Space & Times

---

Note: This post contains SPOILERS. If you’re interested in this game, I encourage you to go play it first and then revisit this post.

Spec Ops: The Line plays much like a novella, like the Joseph Conrad tale to which it will always and inevitably be compared. It’s relatively short for a game, but delivers its message in a dense and potent gut-punch.

In The Line, near-future Dubai has been all but buried underneath catastrophic sandstorms that left the city’s inhabitants stranded. Colonel John Konrad of the 33rd Battalion volunteered himself and his troops to stay behind and help evacuate the city. You play Captain Martin Walker, leader of a three-man Delta Force squad sent to investigate Dubai after receiving a distress signal from Konrad. (For a more in-depth plot summary, the Wikipedia entry is good)

Naturally, the game has greater depth than this plot might imply. As Russ Pitts writes in Polygon’s great behind-the-scenes look:

It is a game about a city at risk of being swallowed by nature and a man at risk of being swallowed by the weight of his own horrible acts. It is a shooter in which the innocent bystanders are as much a part of the story as you are, and telling the good guys from the bad is practically impossible.

The game itself is a bit of an anomaly – it’s actually part of a franchise (the Spec Ops franchise), which I’ve never played before, but I get the impression that this game’s development and evolution is quite unique from its sibling titles.
It’s gameplay isn’t particularly sophisticated, even for shooters. In fact, it can feel quite frail at times – ammo is sparse, you die quickly, and the cover system is pretty wonky. Some take the stance that this less-than-gratiftying gameplay is intentional, and I have to agree. The game functions as much as a criticism on the shooter genre that glorifies war as much as it is on the brutality of war itself. The frightened look on Walker’s face as you’re on the brink of death was hard for me to ignore. An unlike other war-focused franchises (e.g. Call of Duty), you’re not fighting ambiguously Eastern European villains bent on destroying the world or unambiguously evil Middle Eastern terrorists set on bringing the west to its knees. You’re fighting fellow American soldiers and the twisted machinations of your own brittle, guilt-gnawed mind. That you’re fighting American soldiers manages to make the fact that you’re killing people more evident (foreign soldiers are easier to otherize). You mercilessly execute these soldiers for a pittance in much-needed ammunition – a drop of water in the desert – and you can often see the fear in their eyes as you do it. It can be a pretty jarring experience.

In spite of its subpar gameplay (or in addition to, if you interpret it like I do), The Line‘s drawing of the narrative, and use of immersion and simple decision-making is so compelling that this game is hard to put down. There are only a few decision-making points in the game, but each is heavy, bearing solid ethical and moral ambiguities that can compel you to question your own sense of justice and belief in what’s right. For instance, the decision to either leave Riggs to suffer a slow painful death or mercifully kill him – Riggs having just damned the whole city to thirst – led to a discussion on justice in the modern age, tit-for-tat punishment, and the bitterness of post-massacre suicides. Games like this are powerful, and to me indicate the artistic potential of the medium.

The most important and most discussed event in The Line is the white phosphorus scene. In this scene, Walker makes the call (the player has no say) to blanket an entrenched group of the 33rd with white phosphorus, believing that they took a large group of refugees hostage. After the troops had been cleared, Walker and his squad find amongst the devastation that what they thought to be a cluster of enemy combatants was actually the refugees they were looking for, now charred and blackened from the white phosphorus.

It’s easy to be critical about the forced hand here. But technically, it’s hard to be truly critical about it – making an event so crucial to the plot optional would possibly mean spinning out a completely different alternate plot. Which would be neat, but maybe impractical for this game, and against its intent. But perhaps that this pivotal moment is without choice is what makes decisions so much more powerful afterwards. Walker, to cope with his crime, begins to posit imaginary decisions – such as the two hanging criminals – in the hopes of offering himself an opportunity at redemption, a chance to make the right choice. But ultimately, and tragically, he still denies himself from the most important decision he has – to leave Dubai and save his squad, or to ruthlessly press on deeper into the city and his madness.

In general, however, the game has a lot of great touches that maybe deserve greater analysis. The deeper you descend into Walker’s tragic deceit, the innocuous loading screen tips give way to dark and doubtful introspection – a glimpse at the player’s own lucidity that tunnel-visioned Walker does not have the benefit of. During the white phosphorus sequence, the sense of calm on Walker’s reflected face is startling and disturbing on a second playthrough, knowing what he’s actually doing on that monitor. It could be interesting to think about the decision to do an over-the-shoulder shooter rather than a first-person shooter like Call of Duty or Battlefield. At first thought, it seems to me that an FPS could have made the gameplay even more immersive, but it might have been equally important to see Walker’s expressions as he fought.

But these are all opinions of someone who has been fortunate enough to never have seen real war firsthand. What would a real soldier think of The Line? Game critic Kris Ligman had a friend, a Marine that served two tours in Iraq, give his thoughts on the game during two playthroughs. Both his takes are worth a read.

Take One
In the first take he points out issues in general with games that implement decision-making systems. He also figures out the twist early on (and to be honest, it is a maybe overused plot device) – if I’d figured it out that early, I think that would have ruined a lot of the weight of the decisions that followed. They would have felt arbitrary and meaningless, as it would be apparent that Walker was careening toward his own inevitable destruction. For this game to be successful, the player needs to be as much in the dark as Walker – Walker, in his state after the white phosphorus incident, is mentally incapable of seeing the truth of his situation. You – the player – have to think you’re doing the sensible, rational thing just as much as Walker does, so that your realization of (self-)deception is just as damning as Walker’s. According to Walt Williams, lead writer of the game, one of your final choices is to just stop playing (that is, to let your Konrad hallucination count to five and kill you). In this light, this choice can be interpreted in a lot of ways – Walker finally giving up, or the player refusing to cross his or her “line” and play along with these disturbing decisions.

Take Two
The second take seems to mostly be concerned with technical inaccuracies (there seem to be quite a few), but his reflection/summary at the end is a good look at the game in the context of today’s American conflicts, and the nature of heroism:
“This [cognitive] dissonance arises from the idea that everyone is the hero of their own story. No one truly believes themselves to be the villain. This game makes you the villain.”

This observation points out The Line‘s sharpest criticism of similar war games, and perhaps of human nature in general. In other war titles, it’s always a given that the player is the hero. But is that a reasonable assumption to make? As the “hero”, you’re killing countless amounts of people, and these games often fail to put such acts under sufficient ethical scrutiny. And in our own lives, how many of us fall victim to the blind conviction of our own actions, believing them to be unambiguously justified, assuming that we’d do no wrong (because if it were wrong, we wouldn’t do it)?

Caveat: This is a pretty rant-y post and the bounds of this aesthetic are ill-defined and its interpretations are pretty wide-ranging and open^[1]. My interpretation is admittedly a pretty idealistic one, and my thoughts about it are pretty scattered. At some point I want to revisit these thoughts and make them more coherent.

By “shit aesthetic” – which is something I’ve been calling it ever since I first noticed it, never meant to be demeaning but meant more to be playful and pridefully much like the “grunge” label meant something positive… – I’m referring to a pretty wide range of related styles that typically evoke initial reactions of disgust, offense or just confusion, that seems to owe as much to cheesy 90′s computer graphic technology and music visualizers and karaoke and low-fi candid photography as it does the penetrating reach of internet hotbeds like 4chan and the most advanced gif technology. I call it that because it seems to capture the most typical first impression it elicits from people – “Why does it look so bad?”

It’s a style that was once relegated to the outskirts of the internet but has been growing in (relative) popularity, and has percolated down to more “progressive” tastemakers, albeit to a somewhat negative reaction by their constituents, such as Rihanna’s performance of “Diamonds” on Saturday Night Live:

Compare this performance to one of my favorite video series growing up, the Mind’s Eye (produced in the 90′s):

(also see [2])

Rihanna got some ambivalent response for her performance, which (if you ask me) is really the most digestible form of this style:

Because things can get a lot weirder:

Many find this particular style grotesque, silly, discomforting and shocking, taking it to deal only in cheap feelings of disgust and disturbance, and as such I think many peoples’ first impression is to dismiss it as a form of shock art. When most people watch Tim & Eric, for instance, they often can’t make it through an episode, dismissing it as a vulgar show, and even worse, as a show that’s vulgar for the sake of being vulgar. But Tim & Eric, and other works of this type, have, in their own way, a great deal of honesty – certainly more honesty than many of the portrayals we come across in modern popular media^[3]. Instead of engineered perfection masqueraded as effortless, natural condition, this style pulls back this touched-up curtain, laying bare the raw side of human imperfection and eccentricity.

It’s a celebration of the bizarre, certainly, but even more so, it’s a jubilation of our modern blessing that makes such a celebration possible. This shit aesthetic is adulation for democratic nature of the internet.

In the past, means of major distribution were tightly regulated. Not necessarily by some governing body but by often by popular taste and opinion. Anything deviant or distasteful in a conventional sense would by its nature fail to have access to popular distribution channels.

Of course, there were local and smaller distribution channels, such as public-access television, which allows “ordinary people”^[4] to produce and broadcast their own television segments to a limited audience. Tim and Eric was largely born out of a fascination of this frequently bizarre public-access and related self-produced video subculture:

“Yeah—[the old videotapes were] real. There’s a real person up on that stage; it’s not an actor in front of the camera. There was an awkwardness I always found fascinating. Why are they shooting this? Why are they performing this? Shit, why am I watching this? It was mesmerizing.” – Eric Wareheim, interview with Believer

But for access to broader audiences and global reach, the internet really changed things. Anyone with a computer has nearly direct access to an audience of potentially enormous size. This new access to such a distribution channel has us, partly out of curiosity and perhaps morbid fascination, pushing and exploring the limits of what’s possible to distribute. What marginalized and latent audiences are out there that previously lacked the numbers, organization, resources or influence to traffic what they wanted to consume?

This aesthetic is almost hyperbolic in how it takes advantage of this newfound capability. It rushes to the fringes of popular taste in an exaggeration of this democratic medium, and as a result can open our own minds: we no longer have to rely on the judgement of taste-filtering machines but instead can explore our own “deviant” stylistic or behavioral inclinations, or expose those of others. In the cyberworld where we can be connected by solely by tastes and ideas and not be limited by geography, our personal influences less influenced by location, and less pressure to conform to our immediate environment, since our strange tendencies may find human validation through others squatting at the end of a modem. We’ve total free reign to be guided our creative impulse, reinforced by the potent echo-chamber of obscure but like-minded bulletin boards and other watering holes of the wild net.

But even more seductive than this liberation of identity is the panopticon powers that the internet affords us. We can gaze (and gawk) at a the less polished and unadulterated, unfiltered representation of those who have never had a far-reaching platform for self-expression.

For example: a subsection of this aesthetic focuses around the use glittery and sparkling gifs, iconography, and colors that might be most associated with a teenage girl, a demographic who’s widest-reaching means for creative self-expression never extended much beyond spiral notebooks or binder covers. But with the advent of platforms such as LiveJournal, Xanga, MySpace, and lately Tumblr, these individuals could carve out a distinct visual identity more public than they could ever have before.

And now we have tongue-in-cheek internet tools that allow us to spread the boon of such a sparkly style anywhere, and people outside the specific confines of this demographic (i.e. teenage girls) are starting to draw upon its stylistic notions.

In a society where conspicuous consumption is often the preferred means of establishing an identity, and one that increasingly values creativity via mashups and remixes, and, to go a bit further, one that increasingly understands the importance of public image and branding, and to go even further, one that continues to place a strong emphasis on individuality and uniqueness in a landscape of increasing homogeneity and uniformity, it seems natural that we’d love to experiment with our anonymous and visual internet identities (or “personal brands”) by sampling from obscure subcultures and demographics (but I may be reaching here).

Nevertheless, like all previously socially-deviant activities, that which had been assumed to be too distasteful for popular audiences has already begun to fall to capitalist machinations. Urban Outfitters references the aesthetic to appeal to it’s demographic:

It’s only a matter of time, I imagine, before it’s fully co-opted as a marketable style. Popular independent music is already taking it to heart; see the video for Azealia Banks’ Atlantis:

Anyways – next time, before you turn up your nose and say “gross” to a piece of this kind, stop and think! Be proud of the free internet, and the bounty it brings us. Before it’s too late!

…

Edit: As another unfocused aside I realized I originally forgot to mention one of my personal favorite examples of the style, Tales of Game’s Studios Presents Chef Boyardee’s Barkley, Shut Up and Jam: Gaiden, Chapter 1 of the Hoopz Barkley SaGa, a JRPG-inspired (think Squaresoft & the Final Fantasy series) basketball game:

I’m not totally sure how this fits into my framework yet.

The Architecture of Happiness by writer and philosopher Alain De Botton is an excellent tour of the impulse and purpose behind the practice of architecture, and even art in general.

“Any object of design will give off an impression of the psychological and moral attitudes it supports…To describe a building as beautiful therefore suggests more than a mere aesthetic fondness; it implies an attraction to the particular way of life this structure is promoting through its roof, door handles, window frames, staircase and furnishings. A feeling of beauty is a sign that we have come upon a material articulation of certain of our ideas of a good life.” (pp72)

Some of my highlights & notes:

• Architecture is meant to convey messages, ideas, and/or morals, but it has “no power to enforce them”.
  “It offers suggestions instead of making laws. It invites, rather than orders, us to emulate its spirit and cannot prevent its own abuse.” (pp20)
• Architecture is based off the associations (emotional, ideological, human, etc) we as humans have even with the most abstract of entities. Think of a line – a straight line is “stable and dull”, a wavy one “foppish and calm”, and a jagged one “angry and confused”.
  In architectural forms we often see human patterns and personalities. The Roman author Vitruvius paired columns with human/divine qualities (Doric => Hercules, Ionic => Hera, Corinthian => Aphrodite). We might see bridges, some elegant as if they were being held up by a cheerful woman, or “punctilious”, held authoritatively by a “nervous accountant”. (pp78-89)
• Different aspects of our own multifaceted characters are elicited, enhanced, or suppressed by our physical environments. One thing that feels believable and sensible in one environment/context may feel inappropriate or impossible in another. (pp106-111)

For some time now, there’s been a great deal of buzz about “mobile”. Despite the hubbub surrounding mobile, it seems that a lot of applications of “mobile” have just been a direct translation of web/desktop products to smartphones, which doesn’t take full advantage of the platform’s potential.

At the highest level, mobile allows us to bring the interconnectedness we’ve come to love, but that’s confined to computers (in the laptop/desktop sense), to the rest of the world. Mobile technologies enable us to create a digital layer upon the physical world, making tangible the intangible information embedded in all physical objects. Your smartphone will become your ambassador to this digital world, communicating with this digital layer and translating it into useful, human-comprehendable output.

Here are the broader mobile trends and potentials that I’ve noticed:

Literal Input

With the increase of software pseudo-intelligence and the proliferation of alternate input devices on mobile devices (most notably the camera, which of course isn’t really all that new, but also other sensors), mobile devices (and computers in general) will be capable of understanding increasingly literal input.

As it stands now, there exists a gap between our information needs and the queries we end up forming to (hopefully) express those needs in a way a computer can understand. With computers becoming better at “doing what humans are good at”, this gap will shrink. Computers will be able to digest direct and literal input, creating an altogether more fluid and enjoyable mobile experience. In fact, we’ve already been seeing this for awhile with technologies such as Google Goggles and Word Lens (though current technology often leaves something to be desired). With Google Goggles, for instance, instead of having to translate a physical object into a manually-inputted word query into a search engine, the application can directly “understand” the visual input of the object itself.

WordLens

Context-Aware Automation/Prediction

With increasingly “intelligent” software – perhaps fruits of the latest “big data”/data science/etc craze – we can expect these interactions to require less and less of our personal guidance and management, and for them to become more automated and predictive.

This is something that Google is already tackling with Google Now, which is capable of learning your behaviors and tries to predict what information you need based on your current context.

The implications of such technology are pretty huge, perhaps we’ll see some realization of “machine augmented cognition” where mobile devices function like an auxiliary brain, remembering things for us, handling small tasks for us automatically, and knowing when to do all this without needing our managing or guidance.

It’s worth noting that context-aware automation & prediction leapfrogs over literal input because you are presented with your information before you’ve even formed your information need!

Google Now

Device modularity through accessory ecosystems

Mobile is not a single-device experience. Right now the current mobile experience is pretty centralized around, if not exclusively focused on, your smartphone. But we’ll see more external (and wearable) sensors that extend the capabilities of our smartphones. Functioning as inputs, our smartphones will communicate with these sensors and translate their streams into something useful and informative to a person. This is already emerging with personal health monitoring devices such as Jawbone UP, Nike+ FuelBand, FitBit, etc.

The adoption of these sensors reflects, in my mind, how people are becoming more and more interested in turning to the objective reality that data describes as a means of informing personal betterment and self-management. Is this indicative of a broader “computer infallibility” trend where we form greater and greater distrust in our own subjective experiences and evaluations, and instead fill this void with an increasing reliance on the objective “truth” (perhaps more appropriately “fact”) of computers? (That’s a little extreme and probably worth more discussion!)

In general though, such a network of sensors allows us to automate what used to rely on manual input and/or memory to a level of granularity that we could not hope to realistically achieve on our own. We wouldn’t even necessarily need to ever be exposed to the raw data but instead just have the data pre-processed into what’s most relevant to us, such as broader trends or simply suggestions on what to do next.

These sensors could also empower “invisible computing”. Currently, the process of documenting an experience necessarily interrupts the experience (unless documenting the experience is the experience which certainly can be the case), but with such a network of sensors this documentation can happen subtly in the background. This allows us to return to the pre-smartphones-everywhere experience of experiences where experiencing the experience meant just experiencing it.

Jawbone UP

Increasingly layperson-friendly computer interaction paradigms

These other trends lend to a broader one of increasingly layperson-friendly computer interaction paradigms (and this isn’t really contained to mobile). Computing interaction could more directly correlate with physical metaphors/analogues that most people find more intuitive. We’ll have to make less special considerations when using computers, such as having to edit our queries so that a computer may understand them. Things will just work as the average person would expect them to.

For instance, file transfer amongst computers typically requires going through a router. To people unfamiliar with computers, that doesn’t really sound logical – if a computer can connect with things wirelessly, why not to another computer? Why does it have to go through something else to get there? Less technical folk can take it on faith that it just has to work that way, but that’s never satisfactory for anyone.
With the proliferation of WiFi Direct, however, computers can directly connect with each other, in a way that makes a lot more sense to the layperson. Adding an interaction that allows “moving” physical gestures (such as “pushing” the file to another computer) makes the whole experience that more intuitive.

EyeTap McDonalds scandal

Of course, as it typically is with technology, there’s a whole mess of things that could go wrong. There’s always potentially disruptive implications of a new technology or usage pattern at a broader scale. For instance, these wearable sensors have controversial implications in a society where ubiquitous recording is often treated as a crime or as an infringement upon rights (see the EyeTap McDonalds scandal).

With wearable sensors there’s also the potential for cultural and social resistance (think of the negative reputation of Bluetooth headsets), but I haven’t really seen that myself with these latest health monitoring devices.

Every generation lives in its own state of uncertainty. There’s a tendency to look at the past filtered through the generous lens of nostalgia, and to the future with an overwhelming unease colored with dread. But that doesn’t change the fact that we really do face some problematic challenges: reckless energy usage, climate change, massive income inequality, widespread debt, irresponsible borrowing, and so on. All of these problems have at their root, people^[1] – by-and-large, they are manifestations of aggregate individual human behavior^[2].

I’m optimistic about human intention and potential – most people mean well and are capable of doing great things. I’m less optimistic about people’s ability to actually exercise this intention and fulfill this potential^[3]. We frequently act against our own interest^[4]. We are irrational; homo economicus is just a distant cousin^[5].

These “imperfections” – if they can be called that, are vestiges of a time when human life was simpler. We developed mental shortcuts (“heuristics^[6]”) enabling us to make quick, albeit messy, extrapolations and assumptions from limited information — useful for many situations where careful analysis is overkill. We have impulsive behaviors that often result in a short-term and equally short-lived benefits at the sacrifice of long-term reward^[7]. We have an extremely hard time properly evaluating future implications of long-term sacrifices^[8]. Our heuristics seem outdated for the world we live in, where we are part of mind bogglingly complex and nuanced systems in which the smallest details can have huge implications. We are immersed in so many of these intricate systems that no one can be expected to fully comprehend them all, nor give each the attention necessary to make good decisions – the kind of decisions that we need to resolve the myriad issues we face. And, more and more, these problems require the cooperation of the majority of the population.

This cooperation can be hard to come by. We are fond of digging ourselves into social traps^[9]. We often act self-centeredly^[10] (or more appropriately and less absolutely, “tribe”-centeredly^[11]). But we only feel comfortable doing so if we can justify it to ourselves in some way. As I said before, people’s intentions are good, and this self-centered behavior only happens if we can adjust it to fit within that good intention (and yes, we are completely capable of those mental gymnastics^[12]).

So what can be done?

 

Blindsight Systems

In cognitive science there’s a phenomenon called “blindsight”. It has incredible implications for the separation between our conscious experience of the world and our subconscious interaction with it. Blindsight patients are perceptually blind – they cannot see anything. However, if you place them in an obstacle course, they can navigate through with little problem. So while they are not consciously capable of seeing, on some subconscious level their visual system is still functional. They make the right navigational choices despite not knowing the right choices. And these choices seem almost automatic.

This is what design should aspire to. We can offload much of this decision making by designing systems where the right decision^[13] is intuitive. No conscious thought is needed – the choice is almost automatic. As you may have heard, “good design is invisible^[14]”. With our ever deepening knowledge of human behavior, we can make these systems more and more tailored. We can prescriptively design to compensate for lack of knowledge or common errors in our thought, to course-correct us when we begin acting against our own interests, and to relieve us of cognitively-taxing evaluations that may deter us from doing what should be done. These designs can influence behavior at the individual level, which can aggregate to cause macro-level impact.

Here are some examples where design has encouraged better decision making:

Retirement Savings (401k) Participation
It’s always in your interest to begin retirement saving early, and to always contribute, but not everyone participates. Employees typically had to be proactive in beginning these retirement programs, providing a hurdle that might have been too strong a disincentive. Changing 401k enrollment from opt-in to opt-out “has succeeded in dramatically increasing 401(k) participation^PDF”, with a 48% increase among newly hired employees and a 11% increase overall the employees at the studied company.

Organ Donation
Organ donation also increases significantly with opt-out systems^[15] as opposed to opt-in systems. Germany, with an opt-in system, had a participation rate of 12%, whereas the similar Austria, with an opt-out system, had a participation rate of almost 99%. Sweden, with an opt-in system, has a participation rate of about 4%, whereas the similar Denmark, with an opt-out system, had about 86% participation.

Insurance Honesty
Typical car insurance forms have statements of honesty at their bottom. Economic behavioralist Dan Ariely demonstrated widespread (albeit moderate) cheating on these forms, with users underreporting their driven miles (for lower insurance premiums). With the honesty statement moved to the top of the form (that is, it’s viewed prior to filling out the form), the average reported mileage went up 2,400 miles (a 10% increase), indicating greater honesty in the reports.

Glowcaps
Vitality’s Glowcap is a great example of a simple product, with the aim of changing micro behavior that could have macro consequences. Using a multi-factor approach, Glowcaps are designed to remind people to take the full course of their medication. One of the contributing factors to super bacteria is the failure of individuals to complete their antibiotic courses. Of course, the problem of antibiotic resistance is much more complex than this, but this is one step in resolving the issue.

 

I believe most, if not all, people try to do what they think is right. But sometimes we need a little guidance – and these blindsight systems can provide that guidance.

 

I always love it when games manage to seamlessly incorporate mechanics or features into the game world. A lot of times the writers handle these things really clumsily, or even just avoid acknowledging them entirely. Sequels of games with multiple endings often disregard the one you arrived at, sticking to a canonical one that’s decided post factum. Or multiplayer is tacked on as a marketing feature, and not used as a means of deepening game immersion. Here are some of my favorite game moments where the writers/developers don’t take the easy road, and do something amazing.

 

 

 

 

 

The Elder Scrolls: Morrowind: I never really fully appreciated the depth that went into the world of the Elder Scrolls until I read the Metaphysics of Morrowind. In that series of essays, the author exposes the god-king Vivec as a self-aware entity, an NPC who realizes that he is in a game. Vivec uses this knowledge to become a god within the game world, and acknowledges that the player is similarly cognizant of the world’s nature as a game. This is why you as the player is considered the Nerevarine, because you have this divine awareness like your previous incarnation, Lord Nerevar. Some of the divine abilities that Vivec possesses are the same as the player, though where in-game NPCs see them as godly powers, we, as the player, see them as basic game mechanics such as saving and reloading (“The immobile warrior is never fatigued. He cuts sleep holes in the middle of a battle to regain his strength.” – you can read Vivec’s 36 Lessonsfor more, and for a window into his mind). By acknowledging the “true” nature of the game world, the writers paradoxically made Morrowind one of my most immersive gaming experiences.

The world of the Elder Scrolls also has a very rich lore and history that you can uncover by reading in-game books. In an early Elder Scrolls game, Daggerfall, there are multiple endings, each with different consequences. Rather than pick one of these endings and make it canon, the writers made all the endings canon. How is that possible? The ending of Daggerfall is referred to, in the in-game history books, as the “Warp in the West“, and is explained by baffled historians as some bizarre cosmic event where time split into multiple streams, eventually becoming one again. Again, the writers acknowledge the realities of the game as the user experiences it, and manage to make the Elder Scrolls all the more richer for it.

 

 

Dark Souls*: The implementation of multiplayer is perfect for the atmosphere of the game. In Dark Souls, you’re essentially battling your way out of hell. It is lonely, often very dark, and you literally fight to reach the next bits of light and warmth (bonfires). However, via “multiplayer”, you can see traces of others fighting their way as well. Through notes, footsteps, or errant drops of blood, it doesn’t feel as lonely to know that others are also fighting alongside you. And with a bell that rings at the defeat of a boss, there’s always a reminder that, in a game that is notorious for its difficulty, it’s still possible to win.

*Note: I’ve never actually played Dark Souls online (my Xbox360 didn’t have an internet connection at the time), so this is based only on what I’ve heard from others.

 

 

Infinity Blade: Infinity Blade‘s “lineage” system is a brilliant and fresh implementation of “game over / continue”. It’s a very fluid integration of game mechanics as a part of the story, and instills you with the personal motivation of avenging your ancestor’s death.

The objective of the game is to beat this superhuman entity known as the God King. After many tries, you finally defeat the God King and take his place. As he dies, he mentions that you don’t know what you’re reckoning with when you become the God King, and then a holographic globe is revealed with markers all over it. I’ve read speculation that said this globe indicates the presence of other “God Kings” (i.e. other players like yourself) who you must now fight off as the God King of your game world. I never found out if this speculation turned out to be true (haven’t gotten around to Infinity Blade 2 yet), but if it was, then that is another brilliant integration of multiplayer neatly into the game world, pulling back the curtain to reveal a new depth*.

*Note: After reading a bit more into Infinity Blade / Infinity Blade 2, it seems that there’s actually a bunch of other stuff going on I had no idea about…robots and clones and more. So this ending I’m talking about seems to only be wishful thinking.

 

 

Metal Gear Solid 2: Like the Elder Scrolls, MGS2 isn’t afraid to use the fact that you’re playing a game to make your playing of the game a richer experience. For example, the boss battle of Psycho Mantis. Psycho Mantis can predict your attacks (he “reads your mind”) before you execute them; no matter how hard you try or how fast you mash the buttons, you can’t get anything past him. The only way to beat him is to remember that you’re playing a game. That, while your avatar is punching and kicking and shooting, you’re just hitting buttons on a controller. You’re forced to momentarily recognize that you are playing a game, and temporarily disturb that boundary between the game experience and our lives in the real world. When you realize that, you switch your controller to another port, safely hidden from his clairvoyance. You’re pulled out of the game, but somehow, it makes the whole experience a lot richer. It’s a really apt boss strategy for a game that relies so much on bizarre twists and “behind-the-scenes” puppeteering.