That Game Company

A very important part of my world is the interactive medium. I’ve been playing games since the age of three, and as I grew the medium grew with me. Over those years I have been entertained by games such as Mega Man, Halo, Zelda, The Elder Scrolls, etc. However very few have reached me to a fundamental level. Most games are meant to be fun, some are meant to tell a story, but very few are designed specifically to resonate at an emotional level.
I’m writing this post as somewhat of a “thank you” to a company that has made that their goal. A company that not only set out to, but has succeeded in creating what I would call interactive art.
I was playing through Flower today because I purchased Journey and anxiously await my chance to start my first Journey after I come home from work, but I wanted to experience some of the work of thatgamecompany before going in. These games are beautiful journeys of raw emotion, and beauty, and in a time when CoD and Angry Birds seem to be king it is good to see companies stepping out and taking the risk of creating an unparalleled failure to make something genuinely special.
I cherish my time with Flower, and I feel that at the end I will be able to say the same about Journey.

To Jenova Chen and all the others at thatgamecompany: Thank you for stepping out and showing the world that just because you have a controller in your hand doesn’t mean that the only experience you can have is CoD.

My problem with the ending of Mass Effect 3. *SPOILERS*

I’ve realized that, though my hatred for the Mass Effect 3 ending is equal to (and in many cases greater than) the rage I see online, my reasons are different than what most of the reasons appear to be. Most people argue that the lack of choice in the end destroyed it, but let me ask you this: when did the choices you made up until the end truly factor massively into the end result of any Mass Effect game? No matter what, Mass Effect still ended with you stopping sovereign and Saren dying. Ultimately at the end you were faced with 2 choices – which were the only choices that mattered to the end of that particular game: (1) do you save the Destiny Ascension (yes or no) and (2) who should become the human councilor (Anderson or Udina). Yea, ok, Wrex may have died on Virmire and either Ashley or Kaidan did die. But let’s be serious, was any of that touched on in the end? No.

Mass Effect 2 was better than 1, but it still didn’t do much with the choices you did in the game up until the end. Ultimately your choices prior to deciding what to do with the collector base just effected the number of coffins on the Normandy and who was looking at them. Whether you slept with Miranda or Tali wasn’t important to the end. If you lost the entire crew of the Normandy wasn’t touched on in the end, just what happened to your squad and Shepard.

Mass Effect 3 did the same thing.  The only difference is that it didn’t give you the Illusion that your choices mattered to the end. The only way your more minor choices mattered was the linking of game to game: If Thane dies in Mass Effect 2, he won’t be there to stop Kai Leng in Mass Effect 3. But that does’t change the fact that Shepard stopped the Collectors, just like if Cortez dies, Shepard will still reach the beam.

Others argue that it needs a “happy” ending. All I can say to that is that not all stories need a happy ending. I, honestly like that Shepard had to sacrifice himself for the good of the galaxy.

No, I have no issue with these things, my issue is with the Reapers…

One of the biggest pitfalls in fiction is over-explanation and too much exposition. Up until the last 10 minutes of Mass Effect 3 my imagination was able to fill in the gaps of what the Reapers were. To me, and I’d lay odds a large majority of Mass Effect fans, they were the worst of what machines could become. No love, no hate, no sympathy, no emotion of any kind, simply cold logic. The antithesis to such logic (which can be described as order) is chaos I.E. organics. The cycle of evolution is extraordinarily chaotic, and would be vile to the eyes of something so logic and order-driven. The Cycle was simply as Sovereign said in Mass Effect. “We impose order on the chaos of organic evolution.”

Mass Effect 2 added clues to the mystery of the Reapers in that the Human-Reaper Larvae (or T-1000 as many call it due to it’s similarities to Terminator) was made by the melting down of humans. I.E. we discovered that Reapers were created out of organics – most likely one species per Reaper. However, that wasn’t nearly enough to actually answer the question, and the mind had room to imagine what could be going on here. I remember talking to friends, tying threads together and trying to make sense of the Reapers and what they were after. I ultimately came to the conclusion that there was a second motive in the Reapers return every 50,000 years: reproduction. By the end of Mass Effect 2 I had cultivated this image of the Reaper’s return having 2 motives (1) to cultivate the Galaxy, much like happens when people deliberately start a forest fire: Killing what came before so what comes next may have room to grow and (2) harvesting organics to create new Reapers. Which makes sense because as Mass Effect showed us, not all Reapers survive each cycle.

Mass Effect 3 added another clue: The Reapers don’t control the cycle. This one both worried and excited me, if done right Reapers could have remained the near-demonic destroyers that the previous entries had made them out to be and there would still be potential for a Mass Effect 4 after they are defeated by delving into the ones behind the Reapers. Unfortunately, Bioware decided that it’s best to sum everything up in 10 minutes by making them agents of a being with a very flawed sense of logic. In order to stop Organics from being destroyed (or ruled) by synthetics, we have to destroy them with synthetics. It’s logically the same as “I shot him in the head so he wouldn’t set himself on fire.” Yea, there is a logic there, but it’s flawed. Instead of letting him die the slow and painful death of burning alive, he shot him – ending it painlessly. End result of both is the same: In Mass Effect, Organics are being killed (and in a way, ruled) by synthetics. In my example, the guy still died. I can’t get behind that. It was a lazy way to end the series, and ultimately destroyed the image of the Reapers that had been cultivated for 5 years.

[EDIT] Oh, and one last thing I forgot to mention. I got so focused on the Reapers while typing this, I forgot to mention Shepard’s part in all of this. Commander [insert name here] Shepard, throughout the entire Mass Effect series, was never one just to accept things. Despite his beliefs (which are based on choices the player makes throughout the game) he has never been one to just accept things. No matter what, however, Shepard stood for one thing (The right for organic life to continue) through every game. However, at the end of Mass Effect 3, when the Catalyst laid out what it’s flawed plan was, Shepard doesn’t even bat an eyelash? Despite how tired he was, or how much pain he was in, I find that hard to believe.

Mass Effect 3: A game that was almost phenomenal.

“Holy shit, they’re actually here,” was the first real thought I had after starting Mass Effect 3. Within minutes of starting the game, I was thrown into a desperate race to reach the Normandy and escape a dying Earth in order to unite a galaxy against a threat that has eradicated organic life time an time again in a cycle that has continued for millions of years. That desperate feeling is something that never truly lives you throughout the entirety of Mass Effect 3.

Despite that constantly looming shadow, the game manages not only to convey the dark heart of war, but also manages to throw in the lighter jests that we loved in Mass Effect 2. I found myself standing at a billboard advertising “Blasto 6: Partners in Crime” listening to every dialogue clip from it, the face Shepard made when EDI said that she only forgets to recycle the Normandy’s air supply when she discovers something truly interesting was priceless, and Joker is the same old guy we’ve loved since the first Mass Effect. However, as a game about galactic war should, it pushed the more lighthearted interactions aside for darker ones. The Citadel was a prime example of how the game showed that this war devastated everyone. Where in Mass Effect 2 most conversations you could eaves-drop on were lighthearted and funny, the ones in Mass Effect 3 referenced people loosing friends, a lover going to war, and even entire colonies being destroyed, and that’s not where the dark tones ended. Two locations in particular on the Citadel changed constantly: Huerta Memorial Hospital filled with patients to the point that you’d walk in to see the sick and injured being cared for in the lobby, and the refugee camp in the dock’s holding area continually expanded with people from worlds that had been overrun by the Reapers.

The Citadel is a mostly peaceful hub world that the war hasn’t truly reached yet, but the effects of the are still felt as you pass by all those effected. The Battlefield, on the other hand, understandably puts the war itself into sharp focus. Everywhere I fought Reapers, I could turn my camera to see decimation left behind by the Reapers, and forces facing off against Reapers themselves. One time that sticks firmly into my head was standing on a ledge while on a moon to see a burning planet in the sky, with ships locked in battle overhead, and down in a valley, a Reaper was laying waste to an entire army. The intensity of that moment underscored the desperate fight the galaxy found itself in, and the almost non-existent odds of success.

As far as gameplay is concerned, Mass Effect is no longer an RPG. Where in the first Mass Effect you personally had a hand in almost everything Shepard had to say, Mass Effect 3 takes it down to almost a decision of “what should the next cutscene be” rather than “what should Shepard say next?” Character customization and leveling is a definite improvement than 2, but still didn’t give you the variety found in games like Dragon Age: Origins and Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic. The shooter mechanics improved it also, making parts of it’s gameplay reminiscent of Gears of War as you roll in and out of cover constantly vying for a better position to stop the hordes of Reaper, Cerberus, or Geth forces.

The shooter mechanics also make the multiplayer an enjoyable experience which understandably drops the weapon and power wheels in favor of the quicker “press RB to use shockwave” and “press X to switch weapons”. The formula of the multiplayer makes me think of what Horde 3.0 might be when Epic innevitably comes out with Gears 4. It takes that holding out against waves of opponents aspect and adds objectives every few waves such as shutting off Reaper indoctrination devices or killing high-value targets (I will never understand how a particular husk is a higher-value target than the husk next to him). The multiplayer also factors into the story by acting as a multiplyer for your war assets which factor into your odds of getting a “perfect” ending once you beat the game.

This is probably the most glitchy Mass Effect I’ve played. The predominant glitch being one that causes characters to sometimes disappear during dialogue. When I played through the game the character who disappeared was my DLC squad member, so I had thought it was simply a problem with the integration of the DLC into the game, but a friend of mine mentioned having the same problem with Ashley and Liara. The other big problem was dialogue fading out before it reached the end. It was a little irritating to be talking to a character to suddenly hear his dialogue fade out then cut to the next line. However, it isn’t the glitchiest game I’ve ever played, and I never ran into a Reaper flying backwards a la Skyrim’s infamous dragon, so that’s a plus.

As far as the DLC is concerned, we all know what it is, but in case someone has been living under a rock, I’m not going to say it. I’d hate to aid EA, Bioware, and Microsoft in it’s efforts of spoiling that DLC for everyone. It’s infamy is also well-known. It’s very hard to believe that this was not an intended part of the game sold separately for added profit, however I still enjoyed it none-the-less. The true beauty of the DLC isn’t the mission, but the character and perspective you get, which is ironically on the disc itself. It should have come with the game, but I can’t fault the DLC it’s self for shady marketing tactics employed by Bioware and EA.

All this considered, I’d give Mass Effect 3 a 9/10… though there is one thing that hasn’t been considered yet. The now infamous endings. I don’t want to spoil the ending for those who haven’t reached it, but as my best friend would say: It’d be disingenuous of me not to say anything about it. I walked away less of a fan of Mass Effect as a result of how this game ended. It damaged, irreparably, the overall feel of the Mass Effect universe by explaining far too much with an explanation completely out of left field. Don’t get me wrong, I still like the Mass Effect universe, it’s just that looking back on everything… it’s not the same. It’s almost like growing up in a way, the magic is gone, and it leaves me feeling empty.

Taking everything into consideration, I have to give Mass Effect 3 a 7.5/10. I still like it, and there is a lot  the game did 100% right. But the last 10 minutes managed to take that all and make it, and everything else in the universe, feel hollow.

Emotions within the interactive medium

There are many people who believe that emotion can’t be conveyed in interactive entertainment, and thinking back on all the games I have played over the years, I have to say that these people are simply wrong. Now, before you go “Oh, this guy is simply promoting his opinion as fact,” just hear me out. Every person has differing emotional triggers, for example: I can’t stand romantic movies. I tend to think of them as the corniest, stupidest movies on the face of the planet, but I have known people who, when you simply mention the title “The Notebook” will start crying like babies, talking about how beautiful a movie it is. Personally, I’d rather see a movie about the dynamic between best friends. I can’t say I’ve ever had a strong romantic attachment, but I’d kill for my best friend.

Whenever I get to talking about story or emotion in interactive entertainment, one name always has to come up: David Jaffe. Not because I have some illogical rage and hatred of the man, but because he’s the most recent person to step out against everything I believe in regards to this industry. But, I have to point out something ironic in his speech about the “dangers” of story in video games. He starts talking about how games can not convey story like movies, books, or even commercials on TV. He said “I cry at almost everything, ok? So, I cry, there’s a commercial every christmas where the mom takes the cookies out of the oven and she, and the narrator says… I’m gonna cry right now because I’m thinking about it… she says ‘childhood quickly slips away…” and over the end of this you hear a response of laughter from some of the people in the crowd to which he responds “Fuck you all, I can’t help it, ok?” then he continues to say that this commercial reaches him because he has little kids, and he loves them so much. Then he continues to ponder why when a guy like him who is so open to be emotionally effected by things, why do games only effect him by 1/100th of the amount the cookie commercial does.

Does anyone notice the irony there? Can anyone pick out where his logic fails? It’s in the laugh. The laugh he received about his emotional reaction to the cookie commercial. The evidence of his flawed logic was there, staring him in the face when the people laughed. It showed the fact that they don’t share his feelings about the cookie commercial, that it doesn’t reach them the way it reached him.

I can guarantee that every single one of us can describe something that effected them emotionally, that does nothing for others of us. It could be a song you love, or a book, movie… and yes, even a video game. For me… I don’t want to drop any spoilers, but I played a game relatively recently in which a character I had grown to genuinely care about got shot. That effected me, I cared when I saw him fall to the ground, and the blood pool around him. Hell, I won’t lie, I cried when that happened. This is a character that I had grown to genuinely care about, and suddenly he was gone, shot in the back… and it wasn’t just because he died, but he left a friend behind, a close friend. Being a guy who has a best friend who I care about dearly, that got to me. The idea of anyone losing such a friend is horrifying to me, and here it played out in front of my eyes… and it wasn’t in a movie, or a book, or on TV. It was in a game.

The point I am trying to make is that things effect different people differently. This can work not just for interactive experiences, but for books, or movies, TV, comics… Cookie commercials at Christmas time. In the end, no one is an emotional template for the entire world, not me, not my best friend, not… (who’s the woman who wrote Twilight? Stepheie Meyer?) not David Jaffe. No one. And to say that something can’t convey emotion is to set yourself up as an emotional template to which the rest of the world has to adhere to. That simply doesn’t work, because we all have different triggers that bring about different emotions.

Dear, David Jaffe

I have been playing videogames since the age of three, and from there I have watched this industry grow and change in ways that I could have never imagined. We have reached a point, however where we are at somewhat of a fork in the road, if you will. On one path is experiences like God of War, Twisted Metal, Zelda, and Mario. These experiences are focused on gameplay before story, which isn’t wrong. I love popping in Super Mario Bros. on my SNES or Super Mario Galaxy on my Wii and stomping Goombas just for the fun of it. The other path is where you find your story-driven experiences. Uncharted and Heavy Rain and Indigo Prophecy lie beyond these paths. These games are enjoyable in a different way, sure, walking around a shopping mall yelling “JASON! JASON!” isn’t mindlessly fun, but it brings you into a story in ways not possible anywhere else.

I watched your DICE speech and, honestly I have a few problems with it.  It’s not that you aren’t a fan of story-driven experiences, and I’m fine with that. To each his own in that regard, however, you don’t stop there. My problem lies in your first line of the speech “My talk is actually a warning about why we shouldn’t tell stories with our video games. I think it’s a bad idea, I think it’s a waste of resources and time and money and, more importantly, I think it actually stunts, and has stunted over the last ten years or so, the medium of videogames, sort of at our own peril.” This is essentially a call for the end of the story-driven experience, and I can’t find anything I disagree with more in relation to this industry.

Now, there is something I feel I need to be extraordinarily clear on: The story driven experience will, by no means, kill the gameplay-driven experience. The proof of that can be seen in the success of games like Call of Duty. I think we can all agree that the gameplay, and more precisely, the mulitplayer drives the Call of Duty franchise, and every year hundreds of people line up in front of the little GameStop in town to get their hands on the newest iteration of that franchise. The Elder Scrolls is by no means story-driven, and it won 2011 game of the year at Spike TV’s VGAs. The Legend of Zelda, an Immensely popular franchise is built from a gameplay standpoint and the story is built around that,  and let’s not forget everyone’s favorite plumber. The extent of story in Mario games is usually a cut-scene at the beginning showing Bowser, or Bowser Jr. or one of Bowser’s minions carrying off Princess Peach, and Mario giving chase. There will always be a market for Mario and Zelda and CoD and TES, and so on, so, honestly, it’s folly to think that there is any chance that the story-driven experience will drive out the gameplay and fun-driven experiences.

Your first example is the beginning of Arkham City, saying that the control was taken out of the player’s hands for the beginning of the game in service to the story. I find this a little funny, because right before that you mention how IP helps people connect emotionally with the product. I don’t know about you, but I have to say that I wouldn’t have connected with, and come to love Arkham City as much as I do had it not been for that opening sequence. Not only does it, for me, work from a story standpoint – really driving it home that you will find no friends within these walls – but it also works from a gameplay standpoint. When that chain broke, my first thought was “Ok, Cobblepot, it’s on.” When it comes down to it, that moment wouldn’t have meant as much, and dare I say – It wouldn’t have been as fun had that sequence either (a) been a cut-scene or (b) not existed. The reason is that, I was with Bruce, I was the invisible hand guiding him along as he rocked himself out of the chair, as he walked into the city itself, and as he first was confronted by the Penguin. When the handcuffs broke and Bruce was free to unleash all his skills on the Penguin and his henchmen, I couldn’t help but smile and I enjoyed the fight that followed all the more because of it.

Later on you make another declaration as you are talking about the difference between movies and games. You said that in these instances, I’ll use the D-day example, essentially you are storming the beaches of Normandy and your main thought is “how do I get to that rock”. And yes, when storming the beaches of Normandy, you’re absolutely right that will be your thought process, but there is also no context to put in story at that point. It’s not like you’re going to be running up the beach, bullets flying past you and the soldier next to you is trying to tell you about his kids. At that point, it’s all about the fight. However, that moment means nothing with out the before and after. Lets say the game begins and you are in Perl Harbor, you experience the moments before the attack as the invisible hand leading your character – let’s call him Jeff – Jeff has a wife and a kid, you get to experience the first hour of the story leading Jeff through his life, meeting his friends, meeting his wife, his kid, his dog… establishing a connection with this character, without which you would never have. After that, when it comes down to it, the storming of Normandy beach is not just about shooting the Axis, but you are going into battle with Jeff for his wife, his kid, his friends, his dog, every one who’s life was effected at the beginning of the experience.

Next you equated video games to football. Ok, there is a stark contrast here. If anything, you can equate the multiplayer to a game of football because that, actually is focused on being competitive. There is a reason that the singleplayer is called “story mode”. Whether it is driven by the story or the gameplay, that element is there. Whereas in football it isn’t. Football is about the competition, single player story mode is not.

I think games, through the interactivity can provide a greater experience than movies can. The greatest example is Uncharted 3’s desert experience. My roommate, who is nowhere near the story guy I am, came to me after playing the desert sequence in Uncharted 3 and said “Come play Uncharted, you have to experience this for yourself.” When I did I was speechless, something no game, movie, or book has ever truly done. The experience simply washed over me as I went with Drake through the Rub’ al Khali desert. I didn’t watch him, I wasn’t a passive observer, I was with him. Step for step, I went with him through the desert, I, the invisible hand, guiding him along as he tried to survive the harshness of the sands before him. I, to this day, do not have the words for what this sequence means to me. I still get chills when the cutscene ends and all I see is Drake in the middle of an infinite expanse of sand as the camera pans around him, and I only get more into it when I realize that it is me who controls Drake here. That, in a way, with out me, he can’t go on. You don’t get that out of movies or books. Yea, both mediums have fantastic moments, I’ll never forget the image I got as I was reading the segment about Sarah and Kelly chasing the velociraptor in The Lost World by Michael Crichton. I will never forget how I felt when I heard Arigorn’s speech at the Black Gates in Return of the King. But those are not the same experience I got out of leading Drake through the desert. The sense of wonder I got out of that experience can’t be re-created in movies and most definitely not in books.

In the end, the addition of story can immensely help the context of the interactivity, and the interactivity can, in turn immensely aid the story and the immersion into said story, and to say that is dangerous is not only ignorant, it’s down-right offensive to these great experiences and the people who enjoy them. Also, why is so mind-boggling to think that both experiences can exist together? Why is it so preposterous to think that we can have our Uncharteds and our Marios too? We aren’t seeing the future of gaming. We are seeing the birth of a new medium. A medium that can exist along side video games, which can bring story in ways never before imagined. We are seeing the birth of Interactive Cinematic Entertainment.

Edit: I’d like to add one last thought to this. You may not support the idea of story-driven interactive experiences (be it games or otherwise), but don’t go out, call it dangerous and call for it’s end. Sure, it may not be for everyone, but there are people (like myself) who love this direction and love the experiences it produces. To call it dangerous, to try to make people stop, I think is no better than the man standing outside a church or school and burning books because he disagrees with it’s content. Just because you don’t like an experience, don’t tell me that I can’t.