Noble Carrots

Inspired by last month’s Blogs of the Round Table theme, Taking Games Seriously, Making Games Seriously, on designing a game concerning a pressing social issue, I decided to write this post. Please note that it contains some themes which may prove disturbing.

Rated AO. Titles rated AO (Adults Only) have content that should only be played by persons 18 years and older. Titles in this category may include prolonged scenes of intense violence and/or graphic sexual content and nudity.

Quo Warranto? appears to ask its players to - explicitly or otherwise, depending on their own “decisions” - endorse torture. I envision its release for the Nintendo DS. It is part First-Person, 3-D part side-scrolling 2-D.

In writing this piece, I have tried to stick to a specific, descriptive tone. I imagine an extremely linear game, in which the player’s own “input” is constantly mocked by the impetus of the game’s plot. Again and again, the player is presented with a situation in which they appear to have choices, where in reality their only choice is to defer to in-game authority or shut off the game altogether. The game comes across as impersonal and abrasive, even during its calmer scenes, so that the player never becomes comfortable, and as there are no goals to be reached, the player can never become satisfied with their progress. I don’t imagine it being a long game. Perhaps it would take less than half an hour to play through the entire thing.

The player finds themselves in a three-dimensional space: an office, not tidy, but not cluttered, and surrounded by the dated and ugly office furniture of the early 90s.  There are no windows. There are many coffee-cup ring-stains on the desk, which is noticeably large. There is an American flag in the corner. The office is somewhat spacious; apparently, the player is a Person of Some Import. There is little to do in the office, but there are many papers on the player’s desk. The player is beckoned to sit, and sort through their paperwork, which brings up a sort of subscreen consisting of hundreds of boring and very wordy documents. After a few seconds, however, certain words in the document on the top of the pile begin to swell and morph. Within moments, these proper nouns - formerly synecdoches - have completely transformed into the physical entities they represent, creating a new, crude, two-dimensional world, which the player interacts with through an interface not dissimilar to that of the LucasArts adventure games. The player’s avatar appears, and, now visible for the first time as a faceless suit, interacts with their paperwork physically and personally, just like Guybrush. And, just like Guybrush, the player is free to explore this new world as they wish.

In the player’s initial interactions with the characters and places named in the document, the player is able to comprehend little of what is being told to them. They are bombarded with waves of strangely-dressed peoples and foreign-sounding place names, and little is asked of them. Once the player has spent enough time in this world to recognise that they are out of their depth, they are suddenly forced out of the two-dimensional world of the documents and into reality. Another faceless suit sits across from the player, relaxing, with his feet resting on the player’s desk. Seeing the document in the player’s hand, this NPC reminds the player that he is a Person of Some Import, and asks him about “the case.” The player is given an opportunity to respond, and is presented with three dialogue options:

No. 1 “…”

No. 2 “…”

No. 3 “…”

“I’m your friend,” claims the NPC. “I’m your friend, and I’m here to help you.”

It is made clear to the player by the NPC that they will soon be asked to testify to the United States Congress, to give their opinion on this case as an expert on the subject matter. The player’s screen fades to black, and an impersonal muzak jingle plays to signify the passage of some time. Once the player resumes control, they find themselves back in the office, this time with a different pile of paperwork on their desk. Once again, they enter the adventure game world of the top document. Once again, they are free to explore this world as they decide. Some of the place names and people in this world are vaguely recognisable, since they appeared the last time the player entered this world. This time, too, there is some semblance of coherence to this exploratory experience. After some time, though, a man in a colossal, stripey hat meets with the player in an alleyway, and demands protection money. On discovering that the player has no money on him, the man demands that he sign a document offering his life in servitude, and the player is forced to sign their name on the touch screen in order to advance. At this point, the veil of the adventure world is once again abruptly lifted, and the player is returned to their office.

This time, the player has left the adventure world early enough to see the aforementioned NPC walk in, smiling with chalk-white teeth.

“I love you. Everything I do is for you.”

He beams at the player, and hands their avatar an envelope.

“Everything.”

The player’s avatar places the envelope in the bottom drawer of his desk, which he locks with a key. The NPC holds out his hand for the key, and the game cannot progress until the player drops it into his fleshy palm. His eyes wrinkling into his already nauseating smile, the NPC backs out of the player’s office, bowing every few steps.

“Everything.”

Again, the screen fades to black, and again, the non-committal muzak plays to signify the passage of an unknown period of time. Returning to their office, the player finds a different collection of papers on their desk, and, again, they enter the strange adventure world of the topmost document. This time, the world is just one giant labyrinth, inhabited by NPCs who spew spliced and confused platitudes. After some travelling, the player discovers their master, the man in the stripey hat, who demands only one thing of them: that they remain still and watch the events about to unfold. If the player ever attempts to move during the next scene, their movement is inhibited and the screen obscured by the document which they signed with the man earlier.

The man in the stripey hat drags a blindfolded, naked inhabitant of this strange world toward the player by a leash, and pushes him to the ground. The game forces the player to watch as he defecates on the prostrate man’s face. The player continues to watch as he pulls a blowtorch from his jacket pocket and burns the man’s toes into blackened, charred stumps, before ripping them from the man’s foot with a pair of pliers. Leaving the room for some time, the player is forced to listen to the man’s excruciating screams for over a minute before the man with the stripey hat returns, and shakes the player’s hand vigorously, staining their hands with blood.

One more time, the player returns to their office to see the NPC waiting for them. He beckons the player to come with him, and then leaves through the only door in the office. The player follows him, into a tiny, dark room and sits down on the floor next to the NPC, who sits at a small desk.

A few moments pass, and then the NPC introduces himself as “the United States Congress.” He introduces the tiny room, which he addresses as “the Court,” and the player, whom he identifies as “The Taxpayer.” He produces the envelope which the player placed in his bottom drawer earlier in the game, and from it, he extracts a number of glossy photographs.  Turning the face the screen, he shows the player the prints, which depict some extremely disturbing images of humans being tortured, and then asks them to agree that carrying out acts of violence such as these help to protect America. Once again, the player is presented with three responses:

No. 1 “…”

No. 2 “…”

No. 3 “…”

“Very good. Sign here, please.”

The player is presented with the contract which they signed earlier in the game, their signature still intact. The moment their stylus hits the touchscreen, the contract is retracted.

At this point, the NPC leaves with his papers, and the images of extreme torture are left on his desk for the player’s perusal. The game effectively ends here.

It seems to me that video game sequels are useful tools. Instinctively, as a pretentious ‘art’ enthusiast, I respond badly to the word ’sequel’, but I feel that video games can often exist in series more comfortably than other media. Rapid technological advancements are probably the main reason for this, but there are other reasons, too. Frequently, the sequel to a popular title bears only a passing resemblence to its predecessor. In these cases, often, the developer is simply using the same genre to explore a new world, and will concentrate on different themes and characters. Consider Grand Theft Auto, Final Fantasy and Grandia. In these examples, there is little continuity between the games in the series outside of the structure and functions of the game worlds. Of course, some sequels appear vacuous and derivative, like Tomb Raider, and many of those which attempt to mix things up end up ruining a great formula. I’m looking at you, Sonic.

I think that Rayman 2 is really one the greatest video game sequels I’ve played. The transition to 3D seems to work better for Rayman than it did for Mario. Don’t get me wrong, Super Mario 64 is fabulous - but it’s very different to Super Mario World. It’s not really a sequel so much as a new series involving the same characters. But the environment and mechanics of Rayman 2 are comfortably familiar for anyone who played Rayman without being repetitive or inaccessible for the newcomer. Rayman 2 feels like the right way to do a sequel.

I’ve been thinking about BioShock 2 lately. I saw some supposedly leaked screens not so long ago and I’ve heard some rumours, but I don’t really know what to think. I worry about how appropriate the word ‘re-hash’ might end up being.

Street Fighter hasn’t traditionally been all that shy of sequels. I’m excited about picking up Street Fighter IV and seeing how it works, even though I’m almost certain that it will barely differ at all from all of the previous Street Fighter games I’ve played. All the same, I’m not sure that too many fans would be receptive to the suggestion that we should stop buying these games because sequelling is superficial.

Welcome back. Did you miss me?

Starting today, I am going to be blogging back here again. It’s been less than two months since my last post, but it feels like a year. A lot has happened in that short period of time. It’s been nice to reflect on what really matters to me, and come away with the decision that this blog is one of those things. I’ve also been playing a lot of games - I’ve played through Psychonauts, God of War, Super Mario Bros., Super Mario Bros. 3 and Rayman 2 since last we spoke. I’m finally done with GTA IV, and have almost finished Fallout 3, too. It’s been a crazy five weeks.

In my upcoming posts, I’m going to reflect on a few ideas I’ve been thinking about, ruminate over the games I’ve played and make outlandish claims. So it’s back to business at usual here at Noble Carrots. I want to pen a series of posts on Dark Cloud once I get back into the swing of things. I’ve been thinking about that one for a while.

I had planned to link to all of my video games articles in the Leeds Student when I kickstarted the blog, but it looks as though that’s going to present some difficulties. So, apologies, but you’re going to have to be content with my blog posts for now.

Finally, I just want to thank everyone who’s stuck through the blog throughout its short hiatus. The readers are where it’s at - without you guys, I’d be nothing. So keep criticising and agreeing with me wherever you feel it’s appropriate. After all, what do I know? I’m just some jive blogger with a penchant for video games.

Starting today, Noble Carrots is going to be taking a temporary hiatus, because I just don’t have the time I need to tend to it right now. It’s easy to forget that I’m in my First Year at University sometimes! I have a lot of exams coming up, and I also have some priorities I need to re-assess. I’ve been dissatisfied with my last few posts, too, so this should be an opportunity for me to recharge my batteries and get up to date on my reading list.

I want to thank all of my readers for sticking with this blog so far. I’m grateful for everyone who reads my blog, but I want to especially thank those who take the time to comment on my posts. I wouldn’t have learned half of the things I’ve picked up recently if it wasn’t for you guys. To those who’ve picked me up when I’ve gone wrong, or probed my ideas from unseen angles, I am hugely thankful. You know who you are.

Rest assured, I will not forget about this blog. It’s been an amazing ride these last four months, and I have every intention of returning, in time. I just need to get a few things straightened out first.

Games with pretentions of being “cinematic” are problematic for a lot of reasons. I have argued before in this space that games which err (though I hesitate before definitively condemning the move an “error”) too far towards Hollywood are in danger of ceasing to be “games” altogether. I still feel that way, but I must capo my statement: I am also concerned that many of the most moving and the most profound experiences I’ve had playing video games have been during extremely cinematic moments. I was moved when Mareg died in Grandia II, and when I witnessed the innumerable deaths of black mages in Final Fantasy IX. These weren’t interactive scenes - I pressed a button to advance the dialogue in Mareg’s death scene, and the black mage massacre happened during a full motion video I could do nothing at all to influence - but they were still moving, and I must concede that they’re representative of the sorts of scenes I frequently bring up when attempting to illustrate the artistic potency of our medium.

These scenes aren’t just problematic because they threaten the core interactivity of the games they feature in. On another level, they often simply refuse to gel with it.

Games tend to be played in short bursts over time, unlike films, which tend to be watched in one chunk on one occasion. This is why game developers created the idea of “saving” in order to preserve the player’s progress. Most modern games save their state at specific play points. Grand Theft Auto IV autosaves after every successfully completed mission. This means that, if the player fails a mission, they have to play through the mission again (and all of the things they may have done since the previous mission ended). The resulting repetition isn’t just irritating. It dulls the mission’s salience.

In one mission in GTA IV, a character is killed during an action scene, and his friends are forced to abandon his body in order to escape safely. Their consequent reticence is something of a touching island in a sea of swearwords and guncrimes. Or at least, it was the first time. Since the first time, I have heard this same exchange numerous times, and I am very bored of listening to it. It is no longer the moving moment it once was. It’s a waste of my time, and a distraction to me as a player.

The issue is especially problematic when dealing with games with high difficulty settings. I am not an especially competent player of games, and I die frequently, even in games I love and play often. I am often forced to replay missions in GTA IV as many as ten times. When, in many JRPGs, re-trying that boss means watching three unskippable cinematics for a time before being taught the true meaning of futility, I’ll often elect to turn off my console rather than try again. Repetition is stultifying at the best of times. When it’s associated with the player’s failure, it’s even less welcome than usual. It’s as though the pervasive school of thought concerning game difficulty considers frustrating the player a meaningful goal. Why can’t games be a celebration of the virtues of play, rather than a narrow exercise in futility?

But repetition in games can include something of a self-righting mechanism. GTA IV goes some way towards this, admittedly. When driving to the location of any given mission, there are often two different conversations which the characters can have together. It’s a nice way of stopping the player from killing themselves out of frustration, but it’s only a temporary solution to the problem.

There are exceptions, of course. I was touched when Epona remembered me in Ocarina of Time. The beauty of that moment is that it’s entirely contingent on the player’s input. The player who runs through the game efficiently will never befriend Epona, or learn her song.

One of the biggest problems I have with all of this is that the whole point of video games is that they should be able to deal with it in their stride. Video games thrive on multiplicity and interactivity in ways other media can only dream of. (If you want to open the green door, then please turn to page 34.) Even what is ostensibly the same scenario should be capable of being multifaceted and different every time. Dealing with repetition should be something we have down to a fine art by now.

Last year, on the Gamasutra podcast (presented by Tom Kim), Iain Simons declared that it was “just obvious” that games are interesting. He asserted what others have intimated - that we don’t need to justify the statement that “games are art.” His comment seemed to be part of a wider argument that we don’t need to justify calling games art, interesting, or worthy of study. For the sake of the podcast, that was fine. Simons has done a lot for the public profile of games (at least in the UK), and he and Kim were hardly recording a podcast to discuss whether or not games were art. They could assume, for the sake of their conversation, that games were all of these things.

But the conversation has ended now, and we no longer have that luxury. We have to justify what we’re doing here, even if it seems obvious to us. You can’t just call the game an art form and hope to get away with it.

So when Roger Ebert claims that games aren’t high art, we shouldn’t react negatively. We should think about what that means.  When he made the now-famous claim, months ago, bloggers rolled their eyes and angry gamers flamed. This was the wrong response for a number of reasons. Firstly, that’s not how we do things around here. Secondly, he had a point. From his own blog:

Anything can be art. Even a can of Campbell’s soup. What I should have said is that games could not be high art, as I understand it.

The term “high art” may engender elitism, but I feel that - at least, as I define it - it is elitism of a linguistic nature and not a broader one. The concept, I suggest, is a valid one, even if the wording of its name embodies snobbery. (NB: high art, by my definition, is not the same as high culture. I would probably condemn the idea of there being a “high culture.”)

High art, as I understand it, is art (art here being “a created thing”) which exists for no purpose other than the immediate; the aesthetic. That is, high art is invention without utility. Can we say that games have no purpose? Compare the game to the painting. The painting exists for its own sake more obviously than the game does. After all, games, by their nature, have utility. By the very fact of their involving interactive mechanics, they necessitate internal utility. Externally, we’re already talking about what games can teach us, or where they can take us, or what they can do for us: they could teach us about a past war or civilization, simulate flying a plane, or even - somehow - visualise the development of a scientific theory. What do paintings do for us? Some of them look nice, but that’s rarely the raison d’êtré for the best paintings. It is in the nature of paintings to be; their utility as an ornament is usually peripheral. Games have obvious utilities. These utilities can be just as expressive and educational as anything else, but they are not representative of a medium which can call itself fine art. (Both of these media, by the way, are open to the criticism my father makes when he claims that games are not art: that they are designed for a very explicit purpose, and that that is to make money.)

I want to clarify my position, a little. I do disagree with what I understand Ebert to be saying when he asks,

If you can go through “every emotional journey available,” doesn’t that devalue each and every one of them? Art seeks to lead you to an inevitable conclusion, not a smorgasbord of choices.

Perhaps Ebert means to say that art forms may only express themselves along a linear plane. If he does, then I feel that he might have the makings of a coherent argument which excluded games from being considered high art. As it stands, he seems to be claiming that nothing which is open to different interpretations can be called art. I really hope that he’s not claiming that, because Roger Ebert is very articulate, and a pre-eminent film critic. I would hate him to be a madman.

He writes:

I might suggest that gamers have a prejudiced view of their medium, and particularly what it can be. Games may not be Shakespeare quite yet, but I have the prejudice that they never will be, and some gamers are prejudiced that they will.

If we take “prejudiced” to mean “subjective,” then I wouldn’t want to put myself in the camp which claims that games cannot be Shakespeare. I’m not really sure what to do with that particular phrase, but I wouldn’t want to say that games aren’t worthy of study, or that they aren’t moving. My purpose in starting this blog in September was to attempt to study games, and to explain why I found them moving. At the same time, though, I’m not sure that we can responsibly call them high art.

A lot of the trouble here stems from our definition of high art. Ebert has this to say:

Many experiences that move me in some way or another are not art. A year ago I lost the ability (temporarily, I hope) to speak. I was deeply moved by the experience. It was not art.

High art is not “what moves us.” Even art does not mean that. I think that we’ve proven that games can move us, and Shakespeare’s work has moved a few hearts by now, but that does not make either of these things art.

I’m not so sure that this matters. When I first declared that I planned to write this post, Michael Abbott responded, asking why we’d want games to be high art anyway. Would it make us play our games any differently, or make us enjoy them any more? No. Would it make them less worthy of study? Of course not. So what does it matter? It’s like arguing over whether pineapple is a fruit. (It’s not.) We might be interested in the answer, but it shouldn’t keep us up at night. When, as I brushed my teeth one morning, I came up with the idea for this post, I didn’t think “and that’ll be my last post, because if games aren’t high art, then why write about them?”

Furthermore, “high art,” as many of my Twitleagues appear to have noted, is a problematic term. No-one seems to be able to agree on what it means. In order to avoid the vagaries my blog has been accused of in the past, I have given it a definition I could refer back to. Perhaps this strikes you as artificial, but I had no choice. In any case, my definition of “high art” is certainly different from Roger Ebert’s. Make of that what you will.

What’s important to note is that being art isn’t the same thing as being worthy of study, or relevant. I can’t agree with Chris Hyde when he comments that “if games aren’t high art or don’t aim for that, then I’m spending a lot of time on something with a low return on investment.” Why should games have to be high art for us to enjoy them?

Now it’s time for you to have at my definition of high art, or my assertion that games aren’t it, in the comments section below.

Back in October, I published a post entitled The Role of the Tutorial, in which I claimed that the form of a game’s tutorial  or manual should  be subordinate to the game’s narrative. I still think that that’s important, but in this post I want to address a different issue. I want to argue that if a tutorial does exist, then it should at least encourage positive thinking practices and not reactionary ones. The tutorial level of Mirror’s Edge seems to miss the point a little. It behaves like a bad teacher, telling the player what to do, rather than how to do things, or how to think about them.

About halfway through the tutorial, the player is asked to press three buttons in quick succession in order to complete a task. If the player has been paying attention to the game up to this point, then they have probably come to grasp that one of these buttons is effectively Mirror’s Edge’s jump button. In any case, it generally propels Faith in an upwards direction. The other button used to complete this action, however, which serves to swivel Faith about 180°, has not been explained to the player. The problem is that this means that the player is being told - explicitly - to press some buttons, and emphatically not to complete the task. This may sound like a trivial quibble on my part, but I feel that it is representative of flawed thinking on the part of the game’s developers.

Let’s link this back to a more traditional understanding of teaching. It has been claimed that the best teacher is not the one who simply imparts knowledge, but the one who encourages positive thinking and learning practices. The teacher should teach their student not what to think, but how to healthily approach thinking. Mirror’s Edge, in the sense that it tells the player to press the buttons, and not to perform the actions which correspond to the button presses (or, even better, to traverse the obstacle by recourse to their existing tools), is the first teacher.

This is part of why I condemn most fighting games as little more than competitive quicktime events, though that discussion has got me in trouble in the past.

This particular approach to teaching harms the sense of organic play in Mirror’s Edge. I like play to involve granting the player a toolset and then letting them loose with it in a well-designed playground. For sure, that involves explaining to the player which buttons correspond to which actions, but that’s very different from what’s happening here. DICE isn’t giving the player the tools and then letting them put the tools together in well-designed levels. It’s looking at a dynamic which can be reached by combining existing tools and calling that a tool too. In my mind, making such a leap for the player removes the play element from the game. The result is something quite undesirable. It reduces play sections to glorified quicktime events. Wouldn’t it be far more rewarding for the player to receive their basic toolset (that is, an understanding of which button presses correspond to which actions) and then work out how to combine their tools for themselves?

I worry about this kind of situation. If players are to learn sets of button presses as single actions, and to react to situations as the game prompts rather than as each scenario demands, then what differentiates a video game from an interactive DVD menu screen? User input alone isn’t what makes a video game a game. We need an element of play, too. As Jorge Albor of Experience Points notes,

needing this assistance at all is a sign the bicycle was not built with training wheels. You wouldn’t need the developer’s artificial touch if the game could be “ridden” on its own.

Enabling the player to ride the bike all by themselves is the whole point of making a game.

And in identifying this flaw in the thinking behind Mirror’s Edge, I think that I’m coming to see Braid in a more favourable light, too. Braid nails this. First, it says, this is how you walk. Slowly, it goes through the rest of the player’s toolset. This is how you jump. Hey, you can rewind time if you make a mistake. And look - if you jump on these guys, you bounce slightly higher. After it’s done that, though, the player’s on their own. And that’s a powerful thing - it’s a wonderful thing. It does highlight, though, just how dominant certain negative thought processes are among people who play games. After all, my first player was utterly unable to come to terms with this approach.

I recognise that nothing in particular qualifies me to decide which game is the best released in any given year. My choice is entirely subjective. I have decided to share my thoughts on which game I feel said the most important things about or did the most for the medium this year. If you have some philosophical objection to my doing this, please launch your assault in the comments section below.

I’ve blogged about Grand Theft Auto IV three times now. Now, I told Michael Abbott, on The Brainy Gamer Confab Podcast, that my favourite game of 2008 was Super Smash Bros. Brawl. Honestly, I’m not going back on that - in this post, I claim that GTA IV is the best game of 2008. That, in my mind, is not quite the same thing as saying that it’s my personal favourite. I’m aware that this game is the best one released in 2008 is a somewhat contentious statement, and that’s why I’m about to spend so many words justifying it (and make some more contentious statements along the way).

So tell me how GTA IV is social commentary, precisely.

Well, Mr. Elrod, that’s not exactly a simple task. It illustrates parts of Western society which make many of us uncomfortable, and, in a lot of ways, it seems to celebrate them, or at least tolerate them. I know that many of my friends and contacts are disgusted by the game’s treatment of prostitution, organised crime and racial and sexual stereotypes. While I’m wary of both flogging a dead horse and digging up a freshly buried hatchet in talking about this game at the year’s end, I believe that GTA IV is laudable enough to merit abusing a few more metaphors.

All things considered, the non-specialist mechanics bring us closer to Niko’s identity. He’s not quite the everyman, but there’s a great sense of there but for the grace of God with Niko. He isn’t a Mafia member, and he isn’t CJ. He’s an immigrant who’s fallen on hard times, and if it wasn’t for Rockstar’s dubious attempt at providing an engaging backstory for Niko, then his story would be a wonderfully nauseating antidote to the hubris inherent in modern American patriotism. He can drive a car, but not like your Burnout avatar. He can shoot a gun, but he’s no Master Chief. He’s no fitness fanatic, either. On an early mission, when Niko is forced to climb a lot of ladders and run a great distance, he can be heard to shout “fuck!” repeatedly. He is not as otherworldly as past GTA protagonists.

The game is at its strongest when discussing the American dream. In that sense, Niko’s interactions with his cousin Roman are among the best moments in the game, and much of the rest of the narrative and play seems incongruent with these crucial points. Roman is a true believer. If nothing else, the titties have made him fall in love with The Land of Opportunity. Niko, on the other hand, is more skeptical:

Everything is just advertising with nothing to back it up!

It’s an attitude which pervades Liberty City. Packie, who quickly develops a rapport with Niko, has this to say:

Tell you what, I’m going to do a ton of lines, bang a lot of college girls, then die young leaving a bloated corpse. That sound like the kind of life worth saving?

When Niko responds, you can hear the venom in his voice. When, as the player guns down a rival gang, Niko can be heard to shout, “I LOVE THIS COUNTRY,” this is not a celebration of violence or the ease with which it is possible to buy a gun in New York City. It is Rockstar accusing the American dream of “leaving a bloated corpse.” When Niko pays a prostitute to have sex with him and then runs her over to collect his cash, it is not without context. Has Manifest Destiny been reduced to measuring a person’s worth by the relative size of their titties? Is this what society has come to?

I was disappointed to learn that Niko’s skepticism ultimately comes from a very sociopathic place, and not an intelligent and concerned one. I really can’t understand how or why Rockstar slipped up on this one. When the game starts, Niko worries to no end over every crime he’s committing. It doesn’t slowly ease him into a freer conscience. It just decides at a certain point that Niko no longer cares about his actions. It’s alienating.

If Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas made us part of the American dream RockStar so loves to mock, then GTA IV has us take on the role of an outsider looking in. This makes the satire that much more potent. When we drive Manny’s corpse to a streetside “doctor,” we are left with a sour taste in our mouths. A similar scene with CJ at the wheel would seem comical, or even pimpin’. Niko’s commentary is vital to the message of GTA IV, as it gives us a perspective we might otherwise lack. In previous GTA titles, it was possible to turn off the radio, avoid RockStar’s parody of American culture and focus on the bloodthirsty descent into crime the games offered the player. In GTA IV, it is impossible to turn off Niko. His bitter critique of the society he has been thrust into incontrovertibly affects the player’s perception of Liberty City. Grand Theft Auto is no longer all a big joke. It’s a comment on crime. We’re no longer going to bust a cap in someone’s ass in order to get revenge for some trivial gang slight. Instead, we’re forced into the criminal underworld by adverse circumstances. Niko wants nothing more than to move on with his life and start afresh, but, unlike Roman, he’s also a man who does what needs doing. When it becomes obvious that what needs doing involves criminal activity, he comes to terms with that fact very quickly.

There is a sense in which Niko’s feelings and the game’s narrative come into conflict. I’ve argued against the conventional wisdom on this point, but I’m coming round to the accepted view. In fact, in the last few weeks, I have become disillusioned with GTA IV. Like many games this year (Braid, Fallout 3, Mirror’s Edge and Fable II included), it is not everything I wanted it to be, or even everything it told me it was when I first started playing it. Once, I would have attempted to rebut Elrod utterly when he said this:

I’m seeing it bandied about that you can play through GTA IV without ever once being a criminal thug. Seriously? Not a single core mission needed to complete the narrative of GTA IV requires you to kill? Steal? Maim?

And it’s not true. I had been playing Niko as a highly intelligent (if uneducated), slightly cynical but not overly cold or violent man of mildly conservative values (as I believed I was being prompted to play by the game’s narrative), and that worked well for the first twenty hours of play, but, as Niko became more involved with more hardcore gangsters, he started wearing balaclavas and shooting down cops by the bucketload. Slowly, I felt my heart break. Niko wasn’t the honest man pulled down I so wanted Rockstar to make him. He was a killer. Worse: he was reckless. In one mission, when working with a group of others, Niko insists on more unnecessary violence while his peers recommend running. His bloodlust was very disappointing to me.

So, in more ways than one, this is the game which, to my mind, best captures the spirit of 2008 for the video games industry. It showed us just where we can go, and how beautiful that can be - how transcendent, how moving, how illustrative, how engaging, how involving, how visceral, how hands-on - and it promised to be all of these things. And, yes, in the end, it failed to deliver. But in a year wherein the issue of games - and game writing - “growing up” seems to have been at the forefront of everyone’s minds and on the tip of everyone’s tongues, just showing that we have the guts to stick a flag in the ground and proclaim that we can be this emotional and thought-changing medium is a huge achievement.

GTA IV isn’t the finish line. But we’re on the home stretch.

For the most part, Professor Layton and the Curious Village is a delight. It has a charming, early twentieth century rural French setting, it’s written more than moderately well, and the premise is a fine - if unbelievable - excuse for making up lots of puzzles. For all this, though, Layton isn’t a game without its faults. There is something seriously wrong in the town of St. Mystere.

The problem with Layton is that it sometimes betrays itself. It spends much of its time showing off its good side, but then, just as I’m beginning to fall in love with it, it offers an arbitrarily difficult puzzle which sits very awkwardly with what would otherwise seem like the game’s mission statement. The good side I’m talking about is the group of puzzles which can be worked out without prior knowledge, and which often require thinking along unfamiliar lines. The other group involves puzzles which bully the player - puzzles to which the player can’t possibly know the answer without having some experience of them which is external to the game.

One example comes early on in the game. One of the first few puzzles asks the Professor to identify the one of four possible hats which has a brim and height which are of the same length. The puzzle is a famous optical illusion, but even armed with that knowledge, it’s very difficult to tell which hat is the right one. And what if the player had never heard of this illusion? They would be reduced to guesswork at best.

By contrast, many of the game’s puzzles are more intuitive. Many involve nitpicking discrepancies in the semantics of the puzzle brief, or looking at objects from different perspectives. These puzzles give the player everything they need in order to proceed. That’s what games should be doing. I’m not suggesting that we remove the challenge from games, but rather that the challenge should be on the player’s terms. Layton arbirarily penalises the player. It could benefit from being more generous.

These puzzles aren’t the majority in Layton, but it’s difficult to avoid them. And it’s not their frequency which is the issue. It’s that they’re there at all. Their presence makes Layton like a young lover. It tells you that it’s all about you, babe… but then behaves offishly, reveling in tricking and alienating the player. It’s especially sad to see this kind of game design in Layton, because it comes so close to offering the player-focussed game I so badly want to see it as. Unlike Braid, it is comfortable with easing the player into their new environment, it’s just that it forgets this for every third puzzle.

In a sense, though, these puzzles are even more confounding than the unfriendly nature of Braid. After all, Braid technically does give the player everything they need - it’s just that it’s very coy about it. The worst puzzles in Layton don’t just alienate the player. They are simply impossible to solve without guesswork, or prior knowledge.

A number of bloggers have noted dissonance in Grand Theft Auto IV between the imperatives of narrative and the imperatives of play presented to the player. Specifically, I’m thinking of Iroquois Pliskin. In his blog post, The Tollbooth Problem, Pliskin exposes a problem he identifies in GTA games.

[T]he narrative portions of the game cast you in the role of a troubled-but-essentially-sane human being, not a deranged sociopath. But when the game hands the reins over to the player and lets them get around the world on their own you immediately find it difficult to play this role.

He goes on to describe how fun it is to break the speed limit and kill civilians, and how the game encourages the player to do these things.

Admittedly, there is a tension here. My argument, though, is that it is a wholly intentional and functional one.  Yes, it is problematic that, on the one hand, we see Niko trying to have normal relationships, but that on the other, we’re encouraged to pump lots of young men full of lead, but I do not believe that this detracts from GTA IV’s ability to be a coherent game. Instead, it reinforces its message.

The narrative of GTA IV chronicles Niko’s descent into organised crime against his own wishes. The mechanics and scenarios push the player down that path, even if they are uncomfortable with heading in that direction. The very fact that, when the game demands that the player kill x, they have no choice but to obey (no matter how long they stall for), is part of GTA IV’s plot. As a result, the player’s own game narrative evolves - one in which the game’s plot and its mechanics seem to disagree, and one in which they are uncomfortable with the scenarios which Niko is put in.

Thus, the sense of separation we get from Niko’s personal goals when we’re murdering mob bosses is entirely appropriate. Niko is no thug. He’s not CJ. He’s been drawn into crime against his will. And that’s the point. We’re supposed to be feeling conflicted, because that’s what Niko is feeling. And, more than that, this feeling of conflict leads us to do exactly what Niko has to force himself to do in order to deal with the dissonance in his own life: to put compassion out of our minds and focus on the job in hand.