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

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...]

With a few noble exceptions, I’ve never been a fan of epic, sprawling, hundred-hour long games.  For a while, I put it down to my hideous attention span.  It’s the same across all the media I consume: if a film doesn’t grab me within minutes, if a book doesn’t captivate me within pages, I generally switch off.

So, I assumed, this would be the reason I’m drawn to certain shorter, snappier games.  But as I began to think more about the subject, something didn’t quite add up.  There have been plenty of occasions where a slow start has led to something truly remarkable.  Indeed, they seem to be among my most adores titles: Deus Ex’s opening mission was somewhat uninteresting, and – more recently – Red Faction: Guerrilla only reached its exciting potential a number of hours in.

So why am I drawn to games that make an impression within such a short time frame?  I considered an obvious example: Portal.  At just a few hours long, it’s clearly designed to be consumed in a single sitting.  For the first two hours or so, it’s an inventive, entertaining puzzle game.  Then, in one moment, everything changes. It twists into something sinister and remarkable.  And, well.  There’s the answer.

//The great escape
Navigating your way through a maze of military turrets, you find refuge behind a gap in the wall.  In this room, tucked away out of sight, you learn the hideous reality of GLaDOS and the Aperture Science set-up.  The cake, which you’ve been promised from the outset, is a lie.  People are desperately trying to escape.  People are dying.

Without much warning, save for the bizarre split personality of your automated guide, Portal becomes an escape story; a mad dash for any available exit, a way to escape the clutches of your wretched antagonist.  Portal shines not because of its innovative mechanics, excellent though they are, but due to its utter defiance of any expectations you had of it.  It leads you happily in the obvious direction, then derails entirely.

This would be absolutely impossible in a longer game.  Players would grow tired of the formula, assuming it wouldn’t change, and wander off to do something else.  There are plenty of people who simply do not have the time or patience to sit through lengthy releases, no matter how outstanding or ambitious they are.  If you’re creating an epic game, you need to show it at its finest early on – and you need to do something special to keep people riveted.

But even something like BioShock, heralded for its big reveal, isn’t really defined by that crowning moment, and doesn’t change substantially after it.  Games like Portal are rare, imaginitive, risky gems – titles that only succeed due to the single-session play time required.

[Continues...]

By Barry White

In the first in a planned series of articles, Barry asks whether we overlooked one important aspect of the otherwise mediocre Kane & Lynch: Dead Men.

“I don’t have to listen to your shit. Lynch, snap out of it. Lynch, don’t kill the hostages.” – Lynch

Kane & Lynch: Dead Men: what Hitman developers Io Interactive did next, and what some regard as their great folly. After the release of the superlative Hitman: Blood Money, Io seemed to be at the top of their game, and the pre-release speculation and hype over their next project was roundly positive and anticipatory. No one was predicting the arrival of a decidedly average, flawed action game that would eventually attain a peak Metacritic score of only 67. What fame (or more appropriately, infamy) it achieved during its release was due to anything but the work Io Interactive had done on the game, and it has subsequently sunk mostly unsung, a mistake everyone would rather forget in the hope that Io get back to making Hitman games.

I’m not here to make any attempt to defend the game that was Kane & Lynch: Dead Men. It’s clunky, rough and buggy, and the title thoroughly deserves the middling scores it received on release. My problem, though, is that there’s one excellent aspect of Kane & Lynch that’s always totally forgotten about whenever people discuss the game. They focus on Gerstmann-gate or the pedigree of Io Interactive, and try vainly to figure out where they went wrong.

Bad games like this are usually wholly dismissed as just bad games. If the entire package fails, nobody ever seems to care if certain parts of it might actually have been brilliant, or interesting, or worth talking about. No one, in my experience, ever thinks or talks about Adam “Kane” Marcus and James Lynch. This duo is the one truly good thing about this bad game.

//Double-act
Kane and Lynch are how Lethal Weapon’s Riggs and Murtagh would’ve turned out if writer Shane Black had made those characters criminals instead of cops and Smokin’ Aces’ Joe Carnahan had been around to direct.

The similarities between the two sets of characters and their relationships are striking. Kane and Murtagh are the straight men. Both spend most of their time trying keep their respective partners (who they’re forcibly paired with) in line, and they care inordinate amounts about their daughters. Both are clearly too old for this shit. Lynch and Riggs are highly unstable psychotics with bad haircuts, who can always be relied upon to drive the action and the story forward into unexpected places by just going berserk. Riggs will try to tear down a house with nothing but his pick-up truck. Lynch will start killing the hostages. If Riggs and Murtagh are the kings of the buddy movie, Kane and Lynch are their twisted gaming counterparts.

They take every part of that established cinematic template and pervert it. Riggs might be crazy, but he’s also a wise-cracking, tireless pursuer of justice. Lynch is just out and out nuts. Murtagh is the family man and hyper protective of his loving children. Kane’s family hate him enough to wish him dead and he’s obsessed with trying to reconcile with and protect a daughter he hasn’t seen for fourteen years. The relationship arc between the main characters in a buddy movie is supposed to start out frosty and begrudging, but become closer and closer as challenges and trials are overcome. With every new problem or situation, Kane comes closer to cutting Lynch lose. The two men are constantly at odds with one another for the entire story, with no possibility of reconciliation ever presented. The whole thing is an inspired piece of writing, taking a tried and tested framework and turning it on its head to produce something players probably won’t have seen before.

They are, uncharacteristically for game protagonists, utterly amoral, even evil. Games have their heroes and their anti-heroes; tough action men, honourable soldiers, flawed individuals with hearts of gold, rogues who are as likely to betray their friends as they are to do the right thing. Wherever our heroic avatars fall on the spectrum of good and evil, there always seems to be some little spark that allows us to relate to them in some way. This might not be too important a feature in something like Crysis, where the player character is, for all intents and purposes, anonymous and faceless, but in any game where an attempt is made to make an actual character out of the player’s avatar, this kind of work is key. Gears of War’s Marcus Fenix might look a bit like a serial rapist and spend all his time chainsawing things in half, but when he cracks a joke with a comrade or we see some semblance of emotion flash across his disfigured face during a cutscene, that’s a window for us to try connect to his character a little bit, however crudely fashioned it might be. Games that make the effort to connect you with your digital avatar on a level other than the press of a button or flick of the mouse are often the better for it.

But Kane and Lynch are extraordinary in that they fly completely in the face of what you’d expect from main characters in an action game. They’re absolute bastards, and totally unrepentant about that fact. Forget flawed heroes, anti-heroes, or whatever label you think you might want to apply – these characters have not a single redeeming nor admirable quality between them. Even something that seems overtly positive or good, like Kane’s protectiveness of his daughter, is in reality totally obsessive and in keeping with his destructive personality. There is nothing within these two men to like or to love or to respect. And that is what makes them unique and, if you’ll permit me to say, brilliant in the collective lineup of game protagonists through the ages. The developers, when writing the characters of Kane and Lynch, effectively created two people it was impossible not to dislike.

//Drawing connections
It’s an extraordinarily brave decision to make and it’s not without its potential pitfalls: a friend of mine recalls how he was unable to enjoy the game on any level simply because he hated the pair of them so much. That’s the big risk. And it’s a risk that’s not just brave within the context of games. In film (and Dead Men tries hard in other areas to emulate movies such as Michael Mann’s Heat) our heroes are usually heroic. The better heroes have their flaws, and may not always do the right thing, but in genres like action it’s always made very clear who the hero is. Never, ever, will you see protagonists with such wretched, wholly irredeemable personalities as the main focus as you do in this game. It would be like sticking up two fingers to the audience. It would be madness. But Kane & Lynch does it and, if I may adopt the vernacular of the game for a moment, it doesn’t give a fuck if you like it or not.

Does this mean we’re not able to connect to them in any way at all? Are we just detachedly piloting these two horrors toward their inevitable end while trying to enjoy some of the shooty bits along the way? Not necessarily, but the risk of player alienation is always there. Within the car crash that is Kane and Lynch’s relationship, the game is able to mine some nice veins of jet black humour that my poor soul is able to revel in, but it’s by no means a common taste. I laugh out loud when Lynch confusedly says something like “I was aiming for her leg”, but to the next person this is just another reason to dump the game and walk away in disgust. More than that, I find myself fascinated by these two characters and their interactions in the same way I’m fascinated by the great cinematic villains, like The Third Man’s Harry Lime. They all represent a totally uncompromised picture of the depths to which human beings can sink, and while it’s easy to be abhorred by their words and their deeds, it’s their overall integrity as fictional characters that appeals to me most.

All of which, if anything, makes the reality of the game’s mediocrity all the more painful and disappointing. You already have every reason not to play this game and, if the picture of the two men I’ve painted above is an unsettling one, you can go ahead and add one more to the list. But I still think it’s important not to forget about what Io Interactive managed to create here. They might have made a mess of everything else, but I’m not convinced that’s a good enough reason to overlook the one shining high point. They took a huge risk in fashioning the characters that they did, and in having the chutzpah to turn around to players and say “Why yes, you do have to assume the role of a violent traitor and a medicated psychopath. We’re going to make you murder cops, hostages and civilians, and neither character is going to get a happy ending.”

Kane and Lynch aren’t cool or clever, slick or sexy. They’re bad, bad men – and that’s what’s so damn good about them.

What is culture? Is it music, fashion, architecture? When does an environment become a separate culture to the one we live in currently? It’s arguable that London and Tokyo hold different cultural ideals, certain aesthetic differences that differentiate the Land of the Rising Sun from the Land of the Falling Knife. But when it comes to videogames, are we able to become “cultured” by the environments we find ourselves in?

To venture into BioShock’s utopian underwater city of Rapture, we must traverse into the middle of the ocean: the one area of the world where man is no longer king of the castle. This brings us to a Bathysphere, and in using this new form of transportation we are introduced to the technology of another culture, and its progenitor, in one swift interactive cut-scene. Through descending into this watery world, we agree with the man who “chose something different.” He chose the impossible. He chose Rapture.

The Rapture we descend into is a place of broken dreams, of a culture that became a socio-political time-bomb from its very inception. But to understand the reasons for the separation between the high society of Ryan and his cohorts and Fontaine’s parasitic subservient army, we must learn the world which now surrounds us, almost claustrophobically, in the darkness of the sea bed.

//Like father, like son?
Players experience the life and times of Rapture’s many denizens – some dead, some very angry and barely alive – through audio diaries scattered around the city. Some deal with the hotspots, the locations where the hip and happening citizens of Rapture came to have a good time – or, in Ryan’s case, father a child who became his own undoing – all told in both humorous and harrowing anecdotes and screamed warnings. However, some of these diaries deal more with the day-to-day running of the city, such as the curious equilibrium wrought by the Big Daddies and Little Sisters that still persist post-apocalypse. It is through this binary opposition of the mundane and the melodramatic that we can be drawn into a lifestyle that is now our own, a new culture, and embrace it as readily as we would dine at a restaurant specialising in foreign cuisine.

“A man chooses! A slave obeys!” roars Ryan as you approach him during the climax of your interaction. This is indeed a pair of opposing definitions of the human mindset to consider when exploring the city, even as you begin to plan its downfall. No one forces you to listen to the whimpering tales of those trapped in the depths of anarchist culture gone to pieces, but most players did so anyway. We engage in foreign culture because our natural curiosity about the dark unknown overwhelms us, the desire to explore the Other becoming exciting and intriguing instead of terrifying.

This is fitting for a game in which knowing the cityscape you explore throughout the course of the game’s narrative helps you overcome your fear of the place itself. Splicers are no longer drug-addled, sociopathic murderers; they become pitiful creatures, reduced to the barest elements of humanity. You are no longer a scared foreigner; you are their saviour, the Grim Reaper to Rapture’s uncouth souls.

To absorb culture, from the perspective of a sentient entity, it becomes a case of taking in your environment in a way that feels both natural and self-motivated. We are urged to consider Rapture’s vision of what constitutes “art” through Sander Cohen’s masterpiece, and encouraged to think about science and the quandaries it presents to us as moral human beings through the diaries of Dr. Suchong and Bridgette Tenenbaum. But the most interesting and intriguing aspect of this world is that it’s so different from the one we know and engage with on a daily basis. Man as a personification of industry and war has been removed, and all links to man’s superiority over nature through religion, conflict and technology have been largely severed. What we are left with is nature populated by humans alone, resulting in an environment that is – when we arrive – feral in nature. A culture that has warped, and distended into something else, but at the same time remains as seamless and natural as our own chaotic identities.

//The SPECTRE’s guide to the galaxy
Mass Effect is a difficult game in many aspects. Not only are we presented with a scientific explanation for infinite ammo, but the total background information will, by the end of the trilogy, begin to rival that of early Star Wars. Every race is distinguishable, not just aesthetically, but by mannerisms, attitude, and the education with which they gift your Commander Shepherd during his or her travels through the galaxy.

It begins with something comfortable, something we can relate to, mainly because we are the origin of the Mass Effect universe. It starts on Earth: no alternate reality, simply a possible future. From the discovery of alien technology so high above us primitive apes it borders on sorcery, humanity as a whole is drawn into another world. We are gifted with experiences of galaxy-wide conflict, of genocide on scales that would extinguish our contemporary global population, of cultural differences and prejudice that stretch beyond the simple fat jokes Han Solo could have levelled at Jabba the Hutt.

It’s interesting that you are allowed to change Shepherd to fit the appearance that suits you most as an individual, from a protagonist that is for now foreign to you, both socially and culturally. This ability to turn your hero into a man, woman, black, white or otherwise, to even alter his shaven head to a woman’s feminine locks, is something that questions the player intimately. Someone about to engage with sentient life that may not even be the same shape as the player may certainly have a lot of preferences about their own species, the culture of the protagonist either settling into their own mould, or sitting in the approachably American visage of the default male.

But what of the other cultural aspects of the Mass Effect universe? Surely it stretches beyond character creation and talking to jellyfish that are able to stand. The Citadel, a space station so colossal in size that it classes as the capital “city” for one half of the Milky Way, is a hub of cultural identities mixed together with a variety of positive and negative results. This is a narrative that confronts racism through various allegories, most especially through the Turian species and their effective neutering of the Krogan race, a genocide frequently discussed during the course of events. So much so, in fact, that it leads to a gun-invoked standoff between you and a fellow warrior – nay, your friend – and this division between two different viewpoints is as staggering between humans and Krogans as it is between George and Lenny in Of Mice and Men. You will lose your innocence in this universe, your blind ignorance to the issues inherent in science fiction, and only through learning, through becoming cultured, are you able to deal with this obstacle adequately.

The Galactic Codex is a logbook available to you from the start, though you will have to work to fill it up, and slave to fill it completely with knowledge of different places, people, and technology so vital to fully understanding Mass Effect’s universe. However, to read this database of cultural knowledge you’ll accumulate over the course of your explorative lifetime, you need to exit the game-world, and find it in the menu. To some, this is a simple task, almost as though you were checking emails on a BlackBerry. To others, to not be able to deny this PDA-esque identity of the menu due to the fact the levelling system, save and load functions are all residing on the screen, breaks the immersion irreparably.

Consider your place in the Mass Effect universe, as the leader of a team of brave men and women charging through the galaxy, hot on the heels of an omnipotent government agent gone rogue. The narrative seems generic when such a simple synopsis is attached to it, and yet the amount of holes in the plot break the flow of the game, in turn breaking the flow of cultural information into the mind of the player. I can’t focus on the Elcor diplomat’s given explanation for his verbal etiquette when I’m wondering why, if these politicians are so active in their duties, they are able to represent an entire species standing in the same spot up until the area is rendered unsafe later in the narrative. These small issues – the menu-based codex, the avoidable plot holes – are breaking the very realism of the game. A culture is not viable when it becomes unrealistic, and for this reason it becomes harder to adapt to Citadel life than it does to life as a plasmid-addicted interloper.

//Fly me to the moon
Are we able to become cultured as participants in Mass Effect’s cosmic joke? Are we able to become true residents of Rapture? Arguably, the narrative dictates we always were Rapture’s child. But do we, as the entity outside of the screen, dictate the degree to which we become able to interpret the various cultural idioms of these environments without breaking stride? The induction of your Shepherd avatar into the ranks of the SPECTRE agents makes you feel immediately important, your government status allowing you to experience every aspect of culture without barriers. This all-access pass gives you the opportunity to learn, and if you can look past the flow-breaking codex placement, you can become cultured as a citizen of the Milky Way.

There are a lot of different methods of approaching a foreign land. It depends, really, what you would want from a fictional universe in terms of a cultural education. Are you comfortable with reading a Time Out of Japan, the odd Tim Rogers anecdote and a few Wikipedia entries on Ahikabara? Or do you want to fly there, walk its streets, and save a second-hand Dreamcast from the dumpster out back? To engage with Bioshock, and to become cultured, immersion is key. To put audio diaries in the menu denies Jack his technologically-bereft identity, and you, the player, your immersion in the game. But to have Shepherd, and you the player, listen to an audio diary that would feasibly be hours long if attempted in full is improbable at best.

How we approach foreign cultures, whether digital or real, is something we can attribute to our personality and how deep our Jungian shadow-self sinks into the primal fear and anger at things we are ignorant of. But to become cultured by a video game is as immersive as it’s likely to get, thus we cry out to see Rapture as it once was, to know the true culture Andrew Ryan tempts us with in his opening monologue.

Linear and free-roaming game styles have been at war for years, a brutal battle of betterment and dominance. But why? Game developers would have you believe that games have come to a crossroads of storytelling devices vs. experiences of player imagination and free will – but why can’t we have both?

The current trend is to dismiss linear games for being too restrictive and praise free-roaming ones for their innovation and impressive wealth of choice. It’s the age of the sandbox experience. Games like Grand Theft Auto and Oblivion have made us look at the possibilities, potential new ways to experience games and their stories. The problem is, stories are – at least traditionally – inherently linear. They have a beginning, a middle and an end. So to experience a story you need that linear path, and dismissing games for travelling it is obnoxious and narrow-minded.

//Page by page
Free-roaming games are a fantastic example of programming and design brilliance. There is no doubt that the act of creating an environment with so much choice is a monumental task, and developers should be praised for pulling it off, but the linear games we used to hold so dear are still as relevant today as they were a years ago. The majority of modern games, regardless of style or genre, provide the player with a story to be experienced and enjoyed, much like books, films and plays. What linear games allow is for the player to read these stories at the correct pace, experiencing the joy, excitement and horror at the right moments to induce emotional response and intellectual satisfaction; this is something free-roaming games often struggle to achieve.

When the player has the choice to experience a story on their own terms, the creator no longer has control, and most stories don’t read so well if you shuffle the pages. What free-roaming games depend on instead is emergent gameplay, a form that allows the player to create his or her own experiences within a game world, regardless of the intended narrative. The main story arc is protected by a form of control method: games like Oblivion use this to prevent the player from destabilising the main story by making key characters immortal, and with this control Oblivion achieves a fantastic free-roaming experience whilst maintaining the integrity of the core linear plot. It’s impressive how a free-roaming title can maintain a strong story when everything else about the experience is down to choice.

//The path well trodden
Other than the storytelling aspects of games, there is, of course, the action of actually playing. Regardless of whether or not you would agree that games are becoming primarily a storytelling medium, they are still, and probably always will be, a form of enjoyment and entertainment. While strictly linear games excel in storytelling, free-roaming games often excel in the possibilities of their game mechanics. GTA allows the player to steal cars and drive around a huge open city, performing one simple act: having fun. With free-roaming games, the player has the choice to do what they want when they want, making the experience more personal and quite often achieving something linear games can’t guarantee to deliver. It’s only restricted by the player’s imagination, therefore each person can play the same game and experience an entirely different set of outcomes; the main story may still be scripted, but the options of approaching each challenge and time spent between each mission will be different for each individual.

But the restriction of linearity means that a player has to play the game the way the developers intended it to be played, with no or little room for compromise. Linear games therefore target a more specific audience, each game appealing to different kinds of players.

Metal Gear Solid is an entirely linear title, with a linear story to match. Regardless of the high scores from reviewers, it’s not something that appeals to everyone, and if you don’t like the characters or the story, you won’t enjoy the game at all. Splinter Cell is the same but even more uncompromising. In Splinter Cell you can’t choose how to complete each mission; instead you must do as the developer intended in order to proceed. But this isn’t a bad thing: like with the story element, this allows the developer to maintain control and give you the experience the game was designed to provide.

//The best of both worlds
A good way to enjoy the benefits of both styles is to create the illusion of a free-roaming environment in a linear game; Final Fantasy 7 achieves just that. RPGs as a genre are nearly always dependent on their story. FF7 has the linear story and progression through the game, but hides it by allowing the player an element of freedom when on the world map. It controls the player’s freedom with vehicles that can’t access everywhere, but makes it seem like the choice is still there. By including the large areas available to explore and the numerous optional places to visit and things to do, the game feel a lot less linear, yet maintains the focus of a specific narrative.

Taking the story out of a game almost entirely eliminates linearity, and no game supports that more than The Sims. What The Sims does is create a game where freedom is absolute: for all intents and purposes you are a god when playing The Sims or any other games like it. As a result of the deifying from such games, the term ‘God Game’ was coined, a genre that is the pinnacle of free-roaming, providing players with the power to shape the game experience to their own preference. It’s interesting that the medium of games, having evolved into storytelling device where players and developers want to tell stories in a much less restrictive way, can only achieve true freedom by removing the story, proving the point that both styles should always be present in games. To choose one over the other means denying yourself part of what gaming has become.

The future of games and gaming is not in linear or free-roaming styles, emergence or storytelling. It’s in both. Both styles still have relevance in the gaming world and we would miss them if they disappeared. Linear games are not obsolete forms of gaming that have been surpassed; and free-roaming to the point of emergent gameplay is not, ironically, the one and only way forward. The war needs to end. Each side needs to rebuild and allow the people to enjoy the fruits of peace.