Is Metagaming really that bad?

For those that don't know, Metagaming is when you take an action in a video game that kind of breaks the fourth wall, and lets your character in on info that the player knows, but their character doesn't. The best example of this is when you're stuck on a bit of dialogue (or you're not sure what choice to make) in a game, so you look it up on something like Wikia. Example: You're wandering round the beautiful wilderness in Skyrim, and come across a man who has two bunnies; one white, one brown. The man can only afford to feed one and intends to cook the other, but asks you to chose because he hasn't the strength. He turns his back, sobbing. At this point, you have three choices:

1. Kill the white bunny,
2. Kill the brown bunny,
3. Backstab the man and steal his stuff (including the bunnies),
4. Surprise Nicholas Cage appearance: PUT THE BUNNEH IN THE BAWX.

Now the problem with this is that if you let the white rabbit live, it appears later outside your house; and if you feed it a grand soul gem, it turns into the Great Rabbit of Prophecy and spawns an incredibly rare sword called Gutfücker, which... OK, I'll stop that now because it's rapidly becoming silly. None of that paragraph was true. But there are better examples that have actually made it into RPG games. In Skyrim (for realzies this time) there is an annoying jester you meet on the road. If you kill him, it prevents an entire questline from kicking off (The dark brotherhood). As mentioned two posts ago, there are several very minor and seemingly unrelated bugs that can stop you from acquiring the Windhelm house, Hjerim. Most of the thieves quest storyline gives you the option of killing people or letting them live, with loot and sidequests made available or unavailable based on these decisions. The most common criticism is that in real life, you wouldn't be able to look ahead and see the consequences of your actions. But then in real life, there are an unlimited number of outcomes, and you have full control of how the outcomes play out. If you let someone live but they go on to later betray you, it's largely because there was no option on the dialogue tree to incapacitate them instead of killing them, or alerting the authorities, or getting someone to keep an eye on them. And that's assuming the options are written clearly - in Mass Effect, one of the first sequences involves Shepard telling a researcher that they can 'sort out' the researcher's gibbering co-worker. The speech option doesn't say "I can sort him out (smack him in the head with a gun butt)," it just says "I can sort him out" or something similar and then you hit him in the head. And because of the arrangement of the dialogue wheel, it's almost impossible to play as a female and not flirt with the male crew members without berating them for their unprofessionalism. The speech option to advance the romance is always in the 'paragon' spot, and the option to shoot them down is always a renegade one, so whatever happened to letting them down gently? In the end, the problem with metagaming is that it's not a case of 'spoiling' the story, it's more a case of making sure that the story isn't going to spoil itself if you choose the wrong option. Maybe it does sound like cheating, but the fact is, we're not really making an open choice and experiencing the consequences, we're choosing one of a set number of options and experiencing what the programmers think is the consequence. And that isn't real life either.

Sarkeesian Dualism

Once upon a time (well, yesterday actually), fellow blogger and freshly minted author Rewan over at The Hyperteller made a bit of a point about feminism in his post The Women are Taking Over. Read it. Assuming of course that the women haven't already taken over, in which case ask your nearest woman for permission, and then read it. Now far be it from me to write a blog post that could easily have been a simple reply, but there is another debate going on at the moment about Anita Sarkeesian, she of Tropes vs. Women in Video Games fame. It's an ongoing video series, and the second part was recently taken down via abuse of YouTube's flag system. Which is a shame, because leaving it up does more harm to her argument than good. The problem with her piece is not what it says, but the way it goes about saying it. If you were to ask the YouTube flag spammers "Do you think Anita Sarkeesian has a point, and women are misrepresented in video games," I think the reply would be a resounding yes, and we are aware of the problem. If however, you were to ask "Do you agree with the examples used, the way she worded it, and the misrepresentation of a beloved hobby," then I think it's easier to understand why the pitchforks came out. It didn't help that the whole thing started with a $6,000 Kickstarter campaign that ended up raking in over $150,000, and the best she could do with the money was a new mac and a copy of CS6 so she can slap flashy popups all over what amounts to a series of twenty minute vlogs. It's also surprising that with so much of the money earmarked for production costs, she presents the videos herself rather than hiring someone who can enunciate correctly. See, she's very up-front about the fact that the Kickstarter money was going to be used to buy games and equipment, but what that shows is that she's not going to have played them like a normal gamer would. We spend a few evenings a week, weekends, entire summer holidays soaking in these worlds, learning their quirks and their charm. We play them to win, sure, but we also play them to experience them. But Sarkeesian does not strike me as the gamer she claims to be; more someone who has noticed gaming is getting popular, and has decided that's going to be what she does now that she's graduated. With the timescale she's giving herself between updates, she's probably only got time to rush through the basics of each game before moving on, all the time looking for more points for her next video. And given that she's now closed avenues of dialogue with non feminist gaming channels, the list of recommendations she recieves are obviously going to give a biased view.

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I think this guy sums it up best - he also acts like a complete dick in making some of his points, but a lot of them are good points nonetheless. He notes that Sarkeesian interprets the desire to rescue a damsel as a "male power fantasy" - a direct quote from her second video - which is an interesting reinterpretation of a primal instinct in human beings to rescue people they care about. I say interesting. I mean interesting in the way that a therapist would write down and underline in red pen. This is the frustrating thing about the videos. Her reasoning is built on a chain of conclusions that seem to come out of nowhere, or at least have no impartial and objective truth to them. In the first video, Sarkeesian put a lot of people's backs up when she tried to quash the video game trope that stock male characters tend to be stronger, while female characters are faster. "This simply isn't true," she states, before moving on without providing any evidence to a statement that runs contrary to evidence that can be seen all around us. What she means is that she doesn't want it to be true, or that there are reasons it is true that she feels we should be fighting against. The axiom that the sexes are equal does not mean that there aren't differences between them. And whether through nature or nurture, the fact is - as many morphologists, physiotherapists and statisticians will tell you - male bodies tend to have more upper body strength, which can have an impact on dexterity. There's a reason men and women's weightlifting contests are divided by gender and tend to have different scores. Your average woman can train to be as strong as most men, it's true. But for whatever reason, they don't. As a statistical trend, men tend to be stronger. Another leap in reasoning comes when she examines the motivations of The Darkness II's Jackie in rescuing his girlfriend's soul:

"The implication being that she belongs to him, that she was his posession."

Maybe that's what she got from it - I got from it that the mob guy is a dick, and now I hate him. I'll agree absolutely that the scene in question is about feelings of loss of power, of helplessness. He killed someone my character cared deeply for, and so by the transitive property of human emotion, she's someone I also cared for. And I couldn't do anything to stop it. But she then goes on to state factually that it's all about loss of masculinity. Maybe it's more about loss of girlfriend, Anita. Or loss of another human being. Sometimes a cigar is just a fucking cigar.

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She goes on though, claiming that "Depictions of female vulnerability are used as an easy way for writers to trigger an emotional reaction in male gamers." I don't know how easy it can be to emotionally attach yourself to one of your creations and then put it through that kind of abuse. As George RR Martin put it when talking about the now infamous Red Wedding scene in Game of Thrones:

"That was the hardest scene I’ve ever had to write. It’s two-thirds of the way through the book, but I skipped over it when I came to it. So the entire book was done and there was still that one chapter left. Then I wrote it. It was like murdering two of your children. I try to make the readers feel they’ve lived the events of the book. Just as you grieve if a friend is killed, you should grieve if a fictional character is killed. You should care. If somebody dies and you just go get more popcorn, it’s a superficial experience isn’t it?" - George R. R. Martin

So why doesn't Anita Sarkeesian seem to understand this fear of the death of a beloved character? This is one of the key problems I have with her analysis - it reflects a superficial experience. She is not on the gamer's side speaking out, she is on the outside looking in, telling us what the experience looks like without engaging enough to give a true reflection. She doesn't engage with the characters in any meaningful way, and it shows in her detached analysis. Where she sees game developers manipulating players by doing horrible things to women, I see the antagonist doing it. There's a well established distance between the intentions of the author and the intentions of their characters, and thank god, or George RR Martin would be licking the inside of a cell in Broadmoor. It shows a basic lack of understanding of the way art works - it'd be like saying how antisemitic Spielberg is for portraying the atrocities in Schindler's list, or how much of a fascist Orwell was for writing 1984. A good writer has to be inventive and know how to push his audience's buttons, and the drive for compassion can be an effective form of that drive. I wonder though if it says more about our society that we now have to spell out to people that they should feel compassion for other people, even if they're fictional. Viewed that way, instead of Prey being the hateful attack on women Sarkeesian claims it to be, the experience with finding your mutated girlfriend is there to make you feel conflicted and horrible. Yes, it involves the mutilation of a woman, but that's to show how evil the antagonist is, not the developer and not the victim. Sarkeesian claims that women in this role are written to beg the players to perform violence on them. I really hope she realises that at no point did anyone think this was supposed to be a good thing. And again, when it forces you to fight your girlfriend, it's the antagonist being evil, forcing you to fight what you were trying to protect. You're supposed to think 'Isn't this horrible,' not 'Let's raise $150,000 that feminists could have donated to domestic violence causes so I can complain about this on the internet.' After all, as she points out in the second video, "Every 9 seconds a woman is assaulted or beaten in the United States; and on average more than 3 women are murdered by their boyfriends, husbands or ex-partners every single day." While that's shocking enough, more shocking is the idea that the $150,000 raised for these videos came from feminist-leaning donors with disposable cash, the kind who might have otherwise used it to support domestic violence charities. Hey, if she can level her personal impressions as factual conclusions, then so can I.

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Look, gamers - like any audience - need to feel good and bad to be motivated to invest in a story. They need to feel that the antagonist is a bad guy, and the protagonist is a good guy; so we get them to do good and bad things. Maybe there is a problem with it usually being women in that role. But most of the games quoted as examples in both videos are from Japan, a culture with it's own fairly major issues against women - tarring the western gaming industry with the same brush just isn't fair. Sarkeesian names five examples of a specific scenario, namely 'Your wife is murdered and you then have to rescue your daughter,' to imply a medium-wide trend. And some of the 'modern' examples she quotes date back to the early 2000s, and the mid nineties in one case. It adds further fuel to the idea that she is just 'skim playing' these games in the same way that bad college students get the cliff notes instead of reading the set texts. She claims that violence is the only option presented in games. Really? I just finished the Mass Effect trilogy, in which a female commander unites the entire galaxy primarily through diplomacy and moral choices. My wife is playing Minecraft, in which she tends to set up a shelter on the first day that will enable her to avoid enemies once night falls. My favourite tactic on Civilisation: Revolution is to go for a cultural victory by turtling down and amassing trade and research. I even knew someone who completed the original Deus Ex using only a small crate. She even admits herself that these games do not exist in a vacuum and have a responsibility to a broader social context. They do - it's just that she is missing as much of the game's context by skimming it as she accuses the game of missing in terms of social context. Look at it this way: I spent half of GTA: Vice City trying to rescue Lance fucking Vance. Does that disempower black people? No, I was trying to rescue a friend. By allying a decent notion with a spurious and high profile, self-serving campaign, Sarkeesian is doing her supposed cause more harm than good. I watched both videos, and ended up trying to counter her arguments not because I disagree with them in principle, but because of the arguable way they are presented and the tarnishing effect her conclusions have on a hobby I enjoy. And I think ultimately, that comes back to the original point in Rewan's blog. Women are not equal in status to men, and that needs to change. But damseling? In video games? Given a budget of $150,000 and an eagerly waiting audience that's the best you can do? Damseling is one of the least problematic aspects women face playing video games nowadays; from openly acknowledged abuse by the community, objectification, patronisation and under-representation. And that's aside from all the other social issues which conspire against them from the outside. There are so many other things this money could have gone toward rather than a self indulgent rant about the gaming industry. At least mine are free.

1,500 to go

The next time a tutor tells me not to leave things to the last minute, here's what I'm going to do. I'm going to listen to them very carefully. Then when they're done talking, I'm going to nod understandingly, gather up my notes, and then leave them in my bag, play Mass Effect 2 and leave it all until the last minute. Because let's face it, I'm an idiot. We're all idiots, for the most part. People learn by their mistakes; so really, even if you're a mature student, university is the best place to make them (mistakes that is, not students). This is the last week before FYP deadline, so my plan really was to have the work done and redrafted by this point so that I could throw myself at the dreaded 2,000 word rationale. But no. Life holds too many exciting and interesting things for that, and you're only young once. In fact I'm not even young, so there's that. Anyway, I sit 500 words away from the minimum word count, and easy 15,00 words away from a decent word count, and the rationale as well. Soon I shall be finished, and then there's just the regular essays to be getting along with. Also an icecream van turned up while I was writing this, in the middle of a student infested cul-de-sac. Devious.

Clean for One Week

Events in meatspace have conspired, as they so often do, to deprive my usual haunt of internet for one week. One week in which I got a surprising amount of FYP done, the missus completed Mass Effect and we discovered a new, cheap source of noodles. But yes, the FYP. The bane of our collective existences, THAT is the source of my current tension and forthcoming apology. Yes that's right, I'm apologising for the apology I am about to launch into. Sorry. I mentioned free writing as a warm up to writing last time, and it is my intention to, unfortunately, use this blog over the next few weeks as a way to get my brain into gear and producing me that nice fat 2:1 I deserve. My biggest issue right now is my brain not wanting to write - there are so many bright and shiny alternatives to doing so that, like a petulant child, it would rather watch the xbox, or or play about on Facebook, or pretty much anything except work on the capstone to the last three years. The issue is though, a lot of things accumulate over a week-long internet blackout. I haven't even looked at my emails yet, mostly because there are a bunch of stag related ones in my staff account. So there is currently a war going on in my attention span between the FYP and the internet. In other words, everything's back to normal.

Mass Effect 2: Thoughts

I'm going to start off by saying that Mass Effect 2 is one of those games which is like looking at a trompe d'oeil painted on an extremely thin canvas. Also, it has a big fold down the middle and occasionally sets fire to the other paintings if you don't move on to the next picture quick enough. It's a lovely painting, don't get me wrong; it's just that all these issues make repeated viewings of it incredibly annoying. Still at least it's an improvement on the first one, which tried to show you the same five paintings for sixteen fucking hours. I should probably move on from the painting metaphor. The number one problem with this game is the amount of times that it inadvertently reminds you that it IS a game, when it would have been so much easier to have realised it as a film, or a book, or possibly even an engraving on a brick which you then sling through Drew Karpyshyn's big self-promoting window. I mean who puts copies of their books in one of their own works? I'm fairly sure that at no point in A Christmas Carol can Marley be seen kicking back and reading Oliver Twist, but there they are on sale in the citadel; two of Drew's spin-offs novels about the Mass Effect series. There are a lot of problems with ME2, but also a lot of good things. To talk you through some of them, let's look at an example side mission - Thane's loyalty quest, in which a member of your team tracks down his son. His son has started to go off the rails by becoming an assassin, which kind of makes bottles of white lightning in the park at 3am seem quite tame in comparison. But then again as Drew Karpyshyn keeps reminding us, this is THE FUTURE, so maybe he became an assassin after drinking too much LAZER cider. On the moon. Or something (See, this is why I don't write SciFi). Anyway, the police officer who helps you all the way through the quest seems to be bending a lot of rules in your favour, and one of the conversation options asks why he IS helping you out, and he answers "Do you think your friend is the only guy who messed up raising his son?" And then looks away sadly. Or would do, if the facial animation system looked anything less than terrifying, especially the smiles. People in ME2 grin like rapists invited to a sleepover, and I can only assume that in the future, botox is mandatory. Regardless, it was a nice surprise to see a background NPC acting like anything but the one-function sock-puppets ME1 was peopled with. Questioning motivations is a common theme in ME2, where the main character (Shephard) gets roped into doing things by dodgy people and then blithely accepts a tiny soundbite that essentially boils down to "Because I'm evil, but FUCK, look at THOSE guys." Which is all well and good, except for the fact that Shephard only seems to call people on it when it's convenient for the plotting. In fact you can pretty much tell a double-cross is coming by the fact that Shephard follows someone's orders WITHOUT questioning them beforehand. The other problem is that it really makes fuck all difference to the narrative. In the main quests Shepherd's reasons for working for Cerberus (the organisation that spent most of the side quests in ME1 trying to kill him) are rattled off without your consent in various cutscenes. Thankfully you can skip them with the X button, which - thanks to ME2 - might as well be renamed the clitoris for the amount of teenagers who'll be frustratedly bashing away at it. And the only time you can refuse to work for someone on moral grounds is during side quests, in which case you don't get to do that mission, you don't get the experience and you don't get the boxes of minerals lying around suspiciously. Oh Christ, the minerals. I'm sorry but this is yet another quality Bioware product ground right down by annoying grinding bollocks. I think I've worked it out. It's elves. It has to be. Bioware work incredibly hard during the day to craft an intuitive and natural interface and then seamlessly weave a narrative around it, going home at the end of the day proud of their good work. Then somewhere around midnight, a bunch of elves show up and decide to spot-weld an incredibly annoying upgrade system to it that revolves around scanning planets for minerals. I'm sorry, I know EVE online is very big at the moment but if I wanted to play manic miner I'd dig out my sodding spectrum. The thing is, you HAVE to use the scanner if you want to upgrade your character, otherwise you really start to suffer as the difficulty curve rises. But if you thought driving round a lazily generated fractal landscape was bad in ME1, just wait until you get to the end game and need to scrape through entire systems just to get enough minerals to survive the final encounter. Which is probably the biggest problem with ME2. I'm fairly sure that everyone playing it knows that halfway through the game you get sucked into a suicide mission to save the galaxy, and that pretty much anyone who isn't flagged as loyal by that point will die at the end. My first issue with this is that it crops up after a certain mission, so everyone knows right off the bat to avoid doing the IFF mission. Which is somewhat breaking the realism a little if you can bugger around in space for months mining and beating up pirates, and then all of a sudden you've got the space of about five minutes to stop the entire universe from ending. I kind of liked the way Oblivion did it, with more and more random demons popping up about the place until it gets annoying enough to sort out, but since in ME2 the enemies are all stuck behind one relay and pretty much stay behind it until you invade their space, it kind of makes me feel like I'm the one starting the war. Which again, leads us to an immersion-breaking background problem. Halfway through the game, two of my team decided to have a massive barney in front of me and put me on the spot, asking me which one of them was right. Now normally when I'm faced with this sort of question from a woman, I take the only logical option: set fire to myself and leap through the nearest window. However since this wasn't a speech option, I had to choose; and after several save / reload attempts, it became apparent that one of them will always become pissed off and disloyal to you. Which is fine in a normal game, but not in one that makes it clear in almost all of it's advertising that you have to get the ENTIRE party out alive, and disloyal party members are very likely to be killed unpleasantly. Fantastic. Even worse, the only way you can talk them round is by having a 100% good or evil score, which means that EVERY conversation after that point, you're not doing what you want. You can't disagree with the black and white morality system if you want everyone out alive, so you end up hunting through every dialogue trying to work out which speech options will give you +good or +bad points. And because of this, it highlights the weirdly skewed sense of morality the game has. Example: The Krogan are a race who are dying out because of a genetic plague that causes only 1/1000 to survive childbirth, but Shephard is evil if he keeps research on a cure because it was acquired using live testing. It hypes up the debate on killing being wrong in the name of testing on live subjects; yet it ignores the attatched debate on whether abortion is murder by simply not mentioning it, and assuming that stillbirth is OK. Even the Krogan don't seem terribly upset about it anymore. Now I want to state absolutely that i'm not condoning either viewpoint, but for fuck's sake, you don't package an issue like that in a five minute conversation that boils down to a yes / no answer that brands you as good or evil. One the one hand the game clearly WANTS to be morally complex, but on the other hand it just isn't thought through well enough to really pull it off. And there are other inconsistencies. Your pilot, Joker's legs are one - In the first game it was explained that the bones in his legs are basically hollow and he needs to walk with crutches. To start with, this makes the sequence where you're running through the ship as Joker all the more tense because you don't want the poor bastard to break like glass. Except he's able to limp along without crutches now. But I mean, in the first game they explained he was OK as long as he was caref- oh, he's crawling through ducts. Well, maybe his knees aren't brittle? Oh shit he fell over, Jeff, noo- wait, he's fine, what the crap? Now he's firing an assault rifle on full auto. Wait, I'M firing an assault rifle, when I haven't been carrying or able to fire one all game. It's just that it tries so hard to be an immersive world and narrative but it just keeps falling down because of technical issues that just bring you back to the fact that it's a game, so all your actions HAVE to be moral absolutes if you want to succeed. And you can't force people to make moral choices in a black or white axis, unless you work for Fox News. No seriously, I checked it out, they've got a patent and everything.