gaming. I am, admittedly, rather disappointed in this particular essay, but I want to see what others think before I scrap it entirely. Particularly the end—it smacks of being too preachy. You tell me. Also, there is a footnote. Just FYI. Death of the Avatar Roland Barthes in 'Death of the Author': “Writing is that neutral, composite, oblique space where our subject slips away, the negative where all identity is lost, starting with the very identity of the body writing” (Image, Music, Text, 1977). Replace 'writing' with 'gaming', and we have a new instance of death within video games--indeed, may very well be the only death within video games that matters. “[Gaming] is that neutral, composite, oblique space where our subject slips away, the negative where all identity is lost, starting with the very identity of the body [gaming].” Much has been said about t...

There's a gap, somewhere, as necessary as a space between words, yet perplexing all the same. Video games are unique in many ways, but the most important here is the unreality of the experience, connected via a tiny umbilical cord (now wireless) streaming from the participant to the spectacle. This is not 'naïve realism' versus 'representative realism' or any other philosophical thought experiment. Instead, this is the real experiment of what can constitute definitions of reality, but placed inside of a virtual realm. The game is flat, despite having 3D graphics (or the redundant title of 'stereoscopic vision' being added to give the illusion of dimensional depth to games). The game is silent, despite having 7.1 Dolby Digital sound pumping through the speakers. The game is independent, despite being a console attached to a wall attached to a TV attached to a gamer. Perhaps in a quasi-Buddhist way, we could ask, “If no one is around to play the game, is it...

Games As Narrative or Play? Narratology versus ludology, an old question in a new medium of theory, has become stale and stalemate. Wark plays on this in Gamer Theory (67): But where gamer theory gets stuck is in the tension between thinking games through the forms of the past and the desire to found a--somewhat hasty--claim to a new 'field' or 'topic' of scholarship around some 'new media.' Is the game about story or play? Is the authoritative method 'narratology' or 'ludology'? Questions too ill-framed to answer. Theory cannot answer the question of which is better; the medium, though new, is touching upon a long-held understanding of both concepts. We have never been without play. We have never been without story. The melding of the two is not new, nor is it novel. For fear of sounding tautological: What it is, it is. The game rests on three pillars, as Stephen Dinehart explains. In his article " Dramatic Play ," he explores the thr...

NOTE: This is a long one. It's also a lot more theoretical than conversational. If you have a question, please feel free to post so that I can try to be more clear. There is little debate on what the greatest debate is when it comes to video games: Does the imaginary violence of the game translate into violent behavior in the real world? It seems to be very much a 'depends on your point of view' type of argument. Not only does it depend on one's point of view, but also the particular study itself, what it focuses on, and how well it's managed. It is also important to note the rhetorical tricks of the debate*, since most of the data are coming from second or third sources. But I am no statistician, so numbers do nothing to help me to understand the issue. In fact, numbers about this argument are superfluous, since the entire point of gaming (whether the gamer/designer/critic is aware of it or not) is the individual as the ideal. Let's look at violence, then, shal...