Escapism has been described as an avoidance of reality, and when you put it that way it can seem a little depressing. Avoiding something that’s bringing you down or, worse, destroying who you are as a person, could be seen as running away from problems and hiding your head in the proverbial sand.

But as someone who’s dealt with more than their fair share of therapy, I know it’s often encouraged to escape the banal and mundane moments in life and offer yourself a distraction. As long as this is approached with a healthy attitude, it can benefit someone suffering with problems by allowing their mind to concentrate on something else, freeing up some of that precious grey matter to then, later, concentrate on those intricate issues.

Many forms of entertainment are seen as relaxing and distracting, but gaming seems to be a true escape. This topic is one I’ve personally explored before on this very site, but after listening to lots of feedback from people who took part and colleagues who have given their own opinions, it seems that videogames perhaps offer more of an escape than any other form of media. Of course, movies and books can go some way to distracting you from life’s quandaries, but they seem just that: they’re a distraction, not an escape.

With gaming at its roots being a medium that requires interactivity, it’s probably safe to say you can give more of yourself over to ‘the game’ than a novel or work of cinema. But not everything can allow that freedom, that ability to “log out” of life for a while and just enjoy the moment. During times of grief, solitude or sadness, we all need time to clear our minds; to walk away from a problem and arrive later with fresh eyes or a new perspective. This is exactly what we do when we escape into a world of pixels and achievements.

A few of mine and Resolution’s close friends were eager to tell their stories of a time that they needed those brief moments of escape, something that allowed them to turn away from the issues surrounding them and become themselves again. I asked each of them to tell us specifically about a time in their life when they needed that moment – not only about the time itself, but which game provided that solace.

MY NAME IS CHRISTOS
When I asked ex-IGN, now-sensible-finance-journalist Christos Reid to tell me about moments  when he felt free of the shackles of life, he expressed how much sandbox games allowed him to enjoy a different kind of freedom – and perhaps learn how to be more confident too.

“You know, it’s an odd sensation, sinking into a game to the point where nothing else exists. I spoke recently on my blog about how I used World of Warcraft to deal with the death of my much-beloved grandfather and my isolation on campus whilst in my freshman year of university, and it worked to a certain extent – I made friends, I experienced live-action role-playing (great stress relief and a load of bruises), and I became a far more efficient in-game multi-tasker. But ultimately, I ended up more depressed, and, in January ‘07, left Azeroth and Outland for good.

Before the eternal grind-addiction of the MMORPG, however, there existed another type of gaming escapism that became exclusive to those seeking more than the simple blow-by-blow gameplay of an FPS or platformer. That game was the sandbox game, and if you owned a GameCube, it was largely inaccessible, save for two titles that single-handedly reinvented my love for videogames and their use in dealing with my fluctuating mood patterns.

[Continues...]

By Lewis Denby

Maybe writing for games is some sort of elite club.

Firstly, no one can find the venue.  We’ve been invited to a panel discussion, and a collection of revered writers are supposed to be talking about the process of delivering narrative in videogames at 3, Albion Place in Leeds.  Which doesn’t seem to exist.  None of the buildings on Albion Place have numbers on them, and the only place that looks remotely like a conference venue is called The Leeds Club.  We file nervously into an inconceivably posh foyer.  It’s the right place.  We’re ushered upstairs.

The talk’s supposed to start at six.  It very much does not.  It gets to twenty past, and a few recognisable faces are loitering.  No one’s told us anything.  Half past, still nothing.  We’ve been promised a free drink in the bar afterwards.  The bar closes at nine!  We’re going to miss out on valuable drinking time!

Eventually, at 25 to seven, it begins.  Charles Cecil of Revolution Software, John Dennis from Team 17, The Mustard Corproration’s Marek Walton and freelance writer Andy Walsh emerge with pints of beer.  That’s why they’re late!  They’ve been given their free drinks already!  The cheek!  Chairing the panel is Game Republic Sector Manager and former PC Zone editor Jamie Sefton.  He is drinking a coke.

The night’s a part of Screen Yorkshire’s collaboration with Game Republic, with a remit to communicate and discuss videogame-related ideas with the Yorkshire development scene and budding game development students.  Over the next couple of months, a collection of events are scheduled, culminating in October’s Eurogamer Expo, from which we will be furiously reporting.  Expect plenty of hands-on previewing.  And expect hangovers.

//What’s a game, anyway?
Sefton begins by asking the panel about the differences between writing for games and writing for other media.  The evening’s catered primarily towards writers who are looking to make the move from their current field into the fast-growing and increasingly wealthy videogames industry.

“When you write for TV or film, you’re trying to create a sense of empathy between the audience and the character,” offers Charles Cecil, whose credits include Beneath a Steel Sky and the Broken Sword series.  “In a game, you’re not actually creating that sort of bond at all.  You want to motivate the player, and give them interesting things to do.  The story is a vehicle [for that].”

“A game is inherently a series of repetitive actions,” adds Marek Walton, one of the directors of The Mustard Corporation, a collective of videogame writers and writing consultants.  “Writing lends logic to these.”

But the panel is clear that writing for games is no straightforward process.  Andy Walsh – a freelance writer with credits ranging from Medieval II: Total War to Heavenly Sword, Halo 3 to Prince of Persia, and even TV soaps Emmerdale and Byker Grove – points out the vast spectrum of what we understand to be videogames, and how this means each writing project can vastly differ.  “There’s no such thing as ‘a game’,” he claims, citing the difference between writing a collection of cut-scenes in which the entire story is explained, and writing a 60-hour adventure game in which control is never taken away from the player.

But “the principles of writing are universal,” says Walton – and the panel agrees.  Although writing for games is a specific craft, many skills, they say, are transferrable across a range of media.

//Breaking through
“The industry’s incredibly competitive,” says John Dennis of Team 17, developers of the legendary series of Worms games. “There are many people looking to get into the industry, as games have become mass market rather than a geeky subculture.  There was some TIGA research that said there were 75 games-related courses in the UK, so to fit all these people into the industry is very hard.  That said, here’s a panel of people who all work in the games industry.  If you want to do it… [and] if you’re talented, then do it.  I mean, I’m in the industry.

“Don’t give up.  That’s the difference between people who are in the industry, and people who aren’t in the industry.  It is hard; it seems very cliquey…”

Walton cuts him off.  “You’re actually making me want to leave the industry,” he says.

The panel are talking about the ease with which new writers can break through into the industry.  Writing for games is often seen as a dark area, one that’s filled primarily by developers taking on extra roles, rather than writers specifically focusing on that are of the creation process.  It’s often true, but the panel acknowledge that there are these jobs available, for those who truly understand their craft.

[Continues...]

By Fraser McMillan

In part one of Redefining First-Person, I examined a game that uses the perspective for something that is still very twitch-reliant and action oriented, albeit lacking in firearms.

Indeed, the game I promised to cover in the follow-up article, Brain Pipe, was again in a similar vein – reflex-based and fast-paced. Mike Inel’s second and currently final foray into interactive art, Where, totally subverts all expectations of what first-person should be and, on balance, provides more suitable material for the investigation.

Upon starting, the player is presented with a white-saturated world in which there exists nothing other than a single pillar and an accompanying bright object. On closer inspection it appears to be a balloon, but as an approach is made, tiles fall from the nothingness above and imprison you within a miniature labyrinth. It’s only natural to feel entirely lost at this point, but with a little bit of exploration you’ll discover that the four corners of the maze give the player agency to alter the world they inhabit. Already it’s clear that this isn’t your usual first-person fodder, nor even standard independent esoterica.

Four presets with aesthetic differences and slight layout modifications are the only changes possible, but this is where the puzzle element is introduced. The aforementioned light balloon in the middle is the sole route out of this beautiful nightmare, and some guesswork, coupled with a knack for direction, will lead you to the goal. Each corner of the tile-space sweeps away the maze and current style and replaces them with whichever alternative the player selects.

//Slow-burner
Having felt out the general thrust of the game, and being ever-so-slightly let down by its singular focus on abstract rules, my spirits lifted when I noticed a trio of veiled and possibly accidental – but radical – departures from first-person play. Even among non-violent puzzle games that use the perspective (Portal being the obvious touchstone), Where is in next to no company. Its approaches to goals, narrative and protagonist are all seismic shifts, but changes that, for better or worse, will be largely ignored.

Firstly, though its map design and objective are blatantly rigid, the way in which I came to understand the world’s rules certainly was not. It arrived as a belated and unexpected revelation, but this was perhaps not Inel’s intention; I’ll admit that I was close to stroking the Esc key in frustration, though personal dim-wittedness does not equal bad design. Such a reaction is the wrong one to have, because the pretence was plainly outlined at the very beginning, and it was in my haste that I failed miserably to grasp the connotations.

[Continues...]

By Greg Giddens

Multiplayer has dominated our gaming experience over the last few years, and with the introduction of reliable online functionality in consoles and their games came a surge of popularity, as the PC and console crowds united for the first time in history to celebrate online gaming.

But why is online gaming so great? Why do we allow it to compromise our single-player experience? Why play with others when you can play with yourself?

//Two’s a crowd
Online gaming is starting to compromise our single-player experience, and we shouldn’t just accept this and move on. The single-player mode is not an antiquated function for developers to phase out and replace with multiplayer. In some cases, that’s a recipe for removing the soul from a game. Games have a personality. They’re like friends. When you play through the single-player component of a game, you get to know this friend, share in its joy and sorrow, and this all leads to the story the game is trying to convey.

Most modern games are story-driven, and there’s a reason for this: we enjoy the escapism of interacting with a different world. And to make this world more tangible, characters and scenarios are created for us to experience, for us to relate to. Then, when you switch to the multiplayer side of a game, your bond with that character is broken, and instead you now play a shell of the character you just spent time bonding with, surrounded by other shells with the same face but slightly different dressing. What’s left? Just the grind for arbitrary experience or accessories to style your shell with, just so you can be unique, like everyone else.

There’s an argument that multiplayer offers far more longevity to games, through the delivery of a more dynamic gaming experience, and there is certainly merit to that. However, with more creativity, the single player mode could easily become more dynamic, adding replayability through – for example – AI interaction and multiple storylines, or even by blurring the lines between the single- and multiplayer experiences by having an online component merged with the single-player game.

A perfect example of an innovative merger between the two would be Demon’s Souls on the PlayStation 3, which allows, through online functionality, other players to join in as temporary enemies or allies when in spirit form to regain corporeal form back on their single-player adventure. For a less innovative but no less enjoyable multiplayer enhancement to the single-player experience, it’s simple enough to turn to cooperative play through the single-player mode, a feature that’s been seen in a wide variety of games throughout the medium’s history. The point is, the single-player experience needn’t be solely that. The addition of seamless multiplayer options within the core experience enhances the enjoyment, taking the benefits from the two modes and combining them.

//Can’t we have both?
Often, it’s the experience of immersion in a game that counts. Single-player offers that natively, whilst multiplayer tends not to; it has a different focus. I’m not saying multiplayer should change, but I am saying that single-player should not be overlooked. Multiplayer can be deep – the aforementioned co-operative play through the single-player campaign, for example, allows you to have a personal experience with a game while still having human and AI interaction, and games that create a persistent online world for players to shape also show more depth. Tom Clancy’s End War, for example, features a dynamic world map where players fight for regions. In this game, and similar titles, one person can make a difference, much like how you can make a difference in the single-player game mode. A deeper multiplayer component is often the result of enhancing the single-player experience with more players, rather than creating a new and more hollow experience on top of the single-player.

[Continues...]

If it was looking to provoke a reaction, it succeeded; the only problem is working out exactly what that reaction was. Perhaps, like The Gutter a few weeks ago, it was actually taking the piss, making me look like an idiot for treating it with such sobriety.

That can’t be the answer.

Alternatively, it could just be a half-baked comment for comment’s sake. Maybe 2Dcube had no idea what she or he wished to achieve, maybe the goal was to annoy people, get under their skin with some semi-ironic bullshit. A lot of great art prods, demeans and laughs at the viewer, listener or user, coaxing, daring, them to work out what it’s trying to say. At other times, of course, reading between the lines is easy – indeed, the lines themselves can be meaningful. This can also be an attribute of great art. It needn’t be subversive nor blindingly obvious to succeed, but does Execution even qualify as artful? Of course it is; that it happens to be “not great” is almost incidental, if a dreadful shame.

The premise is thus: a man stands tied to a pole. Behind him is a wall, beyond which is blackness. At his feet are dust, grit and tumbleweed. Are we in a desert, a prison, a camp? It matters not. Nor does his backstory, nor indeed yours. You are looking through the scope of a rifle with the ability to fire in bursts at a click of the mouse; your magazine is infinite in capacity. It’s just you and him and the wind and a firearm. [At this point, spoiler warnings are inevitable. You might want to follow this link and download Execution before proceeding.]

//Moral choices
I tried all I could. I tried emptying the clip, I tried shooting everything in sight, I tried pressing the escape key. That worked, of course, but not in the context of the artwork, not on 2Dcube’s terms. Eventually, I caved in. I shot the man, shot him in the neck, shot him dead. A pang of guilt: what if I was an IDF soldier and he a Gaza civilian? What if I was a Chinese prison guard and he an unjustly charged victim? What if he had a family, a wife, a child, a cat, a gerbil? On the other hand, what if he was a serial killer, convicted by a court and condemned to this fate by my hand? What if he was a paedophile who had raped my daughter and I had finally tracked him down as an act of personal retribution?

As I said before, the periphery is irrelevant. The comment here is not to do with the specific details of this case; it’s to get us thinking about all the other virtual men we’ve killed, the families we’ve torn apart, the innocent blood you and I have on our hands. Is killing moral in any circumstance, even one that isn’t tangible beyond the rumble of a controller and a spurt of simulated crimson liquid on a monitor?

Were this true of Execution, I’d happily consider it great art. There’s a massive, jarring problem though. Because it’s a ‘game’, in either the most insulting or most mischievous way possible, you can ‘win’ or ‘lose’. That’s an “or” there. Once he’s dead there’s no way back, your decision to kill – were it out of curiosity, bloodlust or depressing inevitability – is forever etched into Windows’ registry, and upon restarting the program you will be informed that “Your actions have consequences. It’s already too late.” This would have been a deft and stark reminder of the lasting effects of a piece of great art, were Execution befitting of the description. All it serves to remind me of, sadly, is the foolish end screen: “You Lose”.

There’s always the chance that this was designed to parody the medium’s painfully ingrained tropes, but in reverse. That, however, seems a little too clever to be possible. Were loss inevitable, again, it could have been an interesting comment. We lose either way because we didn’t fulfil our objective, but neither did we follow the obvious moral path. But what makes this piece really hard to stomach is the “You Win” screen. Leave Execution running for seven minutes without shooting the victim, and you emerge victorious. Not only is this the most arbitrary triumph imaginable, but it comes with such baggage. For a start, it has robbed the world of a potentially great piece of art.

I lose indeed.

By Phill Cameron

My dad always used to race from inside the car when we played Project Gotham.

I could never understand it, confused as to why he wouldn’t want to watch the car drift gracefully around the corners, or shunt into the opposition. Thing is, when he’s driving a car, he drives it like he does in real life – from behind the wheel. Without a license, the only experience I’d had driving cars was Scalextrics and Hot Wheels, where I’d been able to see just the exterior the whole time while racing – so, naturally, I ended up picking the slightly more detached view of behind the car when in-game.

It’s not really as simple as all that when you replace the accelerator with a trigger, and suddenly you’re playing as the superhuman protagonist of most games. You see them performing all these incredible feats, and yet, really, they’re not quite you. Not in the same way that you’re the protagonist in a first-person game, the only disconnect being the hands at the bottom of the screen that aren’t quite like your own. There’s a detachment, a once-removed mentality that is almost subconscious when we make the shift from first-person to third-person, that, while mostly irrelevant, makes a real difference when concerning the actions you’re either forced or driven towards.

//Who’s who?
Assassin’s Creed is an undeniably enjoyable game, regardless of the overly repetitive side missions, or the lack of versatility in the actual assassinations. But equally, lead character Altair is undeniably a dick. The game starts with his arrogance culminating in the death of one of his fellow assassins, and throughout the game he displays contempt and pettiness towards almost everyone he meets. The fact he’s got an utterly nonsensical American accent that’s both snarky and dismissive at the same time hardly helps.

It doesn’t really matter, though, because he’s not you. He’s just another action figure you’re playing with. His decisions are not your own, and it only grates a little because you don’t particularly like him, yet he’s omnipresent during your play time. It almost doesn’t matter that he’s hugely entertaining to control, from his ability to climb almost anything to the ease and brutality with which he dispatches guards and the insane alike.

It’s a question of analogy, really. In the third-person game, you’re the puppet master or the child with his toys, orchestrating events. Your only concern is with the progression of the story, and making some really cool stuff happen. Remove that disconnect, and the puppet master becomes at best an actor, placed in a situation where his actions are his own, despite just playing a role. For the most part, games manage to avoid the rather sticky situation by providing the player with the luxury of choice, and anything he doesn’t want to do he can merely opt away from. Recently, however, things have been pushing in a different direction.

Far Cry 2 had you playing a mercenary in an unnamed African nation plagued by civil war and lawlessness, driven by the single goal of finding an arms dealer named The Jackal. Along the way you meet other equally violent mercenaries, an entire countryside hell bent on killing you and you alone, and various representatives for the games two factions. They give you missions, such as blowing up mines and killing opposition leaders, and your character mindlessly accepts them, driven only by the need for more diamonds to fuel his hunger for ever more deadly weapons, which will, of course, help him find the Jackal.

[Continues...]

By Daniel Lipscombe

Editor’s Note: This article began as a short, heartfelt editorial on the positive effects of gaming when dealing with tough real-life issues.  Thanks to your help in answering Daniel’s questions via Twitter, it’s grown into something more.  It’s an exploration of the wonderful things videogames can do to us, all extrapolated from a simple question: why do you play games?

Do keep on Tweeting us with your answers, too.  We’re likely to use them in a future examination of the topic.  You can find us at www.twitter.com/ResolutionMag.

During an interesting conversation with a good friend of mine, we stumbled upon the subject of why we play videogames and hold the hobby so dearly.

His thoughts suggested that he played games as they are an interactive art form with which he held more of a connection than movies or books. An interesting point on its own, but the conversation continued, and my own response was the one that held the topic for the longest time.

Videogames have been with me since I was a child, and they were always played to entertain – something to pass time until the next episode of Knightmare or the next time a friend came to visit and we attempted to finish Rolling Thunder 2 again. The content of this entertainment always flew  over my head, even through the PlayStation era and my teenage years. Only certain moments in gaming ever strummed the heart strings as I aged mentally and physically – Aeris dying at the hands of Sephiroth and, later, the general feeling and atmosphere of ICO.

In recent years I have grown to respect story, ambience and design, and it’s these pillars that hold up many of the games that we hold dear. After learning to respect these aspects of games, my answer to why I play them has changed. Now, it’s all about escapism; the ability to press start and venture into a different world, become someone else. Talking about this escapism led me to think more about why everyday gamers press ‘start’ each day.

Everybody goes through some form of hardship in their life, and each person chooses a different way to escape these troubles. For myself and many others, it’s with a controller, or keyboard and mouse. Whether you’ve had a bad day at work or your partner has left you, you know that you have a home in Albion, the Capital Wasteland, Midgar or even on the battlefields in World War 2.

This escapism has never been more prominent to me than in the last two years. In February 2007, my three-year-old daughter passed away as the result of a car accident. My life fell apart, and I was on a knife edge, ready to jump into a chasm. But I escaped. Picking up a controller allowed me to step away from these problems. I absorbed every game that was released at the time, and each one took me away from my problems and challenged me, albeit in a material and competitive way, giving me something to strive for.

It’s my belief that videogames have the ability to transport you away from life in a more in-depth way than other forms of entertainment. Typically, you’ll be taking on the role of characters who have their own problems, but their problems nearly always have a solution – be it by finding an exit, shooting their way out, finding the princess or winning the tournament. There’s often a resolution at the end that leaves you with the contentment of achieving something, and in a world full of so many problems this can only be a positive thing. The game pad or mouse gives you a sense of control that’s so difficult to attain in life.

[Continues...]

Yesterday, a venomous J.D. Richardson spewed a couple of pages of hatred towards predefined protagonist types in videogames.  It was a thorough and convincing article that I’m sure a hell of a lot of people are going to agree with.

I’m not one of them.  I won’t let him go unanswered.  Not on my home soil.

Let’s be realistic here.  Videogames, though their popularity and respect continues to rapidly rise, are still the geeky cultural outsiders.  They’re still the pillars of modern society that the mainstream knows relatively little about.  They’re still desparately trying to clamber through into the consciousness of the population, still clinging on to the hope that, one day, they’ll be as huge as film or music or literature.  And, though the videogame industry is one of the most prosperous in the world, they’re still some way off achieving this.

The only way forward is to accept the bigger picture.  If we demand more player-generated protagonists, more role-playing and stat-juggling and facial manipulation, we’ll struggle to get anywhere.  Videogames need iconic, recognisable, respectable characters – and the only way to approach this is with predefined, professional character designs.

//Connections
PacMan, Mario, Sonic, even Lara Croft – they’re all gaming icons with whom people of all ages and all interests can identify.  They’re responsible for giving the medium a good name within the general population.  Conversely, the hyper-detailed character generations of modern role-playing titles are responsible for the exact opposite.

They’re what make people assume we’re snotty-nosed, greasy-skinned, shaggy, lonely teenagers, with only the knowledge that we can live out our fantasies through a videogame to keep us sane.  They’re what make people snigger and suggest we created a female character because it’s the closest we’ll ever get to having a real girlfriend.  They are, often, a fantastic way of delving into our own psyches and deciphering what makes us tick in virtual worlds – but that’s a selfish perspective to approach this from.  We need to think bigger, wider.

It’s not impossible to have created for us a videogame protagonist with whom we can entirely connect.  We don’t need to have the reigns here.  Half-Life’s Gordon Freeman is the most immediate example.  There is nothing about Freeman that demands any user-tinkering whatsoever.  He’s a blank slate; a character ready for us to inject with our own personality, without adjusting a single slider.  He’s a face on the box, an enigma throughout the franchise.

He’s also somebody that becomes a hero throughout the series.  This is the truly evolutionary stuff.  At the start of Half-Life, he’s merely a very clever bloke with a prestigious research job.  He’s unassuming, bespectacled, bearded.  It’s only through our guidance of this man through a terrible scenario that he becomes a revered figure; and, arguably, it won’t be until the end of the Half-Life 2 saga that he could be considered a classic, timeless hero.

[Continues...]

By J.D. Richardson

“We don’t need another hero,” Tina Turner once said. Well, yes we do, but do we need another cookie-cutter, bland-as-your-arse hero? No, we don’t.

Guess what, Duke Nukem? You’re old hat, a dinosaur. Your services are no longer required as protector of the Earth. Why? Because we have a whole new breed of hero, a hero who comes from the very mind of the players themselves – and what can be more awesome than your own personal hero whose destiny you’re allowed to shape with your own hands?

//Is it me you’re looking for?
The brilliance of modern computing technology allows us to have loads more fun than we had ten years ago. Now, in expansive modern RPGs such as Oblivion, Fallout 3 and Mass Effect, we can literally mould an alter ego as if manipulating clay with our bare hands. We craft who we want to be, we decide what their personality is like and what their skills are. Frankly, I find it incredible, and absolutely love it when a game throws me into a screen with a generic head to shape and a ton of options. It’s a bit like that video for the Lionel Ritchie song Hello, where the blind girl sculpts his face and it looks nothing like him – only here, you can sculpt anything.

Although I guess you could try to make a Lionel Ritchie in space if you really wanted to.

Then there’s the clothes on your back, which also have an effect on how you perceive your own hero. Take Oblivion, for example. You could be a knight in shining armour, roaming the countryside doing good deeds; or a wizard in grand robes being all wizardly; or even a shadowy assassin, hooded in dark leather, stabbing people in the back.

Failing those, you could just mix and match to your heart’s content. Maybe you don’t want to be a shadowy assassin in dark leather; maybe you want to be a shadowy assassin dressed in jaunty, brightly coloured noble-wear with a big feather in your hat. Or a wizard in shining armour. All these choices are yours to make for your personal, heroic alter ego. It bridges the connection between player and game even further than ever before. I don’t really get as excited about games that don’t offer some kind of customisation of the main character. Prototype, while absolutely brilliant and awesome in equal measure, would be just that bit more awesome if we could customise the hero – even if it were just a change of clothes.

//Duke’s a hazard
It must be quite hard for a lot of developers to let go and let the player create the main character. They want us to love their hero. Take Prototype again: Alex Mercer just isn’t that interesting in either dialogue or appearance. I know for a fact if I had the tools at the start of the game to mess around and create my own version of the protagonist, it would be a hell of a lot better than the default.

To be quite frank, Mario and Sonic are two of the worst designed and uninteresting heroes I’ve ever come across in gaming. I just don’t get the appeal of them. Don’t get me wrong – the Mario games themselves I love to bits (not so much Sonic, though, I have to admit – but who honestly gives a fuck about Mario himself, the star of the show? I certainly don’t. It could be anything jumping on mushrooms and punching bricks.

[Continues...]

By Andy Johnson

In part I of our investigation into the way real-world security issues are treated in videogames, we made a cursory examination of the supposed number one threat to world security today: terrorism. As we continue to explore the way games communicate messages about the ways to defend our social and personal safety, the next and related topic to look at is that of policing.

If we return to the concept of terrorism again for a moment, we can look at why policing is an important issue in the real world and why it’s significant that we’re taking in that propositional content from games about it. In the public mindset, terrorism is often seen as a chief in the pantheon of enemies to states. As citizens, our protection from threats by the state consists of policing. The safety net of having a police force – a relatively recent phenomenon in the grand scheme of things – is one of our principle benefits in “agreeing” to live under the authority of a state’s government. Often, a state is defined as an entity in a territory which has a “monopoly on the legitimate use of force”. The two main arms by which a state potentially operates this monopoly are the police force and the military; consequently, these are among the chief pillars not only of security, but also of what we know today as modern civilisation. Clearly, taking this into account, it’s important that we try to understand how we think about such forces. And again, intentionally or otherwise, games communicate a wide variety of messages to us about this set of linked ideas – force, legitimacy, authority, justice.

//Sticking to protocol
People around the world always seem to have been fascinated by their police guardians. It’s a testament to how significant to popular thought they are that they have such a vast array of nicknames – some complimentary, many rather less so. But whilst perceptions of them have varied from place to place and time to time, they are constantly portrayed in our media: even the briefest analysis of cops in TV series, films and books can show the enormous variety of approaches to the character archetype. We can go from the relatively realistic world occupied by Jimmy McNulty and co in The Wire to the glorious 80s daftness of Axel Foley’s day-glo existence as a Beverley Hills Cop. We can do this by way of Cagney and Lacey, COPS, RoboCop, Miami Vice, even Heartbeat. In their own small way, every one of these portrayals has informed our shared perception of the thin blue line, as part of our common cultural and social consciousness. The fictional nature of many of them does not inhibit their impact. No single depiction is ever likely to be as powerful as the Rodney King case is in Los Angeles or Hillsborough in Sheffield or Liverpool, but nonetheless, we are products of our experiences. The product can be our perceptions and the experiences can easily be cultural, and increasingly are, in an era of accelerated consumption.

And so as violence and force are among the key currencies of many videogame narratives, and among the key concepts we get to wield and make decisions about in games, it’s hardly surprising to find that police and policing have a long history as subjects in the medium. Often these have been film adaptations (RoboCop, The Untouchables) but sometimes there have been police forces and police officers created specifically for the games in which they appear. Police are a different kind of character to other fictional heroes. Ostensibly, they are a link in that chain of authority and justice; they fight crime because it’s their job, and often they bear a sense of duty, a responsibility to “protect and serve”. One of the interesting questions this raises is whether we play games differently because of the fact that we inhabit characters so intimately connected to the people who actually keep us safe in real life. Take Mucky Foot’s 1999 cult game Urban Chaos, for example, in which you play as precocious Union City officer Darci Stern. In your attempts to stop a madman destroying the city at the dawn of the new millennium, you could have Darci arrest or kill the gang members and miscellaneous crooks she encountered around the city. If only a statistics system like the one built into Steam was available in 1999, we might have seen how seriously players took their role as a lawgiver – how many would risk Stern’s health by attacking armed gangsters hand-to-hand, for the satisfaction of an arrest?

[Continues...]