Photographic Narrative in Uncharted 4: A Thief’s End

As the title of the game suggests, Uncharted 4: A Thief’s End marks the end for the rouge Nathan Drake and his Indiana Jones-style escapades. With its near perfect blend of scenic mountain climbing, ancient death traps and puzzles, and punchy one-liners, the terrain of Uncharted 4 is familiar for fans of the series, and its main story still makes a return to Drake’s world a mystery worth solving. Being no stranger to the series myself, I was pleased with the finale for all of these reasons. Yet, there was something quite different with this game that set it apart from its predecessors – and from other contemporary games.

This is, in fact, not a real photograph, but an in-game (non-cutscene) screenshot.

For those who have played at least some of Uncharted 4, it is likely that they have paused their game at one moment to take a screenshot using the sharing features on their PS4 or Xbox One or PC. The visual fidelity of Uncharted 4 is simply stunning and recalls a certain title released by Naughty Dog back in 2013 before 4th generation consoles were released. While Uncharted 4 should be celebrated for its advancements in technology and art, games like this invite one to pause longer and consider how photography as a game mechanic is influencing how players receive, play, and maybe even re-write the story of Uncharted 4.

How does this all shake out in the game? With the introduction of Uncharted 4‘s new “Photo Mode” players can pause the action and access a Instagram-esque photo-taking feature. If that was all there was to this feature, it might seem redundant given the share features on both the PS4 and the Xbox One. However, Uncharted 4‘s Photo Mode has many unique facets including the ability to add filters and frames, adjust the field of view and the camera, change the brightness, saturation, or sharpness, and many other elements. Players can even  remove pesky characters from the scene if they want to get that perfect scenic shot; alternatively, many players have taken some pretty hilarious close-ups of Drake in his not-so-finest moments.

image credit Slyder05 (via IGN)

If this doesn’t sound that impressive or game-changing, consider this personal anecdote from yours truly as I played through Uncharted 4 just a few days ago. After the first opening scene or so, I found myself pausing the game and trying out the new Photo Mode that I had heard about online. Even without editing tricks, I was already awed by the scenic landscapes and lush color and detail of the game. It was enough to make me continue to pause over and over as I went through a game that is ostensibly an adrenaline filled adventure that paces you quickly from one venue to the next. By the end of the game, I had taken enough photos to fill several gigs in my storage – way more screenshots than I had ever taken before in a game.

 

But here’s the other thing: I wasn’t simply stopping to take photos for the sake of aesthetic appeal only to move along with the game as soon as possible. I began to see the game, quite literally, in a different light. I could move the camera around, or zoom in and out to get a better scope of the impressive draw distance; in effect, the impact of the story changed for me. This being Drake’s last hurrah, I felt as though I were collecting photographic mementos for Drake and myself as we rushed from one beautiful location to the next. This is especially amusing given the many jokes that Drake and other characters make about constantly lacking a camera to record any of his discoveries over time – from El Dorado to Shambala to Captain Avery’s secret Liberalia. When the developers handed over the chance to take and manipulate photographs, they gave players a powerful tool to re-write Drake’s history as well as the history of Uncharted‘s world.

If we define narrative as something constructed by an author or series of authors, we can say that for a narrative to exist it must first be created. This takes things back to an age old question among theorists, does history simply exist objectively, or do we influence how it is recorded? How this record-taking is done, whether through words or images, matters because the form of the story will always influence its content, to paraphrase the critical theorist Hayden White. In other words, the two are inextricably linked, since the way one presents the content (the action, the events, the characters, etc.) will inevitably influence the shape of the content itself.

Take the instance of the use of photographs in Uncharted 4 once more. The form of the photograph and the ability to make edits to the photos taken gave players the opportunity to alter the very context, the narrative, of the game itself. Normally, a linear gameplay structure and story like the one in Uncharted 4 would leave little room for players to explore and add their own imaginative pieces to the narrative. And yet, “Photo Mode” provided players with the opportunity to pause the fast-paced action of the story, look around the world in a moment frozen in time, and to edit and expand on the meaning of that moment. Is the focus on the characters in the frame? Or are they taken out in favor of focusing on a sweeping landscape? Maybe the picture is simply a close up of a small detail that would have gone unnoticed in normal, fast-paced gameplay. Or perhaps the photo is edited to change the blue seas into fiery reds and oranges. All of these alterations change the mood, the tone, the color, the reception of the game as a story told visually through photographs. At the end of the game, players can reflect on the images they took, whether in order or not, and tell a new story apart from the one Naughty Dog set out to tell.

It is telling that the epilogue of Uncharted 4 ends with Drake’s teenage daughter stumbling upon his locked cabinet filled with trinkets and photographs of his many daring adventures. Drake hides the photograph perhaps due to the powerful authority that images possess to tell stories of the past, with or without our permission. With two photographs depicting Drake and his brother Sam juxtaposed with another picture of Drake, his wife Elena, and Victor Sullivan, Drake begins recounting his memories for his daughter – and this is a whole new re-telling of a story told once before, through the power of the photograph.

All photos not sourced were captured by the author in gameplay using Uncharted 4‘s “Photo Mode.”

Fire Emblem Fates: A Homoromantic Dating Sim

While the game had already been out in Japan since June 2015, the latest installment in the Fire Emblem series, Fire Emblem Fates, was only just recently released in the U.S. Because of the early release in Japan, hints of controversy reached the U.S. news outlets, leading to several reports on the game’s apparent mishandling of potentially gay characters, where one character in particular was believed to have approached the protagonist for help with “curing” her attraction to other girls. Since this particular controversy first arrived, some of the more erroneous translations have been disproved and corrected, but regardless of the intended message, the scene in question where the protagonist spikes her drink in order to help her feel attraction to men instead of women still feels like an unnecessary and poorly thought out scene. In fact, this scene was removed for the North American and European releases, a smart move for Nintendo to make, but it should be noted, much to my own confusion, that the character in question remains as a straight but girl-obsessed girl but cannot date women. And while some may laud Fates for being the first game in the series to provide the option of same-sex marriage, others were not so pleased with what they felt were basically the scraps at the metaphorical table of representation. Given the fumbles this game has already made how should critics and players evaluate Fire Emblem Fates with regard to its portrayal of gay – or, not so gay – characters?

As a disclaimer of sorts, a lot of this analysis is based on what I, as a critic, have played, seen, and heard about Fire Emblem Fates in the communities online and around me. As a newcomer to the series, I knew very little (and still don’t know much) about the Fire Emblem universe. A quick Google search informed me that Fire Emblem is not exactly known for its representation of queer characters. Being game based in Japanese anime archetypes, Fire Emblem Fates – which is composed of two separate games, Birthright and Conquest, plus an expansion, Revelation – plays fairly familiar to those who watch Japanese anime or read manga. The game was also published by Nintendo, a company that, in my opinion, continually refuses to talk about incorporating diverse characters of marginalized identities while constantly repeating its desire to remain “family friendly” if not apolitical.

With this track record, it was hard to expect much from a game that is ostensibly a dating simulator with tactical RPG elements. Yet, most of the people who play Fire Emblem games come for the characters, since it is certain that almost nobody plays for the story – at least not the terribly average story of Fates. The target audience for Fates appears to be a lot of the same people who would watch Japanese anime and ship the characters. And for good reason – the Fire Emblem fandom, from what I can tell, is heavily invested in the lives and relationships of the characters, myself included. In my friend group alone, my friends excitedly played through the levels and strategically paired up characters they wanted to see form what are called “Support” conversations in the game, where characters have one-on-one discussions, arguments, or confessions of love, depending on their level of companionship. These levels are ranked from C to S, S being the rank where players can have characters choose to marry one another and even produce an offspring, in most cases, “most” being the operative word in this case.

With over sixty romanceable characters between the two main games, only two (count ’em, TWO) queer characters exist, who are both presumably bisexual or pansexual, given that each of these two may choose to marry regardless of gender. To make matters worse, as Matthew Codd points out over at Shindig, these characters are portrayed as villainous if not psychotic and abusive. While it’s tempting to receive a character like Niles lightly as a parody of a stereotype, it’s incredibly damaging to the queer community to have only this single form of representation. Stranger than this is that, while the game approves your marriage with Niles, you cannot have a child with him, adopted or otherwise, which I found to be a disappointment given that plenty of real non-straight couples can and do have children. This is not to entirely dismiss Niles entirely, because he is a fine character in his own right; the unfortunate reality is that he stands as one of two options for queer romance, which is simply unacceptable when a large subset of Fire Emblem gamers desire to see fully realized queer relationships and who may be queer themselves.

At the same time that Fire Emblem Fates has a distinct lack of queer characters, the game also insists on baiting the player with what can only be described as “extremely affectionate characters.” While I am all for the portrayal of strong platonic relationships between friends or even aromantic relationships, Fates has a different agenda in mind.  This first struck me when a (straight) character named Silas arrives (appears in both Birthright and Conquest) and begins to explain how he and the player character are former childhood best friends. Conveniently, your character has no memory of him, which is tragic given that his entire life seems to have led up to this moment of your reunion. Talk about commitment. No matter which gender the user is playing as, his entire dialogue with the protagonist comes off as an extremely romantic, especially when Silas later tells you in your supports with him that his favorite memory of you was trying to sneak you out of the castle on what can only be described as the perfect picnic date. I know – cute, right?

Ramsey, my avatar, speaking to Silas

Even if Silas is just a really affectionate guy with a lot of feelings about your friendship, this sort of borderline homoromanticism is not the only case in the game. Part of the trouble is that the dialogue was probably written with the assumption that only female players playing female characters would want to romance Silas, but even this does not explain the character Soleil (the same character from the controversy with the removed scene), ostensibly the “girls’ love” archetype of the game who repeatedly states her desire for more than “friendly” relationships with other girls. If you need more convincing than the screen capture I took below, here’s all three support conversations between Soleil and Ophelia, another girl in Fates, in which Soleil calls Ophelia her “butterfly” and tells her that “You and me were destined to be together! Once you finally realize it, we’ll be a partnership for the ages.” It would not surprise me if Fate‘s developers were keenly aware of their audience’s desires for homoromantic shipping and therefore created “straight” fictional characters to titillate players into gay relationships for the sake of fantasy. However, what the developers are really doing is refusing to legitimate the actual identities of the real people who play their games.

Soleil, after literally just meeting this girl

Fire Emblem comes out of an environment where it’s common enough to see an anime-type fandom ship straight male characters with intense friendships romantically (re: every fandom ever). This makes sense given that writers in Japan are intentionally making the characters this way – a genre, I would argue, distinct from BL or “boys’ love” – where creators make profit off of the fandoms but conveniently avoid having to write them as real gay characters. Maybe that’s why it is doubly frustrating to see girls’ feelings for each other refused outright as they are with Soleil. I have found myself yelling at my game more than once, “JUST LET SOLEIL BE HAPPY!” as if that would change a thing. Perhaps I am asking for too much when I implore that developers let the characters they created with dialogue they wrote to date who they so desperately want to date.

To make matters more confusing, the same game that refuses to offer more than two queer romanceable characters and baits players at every turn also constantly encourages players with opportunities for approved incest. Corrin, the default name for the protagonist in Fates, is an adopted child who lives with the royal family in Nohr, until it is revealed in a turn of events that they were actually born to the Hoshidian royal family and were stolen away by Nohr’s king at an early age. Both families become very protective of and affectionate with Corrin, to the point where their siblings from both families actively flirt with the protagonist and can marry the protagonist. This is not out of the blue for a game made in Japan, a country with a cultural history of permitted incest practiced in families. The idea of incest is still permitted in modern Japanese anime and manga, though not all media necessarily reflects the attitudes of all people in Japan; if anything, the theme of incest is more of a subcultural phenomena now than a pervasive practice. But it does raise moral questions for consumers coming to Fire Emblem Fates without this cultural background. On the one hand, one could argue that this is a sign that Japan is more open when it comes to certain forms of sexual expression; but with the combined mishandling of queer characters in Fates (not to mention other games and anime from Japan), it is hard to say one way or another if Fates is responsible or irresponsible in the ways it portrays romances and characters in the game.

Before this analysis comes down too hard on the game, I want to make it clear that there is so much to love about Fire Emblem Fates that I myself enjoyed (and am continuing to enjoy). It very successful at what it is, a homoromantic dating sim, and even I love to see some “I’m not gay, but I’m flirting with you anyway” shipping between characters from time to time. Whenever video games seem to fail inevitably to reach my expectations as far as queer representation goes, I remember that fandoms, fanfiction, and fanart all exist to assuage my desires; in these spaces, we get to rewrite the terms of the worlds and characters provided to us and see our identities reflected more readily. While this is a rather depressing conclusion to reach about a game in 2016, I am ever grateful that communities exist to envision better characters whose stories continue on in our imaginations. Perhaps then, it is the Fire Emblem community that gets the final say on who these characters would become if we had it our way.

So how can we judge Fire Emblem Fates? Is it enough to chalk the game’s failings and questionable moral themes up to cultural differences? Or should we be more adamant when it comes to demanding more from developers across national and cultural lines? As both a critic and fan of this game, these questions remain unanswered and open, so my final question is, what do other fans and non-fans of the Fire Emblem series think of Fire Emblem Fates and these issues?

I was featured on FemHype!

ICYMI

I was featured on FemHype just before the turn of the new year. I submitted my essay on Life is Strange and violence against women, which is also posted (sans edits) in the post before this one.

Go check it out and also support FemHype because they post some really great stuff.

http://femhype.com/2015/12/23/on-womens-bodies-violent-men-in-the-life-is-strange-finale/

On Women’s Bodies and Male Violence in Life is Strange’s Finale

[The following article contains spoilers for most of the Life is Strange episodes, including the finale]

Although it is neither new nor surprising, violence against women in video games still feels more and more like an inevitability. For a game where your narrative choices are supposed to matter, Life is Strange took the power out of the players hands in its final episode, “Polarized.”

Let’s start with where the last episode began. Max was captured by the nefarious – to say the least – Mr. Jefferson, who was revealed to be the true psychotic killer of this tale at the end of the fourth episode. In final episode, the player wakes up strapped to a chair in front of a photographer’s white backdrop located deep in Nathan Prescott’s bunker, otherwise known as the “Dark Room.” The room is dim, save for the blinding professional lights reflecting off of Max’s face. The only thing the player has control over is the camera, where you can scan the room to find your “frienemy” Victoria tied up and unconscious next to you on the ground in addition to a cart filled with plastic gloves and drugs. Over and over, you hear the frantic thoughts of Max, who says that she “can’t remember” anything that happened. Eventually, the player uses Max’s rewind powers to relive the moment of Mr. Jefferson standing over her unconscious body with his camera, whispering to himself about the “purity” of Max’s unconscious expression and thinly veiled threats like, “don’t move, or this will hurt very much.”

At this point, we are supposed to accept with just a few crumbs of plot that Mr. Jefferson is just so obsessed with getting the perfect subjects for his photographs that he would go to the extreme lengths of kidnapping, drugging, and photographing teenage girls against their will, not to mention murdering multiple kids in his pursuit. We are expected to believe that Mr. Jefferson is simply a depraved man, which for me simply wasn’t convincing. The big reveal at the end of the fourth episode was so shocking and so exciting that I didn’t know what to expect for the final episode. All I knew was that I wanted my questions answered. What drives Mr. Jefferson’s character to commit these crimes?  What is his end goal? I get that the world of Arcadia Bay is meant to be fictional to the extent that supernatural powers, alternate timelines, and freak natural disasters occur in simultaneity. So it stands to reason that the fictional drama could do with a dose of psychopathic killer à la your typical horror game. Unfortunately, my questions weren’t answered satisfactorily. Rather, Mr. Jefferson turned into a caricature of a Scooby Doo villain.

We seem to get the idea that Mr. Jefferson is getting older and is a bit frustrated with Max’s generation (to the point where he made groan-worthy comments about selfies). Internally, he seems jealous of the fact that his time as an artist has passed, though it’s not as if he can get recognition for the photographs he’s taking in the Dark Room without immediately getting himself arrested. So why does he do all of this? Mr. Jefferson reveals that his interest in Max is the pure “innocence” she possesses – which, if you know anything about Max’s character, doesn’t really sound like her. Instead, what we get is Mr. Jefferson’s distorted perception of Max as a young vulnerable girl and his insistence on having a “connection” with her. And what we’re left with is an implication that the developers wouldn’t directly state in the game – that Mr. Jefferson is a sexually depraved man.

While Life is Strange did not portray scenes of sexual violence explicitly, the Dark Room itself became the metaphorical site of rape that many women and gender variant people will unfortunately quite literally experience in their lifetimes. The entire time I was playing the beginning of the episode I was thinking in my head, when will this be over? Which was the same terrifying thought I had during my own sexual assault. When you play as Max, you are forced to go through what it is like to be tied up and drugged and then violated against your will. I actually felt sick during the entirety of the scene in the Dark Room. Was this the point? Was I meant to feel so disgusted that I no longer wanted to play the game? Am I just too sensitive? Perhaps the only thing that could have made this worse would be if I was experiencing it in first-person mode rather than third-person.

My question is, at what point does this depiction of male violence against women slide into fetishism? As if to make matters worse, the game has you use Max’s rewind powers in order to make you go through the experience again (and again and again if you mess up on your rewinds). Despite Max’s horror at having to relive her assault, we as players become forced to hit the rewind button as if we are replaying the cumshot on a porn video. If the dressing of the Dark Room and Jefferson’s camera wasn’t already enough to produce the overt male gaziness of the scene, this matter is doubled by our own voyeurism as players looking in on the scene. Add in Jefferson’s mad obsession with “innocence” and treating Max like a virginal figure, and the Dark Room is transformed into a visual rape fantasy, albeit a metaphorical one.

Set-ups like this have been the status quo across a wide variety of visual media. In her notable essay, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” Laura Mulvey uses Freudian theory to explain how the structure of cinematography unconsciously serves a patriarchal system of exploitation of women’s bodies. Leaving behind a modern feminist critique of her essay and the dubiousness of Freudian theory in general (for another rainy day, perhaps), Mulvey makes an important point that underscores a certain discourse prevalent in all visual media:

“This is what makes cinema quite different in its voyeuristic potential from, say, strip-tease, theatre, shows, etc. Going far beyond a woman’s to-be-looked-at-ness, cinema builds the way she is to be looked at into the the spectacle itself. Playing on the tension between film as controlling the dimension of time (editing, narrative) and film as controlling the dimension of space (changes in distance, editing), cinematic codes create a gaze, a world, and an object, thereby producing an illusion cut to the measure of desire.”

In other words, the kind of violence portrayed in the Dark Room functions differently than your average strip-tease, where the goal is to make the visual undressing explicit. The Dark Room is an allusion to violence, but it is also an illusion of safety. “True” violence, we’re told, doesn’t happen in front of our eyes, but it could; we (and Max) are “safe” because the game promises us that there’s a way out – but only after we have performed the trauma against ourselves. These “cinematic codes” as Mulvey calls them are a way of hinting at what we can’t talk about (re: sexual violence against women). These visual markers produce tension alongside the narrative, which in turn fosters an erotic gaze towards the scene at hand. That’s our a/illusion of violence – it’s happening but not really happening. It’s terrifying and horrifying. It’s exciting. The stakes are incredibly high for those of us who have staked a lot of our hearts on this game’s story. Worst of all, we’re expected to experience an unconscious erotic (horrific) pleasure as spectators taking part. Our job is to watch and play along.

Perhaps the only redeeming moment of the Dark Room and Max’s capture during Life is Strange‘s bizarre finale is that she manages to rescue herself (mostly) without the aid of male protagonists unlike a more common narrative. Max’s powers save her, she triumphs over the numerous bad male characters around her, and through our intuition, we get to help her realize this. Agency right? Max defeats Jefferson and narrowly escapes, but not without sustaining severe emotional and psychological damage as a survivor of male manipulation and violence. This isn’t even to mention the bizarro nightmare sequence later on in which Max is literally stalked by all the weird and incredibly violent men in her life. To make matters worse, when Max brings this up to Chloe, they simply state how horrible it was and move on, no processing necessary.

I wait with bated breath for the day that we get to see survivors of trauma and sexual assault in video games actually get to consciously process their trauma as part of the narrative. A spectacular example of a show that gets this right is the new Marvel series on Netflix, Jessica Jones, created by Melissa Rosenberg. Rosenberg commented in an article with The Hollywood Reporter recently that “For me, if I never see an actual rape on a screen again it’ll be too soon. It’s becoming ubiquitous, it’s become lazy storytelling and it’s always about the impact it has on the men around them…It’s damaging. It’s just hideous messaging, and so coming into this, the events have already happened and this is really about the impact of rape on a person and about healing, survival, trauma and facing demons. To me it’s much richer territory. If you turn on any television show or, for that matter, film these days, nine out of 10 of them seem to open with a naked, tied-up, dead woman with her undies around her ankles. I think I’ve been calling them the NTSDs, which stands for naked, tied-up, dead, I can’t remember. They’ve just become so ubiquitous, it’s like numbing the audience to what is a horrific violation.”

Jessica Jones uses flashing lights, blurred sight lights, and other cinematographic codes to masterfully express visually what it’s like to be sexually assaulted – not to mention manipulated and gaslighted by your abuser – and to live with that trauma daily. Where Life is Strange falls short is how it fails to give Max moments to name her trauma, to talk to other women who have experienced the same trauma, and to work through it. The plot moves on to rewind and “undo” the scene so that it is as if she was never assaulted in the first place, or that she did not remember it.

Maybe Life is Strange is making a statement on the state of violence against women. What if we’re meant to feel as though these depictions of male violence against women – from Nathan’s initial shooting of Chloe in the school bathroom, to David’s obsession with surveilling teenage girls, to Frank the drug dealer’s violent behavior – are just reflections of our reality? Is this a critical exposé on how we treat women? It’s hard for me to believe that it’s purely just a matter of social commentary. In any case, current examples from visual media such as Jessica Jones are proving that video games can and must do better when it comes to depictions of women, rape and sexual assault, and their stories.

Sources:

Fienberg, Daniel. “Jessica Jones’ Boss, on Losing Carol Danvers, Exploring Rape Responsibility and Season 2.” The Hollywood Reporter. November 22, 2015. http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/live-feed/jessica-jones-rape-season-two-842318

Mulvey, Laura. “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” Screen 16.3. (Autumn 1974). pp. 6-18. http://www.jahsonic.com/VPNC.html

A CASE OF DISAPPEARING QUEERS IN LIFE IS STRANGE

[The following article contains spoilers for most of the Life is Strange episodes, including the finale]

The final scene of Dontnod’s Life is Strange gives players the biggest ultimatum of the series. Despite the narrative leading us turn after turn to believe that Max and Chloe were more than just “friends” if you made certain choices to play the game that way, the way the series came to an end in “Polarized” proved that queer-baiting is alive and real in video games.

When it comes down to it, Life is Strange forces you to either save the entire town of Arcadia Bay or essentially “kill the queer.” I know it’s an odd stretch of the imagination, but think of it this way. A lot of folks like myself had guessed that Chloe would have to die in order for the timeline to be fixed and for everything to go back to normal, so many of us predicted that we would have to make the choice to “kill Chloe” by the end. While it’s nice that the developers give you the option to say, “fuck it all” and drive off Thelma and Louise style with Chloe to Portland or some other place, I was more than a little peeved that the developers made a habit of disappearing queer women.

It begins with Rachel Amber, a sexually ambiguous character that Chloe pines for desperately (and whom Frank also lusts for) and hopes will be found. She is the story’s Laura Palmer, as many Twin Peaks references in the game nod to. When her death is finally confirmed at the end of the fourth episode, the game follows it up immediately by killing Chloe for what feels like the hundredth time in the game. Two queers disappeared, just like that. I don’t know if you noticed this, but somehow Life is Strange managed to tell every iteration of the lesbian death bed story in the ways it killed Chloe; first she dies getting mixed up in a drug deal, then she becomes paralyzed and asks for assisted suicide on what would be her deathbed anyway, and finally she gets killed by a jealous male authority figure.

But let’s just call this what it is. It even has it’s own page on Tv Tropes: the Magical Queer. The point of this trope is that the queer must die such that humanity (Arcadia Bay) can be saved. What’s worse is that nobody seems to know or care that Chloe sacrifices herself for the town if you choose that ending. Chloe asks you to kill her over and over, not because she feels a sense of duty to her home, but because she literally feels that her life is worthless in comparison to the other people in Arcadia Bay (maybe barring Jefferson and some other grimy characters) and tells Max that she needs to “accept her fate…our fate.”

I’m not the only person who has pointed out the queer subtext in the game as a somewhat deliberate attempt at queer-baiting. Even if you choose the Thelma and Louise escape option like I did, the romantic subtext between Max and Chloe is never explored. And before anyone argues that the queer relationship is just a subtlety (“look, they’re holding hands!”) that we as players need to look for, I will just call that what it is: lazy story development. A gentle shoulder touch does not a romantic relationship make. In fact, the only time you get the opportunity to initiate a real romantic moment with Chloe is right after you choose the option to sacrifice her, thereby killing any chance of the queer relationship that the game kept building up to but never delivering on. Talk about bait-and-switch, developers! I mean, seriously, right up until the end the game was like, WE’RE JUST GAL PALS BEING PALS. And if you chose the other ending, you’re like, I JUST DESTROYED THE ENTIRE TOWN AND ITS PEOPLE FOR YOU, IT’S FINE, WE’RE JUST FRIENDS. Life is Strange, you broke my heart a lot over the episodes, but that moment hurt in a bad way as someone who identified with Chloe and literally was born with that as my birth name. //holla name change//

What this all comes down to is that I haven’t played the perfect game about on screen teenage girl romance. While something like Gone Home was its own brand of genius storytelling, I can’t include it here because most of the story was retroactive and without visible characters on screen; but to be fair, that game was still masterfully done and on screen romance simply wasn’t the point. It’s tough to tell myself to just settle for this, for the one real on screen kiss and never the realization of queer relationships (unless it’s in a Bioware game). It’s even harder to criticize independent developers who have a lot more to lose than bigger companies if their game flops due to their narrative choices, even if I would say, screw those people for being afraid to incorporate diversity. Again, I just want to reiterate that I really enjoyed Life is Strange and that this critique is just a call for every game developer to bring us the representation we’ve been calling for.

With the news that Life is Strange will have a second season, I’m feeling more than a little intrepid about what they could possibly choose to explore. While I expect the next season to continue focus on topics outside of mainstream video games, I don’t expect to see another exploration of a queer relationship. It would be nice to see it actualized on screen, though.

ON WOMEN’S BODIES, MALE VIOLENCE, AND DISAPPEARING QUEERS: LIFE IS STRANGE’S BIZARRE FINALE

On October 20th, the developers at Dontnod released the finale of the episodic game, Life is Strange. I had been fervently awaiting this finale over the past few weeks and so I immediately put down everything in my life to see what would happen in – or rather to – the dramatic world of Arcadia Bay.

As the final scene played out after my last big choice of the game, I was a bit stunned to say the least. My first reaction was to text my sister, whom I had made binge play the first four episodes on my computer when I visited her in Chicago last month (she’s still waiting on that Mac support, please). I looked back at my texts and our conversation was a mixture of me yelling and crying at the same time. My sister was moaning about how badly she wanted to play but also feared that she too was going to be upset with the ending. It took me weeks of processing to figure out how I felt about how it all ended, but this is what I came to understand.

Here’s the deal: I really loved Life is Strange. I have written and thought productively more about this game than I have about any game in the past year. There’s so much about the game that’s worth lauding, but with every great game there is always a couple things that miss the mark. For all its centering of female-led narratives and the teenage girl experience, the plot of Life is Strange took an even stranger turn in its finale. //spoilers abound//

EDIT: I have decided to split up the original longform essay, which tackles two rather meaty topics, in order to express the separate ideas more concretely. I am also tidying things up a bit for the sake of post-edits. You can read both articles by scrolling up or by using the links below.

On Women’s Bodies and Male Violence in Life is Strange‘s Finale

A Case of Disappearing Queers in Life is Strange

 

SOME (MOSTLY) BORROWED LINKS ABOUT GAMING, GENDER, AND THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN THEM

Thanks to some excellent feminist gaming websites like Offworld, FemHype, Kill Screen, and Critical Distance, I have some lovely articles on pressing topics to share.

Sex is Like Dark Souls by Kris Ligman

Pick Your Poison: Character Creation & the Gender Binary by Teddie

Diversity, Inclusivity, and Validation in ‘Undertale’ by Nightmare

We Need to Stop Letting Everyone Save the World by Frances Chiem

I plan to write up some feelings on the finale of Life is Strange quite soon as well as some feelings after finishing the much lauded Undertale. 

LET’S PLAY ROUND-UP

I have played so many new games in the past few weeks, so I thought I would just put them all in one post!

JAZZPUNK: God, this game was absolutely bizarre. Even “surreal” doesn’t quite cover it. Maybe “trippy” is the right word? I can’t even accurately explain the plot – you, some sort of hired spy/clandestine operative, are given psychedelic drugs and sent to break into the Russian embassy to recover some important information for the strange director you work for. You also go out on a run to steal an artificial kidney and then you for some reason end up stuck at a resort where suddenly everyone wants to keep you there forever, presumably to murder you. The game is obviously a parody of classic spy/espionage films, but not in the way you’d expect. Everything is colored like you would imagine if someone could vomit during an acid trip. I have to admit that I found myself laughing at some of the more absurd moments (re: every moment) in the game, but I hesitate to spoil even the smallest details. A lot of the fun isn’t about the story or the gameplay but rather comes from wandering around, ignoring your objective as a spy, and clicking on everything and everyone you meet. I would say it’s worth playing for sure if you’re into more eclectic games.

THE VANISHING OF ETHAN CARTER: Easily one of the most realistically rendered games I have ever seen, The Vanishing of Ethan Carter is a jaw-dropper, for sure. I loved how immersive the environment felt. I was expecting a typical murder mystery and then, ten minutes in, ****spoiler**** an astronaut appeared and suddenly I was in space. SPACE. Apparently, I missed the part where this was a paranormal mystery game with the addition of being transported into space. end spoiler. Needless to say, it got my attention. I played through most of the game rather quickly, until I found out that there was a bad jump scare coming up (I am into spooky thrillers that DON’T have jump scares, for the most part, unless they are just part of the constant gameplay like Dead Space where they’re basically not even jump scares anymore). So, I took a break for a few days and waited until it was comfortably the morning or afternoon to finish it – a quick game for sure. I really liked how they blended the realism of the environment with the spooky/paranormal mystery of the game’s plot, where you as the detective, Paul Prospero, use your paranormal powers to touch objects in the environment to piece together the mystery. Some of it was bizarre and seemingly ripped from the pages of a Lovecraftian novel, and I think I really enjoyed this one.

BATMAN: ARKHARM KNIGHT: With rave reviews coming out every which way, I figured it was time to see if the rumors were true. As a fan of the first two installments in the series, Arkham Asylum and Arkham City, I was looking forward to a new Batman game that bounced back from Origin‘s apparent failings. I completed the campaign in just a few days time and was pretty pleased overall, having played it on the PS4 and not, luckily, the dreadful PC version. The Batmobile was at first clunky and weird, but I came to kind of like the new gameplay with the Batman’s slick vehicle. There was a lot to love about the game, from old side-characters and new ones appearing in and out; you can even play as Robin, Nightwing, and Catwoman in certain team combat scenarios alongside everyone’s favorite broody Bat. The overall story is well-written and has plenty of unexpected turns, complete with a surprise villain returning for one last hurrah. The entire experience from beginning to end was very rewarding. I think there’s something to the combat and the ability to fling yourself around with the grappling hook that makes the gameplay in these games so fluid and seamless. I dug it.

SPELUNKY: I tried. I TRIED. I tried so hard, y’all. This game is definitely not for the weak. Do not go in expecting to have fun with a mildly challenging platformer. This game will make you want to bang your head against a brick wall. I couldn’t make it past the first dungeon, for christ sakes, because the game forces you to restart if you lose 4 lives (i.e. if you touch or get hit by anything dangerous) spread over 3 different levels. With a time limit. And the format of the levels change after you die, so you’re never in the same place again. I guess I just wasn’t the sort of Mega Man playing kid who enjoys masochistically dying every damn minute and retrying, unless there’s some proper sense of accomplishment after finally winning and making progress (e.g. Bloodborne). I might go back to this some day, but now is not the time, unfortunately. I am not a Real Gamer™.

SHOVEL KNIGHT: Another difficult platformer that’s punishing but, again, in a rewarding sort of way. Shovel Knight is charming and really quite fun. It’s nostalgic and plays like a true 8-bit platformer should, updated for a new generation of games. I haven’t finished this one just yet because it is difficult and takes some time to work through, but I look forward to making more progress on it soon.

LIFE IS STRANGE (up to episode 3): My last post was all about my new-found love for this game, so I won’t say much except that the game just keeps getting better with each new episode. The end of the second episode got me right through the heart.

ORI AND THE BLIND FOREST: Wow. I just finished this game last night and I am feeling so incredibly floored. A mix between The Legend of Zelda and a Miyazaki film, Ori and the Blind Forest gave me so many feelings. This is easily one of the best games I have played in the past few months, and it reinvigorated my previously exhausted attitude towards 2D platformers. Everything – from the music score, the art direction, the gameplay, the story – is incredibly well-crafted and painstakingly rendered. The colors are so lush and imaginative and MY GOD I have never cried so quickly after starting up a game (it took about 3 minutes). It was like watching UP all over again. By the end of the game I was either sitting their with my mouth agape or I was smiling. Don’t get me wrong – this game has its fair share of extremely difficult puzzles and occasionally mystifying gameplay mechanics. Let’s just say that my thumbs were very cramped after finishing. But I think it was just challenging enough for me to get a sense of satisfaction after beating it. There’s so much to love about this charming little game, and I really hope that other people take the time to play it.

JOURNEY: Today, the PS4 version of Journey was finally released. I never had the chance to play it when it was on the PS3, and I really hate dragging out my old PS3 since the PS4 doesn’t have backwards compatibility, so I have been waiting for this to get re-released for the PS4. I did my first run-through today, and I had a lot of high expectations for this game. I would say that nearly all of them were well met, but I think I need to do another run before I can form actual thoughts on the game. It’s breathtaking and definitely not what I was expecting in some regards, but I look forward to my next run.

And that’s about it! A lot of these games were on the shorter side and are totally worth playing if you can spare the time. If I’m being completely honest though, most of my time was spent a few weeks back replaying the Grand Theft Auto V campaign now that I have the PS4 version, playing Dragon Age: Inquisition for the first time (oh my god it was good expect a write-up later), and I also tackled all of the most recent episodes of Tales From the Borderlands. That’s a lot of hours devoted to games that I won’t mention here.

LIFE IS STRANGE AND EMPATHY

I picked up Life is Strange during the Steam Summer Sale this year (for once, I didn’t go overboard with my purchases and maybe bought about 3 games total this year). I had been hearing about Life is Strange for a while on various gaming news outlets and podcasts that I keep up with and had been meaning to check out the game.

Life is Strange is a narrative-based game much like your average Telltale episodic game. Though I only purchased the first episode (foolishly), I now have a good reason to pick up the season pass. This game was brilliant. It blended together everything I like about story-telling (in a vein similar to Telltale games but somewhat distinct with its own flavor) and interactive gameplay along with one simple yet incredibly effective gameplay mechanic: the ability to stop time and rewind.

Normally, the ability to just correct a mistake you thought you made or go back on a choice because you wanted to pick the “better” option would ruin a choice-driven narrative. Indeed, a game like Telltale’s Game of Thrones thrives on fast-paced and tough decision-making, where players often feel like there are no “good” choices – only the lesser of two evils. But Life is Strange is different. Instead of slapping the player on the wrist for making a choice they might not entirely understand the consequences of in the moment, Life is Strange allows players to experience the thrill of getting it right. Or, at least, getting it right and having all hindsight possible and then still second-guessing yourself and getting it wrong. The life lesson – if it’s teaching us anything – is even if you have all the information about the outcomes of every choice you might make in life, you will still have to make the choice, inevitably, even if none of the outcomes are desirable.

What this produces is the visceral effect of guilt. While choices in Telltale games are easily forgotten until the end of game summary, Life is Strange forces you to deal with the monumental effects of the everyday choices people make. You do know what will happen in each outcome because you’ve rewound time and seen what happens. Yet, you must choose and live with your decision all while knowing the short-term advantages and disadvantages but not knowing the more long-term effects of your choices. The game certainly plays with the idea of the “butterfly effect” both literally and figuratively: a small butterfly appears early on in the game when the main character first discovers her powers to rewind time, and every time you make a life-altering decision with consequences, a small butterfly appears in the top corner of the screen to warn players. And players also suffer the guilt of knowingly manipulating others who have no perception that you’ve altered time, let’s say, to conveniently spill paint on a bully. Yet, the most interesting thing was that I often made choices based not on which would be more advantageous to my character but which ones would most help those around me, even after I might have dumped paint on them. I found it so much easier to make sacrifices which might affect Max’s life negatively in some huge ways precisely because of the empathy that I established with even the most frustrating and unfriendly characters.

Let’s pause on the gameplay for a moment and talk story. Life is Strange follows the life of an 18 year-old girl named Max. She attends Blackwell Academy, a small and prestigious private school, where she faces the throes of high school drama. I was especially attuned to the social struggles of a shy, middle-class girl who has trouble making friends and trouble staying focused in class. Yet, something I found interesting about the game was its refusal to commit to high school stereotypes wholesale. The game presents your typical rich kid snobs, cliques, and bullies, but it is more playful with the small private school vibe in a way that feels much more authentic to something that other people and I experienced at small private schools. Though I never lived in a dormitory (I went to a day school), I could see what the story-tellers were trying to do with characters and their interactions. They could have easily, for example, made the main character into a total social outcast to the tune of any best-selling YA book out there. But here’s what they did instead: they transform the character by dialogue. Yes, Max is a shy and quiet person, but she comes alive in the space that you have her interact with other people.

Max is a character who transcends cliques and social groups and even the gender divide that was so prevalent in my high school. She has a lot of male acquaintances and friends who aren’t assholes, surprisingly. You can have her navigate the school and talk to as many (or as little) people as you want to, including your typical jocks, geeks, skaters, artists, etc. While you have a harder time “fitting in” with some people you encounter, you can still talk to them. And you can also manipulate time if you want to really make kids think you’re cool by “guessing” what they were going to ask or tell you. You spend a lot of time in Max’s head, so you can often just look at people, and she will tell you something interesting about them. Many times she will actually say something typical or mean about someone she doesn’t really know that well – and then she’ll take it back. Max’s demonstrably self-aware character is a delight. It makes her incredibly empathetic and interesting because, despite the options to interact with other people she normally wouldn’t hang out with, Max is a imperfect character who is trying to get over her shy and judgmental (and her own pretentious) behavior, just like anyone else. It’s a part of being in high school (or college, if I’m being honest) and getting over that knee-jerk reaction to judge at first sight and be willing to explore someone’s personality by simply going up to them and saying hi, asking about their day, and learning something about them, even if you really don’t know anything about drones or skateboarding. Each character is well-rounded and has more than one side to their personalities and stories, if you’re willing to ask.

As for the main plot, it’s hard to say anything without spoiling the story. A girl has been missing for a while from Blackwell, and everyone seems to miss her. Max’s old childhood friend Chloe turns up out of the blue on day after not having spoken with her in years, and Max can barely recognize her. She’s gotten herself into some trouble, but luckily Max uses her powers to save her, at least for the moment. On top of the other smaller high school conflicts and just trying to fit in at her new school, Max is dealing with a larger storm of sorts that’s about to hit the town.

Alright, back to gameplay. Something else that makes the game fun to just play for hours is the ability to explore environments in a more meaningful way than most games like Life is Strange. The one that comes closest to this “story-exploration” genre is Gone Home. And the game feels a lot like Gone Home in ALL the good ways (because Gone Home is amazing, so everyone should play it). The more you explore, the more you learn. I loved running into posters on the dorm walls advertising a “grrl only book club” that reads Ursula K. Leguin and Neil Gaiman but insists that “no wizard boys or teenage vampires” are allowed. It’s humor like this that makes me smile and think YES to this world that these girls are making for themselves (and a world that I wish I had in high school, being raised socially female). I also saw a hand-written poster that advertised a “girls’ night out” that included the notes “bi-weekly and bi-friendly ;)” – LIKE HOW CUTE AND COOL IS THAT?? Anyway, what’s actually kind of brilliant is that, the more you explore, the more you feel like you’re snooping (hence, the guilt factor) and the more likely you are to get caught. Luckily, you have the superpowers to rewind anything you mess up, but unfortunately you still have to live with that guilt. (I like games that are aware of the effects of, let’s say, going into someone’s house and breaking their pots for money.)

passing the bechdel test with flying colors

Similar to Gone Home, Life is Strange centers in on female-identified characters and their relationships with one another and completely prioritizes them over male ones without tossing out male characters from the plot line. I love that these games are willing to make teenage girls, their emotional lives, and stories the genuine centerfold of the plot without pandering or falling into traps of invalidating teenage girls as insignificant or trivial, erratic or overly emotional, or foolish. And high school drama is just as important to the main character as the supposedly bigger events that she has to deal with in turn. The coolest part is that all of this gets recorded in a beautiful, teenage-style journal, complete with hand-drawn pictures, snapshots, and lots of tonal “ughs” from Max. I should mention that the writing and dialogue is just so perfectly attuned to how kids speak without insisting on overloaded chat speak or inauthentic garbled slang as if it were written by a 40 year-old parent. It almost feels like a precocious 18 year-old wrote the story right out of her journal.

I also found it interesting how the game plays with the concept of photography in its storytelling. Max is a young and aspiring photographer who takes self-portraits; the game pauses to both make fun of and critique the stereotypical hate associated with selfies and narcissism before brilliantly dismissing selfies as some new-aged phenomena by pointing out the historical evolution of self-portraiture. There are many moments where you can pause and take photos of people and places that you encounter in the game which are saved in your journal. There’s something about photography and storytelling as developed in this game that becomes such a meaningful addition. I think it has to do with the way that Max is often looking down the lens of her camera, viewing people around her through a literal barrier that simultaneously narrows and alters her perception of them. She takes a picture and freezes a moment in time – and that’s something she can’t rewind, necessarily. In the story, Max struggles to find the perfect picture for a special photography contest, much like she and you will struggle to make choices in the game. The story is, after all, all about how you frame it – how you choose your words and which actions you take.

I look forward to learning more about Max’s reestablished relationship with her old childhood friend, Chloe, and her relationship with Kate, a girl who goes to her school, doesn’t say much, and seems to be sad all the time. Both of these girls are dealing with their own kinds of depression – Chloe lost her father and is now dealing with a new, awful stepfather, while Kate is just inexplicably depressed and forlorn. Rather than painting Kate as a moody or butt-of-the-joke character, however, the game gives you the opportunity to be a supportive friend – one who doesn’t blame Kate for her depressive feelings or ask her to just get over her depression and hang out already. Max can choose to be kind and empathetic with the character of Kate, just as she would with Chloe even though her “problems” are more visible and obvious. In this way, the game addresses the realities of what its like to live with an invisible illness, and one which often has no easy explanation for others who constantly demand to know the “source” of mental illnesses.

Kate doesn’t have time for high school drama bullshit, tbh.

As for last words, the game is just really beautiful. The lighting and art direction are top-notch. The soundtrack is spot-on and gorgeous. There was only one weird glitch for me in the game which was that sometimes the audio would hitch when someone started talking and their mouths would keep moving – luckily subtitles made up for anything garbled or misunderstood. Aside from that, I absolutely recommend this game to literally everyone who has ever gone to and survived school.

LET’S PLAY: MIDDLE-EARTH: SHADOW OF MORDOR

Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor was a game I bought purely on recommendation. I had little interest when I heard about the title upon its release, since I tend to find LOTR spin-offs hugely disappointing, though I must admit, little is as disappointing as the new Hobbit movies. But, I listened to a mass of people rave about the game’s mechanics, describing it as Assassin’s Creed if that game had finally polished its mechanics (which you think it would have by now, about 8 games deep, but Unity showed us how wrong we all were). As a fan of most of the AC series, I decided to give it a go.

At the start of the game, I felt frustrated. I wandered into packs of uruks carelessly and quickly realized what happens when you die. I was so angry when I found out that my death resulted in the promotion of the uruk who killed me! But I learned, slowly, not to jump into crowds that I wasn’t ready to take on. The game does take an adjustment period, where you should probably spend time exploring and hunting for experience points to level up your skills. The main missions should be approached carefully, not because they were difficult by any means, but because you can run through the game in a few hours and miss out on a lot of opportunities to pad your skills. That isn’t to say that doing some side missions or exploration isn’t fun–quite the opposite actually.

In fact, I found the story line and the main missions less fun than the nemesis system and side missions. The main story is typical: man loses wife and kids to evil, is given a second chance to avenge them, and is possessed by an elf lord spirit to get it all done. Ok, so maybe that last part wasn’t so typical. You gain some superpowers from your elf wraith friend, which is a unique advantage to the game, but the narrative between them is less exciting. It wasn’t the worst thing I’ve seen, but it wasn’t the most innovative, either.

As I mentioned, the nemesis system is the oft-cited and exciting addition the game makes to the gaming industry. It works like this: when you die, the uruk who killed you is promoted. Additionally, there might be some squabbles and clashes of power in Sauron’s Army of uruks, which play like a dramatic boxing match replay in the menu screen. And it worked really well. I was initially angry, as I said, but soon came to love picking off my enemies, so that there was a point in the game where I was only hunting down uruks and completely ignoring the main missions. A lot like the AC series, SoM allowed you to stalk big time targets, often prompting you to strategically stealth your way across the strongholds, taking down archers and special guards along the way. When you confront your main target, he often has a few words to say, and each uruk has a unique name and, uh, charming personality. The best part is when you die or run away from your target, he will remember you and tell you what you did to mock you! Or, if you make him run away, he comes up with some sad excuse as to why he couldn’t get it together last time.

Each boss has strengths and weaknesses, which you uncover by finding intel and bleeding the info out of lower grunts. When you discover this information, you can strategically use it to your advantage by, let’s say, dropping a nest of bees on his head because he fears bees. FEAR THOSE BEES. Or, you can release cages of wild beasts called, caragors, which attack anything on site (including yourself, so get to hiding). The controls were like butter, and I really enjoyed slinging myself around like Spiderman once my abilities leveled up more. I became more deadly and started taking out my targets with well-placed bow shots, sneaked poison into their grogs, and hidden yank-them-off the edge of the tower maneuvers. SoM aced all of the angles of stealth that I enjoy most without forcing me to do too many pointless escort or delivery boy missions like some open world and stealth games out there.

When you really level up your abilities, you essentially become god-like in crowds of uruks. The combat style, which has been compared to the most recent Batman series, is really smooth and top-notch. Fighting in crowds is fun once you have the skills to drop them and vault over them and avoid attacks. It was immensely satisfying to chop the heads off uruks and deal off finishing kills. The camera slows down dramatically when you finish a top target, and all the other uruks high-tail it out of your area in fear. It’s always a good sign that a game is enjoyable when I am cringing or making “OOOH” noises at the screen when finishing my targets in combat.

From my perspective, SoM‘s developers have been taking careful notes from other games, but they implemented the mechanics perfectly. It was a short-lived experience, but I ultimately think it was for the better that way. Hopefully, developers will take a leaf out of Shadow of Mordor‘s book and will implement the new nemesis mechanic in future games.