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Transcript:
If you head over to Google right now and run a search for Rabbit Rush you’ll find… absolutely nothing, because it’s no longer available. But if it were available, you’d find one of the most interesting games you’d ever play.
It goes like this.
[Titles]
Rabbitville is overpopulated, and it’s your job to command its excess rabbits and conquer neighbouring towns. It’s very simple – click on the rabbits here then drag to a nearby building, and you see them moving. They fill up the building and it’s yours. If the building is occupied by another town’s rabbits, send more of your own to take it over.
Then onto the next one, and the next one. It’s so gloriously compulsive. The glowing lights, the sounds, the cheer of your rabbits when they take a house, the flare when you grab a power-up. It entrances you as you spread your little empire.
But before long, someone sends you a message – “hey how’s it going” – and they say, click on the carrot in the store for a quick hack.
Once you do, the game breaks and you exit into this eerie arcade. You find these notes scattered around from a dear friend you keep missing, and outside, a line of shops light up as you pass – “all that you see or seem is but a dream within a dream.”
What follows is a dream sequence based around different forms of media – some are types of games, others are types of photography or literature, and so on. As you cycle through these different scenarios, you learn more about your relationship with your missing friend, as the world repeats and degrades. Every now and again you return to the arcade game, Rabbit Rush, to find some solace, but always it’s more warped, more traumatic.
It’s only a short game but it’s so full of joy, sadness, hope, and paranoia. Each transition from one media form to the next carries such a complexity of emotion.
I love this game for how it uses the form of each sequence to convey a narrative of self-discovery and the dangers of retreating into nostalgic dreams of the past.
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Transcript:
There’s a bit in Virtue’s Last Reward where you’re just about to escape from a puzzle room when you’re interrupted by a friendly Cockney robot, who talks to you about The Chinese Room, and then explodes and is never mentioned again.
This is one of the most fascinating scenes in a game already full of interesting ideas and in this Two Minute Game Crit, starring me, Stephen Beirne, I’d like to discuss why.
So what is The Chinese Room? The Chinese Room is a thought experiment presented by John Searle to refute the idea that computers can have a mind the same way people do.
Imagine there’s a woman locked in a room. Every now and again somebody slips a note in Chinese through a slot in the door. Your wan can’t read Chinese but conveniently she has a book of Chinese phrases, so she writes down what looks like a response and slips it back through the door. As far as the person on the outside is aware here’s a system which understands Chinese, even though neither the room as a metaphorical robot nor the woman inside it have any clue what’s going on.
The point Searle makes is there’s a difference between actually having a mind which understands something and merely simulating having one.
But Cockney Robot Friend draws a different conclusion. He says a computer being programmed is the same as a person being socialized. A mind, like knowledge of Chinese, isn’t a hard fast thing that people “actually” have or don’t have. Rather it’s a matter of perception.
This lines up with Virtue’s Last Reward’s thing where reality is literally defined by the ideas of people and where people are vessels filled by ideas from their surroundings and communities. If a group of people is traitorous, the world seems harsh and hopeless.
Whereas for Searle consciousness is intrinsic, in Virtue’s Last Reward consciousness is extrinstic and transitive, shared between people. We can only say someone understands Chinese because there are others who agree she understands Chinese. Individually people are unknowable but together they form a pattern of semantics.
If this seems weird consider it another way:
If you take a puzzle or a mystery novel and isolate just one single clue, you’ll never figure out its relevance. But by putting it together with all the other clues and examining the whole you get the truth.
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Following the March release of Dark Souls 3: Die Dark Souls Die, the table has again been set with discussions on how an easy mode would attract onlookers to finally dig in. This is an old discussion at this point and it’s worth considering why it resurfaces by coming from a place of forlornness, from the quiet wishes of a scattering of people who want to enjoy something they can’t—from reactions to wistfulness rather than manifestos, from tweets not petitions.
I don’t know if you can quite call his favouring an easy mode an argument, but he positions it in opposition to the pro-Dark Souls coven of Matt Lees, Chris Franklin and Adam Smith. These readings cover the gist of what attracts people to its difficulty: Smith denies the inaccessibility of Dark Souls is necessarily a negative trait; Lee tells of how our intrigue would wither were patience not a prerequisite; Franklin focuses on the difficulty and its subsequent systems as existential to the text. Each is worth your time.
As the topic is divisive, I want to stress what’s at stake when we talk about the ramifications of a hypothetical Dark Souls easy mode:
Nothing. Nothing is at stake for those who currently enjoy Dark Souls, who have already done it and gotten theirs and remember it fondly. Realistically I don’t believe anything will come from a few people saying in increasingly louder and better reasoned manners how an easy mode would improve the experience, but even if From Software decide to patch one into Dark Souls 1, it would not besmirch your memory of the Capra Demon. What’s more, for critics such as myself who play up the existential argument and acquiesce to the developers as designers of their own game, were they to instil an easy mode in a future instalment, we would be some mad bloody hypocrits to then turn about and say it’s antithetical to the point. That easy-moded sequel may not be the Dark Souls we knew and loved, but no Dark Souls, not 2 or 3 or 4 or 5 or 6, could ever be.
On the other hand, for those who have yet to enjoy a Dark Souls, what’s at stake is the possibility of finally enjoying a Dark Souls. If no easy mode ever came about, they would continue to live with nothing being changed. I suspect they would find a way to survive.
With this now said, bear in mind that discussion of an easy mode is a thought experiment, not an asteroid. What arises from it is usually a conversation on the particular textual analysis of Dark Souls, and the general role of mechanics and systems within narrative frameworks.
So while the prospect is not dangerous, it’s easy to view it as a threat for reasons of sentimentality. (There is also a troupe which feels threatened by how it would dilute the pretend aristocracy of folks who have finished a videogame, which is a petulant viewpoint and another issue entirely.) Much of that sentimentality is irrational but human and I find it hard to find too great a fault in it. My feelings are complicated, since I think it would be great if Kunzelman could enjoy Dark Souls like I have, but at the same time I agree with Smith that not everything needs to be for everyone, and I agree with Lees and Franklin that much of what puts Kunzelman off the series is intrinsic to what makes it provocative.
Kunzelman responds to Lees and Franklin by describing a mode where baddies take fewer hits but everything else is more or less the same—in essence, a version where players die a lot less. What he seeks is an abbreviation of the routine of dying and retrying, to expedite passage past monsters before they grow too familiar, to see its famed architecture and read lore at a leisurely pace. Whereas the Dark Souls routine for most fans means to waste and wallow and regather and triumph, he wishes to skip straight to the triumph. It’s a destination without the epiphany, and maybe it’s a blindspot in what he hopes to enjoy, or maybe he already sees what’s to be gotten from the journey and is confident of his disinterest in it. To him, nothing is gained by dying and being reborn, so there’s nothing in his easier version incomparable to the experiences of those who, as he rightfully says, have bought into how it currently is.
There are many ways to read into this. A common thread in discussions about hard videogames is that those who dislike the game do so by a measure of a senseless, inarticulable yardstick of skill, where players with enough of this mystical attribute are good and players with too little are bad. I interpret Kunzelman’s insights as distinguished instead by a matter of attitude. Excluding the bollocks aristocracy, I don’t think anyone will find it controversial for me to say Dark Souls’ difficulty is largely psychological, much in the same way that Project Zero’s scariness is psychological. It’s a difficulty born out of your nervousness and recklessness, but where those who act cautiously and learn to adapt get by easily enough. Compare this to something like Trauma Center which demands an impossible standard of highly precise and rapid inputs in order to do something as basic as brain surgery.
This, for me, makes Kunzelman’s insight noteworthy as his appreciation of Dark Souls leaps over its characteristic mentality. It suggests affection for a story composed of tidbits and residue, excluding as irrelevant the significance of these elements in context of the whole. He’s not interested in the whole, just the tidbits.
What first impressed me about this position was how convincing it was, even as a response to fans for whom this approach can easily seem wrongheaded. Off the top of my head I can think of a dozen games I have zero interest in playing but whose fiction and worlds I find attractive—I’ve always been curious about the lore of Gears of War but can’t stand to play it. It seems sacrilegious to target Dark Souls with that same half-apathetic, half-curious attitude because of my sentimentality towards it especially as a cohesive whole; I recognize this reaction as silly, born out of aversion to entertain the irrelevancy of what I love about this series. Why is Dark Souls so personal? Why do I exempt it from cherry-picked analyses?
I believe it’s because of the same reason so many people want it to have an easy mode. Because Dark Souls is special. It is not coincidence that of the billion games with variable difficulty levels, few attract the attention and analysis Matt Lees describes. It is not a coincidence that of the fewer games without variable difficulty levels, people seldom clamour for the introduction of a mode that would make it accessible to newer or less skilled players. The discussion focuses on Dark Souls instead of Super Mario Bros because Dark Souls inhabits a distinct cultural myth. Even though Super Mario Bros is a much harder game, even though it requires just as much repetition albeit with less reward, and higher and more precise demands of player skill to complete, it’s culturally placed not as a difficult game but as a ubiquitously nostalgic lark.
Dark Souls however is cursed by its projection of a sense of difficulty, despite how it mitigates that conceit through a robust system of player co-operation and in-game messages, and which fans gleefully diffuse through community wikis, online conversation and ten thousand or so Top Tips listicles. While this sense of difficulty is on the most part a fabrication—an aspect of its social fiction—it is pivotal to its allure as a cultural text.
The first is: There is no purpose in “reading” The Great Gatsby unless you actually read it. Fitzgerald’s novel is not about a story. It is about how the story is told. Its poetry, its message, its evocation of Gatsby’s lost American dream, is expressed in Fitzgerald’s style–in the precise words he chose to write what some consider the great American novel. Unless you have read them, you have not read the book at all. You have been imprisoned in an educational system that cheats and insults you by inflicting a barbaric dumbing-down process. You are left with the impression of having read a book, and may never feel you need return for a closer look.
Despite the phenomenon of talking about a game’s language in terms of its verbs—jump, shoot, run, solve—there is still not much an appreciation for play as prose. Fundamental to the experience of playing is that it intimately and unavoidably conveys narrative through the sensation and psychological effect of its moment. No-one cared about the narrated story of Thomas Was Alone, whereas everyone praised how the character interactions conveyed a message of community and relationship.
Kunzelman wants to play Dark Souls without having to go through the burden of playing it. And yet, he wants to play it. Reading the wikis and watching the lore videos and Let’s Plays isn’t enough, it’s not the same as playing a game first hand, of experiencing that embodiment and bathing in its prose. And for we who have bought in, this is entirely why there is no point in “playing” Dark Souls unless you actually play it. Why it would lose all intonation about time and temporality. Why it would decimate its esprit de corpse (which in hindsight is what I wished I had titled that piece).
His assurance that for what he wants to get out of it an easy mode would affect no ontological change is the crux of Kunzelman’s article and the reason why I feel, however ridiculously, like Tevye the Dairyman. My summaries of Lees’ and Franklin’s videos should not be thought adequate representations of their humour and earnestness, nor my rhetoric the conviction of Kunzelman’s article. Likewise, a summary of Dark Souls stripped of its narrative backbone, which fronts leisure and abandons hostility, is not Dark Souls. It is irrevocably something different, like a Fiddler on the Roof where everything works out in the end, a Ghost in the Shell movie about America, or a Gaeltacht where everyone speaks English. More accessible to some, perhaps, but doubtlessly misshapen. If all you’re looking for is a film with songs or plastic tourism, you may be satisfied with it.
But I wonder, if the boulders were inconsequential and the giant hurling them friendly, if Sen’s Fortress were Sen’s Creche, would this resemble the Lordran that intruiged you? Would the impact of its discovery be undiminished? Would you still envy the accomplishment of your friend atop the ramparts?
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Transcript:
Hi, this is Two Minute Game Crit and I’m Stephen Beirne.
There are many ways to create a relationship between the player and their character, but if you’re a Metal Gear Solid game, it all boils down to just one: crouch and zoom.
It’s the first thing you learn in the first Metal Gear Solid, and it’s taken nearly twenty years to perfect. So why has crouching and zooming remained so effective through all this time?
Firstly, because it conveys to Snake a sense of body.
This is vital for any stealth game. It’s the player’s role to guide Snake through each level while hidden from enemy view, and that means getting intimate with the contours of his body. You need to know precisely when he’s out of cover, how far he can reach, and how fast he can move.
Since any slip up can end in disaster, you have to be mindful of his body and its place in the world at all times.
Bodies in MGS are fragile, they break and they age and lose bits of themselves. But they’re also conduits to a character’s spiritual uplifting. So when bodies communicate with one another it’s an intimate affair.
For the player, keeping a low profile is simply how we survive. In every crouch we express care and attention towards Snake and his well-being.
Which leads us to the zoom.
A camera in a game is never just a camera. It’s also an extension of the character’s mind. They can use it to see around corners, and pick up on the slightest of details, like this exchanged glance.
More than anything, the camera defines power, by what’s inside the frame, and vulnerability, by the bodily cost of framing it. There’s always a tension in seeing what you need to see while keeping Snake safe, and this tension creates drama, which in turn creates a relationship.
You can always tell how Snake is feeling by the way the camera works with his body. Whether he’s exposed, energetic, cagey, or grandiose.
Because it always contrasts with our natural position: crouched and zoomed.
What follows is the rough script and a selection of the slides for a talk presented at the Eargoat 2 event, a meetup for creative types in the greater Dublin area, held on the 14th of November, 2015. This talk covers my opinions on game criticism as a creative medium and presents an overarching argument for criticism as a craft in and of itself, rather than merely a vassal of videogame development.
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Normally Rascal 