Press X to Not Die, #GirlBoss -- Tomb Raider (2013)

 Within the first several minutes of Tomb Raider, Lara Croft is nearly drowned, impaled on a spike, and has to fight off a man that, if you are not quick-thinking and agile, will kill you with a handmade axe in an intensely intimate fashion.

For a male action hero, this is all in a day's work. We would not even blink to see a man subjected to this kind of violence in a movie or video game. But when it's a woman -- especially a frightened, disoriented woman inexperienced in facing violence -- things get a little more complicated.

I'm sure that Tomb Raider needs no introduction. This critically acclaimed reboot of a franchise going back to the 90s shows the origin story of famed archaeologist Lara Croft. While striving to live up to the legacy of her dead father, Lara and a boatload of comrades are shipwrecked in the Dragon's Triangle and wash up on an island which is the former home of an ancient Japanese god-queen, and the present home of an insane cult hoping to resurrect her. Mechanically, it's set firmly in the grand tradition of its forebears, a third-person adventure game involving traversal, shooting, puzzling, collecting, and of course the inevitable quick-time events. Priority is given to immersion; there are no health bars, precise gear loads are obfuscated, and the inevitable RPG elements are cloaked in a descriptive veneer to hide their naked mechanical advantages. It's a pretty linear experience, predating the open-world live services that are popular these days, and it has a difficulty level that makes it accessible to even a filthy casual like me. All in all, I'd say it deserves its reputation as one of the best games of the decade; I had lots of fun with it.

Facing off against a squad of cultists. Some things never change.

For years, Lara Croft was held up as the icon of Feminism in gaming, a badass chick that could hold her own against the likes of Doomguy and Duke Nukem. There was even talk of how playing as a strong female character like Lara could serve as a role model for girls and make teenage males steeped in the toxic macho culture of gaming more sympathetic to the plight of women in society. But in recent times, the discourse around female characters in media has changed, and the designers of Tomb Raider quite plainly took some of those ideas on board when reinventing this iconic gaming franchise.

The most immediately apparent difference between 2013's Lara Croft and her 1990s namesake is that she's less... she doesn't have such... she isn't as... there's no polite way to put this: her boobs aren't as big. Not A-cups by any means, but not pornstar-sized either; reasonably proportioned. That's hardly the most important change, but it does seem to encapsulate the direction in which the devs have chosen to go when reinterpreting the character. Lara has also lost a lot of the sass and wisecracking nature of her hyper-competent forbear. She's hardly a shrinking violet; in addition to being a trained archaeologist, she's athletic and competent with a bow, able to easily climb rock faces and leap off of crumbling bridges. She also has an innate survival instinct, translated mechanically into the ability to highlight important environmental objects, that will serve her in good stead in the coming trials. But here at the beginning of her career, Lara is not the flippant and frankly mannish globetrotting superstar of the franchise's earlier (and later) outings. She has emotionally vivid relationships with other characters, and projects a kind of vulnerability that makes the terrible things that are happening to her deeply threatening in a way that games rarely really accomplish. She is just a relatively normal young woman who finds herself in a bad situation and has to do whatever she has to, learning to kill and to survive under the harshest of trials.

It would hardly be Tomb Raider if you didn't get to raid some tombs, now would it?

And that's kind of a problem, because mechanically, the game doesn't really keep up with this change in mood. One minute Lara is almost puking after having to shoot a man for the first time; the next she's gunning down armies of cultists with practiced ease. She wails and gasps at every new terror, yet takes dozens of bullets with barely a wince. She is motivated by her interpersonal relationships to pursue goals with deep urgency, yet is willing to take time off at any given moment to track down collectibles and infiltrate ancient ruins -- her deep scientific curiosity getting the better of her, I guess. This makes for a rather schizophrenic experience, as the story the devs want to tell about an average woman having to overcome adversity and survive against all odds butts up against the gamer fantasy of going HAM on an island full of bad guys. I'm not saying it makes the game bad, but it does kind of undermine the idea that this is a new Tomb Raider for a new generation of women gamers, that this Lara Croft is a realistic portrayal of a female character with a deep interior life, that the bad old days of a woman built like a stripper cracking one-liners with a gun in each hand are gone.

My wife absolutely loathes Lara Croft and Tomb Raider. She hates the fact that for years, such a blatant sex object was pointed to as proof that the industry and gaming culture was not sexist -- let us remember that Lara's infamous bustline was the result of a programming error that was loved by adolescent playtesters -- and she has told me that the aftertaste of years of seeing women in gaming portrayed this way has permanently soured her on the franchise. She is not going to play the new Tomb Raider; she is not going to experience the growth in the way the developers think of women as characters. When you make a bad enough first impression, it's not good enough sometimes to make amends and beg forgiveness later. The damage has been done.

Throwing Bricks at Cops is a Good Idea -- Tonight We Riot

 Tonight We Riot is a retro-style brawler in which the player is the leader of a revolutionary anti-capitalist movement which must fight its way through the city block by block, liberating the oppressed workers of a futuristic dystopia and breaking through waves of violent riot police on their way to ridding their society of bourgeois parasites and creating a classless utopia. You play not just as one character, but as a mob of radicalized proletariat; as leader, you take the vanguard and direct your comrades in battle, but if one leader falls, another automatically takes their place. As you rampage through the city, picking up bricks and Molotov cocktails (the weapons of the people) and gaining numbers by organizing workplaces, you will be faced with gradually more and more deadly police violence, starting with "nonlethal" truncheons, water cannons, and rubber bullets and proceeding to more naked displays of deadly force and futuristic weapons of mass slaughter, until at the end of each stage you send the capitalist pigs packing and claim a new part of the city for the worker's paradise.

These piles of bricks conveniently left lying around bring to mind recent accusations that police have done exactly this during BLM protests to encourage violent riots which they will then have an excuse to crack down on.

Tonight We Riot wears its ideological commitments on its sleeve. It is a full-throated exhortation not just to revolution, but to violent insurrection. As we have seen before, to make an engaging game, some aspects of reality must be left out; the nuts and bolts of organizing a revolutionary coalition capable of amassing sufficient force to challenge the institutionalized violence of the state is left in the background, and so is the broader picture of what the revolution means for society in general, to focus on the immediate process of direct action in the streets. But the game also implicitly forecloses the possibility of change through anything but violent overthrow of bourgeois democracy. Every organ of society is turned against you, from the capitalist economic system itself, to the militarized police who defend it, to the popular press who manufacture the consent of the populace, to the electoral machine that puts only corrupt corporatist stooges in power. In the tradition of Marx, the democratic process is seen not necessarily as suppressed, or even fixed, so much as simply ineffectual. There are no reformists or incrementalists or social democracies in this world, just the cold reality of naked state brutality and the call to arms of the people to struggle and fight for their freedom.

At the end of each stage, you get a score based on how many comrades you managed to not get killed. A grim reminder that the revolution cannot be without martyrs.

Obviously, I am writing this against the background of the recent and ongoing mass protests against police brutality occurring in the US, and the attendant response that has seen police become even more brutal and repressive, defending the state's monopoly on violence in a way that only further demonstrates the merits of the protesters' assertion that the institution's monopoly on violence is fundamentally illegitimate. Though they started with riots, looting, and the burning of a police station, the protesters have been forthright about the need to remain peaceful and nonviolent in their methods, even as the chattering classes fixate on the comparatively minor incidence of rioting, the police interpret any resistance whatsoever to their war crimes as rebellion, openly fascist paramilitaries engage in their own intimidation and murder, and random people get dragged off the street into unmarked vans by anonymous individuals without uniforms or badges. And for a while, it seemed as if the protests were beginning to accomplish their goals, with multiple jurisdictions promising reform and even one city council voting to dissolve the police department altogether, but such gains have disappeared like the tide as the fickle media and public have moved on to fresher, shinier controversies. Too, this article will be posted in the lead-up to one of the most consequential elections in US history, with one side openly attempting to suppress the vote, and the other seemingly unable to make a convincing case for why they should be the ones elected; a culmination of decades of reactionary neoliberalism and expansion of government power during which the left have failed miserably to build a coalition that can enact meaningful change through the ballot box while the extreme right does unrelenting violence to democratic norms. And with all that taken into account, it feels hard sometimes to believe that the advocates of revolution doesn't have it right.

Darkly sarcastic headlines between each stage indicate the public reaction to your revolutionary crusade. Not promising, is it?

I can't help but admit that Tonight We Riot paints an appealing picture. There is a visceral happiness to seeing the downtrodden just uncompromisingly win for once. Anyone who has been the target of police harassment (as I and a lot of people I know have) can understand the joy in the idea of smashing a pig's face in with a brick, of blowing up a car just for the sake of showing them that you won't be crushed under the iron heel, of breaking out the guillotines and sending those suit-wearing, briefcase-carrying crypto-fascists fleeing for their lives. Of course, not to be all "you participate in society, gotcha", but the great irony is that this piece of what can only reasonably be described as anti-capitalist propaganda in game form makes huge corporations money every time it is downloaded. After all, the good comrades at Pixel Pushers Union 512 still gotta eat. And so the machine continues to churn, grinding up every rebellious urge of the population and spitting it out as more product to consume. However, the most subversive message of Tonight We Riot is not just that violent revolution is an option that is on the table, but that it is possible to win such a revolution. And hey, it's not like it hasn't been done before, and it's not beyond the realm of possibility that it can be done again. But there is something about the vision of those little pixelated figures, revolutionaries and cops alike, smeared across the screen in a gush of cartoon blood that is deeply unsettling. And what scares me the most is not the prospect of such a violent uprising as a legitimate means of social change, but that maybe it is the only possible means.

Life, the Universe, and... -- Everything

Everything is an open-world sim in which the player takes the role of a sort of spark of life in a quest for the meaning of its own existence. The player starts their journey as one of an extremely wide variety of plants, animals, or natural and man-made objects; When I started playing, I was put into the body of a polar bear. The player then roams the environment, slowly picking up clues about what they are capable of as they interact with the stray thoughts of other things. The core mechanic involves inhabiting more and more of the other various things that make up your surroundings; from the body of a polar bear, you can jump into a tree, a rock, a clump of grass, or a woolly mammoth. That's the game's big selling point: you can "be everything". Once you have come to know this body by "singing" to the rest of the universe, you add it to your directory of things, and can become that thing again as desired. You can also join groups of these things together, and have them dance; and that's really about it as far as mechanics go. As you wander and add more and more things to your lexicon, you will also be occasionally gifted with audio files of quotations from a lecture by British philosopher Alan Watts.

Just a polar bear rolling. You know, as they do.

And there's the real point. Everything is the most deliberately and self-consciously philosophical game I have yet to play. Although serviceable, the gameplay and graphics have an almost deliberately unpolished look; animals aren't even animated, but move in a sort of herky-jerky rolling. I don't like to impute sinister motives to creators, but the style of the game seems like a deliberate attempt to give the impression of the game as being an "art piece", like the developers had more important things on their mind than merely making a good game. And once you've tired of accumulating more and more things in your library and watching penguins or spruce trees dance, the game becomes mostly an over-complicated way to listen to an Alan Watts lecture. The lecture in question is about the theory that there are "no such things as things", that divisions between one thing and another are arbitrary and unreal, that humans are merely an expression of the universe trying to know itself. 

The 'mind' full of thoughts I've encountered. Some of them feel remarkably try-hardish.

This definitely gives context to the game's mechanics, but it sort of leaves one with the impression that they are being talked at by the devs, rather than invited to join in a conversation. Is this an effective way to communicate your thesis in a game? The strength of games as argumentative tools is in their ability to involve the player in a system, to illuminate an idea through doing, through simulation of actions and reactions. The fact is that after a while, actually playing Everything seems a bit pointless. To make it an effective didactic tool, the devs might have profited from making the mechanics a bit more complicated and involved, giving the player more to do, and making the quotes a bit harder to come by; add some actual play to this game. As it is, Everything really leaves me cold, and I absolutely love philosophy and also largely agree with the point that is trying to be made. If even I, the definition of the intended audience, find that it falls short, what hope can it have with anyone else?

Carnival of Microtransactions -- Raid: Shadow Legends

So I finally got sucked in. After being bombarded with ads and offers on the various gaming-related YouTube channels I follow, I caved and decided to support one of my favourites by accepting their blandishment of free stuff, and downloaded Raid: Shadow Legends. After all, so many people whose opinions on gaming I trusted were saying that this game was a lot of fun, and could they all really be lying through their teeth for profit? So I downloaded the game, made an account, gritted my teeth, and gave it a try.

And honestly, it's not the worst game I've ever played. The core gameplay loop is pretty bog-standard JRPG-style tactical turn-based combat, shorn of all of the extraneous exploration, puzzles, and all but the barest hint of plot and character development. The centrepiece is the collection and management of the game's endless stable of unique champions -- from Orcs, Elves, ad Dwarves to holy paladins, undead revenants to knights and barbarians to ferocious Lizardmen, each with a unique set of skills and their own strengths and weaknesses. It's a pleasant enough way to kill time.

But oh my god, is this game lousy with monetization. It uses pretty much every psychological trick in the book, and as such, it makes for an awesome case study in the way that modern games' financial models function. I don't know if Raid is particularly worse than any other free-to-play game on the market, but it is definitely the worst that I have ever had the pleasure of playing; and yet, it's still fairly enjoyable. But that enjoyment comes at a psychological cost.

My stable of champions. Not pictured: the parade of common cannon fodder who have fueled their advancement.

To start with, there are the endless array of limiting factors. As Jim Sterling likes to put it, there's the "bullshit currency", silver, which is fairly freely available and which is required to perform almost any action in the game from summoning champions to upgrading weapons to improving skills, and the "real currecny", gems, which are drip-fed to the player but also available for real-word money and can in turn be traded for anything the player needs. Then, almost everything either needs or benefits from an additional extra item to perform -- shards of various capability to summon champions, the vast majority of which will be the near-useless commons (literally a party of level-1 common champions can't even beat the first level of the campaign) and whose main utility is as fodder to improve your more important heroes; skill books to improve skills, potions to "ascend" them, chickens to improve their rank from rare to legendary. All of which can be obtained through gameplay, but all of which are also available for a price in precious gems. There's also an energy meter which depletes as you engage in actual gameplay, and further tokens needed to fight other players' teams in the arena. I have seen this described by other games as an "anti-poopsocking" measure designed to stop the player from going for days without stopping play, but conveniently, all such games seem to provide methods of refilling or extending your energy ... for a price. You get tons and tons of such resources as a new player, especially if you've redeemed one of the endless head-starts offered by various YouTube channels, but eventually the silver and the excess energy has to run out, and you're stuck with whatever dribble the game will still allot to you, unless you choose to pay.

Actual gameplay: my primary party in the process of destroying the hopelessly outmatched opposition.

Then, the relentless driving of engagement. The game has a free hand with the play rewards. There are of course increasing bonuses for logging in every day, rewards just for spending time playing the game, and a roster of daily, weekly, and monthly quests, plus a wealth of missions, challenges, and tournaments that ensure the player never lacks for something to do to earn a little reward. These intermittent hits of dopamine from progress and free stuff are addictive, and missing out on something you could have had with just a little more play feels pretty crappy. A really dedicated investigator would have tried to complete all of the time-dependent quests to see if you can actually do them all without paying, as a lot of them require limited-supply items to finish, but frankly, I just don't enjoy the game enough to spend that much time on it. This is all of course framed as a "reward", but we must keep in mind that what the player is being given is a solution to a problem the game itself creates, a problem of limited resources which is primarily present not to make gameplay more challenging or satisfying, but to present a barrier that can be surmounted, if the player chooses, by spending real money. And the more time the player spends on the game, the more investment they have in their champions and tournament ranks, the more tempting spending that money becomes. Then there is the classic trick, when upgrading weapons, of making the occasional upgrade fail -- a psychological tactic called "intermittent rewards" employed to great success in gambling institutions, requiring further investment of resources while exploiting the sunk-cost fallacy and the weaknesses of the dopaminergic system to encourage the player to give it just one more try.

Just look at all of the busywork I am expected to complete every day for a few gems.

The final piece is of course the advertising. Raid is blatant in its promotion of its paid services. There are a continual stream of bundles and deals being offered by pop-up ads, all time-limited to play on FOMO and purchase-quantity-limited to create an artificial illusion of scarcity. There's a free shard item available in the store every day; that gets the player regularly visiting the storefront, with its array of tempting deals on offer, and I have definitely caught myself thinking "Hey, this bundle is only a buck thirty-nine! That's a steal!" In addition to the ability to directly purchase the items you need to advance and keep playing, there are a number of places where premium-currency gems can be "invested" to create a continuing gameplay benefit, giving the player a sense that they are building something of real worth, especially if what they have invested is not mere time and effort, but cold, hard cash. The game even gives me notifications in my fucking windows system tray! And there is the advertising blitz that got me into the game in the first place, that offer of a fortune in silver and a premium champion from those we trust to give us gaming content; all of those professional game content creators lying, if my experience with the game is any guide, through their teeth to sell this Skinner box psychological torture, each endorsement reinforcing the others until social proof gets the better of you, as it did me.

You get hit with about a half-dozen of these every time you go back to home base.

Practically everything about the game is a calculated inducement to spend money. Which raises an interesting question: How much actual game can be removed from a game of this type before it ceases to be an actual game? Now I'm not saying that Raid involves no actual gameplay at all; there are plenty of others that would suffer in comparison. At its best, the combat can be a real challenge, as is the meta-game of picking the champions whose capabilities suit your play-style, figuring out which ones make a holistically effective party, and managing the byzantine system of character levels, weapon levels, character ranks, skill levels and ascensions, perks, whole-game advantages, and so on. But I find that in a lot of cases, my party is either vastly overpowered or vastly underpowered, with muscling through the actual battles either trivial or impossible. It is pretty rare to actually be in a situation where your characters are exactly the right power lever to make the encounters a tough but winnable challenge. The game even provides a convenient auto-battle option to save you from the tedious drudgery of actually choosing your moves when victory is a foregone conclusion. And actual battle, engaging in the core gameplay loop, is not what most of your playtime will consist of. Most of playing the game as a non-"whale" actually involves playing the monetization system, choosing which activities to engage in to generate maximum free value for time invested while battling the constant psychological pressure to just pay. Raid involves perhaps the minimum possible level of challenge required to be considered an actual game, and not just an unnecessarily complicated way of spending money for pretty virtual goods.

The sad part? I'm probably going to keep playing, even now that I've completed my study and analysis of the game. It's got its hooks in me. Missing out on my next daily reward, losing my progress toward that sweet legendary champion, and leaving all the quests I have started unfinished would be psychologically painful. The game may not have actually gotten any money out of me, but it's winning the battle.

It's a Bird! It's a Plane! It's ... Some Guy! -- Sentinels Of The Multiverse

Sentinels of the Multiverse started life as a tabletop card game, although I have lately been playing the computer version. I have played it before, defeating all of the included villains and then growing bored, but I just recently got a good deal on all of the DLC, so I dove back in and have been having a lot of fun revisiting it. The game plays out as a comic-book-style battle between three to five superheroes and a dastardly villain; it's intended to be played cooperatively, although the video game port allows you to play solo and satisfy your inner alpha gamer. Each superhero plays from a deck of cards and uses various powers and special abilities that they either start the game with or develop progressively; the villain then plays programmatically based on an algorithm set out on their character card and draws from a villain deck, while an environment deck filled with dangers and plot twists, like a bustling metropolis or a dinosaur-filled jungle, throws its own wrenches into the works. Even when heroes go down, they can still help their teammates through a choice of powers on the back of their character card, and villains cards flip between two sides that provide variety to their play.

Legacy takes a hit from the villain's terrible might hand.

You won't find any copyrighted DC or Marvel characters in Sentinels of the Multiverse, but the heroes definitely have a familiar ring to them. There's Legacy, the team leader and a pretty clear Superman clone; The Wraith, a kind of female Batman; Tachyon, an obvious copy of the Flash; Bunker, a beefier version of Iron Man; and Tempest, who ... well, Tempest is a bit more of an original character, like a combination of Storm, Aquaman, and a Skrull. Let it not be said that Sentinels is full of blatant ripoffs. As the expansions ramify, the characters become more and more individuated and creative, though many of them are still clearly inspired by other better-known intellectual properties. The villains, too, are pretty familiar faces; for instance, the tutorial antagonist, Baron Blade. He has a death ray, he has an army of henchmen and brilliant devices, and just when you think you've defeated him, he comes back even more powerful than before. There's a rampaging AI, an alien conqueror, a master assassin, a primeval force of nature. The brilliant thing about Sentinels is that, within a fairly simple set of basic mechanics, every hero and every villain plays differently, and each mechanically reflects the characteristics of the archetype they embody. Legacy bolsters and sacrifices himself for his teammates, the Wraith employs stealth and deploys a barrage of gadgets, Tachyon plays a flurry of action after action, and Bunker switches between power-suit modes that specialize in one or another aspect of gameplay. The mechanics and theme of this game are perfectly in tune.

A laudable, if somewhat generic sentiment.

The employment of ersatz heroes and standard types has a long and beloved history in comic books themselves. Looking for Supermans? You can take your pick; in addition to countless spinoffs, reboots, and re-imaginings from the Communist Superman of the brilliant Red Son  to the bizarre bearded maniac of Superman: at Earth's End, there are plenty of unmistakable knock-offs: the title character from the self-aware homage Supreme; the Samaritan from Kurt Busiek's loving tribute to comic archetypes, Astro City; the subversive Omniman from Invincible and his eponymous son; and too many others to exhaustively catalogue. Superman is of course a valuable intellectual property, and one may not reproduce his likeness without the permission of the owners of that property, though that line has become blurred with the growing benign neglect of such rights when it comes to fanfiction and fanart. But in the majority of cases, if one wants to tell a Superman story without access to the Superman license, or to tell a story exploring the concept of Superman without necessarily involving the character himself, one must necessarily turn to disguises, obfuscations, and winking nods.

Things can get pretty hairy if the cards don't go your way. I wish I could say I bounced back from this.

But that raises an interesting question. What is it exactly that makes Legacy so clearly a dollar-store version of Superman? After all, Legacy is not a refugee from a doomed alien planet, nor does he gain his powers from the yellow sun of Earth; he is a normal human whose superhuman abilities come from a magic ring passed down through generations of his family. He has blonde hair, not black, and his skin-tight bodysuit is primarily white with blue accents, not primarily blue with red accents. He may be quite strong, but he does not seem to have the ability to set entire planets on different orbits, nor is he invulnerable -- he takes damage from attacks just like any of the other heroes. Obviously, if we are to maintain that Legacy is in some sense the same character as Superman, these superficially defining attributes are not in fact essential to the character.

Well, Superman has been called the Big Blue Boy Scout. He is a leader, and he leads from the front, using his invulnerable body to shield others from harm; as mentioned before, Legacy's abilities also involve him taking damage for the greater good. And Superman, by his moral example, charisma, and unfailingly (most of the time) optimistic outlook, inspires his teammates in the Justice League to strive their utmost and persevere in the face of adversity; likewise, Legacy's signature power is to increase the damage dealt by other heroes, and alternate powers involve the same kind of bolstering of other players' abilities. Finally, though he has at times been portrayed as a super-genius, Superman has a tendency to turn first to force to solve problems, as employing unmatched force is what he's best at; and Legacy's cards also tend to go for the jugular and portray employment of brute strength rather than cleverness, guile, or knowledge. Other off-brand versions of Superman tend to embody similar attributes, or in some cases to play with them and deconstruct their implications. So these, rather then the actual details of Superman's biography, appearance, or exact set of powers, might better serve as definitional of the "Superman archetype".

Justice is restored, but something tells me it's not the last we will see of this rogue.

The concept of an archetype was first introduced by psychologist Carl Jung as a description of deep aspects of the human unconscious personality that drive our behaviour. Jung thought that reflections of these divisions of the self showed up in mythology and repeated in every culture's traditional stories, a concept that was further codified by Joseph Campbell in his concept of the "hero's journey". Superhero comics, among other genres, have often been described as modern mythology, and the concept of the archetype has been applied to such repeatedly reproduced sets of characteristics as we have been discussing. There is something about Superman, about Batman, about mad scientists like Baron Blade that calls to something deep in our psyche, and that is why we keep endlessly reinventing them. Superman himself is just one version of a character type that is as old as human civilization -- a Galahad, a Cu Chulainn, a Siegfried, an Arjuna; a paladin, a carrier of a culture's deepest values and a reflection of what it desires itself to be. Superman embodies Truth, Justice, and the American Way, and Legacy by implication stands for similar values. There is a little Superman in all of us, appealing to the angels of our better nature, whispering to us that righteousness can triumph over evil, that the innocent can be protected from the predators of the world, if we can only apply martial force in a just and measured way. And that is why, although Superman the Last Son of Krypton and his iconic "S" may be copyrighted intellectual property, the idea that is embodied in Superman, in Legacy, and in a hundred other heroes never can be. If one expression is locked up by a corporation eager to capitalize on its popularity, another will inevitably arise. The archetype is the common property of all humanity, an expression of the collective unconscious that cannot die, that cannot be owned, and that cannot be controlled.

Abandon Hope, Ye Who Click This .exe -- Pony Island

This post contains spoilers for Pony Island. If avoiding spoilers is your bag, go play the game first; it's worth your time.

Pony Island is a metafictional puzzle game in which you, the player, are playing a game called "Pony Island". (For convenience sake, I will from here on in be referring to the game itself as Pony Island and the game-within-a-game as "Pony Island".) As the game goes on, it starts to seem as if "Pony Island" has been designed and developed by Satan for the purpose of harvesting souls from unsuspecting players. "Pony Island" is a very simple and inoffensive endless runner involving a pony which jumps over gates, but it has been deliberately broken and made unplayable to encourage users to 'insert soul to continue' with the game. Between sessions of play, you must find portals into the game's source code in order to escape various traps the developer has set for you; the "code" of "Pony Island" is pretty nonsensical, although the puzzles involve real programming concepts like loops and branching trees.

When you give up on "Pony Island", you are booted to a GUI desktop, but of course you're not done playing Pony Island yet -- or "Pony Island", for that matter. It's pretty clear that the overarching system is still part of Pony Island, although there are occasional fake-outs in the game intended to briefly make you think things are happening on your real computer; at one point, a character even asks you to uninstall Pony Island from your hard drive. As you try to find a way to escape the "Pony Island", you are contacted by an entity who claims to have the ability to help you get out of the game developer's trap. But this seems not to be the whole story. I have only played as far as the basic ending; I believe there is also a secret ending which may call into question the assumptions which the player is encouraged to form during gameplay.

One thing I find interesting about Pony Island is the questions it raises about the relationship between game player and game developer or designer. In at least the design of solo games, the developer has to strike a delicate balance. Games are supposed to be "fun", and the fun in games comes from challenge -- from finding a way to beat the game by solving problems within a bounded set of rules. Too little challenge makes the game trivial, a waste of time; too much makes the game unfair and frustrating. Thus, the relationship between developer and player is necessarily antagonistic. The developer is deliberately trying to make the player fail if they don't play well enough, but the player also needs to be able to succeed, to overcome the challenge, in order to have fun. And that balance between challenge and success will be different for every player. Some want their games "Nintendo hard", requiring diligent practice and skill building to overcome, while others want to be able to pick up a game, play, and win a level or two without much effort. With every choice about the difficulty of their game, the developer deliberately alienates part of their potential audience. Difficulty settings and play-style options can mitigate this to some extent, as can cheat codes and hacks, but even that is seen by many players as pandering to those who don't want to put in the honest work required to "git gud".

This tightrope act is further complicated by the relationship between game design and game monetization models under capitalism. Most games, after all, need to be able to make a profit for their publishers and sellers if they are to even see the light of day. In the days of the arcade, games were coin-operated amusements, and the player was required to insert more money every time they failed; and so games were designed in such a way that they were very difficult to beat in order to keep the money coming. With the rise of consoles and personal computers, the model changed to a lump-sum payment, but many games -- those that gave rise to the epithet "Nintendo hard" in the first place -- maintained that ethos of difficulty for difficulty's sake, both because it was just baked in to design philosophy and because it made the game's play lifetime longer and thus convinced consumers that they were getting more game for their money. But too many unfairly difficult titles threatened market demand as players felt their money was being wasted on unbeatable games. Railing at the perceived unfairness of such games in creatively foul language is the stock-in-trade of the immensely popular Angry Video Game Nerd. Combined with the expansion of computer memory and evolving concepts in game design, more games became an experience rather than a pure challenge, one that could be completed by more casual players who weren't willing to put in the time and practice necessary to beat difficult titles. But the pendulum continues to swing. Nowadays, older gamers nostalgic for the gaming experience of their youth are demanding difficulty again. Gaming has become part of a social identity, and thus many self-identified "hardcore gamers" feel that their very identity is under threat from games that cater to the "filthy casuals". Furthermore, the rise of digital distribution of games -- and seamless digital online payment options -- has led to further evolution in monetization models. Game publishers can now charge microtransactions in exchange for real-time gameplay advantages, and this has created pressure to make games harder and more of a grind in order that people be tempted to get a leg up and remove some of the frustration by paying a little bit of money, over and over.

At first, the developer of "Pony Island" (who, I will remind the reader, is apparently Satan) doesn't seem to want you to play their game at all. Until you find a way to "fix" the game, you won't even be able to get past the options screen. Once you have made a few minor repairs, the core gameplay loop of "Pony Island" is fun but casual. The game, however, is ugly as sin, deliberately hard to look at, and it becomes clear over time that it's not even finished. The developer has literally become the antagonist. You are not just trying to beat the game, but beat the developer themself at the game of forcing you to play the game, a game in which losing -- or rather, giving in and taking the easy way out -- will see you dragged to hell. But the Devil is not an unsympathetic fellow. At one point, you are informed that the soul he wishes you to pay him is just a token of appreciation for the joy you have received from the opportunity to play his fun game. He asks for nothing else. "Pony Island" is thus less like the AAA abominations of Activision or Electronic Arts, and more like a kind of demonic shareware.

This story, then, has not only sociological and game-theoretical, but even theological implications. What kind of God would condemn you to play "Pony Island"? For what sin have you been trapped in this maze of illusions, this dark wood of error? Is the act of gaming itself unwholesome, taking the gamer away from contemplation of God's grace? Merely by playing "Pony Island" -- or for that matter, by playing Pony Island -- are we damning ourselves to hell? Or is Satan's attempt to unfairly trap us an unmitigated evil, and the decision to play "Pony Island" simply a coincidence, a snare that we have fallen into purely by chance? Are games a harmless diversion, even a positive good in providing us with fun entertainment, or do games have a negative impact on society -- not just violent games or gambling games or shovelware and shitty microtransaction-laden games, but all games? By creating difficult games, even near- or completely unplayable games, are developers harming gamers? By trying to win, and to make our opponents lose, are we harming each other? By gaming, are gamers harming themselves? Is the desire to be challenged, to fail again and again in pursuit of the high of winning, somehow unhealthy, masochistic, psychologically damaging? In playing games, are we condemning ourselves to a hell of our own creation?

Educating your Child by Hucking them at Birds -- Dad Quest

We're in an era in our society when gender roles are changing rapidly, particularly the idea of what it means to be a man. The traditional gender roles of women have been very successfully challenged, and women have gained a lot in terms of human rights and societal acceptance of different lifestyles in the past 100 years, but masculine gender roles have been slower to change. However, these changes have led to what some are calling a "crisis of masculinity". As the traditional role of the man as breadwinner and 'head of the household' has waned, many men are wondering what makes them relevant in today's world and what their role is in society. Then there is the rise of the concept of 'toxic masculinity', a sort of cultural shorthand for all that is considered harmful in traditional masculine gender roles, both outwardly to persons and society and inwardly to the man's own psyche -- emotional cauterization, ritualization of misogyny and homophobia, violence as a means of policing the boundaries. I can attest from personal experience that, even if you don't end up as a violent misogynist, many of the rituals and practices of the formation of a masculine identity seem to necessarily involve violence both physical and emotional -- part of why I rejected the masculine identity in favour of something more holistic and balanced which I am still even in middle age struggling to define. On the other hand, many worry about a creeping effeminization, or at least androgynization, of men and the loss of what is perceived as uniquely valuable about masculine identities as roles in society. This has resulted in a vigorous backlash both informal and organized against efforts to redefine manhood and the rise of the Men's Rights Activist movement, which claims to address the legitimate concerns of men that their rights are being eroded by a form of dominating matriarchy which is being entrenched in the state and society by the feminist movement, but which has also been accused of being a thinly veiled cover for misogyny and an attempt to roll back women's rights and re-establish patriarchal dominance.

Enter the idea of "ironic masculinity". You may have encountered this, for instance in the famous viral Old Spice ad, or in memes like this one:

On the face of it, it's a satirical mockery of the whole concept of masculinity, the presentation of an overblown image of swagger and machismo so extreme as to be ridiculous. But I feel like there's something more subtle going on here. After all, this kind of humour has become immensely popular; the Old Spice ad linked above has over 50 million views at time of writing and has been endlessly shared and parodied. This doesn't quite seem like the behaviour of a population that is sensitive about their masculinity, who feel like masculinity is in crisis and are pushing back on traditional gender roles. But there is something of a paradox in the idea of satire, in the fact that it makes mockery of an extreme while also giving cover to those who quietly believe in the thing the extreme is mocking. In a way, the sheer ridiculousness of the picture of masculinity being portrayed, the line being drawn as to where masculinity becomes obviously ludicrous, makes 'less extreme' but more traditional ideas of what is masculine seem more reasonable. After all, we obviously don't really believe that this is what a healthy, valuable, non-toxic masculinity is like. All of that worry about how men relate to women, society, and themselves may start to look itself a little ridiculous in the face of the reflexive rejection of such an extreme version of what it means to be a man.

Dad Quest is a kind of light metroidvania adventure platformer. I got it as a mystery game from a bundle of blind, random picks, and it was one of the more serendipitous finds I have acquired over the years; I had a ton of fun with it. It's a pretty calm ride, the kind of game you can easily play with a beer close to hand, and is not too long, although there is at least one unfair section of invisible walls that is intensely frustrating. At the beginning of the game, you are ushered into a scientific testing facility in which you are informed you are to be examined to see if you are fit for the extremely important, difficult, and dangerous role of becoming a dad and raising the next generation. (Feminists need not be angry; in preference to the default magnificently-mustachioed protagonist, you can instead be a female dad if you so choose.) You are soon given a kid of your own, which you carry under your arm in manly fashion as you run, jump, and climb around the various levels and obstacles. The primary game mechanic involves aiming with the right stick and yeeting your child at various enemies; you then summon the kid back Kratos-axe style to continue adventuring, although they eventually learn to walk and can return to you on their own. You will also be able to wield your child as a melee weapon, and they can gain access to various upgrades if you throw them through the windows of level-up stations. This is all quite hilarious, of course, as over-the-top violence often is, but contains a shadow of something more problematic, the way the process of father-son bonding often occurs in a context of violence, trauma, and emotional distance and castigation. (I hasten to add that this was not at all my experience of the father-son bond; my father is an absolutely lovely man, and the violence that I have spoken of in terms of a masculine upbringing came at the hands more of my peers and the media rather than family.)

In Dad Quest, the social role of 'dad' is fraught with almost mystical overtones. Dads are rare, and only those in peak condition can prove themselves worthy of raising a child. There are shrines to dads, and the system of government is based on challenging them to single combat (using children as the weapons, of course). Dads have abilities that normal people simply do not; as one NPC makes clear, you can't even defend yourself from the vicious pigeons, pigs, and weird floating eggs without a child to hurl at them. What is missing entirely from this game is mothers. There are women and girls aplenty, but if they have children, they are dads. The origin of children is obfuscated; if they come from anywhere, it seems to be the science lab. (Science, it might be noted, is traditionally seen as a masculine domain.) Are children born from wombs? If so, where are the mothers? Is it an oversight, an afterthought, or a conscious decision that the traditionally caring and nurturing role of the mother has been systematically excluded from the world of the game to give centre stage to the active, physical, exploratory, adventurous role of the dad who teaches their offspring the secrets of success by throwing them through plate glass windows?

On the one hand, this is all in good fun. It's just another silly example of ironic masculinity, a good-natured poking fun at the weird ways in which men seem to define themselves and their relationships to family and education. There need not be anything sinister read into the intentions of the developers. But gender roles, toxic masculinity, and the unsettling and turbulent changes taking place in our society are fraught topics that cast a long shadow on anything they touch.

The Secret to Success in Business is No Bottom Line -- Cook, Serve, Delicious!

Cook, Serve, Delicious! is one of the more mechanically complex of the extant games in the time management sim genre. The premise is pretty simple: you are the new owner of the run-down in-house restaurant in an office tower, and must make your eatery a success by serving customers delicious food cooked to perfection. First you must purchase foods and build an appealing menu which balances different types of foods with different attributes to generate positive 'buzz' which will attract diners. As  each day rolls by, customers will order food which you must prepare by following a set of instructions on the keyboard and/or mouse. Time flies by at a furious clip, customers crowd in during the lunch and dinner rushes, and you must deftly fill orders with perfect precision before your customers leave, angry at the wait, while juggling various chores to keep the restaurant clean and sanitary. There are a few other bells and whistles -- betting, cooking challenges, health inspections -- but that's the heart of it. Pretty standard stuff, although the menu design aspect and the wide variety of foods and recipes make for a particularly challenging experience.

What struck me as I played this game is the way that, like most of its genre, it abstracts away certain aspects of the process of owning and running a restaurant to focus on ... perhaps not the most fun parts of the job. I'm not sure most restaurant owners are particularly enamored of frantic rush hours or struggling to pass health inspections. But these games are trying to provide a certain experience which would be bogged down by such somewhat boring details as budgeting and crunching accounts, which themselves are primarily or exclusively the province of completely different game genres. So in Cook, Serve, Delicious! there are literally no costs to pay in running the restaurant. You must make one-time payments to get menu items and time-saving or traffic-enhancing equipment, but once you've paid for your recipe you receive "a surplus" of ingredients -- enough to last you literally forever. No need to calculate the production cost and profit margin of each item, keep enough ingredients in stock or account for spoilage, no rent to pay or even any need to take home money for your own subsistence; every order you fill is basically pure profit. If you fulfill the goals necessary to raise your star rating, the owners of the tower will even remodel your restaurant for free! No need to take on debt in a gamble to increase your customer appeal.

I certainly understand, from a game design perspective, why this choice was made. People who are playing a time management sim don't necessarily want to manage a bunch of spreadsheets or dick around with the prices and inventory of their food; they just want to challenge themselves to quickly complete tasks and actively manage incoming information. But what I find fascinating is the picture that this presents of entrepreneurship. The implication is that success as a small business owner is simply a matter of plugging away, doing your job and providing the best service you can, and watching the cash roll in. Occasionally you might need to make a major purchase, but going into the red and eventually going bankrupt is just not an option. As long as you keep your head down and satisfy your customers, things will go great. In reality, 9 out of 10 small businesses fail, and not necessarily due to poor customer service; sometimes you just can't compete in a saturated market or against established players with more resources, economies of scale, and political connections on their side. And the restaurant business is particularly harsh and unforgiving; profit margins are razor thin and competition is a shark tank. One of the core assumptions of capitalism is that business owners, especially small business or startup owners, are entitled to the profits of their enterprise because they take risks. A worker is selling a commodity, their labour, and gets a day's pay for a day's work; entrepreneurs are risking their capital assets on an uncertain venture which may fail and take all of their money with it. No risk, no reward. In Cook, Serve, Delicious! there's no possibility of failure, only pure upside, and this kind of serves as a propagandistic message that in capitalist enterprise, everyone wins. Just work hard, provide excellent customer service, and obey the whims of government in the form of the health inspector, and you too can build your shabby little cafeteria into a five-star restaurant and become a celebrity chef who competes on the Iron Cook show. A little elbow grease is all it takes. The waste of resources and ruined lives represented by the constant failure of risky businesses does not exist.

Of course there is one more element of the game that I have not yet mentioned: the Buzz. This mechanic could be said to represent something of the risky nature of running a successful restaurant. Like a real business, your cafeteria lives and dies on word of mouth. Every day you get a buzz factor, which is affected by active and balanced menu management and by the ratio of perfect orders to angry customers during the previous day. More buzz, more customers through the door; bad service and bad food, less traffic, right? But as I played the game up to the two-star level, as my buzz grew and grew through the effects of my own pretty good play, I didn't really see much difference. If buzz had an effect, it was subtle. So I decided to experiment and try to break the game. I tanked my buzz through poor menu design, filling my menu with fatty foods and letting stale items rot, and by deliberately screwing up every order and leaving cleaning tasks unfinished. It worked; it only took one bad day to go down to 0% buzz, and I easily kept it there the next day. I was expecting that my customer throughput would nosedive, but that I would still maintain a trickle of business to get me back on my feet. But the poor reviews didn't seem to have any effect on my traffic at all. The rush hours were still crazy busy, and even in between rushes, I still got the steady drip of orders coming in. External sources claim that buzz does make a difference, but if so, it wasn't one I was capable of detecting. The difference between 50% buzz and 0% was absolutely negligible. Not only is it impossible to fail; it's impossible to even feel like you're failing.

One final, somewhat incidental comment: because of the launch of the sequel, Cook, Serve, Delicious 2!!, the daily challenges in the game's Battle Kitchen mode have stopped coming; as is often the case when a new product hits video game storefronts, content updates for the old game have gone the way of your restaurant in the plotline of the new game. According to Cook, Serve, Delicious! 2!!'s store description, your original restaurant went under because the owners of the office tower it occupied were embezzling funds. So there is at least one thing that can make a business in the Cook, Serve, Delicious! extended universe fail: economic forces completely beyond your control.

Prologue -- Why This Blog Exists

I decided to start this blog for three primary reasons:

1. I have over 1000 games on Steam and GOG combined, as well as a shelf full of board games and a massive collection of tabletop RPG PDFs, most of which I have never played, and sunk cost fallacy dictates I must do something productive with them or have wasted my investment.
2. I just got a nice new gaming computer which can run some of the more resource-intensive titles.
3. Gaming as an artistic medium, while as old as human history, has undergone an unprecedented evolutionary leap and a massive increase in innovation and variety over just a few decades thanks to the invention of the computer and mass manufacturing and merchandising. Along with the development of games as a flourishing form of popular art and culture, there has been an attendant blossoming of the fields of game studies, ludology, and artistic game critique. It's a very exciting time to be talking about games in an academic context, and I want in on the action!

I leave it as an exercise for the reader which factor most influenced my decision.

To be serious, this is a project I have been considering starting for some time. The intention of this blog, A Winner Is You, is to look at modern video and tabletop games in a sociological and philosophical context. I hope to unpack a bit about what these games are trying to communicate, and what they may unintentionally communicate, about the world. I will definitely be looking at games from a narrative perspective, but I am particularly interested in talking about the way in which the mechanical aspects of games inform the worldview that is being communicated. Game mechanics are at base a way of illuminating and simulating a certain kind of system or process, whether that system is intended to be realistic, fanciful, or purely abstract, and the choice of what kind of system is simulated and why has certain implications that I feel it would be valuable to try and explore.

Why am I qualified, if qualified is not too strong a term, to perform the kind of work I intend to accomplish here? First, I have a certain degree of academic training. Although I do not have a background in ludology or game studies (few do, as only sparsely do academic opportunities for studying these subjects yet exist), I do have a Bachelor of Arts and Sciences in Environment and Society from an accredited Canadian university. My primary area of study, which I undertook mainly for the (futile) prospect of career advancement, was in geography, a mix of both human and physical. However, I did dedicate considerable time in my university career to obtaining a minor in philosophy, as well as study of sociology and political science, which are all areas that hold an intellectual fascination for me beyond any prospect of technical of material advancement, and it was these studies that I found the most rewarding.

Second, I have continued studies in these subjects, as well as some study of ludology, on an informal basis throughout my life and particularly in recent years. I have read a number of important texts in the field of game studies and kept up to some degree with the academic literature, although I hardly consider myself an expert in the subject; I am definitely somewhat of a dilettante in this respect, but I flatter myself that I am able to talk about these subjects with at least an educated layman's competence. I strongly feel that informed and rational consideration of all areas of human endeavour is essential to the creation of well-functioning societies, and we live in an age where this kind of knowledge building and discourse is more accessible to the populace as a whole than at any other time in human history, and I will be damned if I do not take full advantage of this fact. I hope to come at my subject from a variety of perspectives, although with full acknowledgement that my personal values and goals will inevitably colour the results, so if you disagree with me regarding anything I say in these blog posts I welcome healthy, reasonable, and informed discussion. That being said, trolls will get the banhammer with extreme prejudice.

Finally, in my personal life I have been an avid gamer since as long as I can remember. Some of my most cherished childhood memories are of playing the new and exciting medium of computer games, first on a Commodore VIC-20, then on a Coleco Adam computer with a built-in ColecoVision console, then on an NES, a Super Nintendo, and a number of IBM-compatible PCs. During High School, I participated in tabletop role-playing, particularly in D&D, Shadowrun, and Rifts, completed several lengthy JRPGs, and got into the then new and exciting world of Magic: The Gathering, though I later dropped that particular hobby due to the expense and only recently have rediscovered my love of the game through MTG Arena (which, do not fret, is not a sacred cow and will receive an analysis in due course). I also dabbled in computer game development, though I ultimately found that the detail-oriented nature requisite for coding was not my strong suit. This love of and fascination with games has continued throughout my life, most recently manifesting in a growing involvement with the tabletop gaming scene and embarking on the design of my own tabletop games and the creation of a small game company, Last Minute Panic Games, with a view to one day publishing them. I would hardly call myself a hardcore gamer, especially as the time commitments of adult life have seriously impacted the time I have to dedicate to gitting gud at games, but I have a sincere love of the art form that leads me to want to explore it in its fullest depth.

Before we end today's preamble, I would like to talk about a few things that this blog is not. This is not the place to come for game reviews, let's plays, or how-tos. Although I may mention whether I enjoy certain games and why, detailed reviews are not my intention. There are already a wealth of resources out there if you are looking for help in deciding whether a game is right for your collection. I myself purchased most of my non-physical games from various bundle deals, and as such I have a wide variety of genres, styles, and levels of quality available for research; unless the game is just an abysmal experience and I can't stand playing it, I will be conducting these explorations without reference to perceived quality or fun factor.

You should also not expect academic level-discourse from this blog. As I mentioned, I am an educated layman, not a professional academic. This is intended to be merely a repository for my impressions and ideas, as well as hopefully a platform for discussion and debate, not the final word on the subject. I am looking forward to possibly doing a Master's degree involving these subjects some time in the future, and if I do the quality of my analysis will no doubt improve, but until then you are stuck with the meandering peregrinations of a person with a familiarity with the main ideas of the disciplines I am touching on, and some knowledge of the published literature, but not rigorous research or an impeccable working-out of ideas. I will also be basing my approach to the subject primarily on my experience of the gameplay itself, without a lot of reference to outside sources.

Finally, although I may be talking about the relationship of things like business models and design philosophies to the wider industry, I will not be engaging in games journalism, and though I certainly will take the historical context of certain older games or games with complex histories into account, I will not be engaging in games history. Again, other sources do this better than I can, and I will be trying to stick to a particular niche.

The schedule for this project may be erratic, as I have both a day job and a number of other projects on the go, and don't have a lot of time or energy either for gaming or for writing. I would like to make a tentative commitment to an article every two weeks, though I promise nothing concrete. I will post about a game when I feel I have played it enough to form a reasonable impression of what message it seems to be putting out into the world, and that may take longer for some games than others, although I will try to interleave my consideration of lengthier and more skill-intensive titles with shorter and more casual experiences.

Last but not least, I would like to thank a few of my influences and encouragements in my journey toward starting this project: The Digital Antiquarian, The Gaming Historian, Game Makers' Toolkit, Extra Credits, Innuendo Studios, Folding Ideas, Feminist Frequency, the Ludology podcast, Game Studies Journal, and of course, thank God for Jim Sterling.

Now let's play (and have in-depth discussions about the philosophical and sociological implications of) some games!