For centuries before the growth of Buddhism’s popularity in China in the second century AD, Chinese communities practiced ancestor worship and engaged in a spiritual culture that stressed the continued role of individuals in the corporal plane after passing into death themselves. Early Chinese civilizations sought to earn the favor of such figures and believed they held a direct role in the fertility of farmers’ fields and the fortunes of kings’ armies. By the time of the Ming Dynasty (1368-1644) local gods and ghosts attached to specific communities operated within a hierarchy in the afterlife. Some ghosts were superior to others and many held office, including official positions and titles recognized by the Ming government itself.

All of this feeds into popular perceptions of the afterlife in Chinese culture that ascribe a much broader set of functions and proclivities to ghosts and ghouls than merely scaring the living daylights out of the living.  Chinese ghost stories are not necessarily works of horror and are in fact just as likely to be romances or morality tales. Indeed, a “ghost story” by the strictest definition (or at least the Western definition) merely has to feature a ghost, and plenty of Chinese fiction does this. The trope gathered popularity in the Tang Period and became a mainstay in Chinese literature. Echoes remain today. I got a chance to mention one of my favorite Chinese language films in the Jade Empire piece: My Left Eye Sees Ghosts, a moralistic rom-com/ghost story wherein a bereaved trophy wife makes term with her grief thanks to a friendly and mischievous specter.

Overall I think I prefer the idea of ghosts with needs and ambitions comparable to our own here on the material plane. A ghost seeking to be lord over his fellow apparitions or seeking love is more interesting to me than an undead creature obsessed with haunting an old house. To be fair, there is plenty of example in western tradition of ghosts having more nuanced motivations but the traditional Chinese afterlife is more than a loose collection of lost souls, it’s an entire society unto itself existing parallel to our own as well as intertwined with corporal existence. 

It’s an in-joke. It’s not a bad one, either. Not because the joke itself is all that funny but because it plays on the duo’s strengths. They’re funny, droll, they clearly love the game and feel comfortable feeding the hardcore but they are also quick to bring in cultural references and play off absurd humor. A recent cast featured a debate over which animals to see at the zoo while they killed time during the brief period of inactivity at the start of a Starcraft 2 match. The surprising accessibility to this complex game provided by talented commentators has been a major element in the expansion of Starcraft’s audience since 2010. “Tastosis” are in many ways the gold standard of Starcraft 2’s tier of celebrity. They are joined there by professional players and other high level casters and interviewers to form a coterie of high profile community figures. As such, they occupy an interesting space between the community and the pool of professional players, and are at the forefront of arguing for competitive play’s status as an “eSport” and not merely an odd capitalist offshoot of an extremely popular multiplayer video game.

This is where Starcraft 2 becomes interesting from an historical point of view. Typically speaking, modern popular sport emerged in England in the late eighteenth century and transitioned from elite pursuit to popular pastime in the aftermath of the industrial revolution. British imperial reach brought soccer, cricket and rugby union to the colonies. Baseball found its way to East Asia a little differently, though aspiration towards imperial status on the behalf of the Japanese played an important role. Over time, popular sporting communities coalesced around formal organizations that grew in scope leading to international competition and in particular large crowds of spectators attending organized play. Sporting communities are traditionally enervated by the experience of attending live fixtures. Although there are live in-person crowds in attendance at high profile Starcraft 2 events that occasionally reach sizeable levels, particularly in Korea, “eSports” as a spectacle exist mostly online. The Starcraft community interacts with each other online and “attend” events online. Unlike soccer, where online communities build up around the nucleus of local fanbases regularly attending games, the online Starcraft community is the Starcraft community. As a result, participation in the game itself among fans is virtually complete. There are millions of soccer fans that do not play the game regularly, and those that do of course rely on meeting with others to play regularly. Starcraft fans are moments away from playing a game. Blizzard’s matchmaking system makes it easy to play with strangers either in an informal game or on the “ladder”, ranked play divided by player ability. Unlike soccer and other traditional sports that have evolved in use of the Internet to organize various communities and fanbases, Starcraft has been defined by the Internet from the beginning.

This is both the greatest strength and the greatest weakness of Starcraft as an “eSport.” First of all, there is the debate over the extent to which this activity can be seen as a sport at all, “e” prefix or no. Beyond that however, the centrality of the online experience to the evolution of the Starcraft community has created a social experience that is at once both open and insular.  Within the English language speaking Starcraft community, prominent professional players and commentators engage in discussions on reddit just like other fans. They stream four-way conversations cum podcasts with significant audiences. They share stories about the new car they just bought or how difficult it can be to get used to California when you’ve had to move for work. Although major Starcraft figures maintain their privacy, they are nevertheless open to the broader community of fans in a way that simply isn’t currently possible for athletes and major media figures from professional sporting leagues such as the NFL. The Internet provides the lifeblood for this culture which thus enjoys a level of comfort with social media and online communication that occurs at a natural level; it is, effectively, impossible to “fake.”

It also brings considerable problems. Games of Starcraft have their own etiquette, with participants expected to type “gg” (good game) as a polite way of indicating a forfeit. Beyond this, manners vary according to personalities and are frequently congruent with Internet standards of politeness. Greg “Idra” Fields, a longtime professional Starcraft player, has long provided the gold standard in negative examples of this phenomenon. He is famously rude by the standards of the game, and has in recent years extended this to communications with his fanbase, discussing his dislike for the game and how his interest in playing has long since been reduced to the financial incentive provided by his career. This would not necessarily be an issue except for Fields’ remarkable use of profanity. He was dropped by his team this week as punishment for using profanity to deride his fans for taking an interest in his career, mostly because it was the final straw, the latest in a litany of incidents. My personal favorite was his statement that David Kim, Blizzard’s resident expert in charge of maintaining the game’s balance between playable races, should be “raped with a tire iron.”  

The last statement really gets to me. It’s exactly the kind of hateful bigoted crap that we all see on the Internet all the time. That trash is the reason few sane people choose to read youtube comments. Yet Fields has gotten away with this behavior for years. The argument can be made (and has been made) that he is simply abusing the fact that his popularity places him in a position of power. However, it’s more than this. Fields benefits from the fact that the community is essentially an insular one. He is close friends with many of those around whom the community congregates online. During the influential “State of the Game” podcast this week, the news of Fields being dropped by his team broke midway through the live stream. The podcast took a rare break to allow certain contributors a few moments to work through their emotions. The top circles in this community are very small indeed.

In the case of Fields’ behavior, the discussion quickly narrows down to the responsibilities of professional players within this community and the economic realities of the tournaments’ emergence and ongoing economic viability. Fields provides the scene with its own “enfant terrible” but his poor behavior is limited to in-game chats and forum discussions. When participating in live stream conversations he comes across as affable, intelligent and good natured though he does defend his statements as being hyperbolic and a product of anger apparently with the inference that they should not be considered offensive. Indeed, he very clearly refuses to express remorse for wishing cancer upon an infuriating opponent in in-game chat. To what extent, then, is Fields simply playing a character? Is this something that is now necessary in a modern sporting culture dominated by and reliant upon media coverage? It’s a far cry from the muscular Christianity and stress on moral purity of popular team sports’ arrival in the nineteenth century. In either case there is a clear need to appeal to the cultural assumptions of the day and it seems that in the twenty-first century, at least according to Fields’ supporters, attention is good for the community as a whole. Fields may well be a rather unpleasant person, or more accurately an infantilized individual with no incentive to correct his behavior, but his actions bring clicks and clicks mean dollars, and dollars mean growth.

Perhaps not all agree with this. He has been fired after all, and there are plenty of members of the Starcraft community who yearn for a more professional attitude among high-level players when interacting with fans. If Starcraft is to see success as a mainstream form of entertainment, it may be necessary to emulate the successes of other sporting industries. This too causes friction. Blizzard, the company that makes the game and that thus maintains an irremovable position at the center of the broader community, recently revealed a decision to overhaul their global championship, the World Championship Series (WCS). Various decisions, including the perceived neglect of communities in mainland China and Australasia and the introduction of high-level Korean players into European and American tournaments, have drawn criticism. Blizzard may be at the center of the community but their position is not an inviolable one in the eyes of many who are personally involved in organizing competitive play. Indeed the company is lambasted, and in the Internet decorum that we are apparently resigned to often viciously so. The latter issue, that of high-level Korean players being involved in European and American competition, causes particular concern for many.

Significantly, the English language Starcraft community is not home to the best players globally or the longest tradition of professional play supported by a popular audience. That distinction belongs to Korea. This has bred a certain aura of insecurity within the English language community and led to a fascinating (historically speaking) trend of Starcraft fans using the term “foreigner” to describe any player that is not Korean. Fans cheer on foreign players in Korean competition and in WCS games against Korean pros not out of any latent racism (one would hope in all cases) but in the hopes that victories over these superior players might indicate an increase of the overall standard of the game in the West. The introduction of high-level Korean players to North American organized competition has been received by many not as an opportunity for American players to face higher quality opposition regularly and thus improve but as a severe limiting factor on the opportunities for Starcraft to develop as a popular “eSport” outside of Korea.

This too is fascinating. The dynamic of developing a sport locally and facing off against the sport’s originator has a long history. Australia and England compete every two years over the Ashes, a symbolic representation of a famous Australian victory on English soil. The English national soccer team sometimes appears to have rivalries against almost every team on the planet by virtue of the role of Englishmen in spreading that game globally. Defeating the American national basketball team is an enormous achievement and a major motivating factor for players on other national teams. The traditional element in this dynamic, the notion of rejecting imperial control or the vestiges of post-colonial cultural hegemony, is missing. Americans, Australians, Europeans and Chinese hold no grudges against any kind of Korean historical dominance either military or cultural. Yet the community does not merely acknowledge the disparity between Korean play and foreign play but seeks to reduce it. In theory, the only significant remaining obstacle to Korean Starcraft games offering a comprehensive product to the Western market is time difference. Why is there a desire to see American and Australian players holding up trophies and receiving recognition as the world’s best?

Blizzard have been able to create international competition much more swiftly than has been seen in other traditional sports. The first soccer World Cup famously suffered from poor participation rates because European teams did not wish to travel to Uruguay. England continued to boycott the tournament on principle, upset at the world governing body FIFA’s refusal to recognize their unrivalled prominence in the history of soccer as an organize sport. Other sports such as rugby union and baseball have suffered from uneven distribution of significant popularity. Starcraft tournaments can ignore most of these concerns. The game became professionalized in Korea but is an American product, the characters and avatars of its visual representations examples of the American cultural hegemony that remains dominant in video game culture globally. Travelling for a tournament is no longer necessary in all cases. WCS games are being played online and not over LAN connections in person. Lag and latency present one of the last practical obstacles.

Starcraft has thus come together as an international “eSport” at a bewilderingly rapid pace. So far, so good. However, the community faces many challenges. Growth has come rapidly but the scene remains remarkably niche, allowing for the continued insularity of the community that in many ways serves it so well. It is not yet clear what kind of economic base the game can realistically rely upon longer term. Starcraft participants are young, with many professional players “past it” by their late 20s. Greg “Idra” Fields has enjoyed a lengthy career and would be considered an elder statesman of the game. He is 23. It’s unclear as to whether there is any audience for Starcraft as an exhibition “eSport” among people who do not play the game itself. Blizzard games tend to sell well but even sales of 4-5 million copies of a game place a significant ceiling on the possible growth of a sporting culture. In this respect, Starcraft diverges sharply from other historical examples of sporting communities. Soccer’s popularity owes no small amount to its accessibility: children in poor communities can grab some newspaper and roll it up into a ball, or save up to buy a ball together. Items of clothing or rocks provide markings for the goal itself. Jumpers for goalposts, as they say. Starcraft necessitates a copy of the game (now US$40 for the base, though $60 on release, and $40 for the recent expansion) and a computer to run it. There are other subscription models available in East Asia, but these options still require the cash to afford hours at a time spent in Internet gaming cafes.

The Starcraft player base and community base is highly skewed towards the middle class and higher, and further towards young men (though young women also play at the highest level). Young white men dominate outside of Korea, China and Taiwan. Logistic barriers make it extremely unlikely that “eSports” will gain a foothold in disadvantaged communities any time soon. Traditional popular sports have discovered some of their most successful players in such communities for decades. The possibility of further growth for Starcraft as a sporting community seems extremely limited.

Nevertheless, I find it genuinely intriguing. The clash between concepts of the game as a form of entertainment and a capitalist enterprise echo similar issues in mainstream traditional sports. Starcraft fans clamor for continued influence in the administration of organized play at the highest level, a battle long since lost by fans of basketball, soccer and baseball. It also begs the question of how new sporting communities might arise as conceptions of valid use of free time has evolved in the developed world. I’m not sure we’ll ever get to The Running Man or the type of goofy future-touchdown representations of sport typical of Starship Troopers but I’m starting to wonder if we’re getting to a point where watching an entire season of an HBO show over a single weekend might become competitive at some point. The limitations of Starcraft’s potential to grow as a popular sport also help to sustain the community as an isolated example of sporting culture development, a test case that is unlikely to develop into the full phenomenon. Is professional Starcraft a sport or a fascinating cultural anomaly, a community that has taken on the trappings of modern sport-driven media as a way to navigate its own growth? Is it a sign of the next evolution of popular sport? Physical sport played on fields and ice and indoor and outdoor courts evolved over time from cultural importance assigned to physical movement and play. This included the desire to increase the physical strength or manhood of the nation through testing its young men against each other, displaying appropriate recognition of society’s stratification through a public aesthetic and honoring gods and ancestors through symbolic re-enactment of mythological events. “eSports” have grown out of present day sporting culture, a social reality that has for the most part abandoned such specific cultural origins and is instead driven by economic goals and vague ideological identities focused on the history of the sport itself and expected behavior from athletes. “eSports” is thus something entirely new, not merely by dint of the necessity of the Internet in its growth. Nobody ever played a game of Starcraft to pay homage to the rising of the sun and good harvests. However, there are champions. There are professional tournaments and amateur tournaments. There are celebrities. There are heroes and there are villains, and there is debate on the extent of this villainy. Investment in this game and its personalities equal to anything in traditional sports is played out daily over twitter, TwitchTV and youtube, with a degree of investment of which Major League Baseball clubs and major soccer clubs continue to dream. So perhaps Starcraft 2 isn’t the future of sport, but the future of how sport will maintain its relevance.

Sources/Further Reading:

Real Talk – Greg “Idra” Fields after removal from EG

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iUf2tRAwMcY

HuskyStarcraft – TEAM EG RELEASES IDRA plus Balance Changes

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NX5pJVdktdc&list=PLEDrKC4b__h-An3pY8PJTsIiLN775bhtN&index=3

State of the Game Episode 93

http://sotg-sc2.blogspot.com/2013/05/sotg-ep93.html

Also see www.teamliquid.net and www.reddit.com/r/starcraft

Note: This blog is spoiler heavy all the time, but the following post spoils elements of Iron Man 3 that will have a strongly negative effect on your enjoyment of the film if you haven't seen it already. 

It feels extremely European. It’s not quite a European game of course, at least not in the traditional sense of a game being “European”: French, in other words. The Lost Journey is Norwegian. Scandinavian and French are two very different aesthetics, at least stereotypically. Yet there is something there that jumps out at you, central differences to the American approach. So many decisions are subtly different, from font choice to the prologue to voice acting to artwork. It’s nice, actually. All of those things (and more, of course) create a different feel to the game overall. It lends the game a sensation of uniqueness.

It also has a weird 1990s style of sci-fi. Not the intrepid journalist on meteoroid style of The Dig, but the kind of sci-fi weirdness of Farscape and Lexx. Everything just feels a little… off. Not because the game is all that weird exactly, but because it’s not quite as predictable as I’m used to. This is also fun: even at this early point it’s becoming clear to me why people are so attached to this game.

I really like the idea of two inter-connected worlds. The artwork is fantastic as well and really sells the idea. Funnily enough, I like the world that more closely approximates our own. There’s something very cool about the depiction of Stark that feels like a greater accomplishment, impressing me without talking trees or enormous lambent dragons. Though I am very curious to learn more about this enormous dragon.

Most of all I’m finding myself wondering what the heck happened to video games in the interim between King’s Quest I and The Longest Journey. I mean, I lived it; I was something of an adventure game true believer for quite a while, though I suppose the extent to which I can claim that identity is rather undermined by the fact I’ve never played this game until now. Playing them back to back now, though: well, it’s something special. There are obvious graphical differences, but there are massive thematic differences and The Longest Journey is already exhibiting narrative ambition leagues beyond anything the King’s Quest series ever tried to do though to be fair, the King’s Quest series was trying something completely different. The interface… actually feels more limited than later entries in Roberta Williams’ series. This comes across as an attempt to strip things down but so far I’m not a fan, and it feels remarkably awkward in comparison to the standards established by Sierra and LucasArts.

However, beyond these differences the overall change in atmosphere is drastic. King’s Quest I was a trailblazer in many ways and an innovator through the elaboration of classic motifs. The Longest Journey (so far at least) is a vehicle for an avowedly off-kilter sci-fi story. The former game was showing that video games could produce a coherent narrative, helping to establish the medium’s potential in storytelling. The latter game seems to be stretching the boundaries of that potential. King’s Quest I sought to show that video games could tell stories as well as other mediums. The Longest Journey is proof that video games can tell stories that other mediums will struggle to tell. I find that very exciting and I hope the rest of the game delivers.

Now, I really don’t like negative articles. I mean, writing negatively can be fun if you have a bit of joy in it. Mocking the Twilight films is, for example, an almost victimless crime: Twilight fans will refuse to countenance my opinions (or acknowledge that I am joking in a mostly constructive manner) while I sincerely doubt anyone thinking of watching an entry in the series will be put off by an adult male blogger detailing the psycho-surreal nature of his enjoyment of the films in opposition to their intended message or aesthetic. No, I think I’m on fairly safe ground making fun of Twilight films, as if you like the films that much you really shouldn’t be offended because in essence your first reaction is correct: I don’t know what I’m talking about. At least not in any manner that would fit your definition of literacy in Twilight fiction.

That’s not meant as a cop out, it’s meant as explanation. I don’t get it. So, when I state that I don’t get it, it means that I well and truly do not understand the appeal. I’m not making judgements on individuals that do enjoy it or do get it. Thus I come back around (finally) to Bond.

I just don’t get Bond. Maybe it’s his arch-Britishness. I’m not sure. There’s something about the Bond films that just seems so homely and lacking in the glamour they supposedly have. Tacky, really. I’m no snob when it comes to older films, and I am very aware that fashion has changed throughout the decades. I don’t dislike Bond because I think it’s cheap. I dislike Bond because I think that it feels cheap.

For example, take the assassination that opens Dr. No: it’s fantastic, really. The marvelous opening credit sequence gives way to the three blind men pottering around Kingston, Jamaica. Their assault on the British secret agent is really rather wonderful; I’d be surprised to see a character removed in that manner today, with his final act on screen something so banal as reaching for something in his car with the camera looking on from inside the car. The three actors playing the assassins pop into view like something out of a cartoon. It’s fantastic. It’s cool. I’m beginning to believe, as Morpheus would say, his temples throbbing.

But then something happened. I had never realized that Bond’s habit of supplying his surname before his Christian name was initially a response to an alluring female opponent in a game of Blackjack. Still cool. Still interested. Then Bond visits M, flirting with Ms. Moneypenny on the way in and I’m reminded…

I’m reminded that I really don’t like this character at all. I just can’t get on board with it. I know it was a different era and I know that Bond has moved on as a character since then but I can’t shake how uncomfortable the whole setup makes me feel. There’s just something so backwards and boring about his manliness. The action always feels subpar, the sexual innuendo more frustrating that fun, and not because I’m sexually frustrated but because it all seems so pointless and needlessly patronising. I know a large part of Bond’s appeal is that he is an embodiment of the “tall, dark and handsome” archetype but I can’t help but think of him as a bit of a pratt. Leaving the pistol he’s been ordered to use in place of his beloved Beretta with Moneypenny was quite cool, but it was too late. I’d had quite enough of watching men with upper crust accents discuss strategy before heading out to pinch a few bums. I’m done.

Now, again, let me stress: I’m not trying to be a negative jerk about this. Bond just doesn’t do it for me. He may well do it for you. Lord knows the series has millions of fans. I don’t write in my blog to rant at the world. To be perfectly honest, I’m rather disappointed: I had assumed that watching some of the classics would finally turn me on to what I’d been missing. I couldn’t even get half an hour into what I understand to be one of the true classics. How on earth would I manage to get through some of the more mixed efforts? Then again, perhaps I’d like them. It’s entirely possible I imagine that I will one day sit down to write a “Dalton the best Bond” article. Then again maybe not.

So why write about it at all, then? Well, I’m fascinated by the disconnect. I mean, I understand why I don’t like Taylor Swift’s music: it’s not intended to perform the function that I ascribe to music. Taylor Swift fans participate in an entire culture, that of being a Taylor Swift fan. The music is secondary, if that. No, the Bond films are more confusing because they are more difficult to dismiss. Many people like them, and for different reasons, with differing levels of acceptance of the films’ various flaws. Some insist there are none, some find the flaws to be part of the overall positive experience.

And I’m missing out. I just don’t get Bond, and frankly I wish I did. It’s just too old, too sexist, too boring, too oddly comfortable with glorifying the British elite. It’s just not my thing. 

I've decided to do something constructive. Starting in the near future* this blog is going to host a podcast. That podcast will feature yours truly and will usually have two good friends as part of the regular 'cast with various experts, fun people and assorted "friends of the show" popping in when I can convince them to do so. We will talk about, more or less, the same topics that I write about on the blog. Not the exact same topics. My ego isn't quite so out of control that I think anybody wants to listen to people discussing eight hundred words on an adventure game from the mid-1980s. The same general topic areas: video games, action films, sci-fi and fantasy novels, popular music. Generally apocalyptic culture and the kind of culture swimming around in this, our cultural apocalypse. 

King’s Quest I is a weird game. Not that I was expecting it to be otherwise, I suppose; a big attraction to going back and finally playing the King’s Quest games was to look at adventure games as they evolved through the 1980s and 1990s, despite the rather perverse nature of said evolution drawing the genre closer to death rather than further away from it, and recollecting my own experiences with the series.

Roberta Williams’ adventure games about a man called Sir Graham, his various progeny and the kingdom(s) they inhabit mean a lot to me. My first experience with video games came sitting beside my dad as we played the games together. I marveled at my father’s ability to figure out the various puzzles, my eventual discovery of the official Sierra hint book covered in magic highlighter reveals notwithstanding. I first learned to type on a computer at a decent speed playing the first three King’s Quest games and become acquainted with function keys for the first time. F3 repeats the last line of text. Various other function keys (in later games) save, load and the like. I even got the hang of basic DOS commands by figuring out how to load the games myself when my father was at work.

So yes, the Sierra adventure games genuinely hold a special place in my heart. It’s a well-worn phrase, but I do care about these games quite a bit. I’ll never have quite the same personal connection with the classic LucasArts adventure games for example.

But man, King’s Quest I is weird. I sat down after a few minutes and took note of the various ways that poor Graham had died.

Walked into moat by accident within seconds of game starting, eaten by moat serpent.

Attempt to dive into lake thwarted by… gravity, I think.

Snatched by enormous bird.

Chased down by sorcerer and frozen in place. Then killed by ogre.

Turned into confectionary by witch from Hansel & Gretel.

I vaguely remembered the games (and the early games in particular) in this series being arbitrary. A timed opening section to King’s Quest III is particularly memorable and to this day I’m not comfortable playing a video game on PC if I can’t save every three or four minutes. Not to mention the need in Sierra games to effectively stagger your save games in case an ogre/king/goblin/leprechaun/fairy asks you for that innocuous item present earlier in the game but no longer accessible. Then, of course, you have the text entry model for the first few games. I was actually looking forward to using it though I was concerned at how finicky text input would get. Imprecise memories of having trouble using the right combination of words to open a door proved to be faulty however. I didn’t have many issues with using text input exclusively. I even typed actions such as “duck” and “jump” despite *gasp* there being an option to use a function key for these specific actions.*

*I have no idea why. I only actually needed to jump once and there was no ducking. But hey. Technology.

So yes. Weirdness. Ultimately though, I really enjoyed King’s Quest I. I had been a bit worried. Sure, I thought, nostalgia will get me through a game or two, but how am I going to get through the next six games if that’s all they have going for them? It ended up not being so. King’s Quest I is a fun game. It seems rather simplistic not just in technology but in theme, but there’s a lot of fun to be had. Trolls over bridges, a witch in a house made of candy, a goblin weaving gold: the clichés abound but King’s Quest I gets away with it. The game frequently hits a pitch at homage rather than simple theft. I suppose it’s possible I’m being too kind to the game, but it hit a nice level for me and by the end of the game the weirdness had become a bonus. What’s the deal with the dwarf thief that basically breaks your game if you haven’t located a magic ring yet? Did I get the magic mirror too early in the first place? It felt like I got there very early, and I completely fluked it thanks to a spell cast upon my character by a fairy godmother I didn’t see again for the rest of the game. The king that had promised the protagonist a just reward for locating the kingdom’s lost treasures collapsed prostrate in front of his own throne, his death granting Sir Graham’s ascent to power. I mean, it’s odd.

This is more an effect of playing the game in 2013 I think, than anything in the design of the game itself. In that sense I am guilty of filtering my enjoyment of the game through nostalgia after all, or at least a hipsterish skewed view of the game that seeks the status of a hidden treasure from the outset. Well, I’ll cop to the former but not the latter. In its own way, the game truly does stand up: this is a classic not just because it was a pioneer in the genre or because it pushed video game graphics of the time. Roberta Williams struck on something fundamentally impressive here, with a gameworld that could so easily have skewed generic but instead successfully evokes faery tales from Western literature to flesh out its own atmosphere. I’m rather looking forward to the next few King’s Quest games now. Thank God for that.

Next up: The Longest Journey!

First off, let’s discuss preconceptions. I absolutely adored the original Bioshock, as did many people. I’ve never encountered a twist so deliciously well done, and that game showed us what video games could do that other mediums could not. The role of the player was inverted, the linearity of first person shooters implicitly mocked, the mechanics and parameters of functioning gameplay presented as a major plot device. It was wonderful. More than that, the story did this central idea justice. Dodgy Irish accents aside, we were presented with a fully believable world. A vivid setting that suggested all kinds of backstories and origin myths that we might never have a chance to explore. That’s the key word really: exploration. Despite Bioshock’s linear progress you felt like you were exploring the city of Rapture. I ended the game as satisfied as I have ever been with a story told in a video game.

Then something funny happened. I have never gone back and replayed Bioshock. I played Half-Life 2 repeatedly for years. Come to think of it, maybe I’ll play Half-Life 2 again soon. But Bioshock? Never went back to that well. Bioshock 2 came and went. I didn’t particularly want to go back to Rapture. My interest never really solidified enough to give the game any kind of a shot despite numerous Steam sales, a friend loaning me his copy and the excellent (or so I hear and believe) Minerva’s Den DLC. The Bioshock spell had worn off, so much so in fact that I didn’t have time for Infinite either. I was a little worried by some of the ambition being put forth about the story and the setting and I wasn’t all that sold on Ken Levine’s interpretation of the historical context. The game was released, and I have a whole set of reviews, reactions and related articles in a bookmarked folder, waiting to be read once I’ve completed the game. Because, despite everything else and most unlike my approach to Bioshock 2 I always knew I would buy Bioshock: Infinite. I just expected to have problems with it.

Now, this might seem unfair. Truthfully, it’s completely unfair, unless the game ends up eliciting a more positive reaction from me because I went in with low expectations. However, this is why games can be different. And books, for that matter. Even as single-player games get shorter in length spent playing the game, I would have to believe (and certainly would hope) that people would have an issue with Bioshock: Infinite taking less than ten or twelve hours to complete. I’m not talking about speed runs here. I’m talking about cut scenes (or scenes set up to be as close to such as possible), talking to random NPCs, soaking in the atmosphere of the game. And shooting. The last of which I’ll address in another post at a future date. I want to enjoy the game, I want to luxuriate in it to a certain extent, I want to sit down and enjoy my time with it. A film will grab hold of my attention and demand that I stay focused from anywhere from ninety to one hundred and eighty minutes. A book can take a few days or a few weeks or even a few months. Video games, although this is somewhat dependent on the genre, can similarly be enjoyed at length. So, even if I do have issues with Bioshock: Infinite, I could still come away with a positive feeling about the whole thing.

So far, it has proven exactly thus. The dialogue is occasionally hokey, we’ve already had a dodgy Irish accent and a janitor determined to push the envelope in his role as a magical negro, speaking in an over the top accent that makes me a little uncomfortable and apparently recording audio diaries at rather odd moments that prove quite fortuitous to the plot. However, the positives are in greater number: the miscegenation raffle early in the game is a truly fantastic moment whether or not you choose to classify it as a reveal. The hinting at the “Vox Populi” terrorist group and the general propaganda has been fantastic, even if that is a bit of a silly name for said terrorist group. And the floating city…

My my, that city. What a dream this is. The moving buildings, the concept of different districts docking with others. The setting as a whole is wonderful. A quiet populace fully acquiesced to the notion of a theocratic supreme leader and the demonization of all cultures without and some groups imported to the underbelly of the city. I’m a little unclear on why exactly that was done, actually, other than to simply have people to clean up after the white folk. Maybe it’s that simple. I’m starting to worry that I’m going to encounter more of such simple solutions going forward. But we’ll see, I suppose.

I wanted to sit down now though and write a quick post about one of the characters in The Dig. The lady character, specifically. I thought about talking about Maggie in the post itself but it was already getting quite long and I’m not sure that any kind of serious attempt to discuss the game’s portrayal of a central female character was going to fit in with the “I liked it but I didn’t like it but ultimately I liked it” vibe that post ended up giving out.

One of the reasons The Dig worked for me is because I knew very little about it. Early in the game, it appeared to be a video game adaptation of Armageddon, one of the worst films ever made, or possibly Deep Impact, a terrible film that still wasn’t as bad as Armageddon. I had no idea it was going to end up being a surprisingly limited adventure on a weird alien planet with a fantastic ending that referred to alternate dimensions and talked about travelling between Spacetime Four and Spacetime Six without irony. I also had no idea what was going to happen with the characters and so assumed that all five would be important for the entirety of the game. Not so. The mechanic guy and the senator that had a slightly troubling relationship with the mission’s flying supply closet both disappear from the narrative early on, leaving us with three characters: Grey tips with an extra dollop of leadership, Boston Low; stereotypically clinical German, Brink; intrepid journalist with a range of research skills one would not expect from a member of the Fourth Estate, Maggie.

There are a lot of things about Maggie that are… that are just so nineties. I don’t mean that in a bad way. I love the nineties. It does date her, though. She’s a journalist, she’s sharp, she’s witty and she won’t take sass from the men. However, to the writers’ credit, she isn’t simply a female character with a one-note recurring statement of independence. Most of her interactions with the other characters rest on a believable conviction borne of her own independence that is, for the most part, gender independent.

For example, Maggie bails on Low shortly after they land on the alien planet, magically travelling to some other area before Low has solved the puzzles to get there himself (don’t think about it too hard), stating that she doesn’t see any point in sticking together. What’s nice about this is that it sends Low into a minor panic. As the team member with the military background, he’s unsure how to handle civilians that decide to bugger off and ignore him. Maggie’s decision to strike out on her own is also a problem for his masculine sense of chivalry. Who will protect her? Maggie isn’t bothered by notions of Low’s supposed ability to protect either of them, and takes off. Her decision has nothing to do with the fact that she’s a woman. Low’s reaction has everything to do with the fact that he’s a man, and a military man in particular.

Maggie certainly has her moments when the gender issue lands on the nose a little too squarely, when she openly challenges Low’s concern for her as being determined by the fact that he sees her as a member of the weaker sex in need of protection. For the most part she ignores it, spending the game learning a complex alien language in a matter of hours. This doesn’t make sense, but neither does the fact that the team sent to save the planet from an incoming meteor brought an embedded journalist (another trope that feels very, very nineties).

Towards the end of the game, Maggie starts to make interesting decisions that make Low seem boring in comparison, to the point that I am increasingly coming around to the idea that this was intentional on the part of the writers. Seeing Brink’s descent into horrific addiction, or possibly even his resurrection as something inhuman, she informs Low that she doesn’t want to be resurrected no matter what. Of the three characters she has shown the most agency. Brink’s overtly masculine desire to displace Low as leader of the group led him to falling into trouble in the first place. Low’s agency is extremely limited. He wants to get home and considers that the next step of his mission; choice isn’t an issue for Low. Maggie, however, actively chooses to accept death over the newly discovered alternative provided by the “life crystals.”

This becomes particularly interesting with the game’s ending, with Maggie’s decision to sacrifice herself for Low intentionally telegraphed ahead of time to the player. Low has spent the game agonizing over how to take care of Maggie, but ultimately it is Maggie that saves him. Let’s play a little game here and switch some characters around. If Low or even Brink sacrificed themselves for Maggie to go on alone, it would present a completely different message. Low, by dying, finally saves the woman in his last manly act. Maggie, who has rejected such a worldview for herself and criticized it in Low, sacrifices herself not as some kind of emulation of Low’s supposed chivalry but as a genuine act of sacrifice for a fellow human being. Truth be told, we hit the bumpers here a little. What is Maggie’s motivation for taking the shot ahead of Low? I suppose it’s that she’s a good person? Fair enough, but it seems that the writers pulled a bit of a fast one on us here. Still, I can’t complain too much. I think the end result worked well.

The Dig is a game that seeks to do some interesting things, and though I remain convinced of its many flaws the game has been growing on me since I completed it. Maggie’s character is genuinely interesting, and though based on a slightly cringeworthy archetype of the spunky female journalist emerges as by far the most interesting and most genuinely independent character in the game. In that sense, she’s a triumph.

Now, I have to take a moment to explain myself. I’ve always been a bit of a cheat with adventure games. So much so that I have created my own workflow for cheating to ensure that I don’t simply ruin the game for myself. I was quite surprised playing through The Dig at how this came back so naturally. Essentially, I turned to Google only when being stumped was driving me around the bend, and it usually took about half a sentence or two to get me back on track.

While saying that… The Dig’s puzzles seemed fine at first but soon enter a rather frustrating range of difficulties that ultimately was unafraid of the utterly obtuse. This was a big problem for my enjoyment of The Dig because it absolutely destroyed my momentum.*

*Truth be told, my momentum was also hurt by an odd bug that refused to save my game and saw me go through about an hour and a half of gameplay again, albeit in about ten minutes (ah, adventure games).

Now, I suspect that momentum is more important for enjoying The Dig than it is for most adventure games. The Dig, you see, trades very heavily on a sense of wonder. Its plot, though resolutely B-movie in origin, transports our characters to a completely alien world that shows off the art design of the LucasArts studio. This isn’t a bad thing. The art design is very good indeed. The music, though a little aggressive in its desire to be atmospheric, was also very good. Overall, I was really enjoying this story.

However, everything started to go wrong. I got stuck here and there. It happens in video games. Before too long, the game became a series of journeys between areas connected to a central hub. All well and good, but the sense of wonder that accompanied the first hour or so of play was gone. I was used to this world now. I just wasn’t all that impressed anymore. Well, that’s not fair: I very much was impressed, but in a rather technical “Isn’t that a lovely bit of work by the art team there” rather than the pure escapism that I had felt in the game’s initial stages.

The game’s lack of humour doesn’t help either. There is humour, and at first I was happy with it, delivered in fairly small doses. As the game went on though, I found that I missed some of the wackier moments in adventure games. I had never thought of such a tone as critical and after all, I was a King’s Quest guy more than a LucasArts guy so it clearly can’t be that critical to my experience. The Dig needed more laughs though, or something anyway to distract me from the fact that I was sick of this planet and sick of Boston Low, however wonderful his name or committed Robert Patrick’s voice acting.

The game’s puzzles, especially towards the end, began to rely quite heavily on visual cues. Now, this could be a particular weakness in the way my brain works (or doesn’t as the case may be) but this ceased to be fun rather abruptly. The puzzles drifted from being a bit harder than I perhaps expected to being utterly beyond any reasonable attempt to put two and two together. I know that adventure games struggle from this problem all the time, and The Dig had some classics, such as remembering this one thing an item did thirty minutes into the game when you arrive at a completely different situation six hours (of game playing time) later. That’s standard, and I made my peace with that kind of thing a long time ago. Having to keep track of which item had or hadn’t been used yet, all these aspects of older PC games that people often lament today… Well, maybe I’m lazy. I was a bit peeved I had to spend a fair bit of time before realizing “Oh that’s right. I didn’t use the red one yet.”

All that being said, I enjoyed my time with The Dig and I’ve developed a bit of a soft spot for it, in the way that one does with things that perhaps don’t quite cut it or reach expectations but deliver something interesting anyway. The Dig, despite the relative lack of humour mentioned above, does have an undercurrent of cheekiness throughout. The protagonist is a bit of a smart-ass even in his difficult situation and every conversation includes the option to “say something profound.” The most interesting character is probably not the one you control but Brink, the scientist that goes through the most trauma on the adventure. By some distance.

The Dig tends to be frustrating. Once you’ve made one of the last major breakthroughs in the story, the protagonist gives a brief “this is what you needed to do all along” speech, which wasn’t the most enjoyable thing to be told by a game. It seems like so much in between the two points was fluff, but again… adventure games can toe that line quite often. It’s hard not to feel The Dig isn’t being a bit cheeky here and there though, not least with areas that feel a little off the beaten track usually so well defined by moving the cursor to the edge of the screen.

I suppose you could argue I shouldn’t be quite so lazy, but that was a big part of the problem with the game: I regularly found myself moving the cursor around the screen and clicking on everything that provided a response. This was how I solved the “puzzle” of saving a character late on, finding myself wandering off to another screen for no particular reason and then pushing a rock. Thrilling stuff.

When it comes right down to it, I had a hard time completely suspending my disbelief with The Dig in large part because it was a bit all over place, tonally speaking. B movie schlock, light comedy, survival drama, it’s all there. Spread unevenly, but there. I would have liked to talk about The Dig as a game that made me laugh, made me cry and all things in between, and it did elicit various reactions but it never came together as a whole. I liked the way the game ended, as the drama regained its impetus and the group dynamic came back into play, but the overall journey had been full of dips and swells. It felt more like I had returned to the game I’d been playing hours earlier than anything else.

I liked the ending though. Really, once I had characters talking about “Spacetime Six” I was happy as a pig in sci-fi themed muck. It’s a pity about the mundaneness in between the exciting opening and the equally interesting (and openly nerdy) ending, but it makes it difficult to stay mad at The Dig, even if it does pitch for an emotional moment that feels contrived. I would much rather The Dig revealed its slightly mad sci-fi plot earlier and allowed me to branch out a bit more, and fully committed to what it wanted to do, one way or the other. Then again, I think this game has won me over by refusing to do that, by insisting on being this other type of story. I admire it for that. I don't think The Dig is a success, but I do feel quite strongly that it's the game its creators wanted to make, for good or ill. And that's good enough for me.

So a nice solid start to this Video Game Friday thing. I’d like a break from the LucasArts games, so next week’s game is…

King’s Quest I!!!