In Retrospect: (the uneasy beauty of) Mirror’s Edge Catalyst

[Readers note: This was initially drafted in 2020 – that year of years – when fires in California were made evident in the atmosphere across the United States. While temped to update it for a 2023 reading, better wisdom said it should stay as is, as a sort of time capsule. Though, hopefully, you’ll find the themes more timeless. Thanks for the 10 or so minutes to read it. I appreciate you]

I began writing this three years ago. [lol, *ahem* – ed.]

Mirror’s Edge Catalyst – the maligned sequel to that darling of an older generation – was at the time only a year old. Its technology still fresh, before the promise of Unreal’s nanite and that holy grail of real-time rendering: raytracing. The game still astonishes with its beauty. But the shadow of that relentless tide of “progress” looms.

But my point is not to wax on technology that I can only embarrass myself trying to explain. Instead I want to talk about a sense – a feeling – that I often got playing the game, back in 2017, which was a different time than thinking back on it from the smoky horizon of late 2020.

Like the game’s tech, Catalyst’s themes are both relevant and slightly aged. Playing a game about a soft-dystopian corporatocracy, where the lines between social policy and a consumer market are blurred to indistinction, where laws reflect the demands of the powerful as much as, well, anything else feels different today than it did even three years ago.

It’s pointless to rehearse the current climate if you’re reading at the time of post. But for the sake of retrospect it may be more valuable. Outside my home, the sun filters through a screen of smoke birthed 2000 miles away, where fires burn on a scale that has outgrown us. Recent pictures of the Golden Gate bridge look like they were taken from the latest Blade Runner. In Kansas, where distance from the coast (geographically and ideologically) is often worn as a badge of honor, our air-quality index mirrors that of a coastal city. Natural disaster, how much of which we are debating was due to our industrial habits, has again revealed the deep existential connection we share, despite our attempts to separate from one another. The smoke in our upper atmosphere, however, is beautiful, diffusing the sunlight into a soft bloom that makes the whole day look like dawn, or dusk. Its beauty masks the poison it carries.

Pictured: 2020.

I needn’t belabor the current presidential election, the stakes said to be the fate of democracy itself, performed under a safety net of social media and facial masks that protect us from a global virus that targets the frail and the marginal. The social response to the virus at times reflects this pathogenic selectivity; we’ve seen the marriage of biology and politics with stark clarity. The campaign(s), regardless of its outcome, will become legend, historical fodder for decades. Our children suffer the fragility of our grasping with these realities and the waffling of our equally fragile judgments.

One of mine drew a cat on her mask.

Meanwhile, a city I once frequented for its relative calm smolders after a string of riots that began with an unarmed black American being shot seven times in the back at the hands of police, the latest in a string of such cases. Here, a 17 year-old walked into a crowd of protesters, shot and killed two of them (neither armed), and walked – past security – back home to sleep. This incident was immediately politicized, and arguments for “murder” and “self-defense” drawn explicitly down party lines. To some, his actions were patriotic, defending as he was the right to private property. The year has seen a level of racial tension not seen since 1965.

And for my theological readers, the ‘faithful’ in North America, far from being the vanguard on these issues, has mostly assumed those predetermined lines and their respective narratives about the climate, justice, or racism full stop. Christians are simply as divided as everyone else, and for the same reasons, but now granting those positions ‘divine’ sanction. It’s been a strange, awful, illuminating year.

So if time and space affects how a game is read, so to speak, my initial impressions on playing Catalyst now seem quaint. And yet, I can’t get the game, its vistas, its immaculate score, its euphoric sense of motion, and its atmospheric unease out of my mind. Who knows, maybe it has more to say today than at launch.

Mirror’s Edge was seen as a mixed bag in 2008. It was beautiful, occasionally breathtaking but flawed. Being about parkour, it was inevitably judged alongside the meteoric impact of Assassin’s Creed. In comparison, it was ambitious, but clunky – I remember vignettes comparing the mechanics for doing wall-jumps between the two games. Mirror’s Edge and its steep requirement of complex, well-timed button combinations paled, it was argued, in light of the elegant simplicity of Creed’s spacebar. This was the era of Creed, Arkham, and the contextual brawler. Games that counted on directional timing and clever animation to simulate dexterity. And it was euphoric. Watching the cinematic fight choreography of Batman unfold was a revelation.

Time may be kinder to Mirror’s Edge, however. The spectacle of that generation gave way to the creative promise of more complex systems. I personally have had a hard time going back to the Arkham games after mastering the combat of Dishonored 2 – the latter having a larger curve for mastery, sure, but one that allows for systemic poetry. So too with Mirror’s Edge. The free running is harder than the two-button system of Creed, but as the still-vibrant community of runners on Catalyst shows, mastery is a matter of degree, and the higher the degree, the more exhilarating one’s experience. Mirror’s Edge the First was a generation too early. We just weren’t ready for it.

By 2016 we were, however, and the high-profile sequel had to contend with the cult status of its predecessor. The promise of an open-world Mirror’s Edge was tantalizing, and probably doomed in principle. Just imagine the design nightmare such a pitch would be, not to mention the visual spectacle that would make good on its trademark. Catalyst was a massive and risky undertaking.

The rest is history: a great concept marred by jarring design interruptions, an unoptimized use of a demanding engine, a predictable story and an unrelatable protagonist. Sales equating to “meh” and its subsequently canceled DLCs. And one of the most beautiful playgrounds ever created in the history of gaming.

Of all of its many negative critiques, and there are many, none despise the sheer, awe-inspiring visual art of its world. And this, I think, held for me one of the game’s more profound elements. As Guillermo Del Toro is often cited saying, strive not for eye-candy, but “eye protein”. A visual panache that adds something of substance to character, story, or themes. And I think that Catalyst is packed with it.

Thematically speaking, Catalyst is, like its predecessor, of cyberpunk orthodoxy: taking place in a neo-capitalist dystopia, where corporations tower over its subjects. To reject the deluge of advertisement and materiality is to mark oneself suspect to the state, itself subject to the whims of the hyper-wealthy. Cameras constantly check your presence for nonconformity and record your movements for the mediators of this social arrangement: the police. This ordering is reflected in the impossible towers of the largest corporations – weapon developers, security firms, technology corporations – titans watching over an urban landscape. The largest and most awe-inducing of these is, as in the first, the “Shard” – its spire puncturing the clouds and housing a wind-turbine that surpasses in scale the massive fans peppering the American Midwest. It is always seen, or rather watching, like a futuristic Barad-dûr.

So: economic disproportion resulting in the abject poverty of many, whitewashed as one climbs the economic and physical space; the state’s subjugation to the megacorporation; omnipresent surveillance and a police state serving as the point of contact – the buffer – between a fragile and violent will-to-power and the masses over which it exercises this will, masquerading as existing “for the common good.” Propaganda rings out like sirens at intervals throughout a day, like a call to prayer from the state’s minarets.

The tension present in these sirens, the police and its systems, and in the glib classism occasionally heard in muffled tones through the pristine glass panes of the elite all bring to mind an anxiety described by Fanon as the product of an uneasy arrangement of subjugation; the powerful know that their situation is built on a false and precarious myth about different grades of humanity. That when the poorest realize that the bill of goods they are sold as representative of this humanity, something to strive for, is shown false, a veneer, then there is nothing stopping the masses from shattering that fragile system in revolution.

The measure of surveillance and thought control is directly proportional to the degree of social disproportionality, the gap between the well-off and the unseen, and the anxieties of the powerful at recognizing this arrangement as the glass floor it is.

It’s an evocative image.

And truthfully, I’m not sure if all of this was the intent of the minds of the developers at DICE. But, I’m not sure it really matters. It is the fate, so to speak, of art and literature to transgress the original intent of its author. It is what makes such art timeless.

But let’s do a thought experiment.

Say you’ve never seen the game or know anything about the series. You’ve never watched a let’s play, a vlog, or even looked at any screenshots (including those I’ve posted here). What is the image that comes to mind? What does this look like? For some, those familiar with the genre conventions, it likely looks something like Blade Runner – rainy streets decorated by rotting trash, neon lights, spectacular penthouses juxtaposed with squalid apartments carved out of whatever space is available. Red light districts and advertisements for a thousand venues of temporary escape from this social purgatory, if one has the money of course.

Deus Ex 4. More orthodox, maybe less threatening.

Or.

Or, maybe what I described feels altogether prescient. Eerily so. A cracking veneer of social norms defined by the most wealthy, the omnipresence of screens and advertisements, the impossible global reach of the largest corporations, and echoes of a police state, or at least the threat of one, and a chasm of economic disparity widening to the point of implosion. The anxiety of a glass floor. For some, maybe less familiar with genre conventions, my description of The City in Catalyst sounds too familiar for comfort.

My point is not to say that we’re there. That we’ve reached the heights of despotic corporatocracy shown in the game. But, the world of Catalyst is worth reflecting on.

The thing that distinguishes Catalyst from other cyberpunk stories is, well, first, its cleanliness. The majority of the game takes places on the city’s rooftops which is like a city on top of a city. Your playground is the domain of the rich, the politicians, the CEOs, and the tastemakers. It’s usually daytime, the air seems clear, and the sunsets are Zen-inducing. Nighttime is equally gorgeous. This is more Aldous Huxley than Blade Runner: dystopia under the shell of perfection. Occasionally you work your way down, to the homes of the resistance, which (not subtly) is in an old sewer system. But even here, while dirtier, darker, and grimier even the abandoned sewers of the City are cleaner than the streets in Blade Runner. The City, aesthetically anyway, seems like a very nice place to live.

The other thing about this quality is how familiar it all feels. It is beautiful and artful, and fantastical, but also normal. One finds no cyborgs or biomechanical transhumanism (sorry Deus Ex, I still love you!) Construction sites harbor the same edifices of steel, concrete, and industry we are all familiar with. The interior of business offices look like business offices. All the cars are firmly grounded, and presumably driven by people thank you very much, and the marketing sounds exactly like it does on our iPhones. The futuristic “gridlink” – Catalyst’s social networking device – seems like a plausible evolution of our smartphones. It’s also the state’s first line of surveillance. Considering cases like the Prism leak, the game feels again, prescient.

It’s in between that one gets the sense that something’s up: a water shortage is pressing, while the Shard houses an enormous terrarium with an indoor waterfall. The Greylands, where criminals are exiled and most of the lower caste spend their lives in service to the conglomerates, where cancer is ten times more frequent and fresh water scarce. It’s use in the city is mythical, as a threat for nonconformists.

A good citizen in this world is called an “employ”.

So here’s the point. When I was playing this in 2017, there was a place in the City of Glass I would often visit to get away from my own real-world of responsibilities for a bit. The first time I stepped out of the narrow corridor into this place was one of the few, if not only time, in a game that I was dumbstruck. I remember even gasping softly at the sheer artistry I was seeing in a videogame. It remains a bar-setter in my mind for beautiful game art. This district was aptly titled, “The View”. It was fresh water and boats and sunlit lounges, it was blue glass and softened angles, cherry blossoms and surgically placed spotlights, highlighting all of these artifacts of affluence on the eve of unlimited power. It was distinctively artful in a game absolutely filled with artful vistas.

But here is also where it hit me. When I was here, playing, I often made a conscious point to forget that which funded such a space within the game’s world. I let the story, the themes, slip away and allowed myself for those 10 or 15 minutes to just slip into this beautiful space without any visible indication of industry or responsibility or, as it was, the asymmetry that created it. It was like taking soma in Huxley’s Brave New World. Forget the bad, the unjust on which I profit. You deserve it.

It was beauty, masking the poison. Like the smoke in our atmosphere.

It occurs to me that this moment, this space, in the second Mirror’s Edge is maybe its most profound for us. It asks us what we are willing to pay for comfort. In the City of Glass, the majority of employs are middle class, working for the 13 conglomerates that run things, in the promise of achieving that which your character – Faith – tramples over in subversion. A few in this world of the elite – the norm for the rest – recognize the veneer and are willing to disrupt it even at their own expense. Humanity still exists, even here. But for the vast majority, they are sold a narrative, one that tells them to buy and consume, and not ask too many questions about the process, for that is what life is about. It directs the gaze away from the glass cracking underneath, to the elysian vistas of yachts and cherry blossoms.

Eventually, as I played this, I realized that to stay in the Ocean Glass View would be irresponsible. Eventually, we need to go elsewhere.

Defiant Christians

When faith began.

Those persons who called themselves Christ followers

Were called cannibals. Very few stirred the concerned gaze of an empire, which saw them as seditious.

As rebels.

Troublemakers. Rabblerousers.

Atheists.

They were hated by their own, promoting a message deemed heretical, long before that term was common parlance for the faith.

Defiant. Folly to the wise and stumbling block to the chosen.

Where the hell did they go? Where is the Christ-follower that incites fear in the powerful, anger in the spiritually coerced, today’s pharisee? The one inspiring a campaign of propaganda warning people against the “atheistic” horrors of the disciple?

Their great social sin – their rabble rousing – was caused not by sword or a concealed carried. Nor was it bureaucratic eloquence or power.

No.

It was a compulsion. Borne of a criminal who spoke of a kingdom that described the present order as being over the coals. It was a life animated by a view that does not accept the rule, and rules, of the world as it currently is. Defiance reflected the birth pains of a new order, one radically oriented towards life, despite the evidence of death – a life seen as distinct enough to quietly live differently. Back then, this meant that slave and slave owner had the same value; that women were no longer seen as lesser because of their body; where class or social status were no longer reasons for exclusion. In fact, it was a way of life that saw the ”last as first, and the first, last.” A kingdom that sought the emancipated have-not as much as the politician, landowner, or philosopher: reorderings that stirred the ire of an society built on such distinctions. Defiance meant raging against the tools, structures, and ubiquity of death, as one’s citizenship was first, and foremost not about geography or ethnicity, but about one’s place in a coming kingdom of life.

Today, much breath and ink is wasted on our so-called “culture wars.” That faithfulness means defining whatever politic, whatever policy, whatever party, whatever vote, whatever politician, whatever agenda represents the faith most accurately.

On all sides, faith is now a voting point. A “political base”. Here little distinction is found between the disciple and the registered voter, or politic with which one self-identifies. Discipleship has been long co-opted. Toothless. Sedition, built not on sword, but on a radical pursuit of a divine peace, is now seen – even among believers – as faith-less rabble rousing.

If a life of discipleship ends with tired practices and political affiliation, whatever that may be, how anemic has our witness become. How does one inspire any concerned gaze to the status-quo if our role is mostly as a “voting base”?

Today, fear dominates faith. Blaming our perceived ills on the ideology of our leftist, or rightist, neighbor has completed our co-option. Our hope is now placed in a vote, and a vote alone. False messiahs abound. And faith has taken on the language of the scapegoat.

We have already lost the culture war.

In Retrospect Part II: Outlast

Sin, as an idea, is a theological shot at explaining a human constant. I happen to think that it’s pretty fitting for the task. But in Christian theology, a study of which I have endeavored to suffer, the explanation of sin – what it is and why it exists – varies among broad traditions. This is telling. I won’t go into the differences; it’s not the point of this post. A video game is. But two things about the observation: sin is something of a mystery, even if we all intuitively know it, even intimately. And through my sightseeing tour of Outlast’s Mount Massive Asylum, it was always on the back of my mind.

Almost like I was learning something.

But let’s be clear. Honest. Candid. Sober about this game. Outlast is the gaming equivalent of a movie like Cabin Fever or the Evil Dead reboot. There’s no larger point than what’s on screen, no metanarrative, no higher abstract or deep moral point to be had. The mechanism, and for many, the appeal, is the schlock. The point is to endure, and the adrenaline that comes from enduring. That’s it. Outlast did not impress me as having a subtle agenda like I gathered from Dishonored. So don’t mistake me for saying that Red Barrels had in mind a theological commentary in making the game. In the guild we would say that such was not their authorial intent.

No. The point is to make you blow a hole through your computer chair. And I’ll be damned if they don’t nearly succeed. Outlast is a very scary game.

Considering the popularity of the game, I needn’t detail too much. You don the unfortunate shoes of Miles Upshur, a journalist attempting to do an exposé on some ill-mannered goings-on at a treatment facility, a case of privatization gone awry (arguably the one meta-theme of the game, though even this would be a hard sell). To summarize the rest of the game, Miles gets more than he bargains for. Like, to the nth degree.

The texture of the game is grimy, like Silent-Hill-otherworld grimy, but grounded in the real and recognizable, which here anyway, makes it seem more threatening. And that’s the thing. One review I read said that Red Barrels was clearly showing off with their use of gore. And of course, that is right. Upon reaching the hospital’s lobby, some 10 minutes in, you are passing corpses that evidence violence of astonishing excess. Shortly thereafter, you escape a chase by surviving a fall onto a comfy bed of viscera, the reveal of which, by switching on your night-vision, is equally jarring. From this limited purview, where the pitch darkness is ever threatening to consume the player, one often hears before seeing that which threatens a similar fate. In this case, after picking yourself up and getting a sense of surroundings, a subtle rattle of chains marks the presence of Chris Walker, a 7-foot, 300-pound malediction, whose cheeks are pulled back into an eternal grin, and who has your number. Outlast gives the player very little room to breathe.

“Oh, umm…excuse me.”
-“What? Oh! My bad.”
“No problem.”

Being a fan of horror games I’ve played many that utilize violent imagery for effect. Blood is to horror like a laugh-track is to sitcoms. F.E.A.R. 2 used it to mostly reasonable degree. But often such texture seems unnecessary, even exploitative. Most of the time it is, for reasons mysterious, simply boring; when I first played F.E.A.R. with a friend, a milestone experience, we were more rattled by empty elevators than displays of violence. Outlast is one of the few examples I can recall that effectively builds tension by its gore. It is so over-the-top, so omnipresent, even before the core gameplay kicks in that it creates a palpable sense of threat. The fact that the designers were able to pull this off in a genre literally saturated in violent imagery is a testament to the talent behind the design. Hopefully, my recollection of the games pacing, above, further reflects the considerable measure and respect for the genre the developers show. Outlast displays painstaking care in the art of conjuring dread.

That isn’t to say that Outlast is not an exercise in excess or is not exploitative. It surely, undoubtedly is. Excess is kind of its MO. But it is couched in a sense of measure and space, a commanding degree of craftsmanship. Thus, for me, the game is a little bit of a paradox; I’m still unsure of whether I should like it or not. I went in expecting tired viscera and Doom III-degrees of jump-scare, and came out respecting the game as a serious contender for the Scariest Game I’ve Played. I could gush, or lament, more. But two things I think are worth mention for the remainder here.

First, Outlast was not very fun. At least in the traditional sense I get from most horror games. Not also in the same sense that, say, Silent Hill 4 isn’t fun; the gameplay is beauty-in-elegance, stripped down to basic essentials, which is perfect. No, rather Outlast is simply too intense, at least the first time through, to be much fun. To play it like I did – with headphones, loud, and alone – is to not so much play as endure its narrative arc. And yet, here’s the thing, I was compelled to keep starting it up. I have a folder called “goods” on my desktop, where I have shortcuts to all of my installed games, and time and again, I found myself clicking on the icon of those infuriating eyes of Chris Walker. Why? It’s a good question. I’m not real sure, actually. Perhaps somewhere in the back of my mind I didn’t want Upshur to stay under that bed I last quit under, while a certain doctor with an obscenely large (and genre-referencing) pair of scissors looked around for him, calling out for his “buddy.”

Recently, I restarted a little gem of a point-and-click adventure series with a horror bent called Dark Fall. As I’m enjoying the first, lo-res entry a second time through, I find myself again compelled to keep playing it, but for different reasons. I do not find Dark Fall the least bit scary, but at times pleasantly creepy. The story, and the creepiness, predicate on a once-removed sort of Lovecraftian vibe, an atmosphere that promises to yield a brief peek behind the corporeal curtain, for those that look long enough. This draw I understand. It depends on an innate desire, or compulsory need, for the transcendent or intangible – the idea that the primordial glue of life really is something beyond the bouncing around of our atoms, be it spiritual or ethical, or both, and that this is what provides meaning and momentum to those physical forces. The creepiness on which Dark Fall, and many other horror tropes, operates comes stocked with a built-in texture, and it is romantic, regardless of its exterior form.

The horror of Outlast on the other hand, while introducing an “otherworldly” aspect in a mad-scientist sort of way, is distinctly opposite. It is hard, grounded, visceral, a face-to-the-cobbles sort of terror. As the good folks at Killscreen said, it reintroduces the idea of survival proper into survival horror, and this is its chief horror mechanic. Outlast’s horror is as stripped-down as its gameplay. And it is not attractive. Simply put, I cannot put my finger on the distinct allure, and incredible popularity, of the game.

Now, second, this is not to say that Outlast lacks a sense of the surreal. Indeed, the survival-based terror works only as the space inhabited seems like something disconnected from the safety of the mundane. I was reminded of some of the narrative backstory in Matheson’s Hell House. The titular house belonged to a character, Emeric Belasco, who personified unspeakable recesses of a narcissistic ego. Sin incarnate, if you will. The house, a temple to his person, at once reveled in blasphemy against the good, the beautiful, and the true and served as grounds for those wishing to permit such impulses to reign unabated. The book details that the end of this circle was horrible violence and murder committed with sexual abandon. Not a fun place. And, in my estimation, a parable on the (now hauntingly common) narrative of the virtue of impulsivity.

Outlast’s Mount Massive Asylum, at least in the early stages, evoked for me Matheson’s Belasco house. A place where social and physical constructs against wonton desire and tension and anger fail with dire consequence. The game thus indeed harbors a sense of otherworldliness, like walking in on the proximate aftermath of the horrors of the Belasco mansion. In this way, the game’s fear is made more palpable by the eerie notion that what is on screen is somehow within the sphere of human possibility. From the little I’ve heard about the possible effects of war on behavior, such is, sadly, not a stretch of the imagination.

Dale Allison has recently written one of the most elegant, perceptive, and pastoral treatments on death and dying I’ve read (if not also one of few such treatments available), wherein in one place he talks about the conceptual shifts “Hell” has undergone. He recalls that in modern thought, Hell has, theologically, moved from language of penal punishment, the (terribly unbalanced) execution of a sentence, to a place for those who willfully choose autonomy over divine communion. Or, in C.S. Lewis’ form, Hell is the self-created space of those who choose an existence governed purely by oneself. Narcissism in the form of a place. If we can permit the parallel, Outlast’s otherworldly element is something of an “earthly” representation of Hell.

And with that, while encouraging things may be said, I think it’s perhaps inappropriate to do so. I end with a final thought on the game’s appeal, beyond the undeniable draw of sheer craftsmanship. I wonder why, well before his first run in with Chris Walker which thrusts Miles Upshur irrevocably deep into the Asylum’s intestinal workings, progress meant not only looking further into the fallout, but videotaping it. In truth, one would simply backtrack and call, well, everyone. Of course this makes sense in gaming logic; Outlast would be a short, and pretty tame horror game that way. But the point is that the player plays the voyeur, directed to willfully peer in on a Hell of aggravated narcissism. And there is something that drives us to endure this, as evident by the game’s immense popularity. My impression is that such is not the romantic allure of the transcendent.

Self-willed Antisocialism: Why I am Hanging Up Facebook

To the social domain of Facebook, farewell for now. Here’s why.

Tonight I was sitting at a local Starbucks, reading theologian Jamie Smith. This should stop any question about my “millennial-hood” dead in its tracks. In his second of a trilogy on “cultural liturgies,” he had some words that gave some dimension to a lingering disenchantment I’ve had recently over my Facebook account. It wasn’t Smith that convinced me, but he did seem to validate my thoughts. I’ll recall the paragraph at the end.

See, lately I’ve been talking with some friends of mine about the ideologies that we rope ourselves to without knowing it. My go-to example was cell-phones and cell-phone plans; that these plans are built around a certain understanding of the role technology should play in our lives, and even the functionality of the phones themselves communicate a particular relationship to our surroundings. But like the now ubiquitous cell phone, at some point these things become so commonplace that they move into the realm of normativity, and when this happens we, by and large, tend to close any critical buffer we may have had to them. When they become normal, we simply don’t think to ask about what they are telling us, or how they may be affecting our understanding of reality. At least for a while.

More recently, I’ve been thinking about this as it regards Facebook, which has become since I first started my account in 2005, well, Facebook. I cannot comment on what your news feed may look like, but I can mine. Well over a year ago, I posted something about how in 50 “stories,” 27 were popular news articles, usually sensastionalist in tone, and often without any cited sources (for those that read these, watch that; more than should be the case, these articles are just shy of being self-referential, and have only a modicum of the complexity that should accompany the claims they make). That’s technically a majority. Today, these aggrandizing articles almost exclusively make up the content of my feed (and yes, I know about the algorithms that kick in if I were to begin filtering them – that’s not the point). These, like I say, are typically sensationalist, hyper-partisan, and seem to view as a weakness the type of charitability for contrary perspectives that serves as a marker for good scholarship in the academy. History has given us a good word for this type of news media: propaganda. The problem is exacerbated when these sites are shared, as they are, as some form of civil advocacy. I’m not here decrying the seriousness and urgency of any of the issues that come around on these sites; I am calling out a self-willed blindness for the issues’ complexity that accompanies the discourse. This, by the way, applies to both the “conservative” and “liberal” sides of the ideological spectrum. A small step back and one sees immediately that rhetoric, and many of the presuppositions, are identical between the two polemical sides.

But to get back to my initial point, the issue goes well beyond politics and the like. The issue is again how this form of discourse, which thrives on the affective pull of sensationalism, is informing our way of thinking outside of Facebook. These types of “shares” have become, in my estimation, Facebook’s dominant form of discourse. Thus, while we are drawn to it for any number of reasons – keeping up with friends, being “in the know,” photos, family, whatever – we are bombarded by a conversation whose logical form is the hard binary. Or, as one theologian I had the honor of sharing coffee with said, “It’s hard to do theology here (he was from Germany).” I asked why. “The way of thinking is so different. People think in mutually exclusive categories; if I say that I like dogs, that automatically means I hate cats.”

If I like dogs, I must obviously hate cats. This type of thinking, which “sells” online, has infected how we look at one another. I have seminary pals who would see their friends from grad school, fellow believers, as little more than an enemy because of this type of thinking. For if they don’t agree on something, no recourse is given as to the reasons why someone might think differently, or the reasons, analytical or existential, for that belief. Instead, they are cast into hard lines, as “unthinking,” “bigoted,” or “spineless.” When these types of categories, informed by the propagandistic “news blogs,” frame the conversation, one can only go on the defensive. Constructive discussion is severed before it has the chance to exist. For those taking notes: advocation does not stop with blame.

I find this exhausting and disturbing. Last week a mass shooting happened 30 minutes from my home. In that block of time when the shooters were missing, I had to make decisions regarding the safety of my wife, as the 210 freeway was right next to the site, and Fuller Seminary, being a religious institution was not closed to threat. It was a surreal day, a visceral one that gave me a glimpse of the ground-level reality of such an event. The next evening, on Facebook my feed was lit up with linked posts that essentially used the incident to lambast the ideals of the opposing political party. Again, both sides were in the same boat. Following my day before, this struck me as so disrespectful as to be reprehensible. I was gob smacked by the response in a way I likely wouldn’t have been if I weren’t so close to the shooting. Proximity gave me perspective, and seeing these news sites leverage the event for their agenda made me burn. Even more so when I saw these sites shared by friends, family.

So, I find myself tonight asking about what is happening to my mind when I begin scrolling through my feed for the third time in an evening, a ritual that has replaced boredom-checking the refrigerator. I am beginning to think that the unwitting result is more troubling than we realize. And I find myself pining for the elegance of a Facebook freed of news feeds, when the blogosphere was still in infancy. I’ll end with Smith’s words, from Imagining the Kingdom:

 

“So the very nature of social media encourages a certain social ontology; it comes primed with a social imaginary, and to inhabit the Facebook world is to play by its rules. Over time, this becomes a formative exercise. In tangible but implicit ways, it inculcates in us dispositions and inclinations that lean toward a configuration of the social world that revolves around me – even if we tell ourselves we’re interested in others. It is a classic example of a ‘pedagogy of insignificance’ that extorts the essential from the seemingly insignificant. While it purports to be simply a ‘medium,’ it comes loaded with a Story about what matters, and who matters. And as we inhabit these virtual worlds – clicking our way around the environment, constantly updating our ‘status’ and checking on others, fixated on our feed, documenting our ‘likes’ for others to see – we are slowly and covertly incorporated into a body politic with its own vision of human flourishing: shallow connections for instant self-gratification and self-congratulation. And all of this happens precisely because we don’t think about it.”

Yes, I’m a Christian. No, I’m not a nut-bag

I don’t get the problem with the red cups. Just a minute ago, I summoned Google for some clarity. I still don’t get it. And yet, by all media accounts, being a Christian, even one who is making a career out of studying Christianity, I should. But while I can’t comment on the “Christ-ness,” or lack thereof, of Starbucks’ holiday cups (which I find pretty striking, really), perhaps the occasion lets us talk frankly about another issue: media selectivity. Or, to add color, why justifying one’s belief is becoming part of many Christians basic MO.

That the brashest of a social group will find media attention is natural enough; the uncritical kneejerk is more sexy, more entertaining, sensational, than the more calculated responses that in all likelihood represent the majority. Yet, too often such brashness gets grafted onto the majority, seen to represent the group as a whole in the wider social imagination. In regards Christianity in North America, this is a growing trend, and it silences the many, diverse, and nuanced voices I see both in and outside the academy. This is a shame, as many of these voices have immense potential to move the issues moving the culture into creative new territory, for believers and non-believers alike.

Instead, in most media depictions Christianity is becoming a fall guy, a foil for whatever posture is on the progressive table. I needn’t spend too much time on examples, and anyone could rattle off a few: gun control, civil rights and social justice, disposable coffee cups. A recent article explains that Christian children are less altruistic than their atheist counterparts, contrary to professed doctrines on love and neighbor.

Certainly, the critique has some warrant: European Christianity long enjoyed a privileged existence, where the relationship between it and sociopolitical structures were deeply interdependent. Here, one finds many examples of egregious injustice done in the name of Christ. Yet most Christians I’ve read or talked to on these matters not only admit this, but are perhaps its most ardent critics. I just began reading Willie James Jennings’ The Christian Imagination: Theology and the Origins of Race. Jennings, a professor of theology and Black Church studies at Duke, works out the historical link between racism and colonialism, the theology behind it, and its long-term effects on the Western imagination. The book is highly critical and deconstructive, and would benefit anyone, Christian or not, interested in racism. Less than 50 pages in I can say that it is a masterpiece. And I’m not alone, the work exploded in the Christian academy, having gained basically unanimous praise and the reputation as a milestone for theological development.

Similarly, many of my colleagues researching current social issues not only share much with Christianity’s interlocutors, but could further the conversation considerably if given the space. Yet these folks, or careful, monumental works like Jennings’ remain absent from the popular conception of Christianity, their voice lost to those who rebel against Starbucks’ by buying Starbucks coffee and tweeting about it. To the latter approach, which some confidently call “Christian,” I ask whether it is worthy of the label any more than say, asking about the ethos that warrants buying that regular $4 Latte and the global processes that produce it.

The harbinger of the apocalypse

Back to those cups, the story is as follows: Starbucks’ design was simply trying to emphasize some seasonal solitude and suggest Starbucks as a haven for it. Enter the Christian, who disrupts this innocuous move on loose theological grounds. I don’t understand the rally against the cups, but I hear the tones in which the story is told.

As far as I can tell, the charge was that by removing explicitly seasonal artwork (or words) from the cups, Starbucks was making some statement against the holiday itself, and thus against Christian belief. Nevermind that the cups are red and green. Thing is, expressions of faith, like that of religious festival, cannot be separated from the context in which they are formed. Christmas in the Anglo-European West is an amalgam of biblical narrative, cultural mythos, and indigenous (largely Scandinavian) imagery. Its normative forms have as much to do with feudal era European Christianity as with the bible, and that’s probably fine. David Brown, another creative theologian, has written provocatively on the historical flows of Christmas expression, showing that even the narrative details have taken an extra-biblical trajectory. Fellow Christians, before attacking something as “non-Christian,” let’s think hard on what exactly we are attacking, and the whether the logic stands deeper scrutiny.

To wrap this up, my point is twofold: one for the angry Christians, one for Christianity’s critics. For the Christians I ask, why have we come to expect a company like Starbucks, whose “religion” is market capitalism, to represent Christian values? Such reaction as we’ve seen this week, in my estimation, reflects a lingering assumption that Christianity and American society are necessarily one in the same. Not only is this not the case, but I believe we shouldn’t wish it to be. History shows us that Christianity thrives at the margins, where it reflects the “power in weakness” of its progenitor, and is often abused where it is identified with some form of geopolitical power. As I’ve said elsewhere, Christendom was never a good fit for Christianity, but it was comfortable.

For the critics, my request is a humble one: be wary of how the media colors the faith, and be open, perhaps, to those that really represent it. I think that if we can get past the broad strokes and binary logic the media purports, much benefit could be had.

A Plea for the Intangible, Part I – or “Why I Find F.E.A.R 2 Scarier than Amnesia”

I know.

What am I thinking? For horror gaming initiates, you’re likely wondering what inspired such non-sense. For the uninitiated, F.E.A.R 2: Project Origin is the follow-up to Monolith’s excellent John-Woo-meets-Hideo-Nakata shooter, and the perennial whipping boy for the horror gaming community.

Well, until F.E.A.R. 3 happened.

But before false judgment is passed, let me explain: I am a horror gaming veteran. I am also a long time fan and advocate of Frictional Games, and was gladly suffering through their labyrinthine puzzles long before Amnesia came out.

The face of fear

My sojourn into horror gaming began around six, with the abysmal Friday the 13th and Jason Voorhees’ grape sherbet-colored jumpsuit. The game terrified me, and aided a long time aversion to anything horror. PC Gaming began the shift, in particular Sanitarium, a respectable puzzler that compels one to watch even when it’s ugly. So too Phantasmagoria, which rightfully became gaming infamy. Resident Evil 2 was the first “survival horror” I completed. These, and others, showed me that I could handle the aesthetic.

The clincher (sorry), however, was the demo for Nocturne. This game was a marvel: its pre-rendered backgrounds that avoided pixelization; its shadows that were a revelation; and the thickest atmosphere I had ever encountered. Nocturne reveled in producing a sense of loneliness. One scene was so effective, so well crafted, and produced such a palpable feeling of dread that I immediately shut off the demo, ran upstairs, shaking, and verbal vomited all over my parents about how cool it was. I was hooked. I’ve since played too many horror games to recount. It has become one, if not my favorite genre, and I could wax philosophic on it for days.

One of the best marketing campaigns ever

Before grad school, I had completed Frictional’s Penumbra: Overture, and had been playing Black Plague, both of which I found quite frightening in different ways. By this time, I had played enough horror titles that my skin had grown quite thick for the usual tropes, and Frictional’s distressing and often relentless approach was refreshing. So when Amnesia was pressed, I was stoked. Especially so since word had it that this was a scary game for horror gamers; if you couldn’t handle it, don’t play it, seemed the operating pathos. But as fate would have it, my gaming rig blew a capacitor one year into grad school and it would be years before I would have the chance to play it.

Meanwhile, Frictional’s reputation left the stratosphere, and Amnesia became known as the scariest game ever made. It basically christened the “let’s play” phenomenon (for good or ill), and drew true horror gaming back into mainstream conscious. This was a boon for horror gamers, who were weary of the action-heavy, but non-affecting “horror” titles dominating the genre. Amnesia is a hinge of gaming history, like the original Half-Life: a game that changes the course of the industry and resets the bar for expectations. I would wager that neither The Evil Within nor the ill-fated, but equally important P.T. would have ever gone past the pitch without Amnesia’s success.

Recently, I finally was able to play and complete Amnesia. It conjured…conflicted thoughts in me about my beloved genre. So let me explain why, as a veteran horror gamer, I find F.E.A.R. 2 scarier than Amnesia, despite my appreciation for the latter.

Pictured: Player character. It’s actually only a horror game for the baddies.

Before Amnesia, the consensus view was that the growing trend of player enablement lessened the affect of horror elements. Or, the more capable the player – like Leon in RE4 – the less scary the game. Fear comes harder if one can easily evade, or decimate, the object of fear. Examples were set in contrast with something like Silent Hill 2, whose tank controls and dexterous enemies served to elevate the sense of dread. Certainly, supporting evidence may be had; the Siren series comes to mind. Distilled down, the idea is a direct correlation of fear to vulnerability, the latter defined by the possibility of harm or death – a quantifiable vulnerability.

The relationship of fear to player limitation I find compelling, even intuitive, but the subsequent correlation of vulnerability to measurable harm less so. Nonetheless, the syllogism has become common fare of the horror gaming community, and has even become a qualitative measure for a horror game. Thus games like F.E.A.R. 2 get hammered on a perceived lack of tangible threat, meaning that horror phenomena do not potentially result in a “game over” screen.

Amnesia plays as a case-study for this idea. Almost every gameplay mechanic is meant to amplify a sense of vulnerability: darkness keeps you safe, but weakens the player’s ability and health in the form of “sanity”; light keeps you sane, but draws attention to you; there are no means for defense, even environmentally, save hiding; like other Frictional titles, you must open doors the old fashioned way, by swinging them open rather than clicking on them – this can be nerve-wracking during a chase; and those enemies chasing you, “gatherers,” also pretty scary, are faster than you at long distances.

There are scripted scares, some quite effective, but the horror usually comes via unexpected appearances of the gatherers, triggering the flight impulse and a desperate scan of the surroundings to find a hiding spot. The tension is most pronounced when you are forced to explore an area where gatherers patrol; more than once I had to override my want to stay in one spot because I knew it was safe. This forcing of the player to confront their fear of confrontation in order to progress is incredibly tense. Indeed, Amnesia is likely the tensest game I’ve played.

The problem is one of pacing. Amnesia begins by dropping one into the middle of a narrative, which is fine. Daniel wakes alone in a spooky Gothic manor. Where we are and why we’re there is unknown, which creates a sense of discovery that motivates the game. Almost immediately, spooky happenings begin that are atmospheric enough, but leave little room to build to the central mechanic of encounter-and-evasion. Once introduced, the potential of this mechanic remains a relative constant. This is intense, of course, but my fear for the encounters was mitigated when I stopped being bothered by the gatherers. Their sudden appearance would produce a jolt, but then descend into a simple change of approach. When I was no longer upset by them, the primary fear mechanic ceased to frightening in any lasting sense, even knowing that that they could off Daniel quite easily. It takes Amnesia less than an hour to reach its fever pitch, and then it holds that note almost unceasingly until the end. This gives an entire game’s length to get used to that which supplies the fear. For me this happened relatively quickly.

And here I want to make a plea for the quality of horror in a game usually presented as a negative case.

Monolith’s challenge with F.E.A.R. 2 was to follow-up a lightning strike. Its predecessor snuck in behind Doom 3 and Half-Life 2, two games whose popularity would have humbled any developer making a shooter in their wake. F.E.A.R was a sleeper, not only holding its own, but seen by many to be an equal game, and by some even superior.

In such cases, expectations are unfair. Short of the rare case with Valve, or the Godfather, the general rule is that a sequel to a classic is bound to disappoint. Yet, Monolith delivered a solid game that earned mostly positive criticism. It isn’t perfect, although its seams seem to reek of publisher influence: brighter (less oppressive) colors, massive scale, and a few generally awkward sections. The mech and turret sections were fun, but suggest a scraping of the bottom of the gameplay diversity barrel. Also, the quick-time events, well…

The other criticism is that the antagonist of the first game, Alma, the little tyke, no longer had the effect she used to, and her appearances were so expected as to be trite. Quite simply, the game was considered effectively creepy, but not scary…in any lasting sense.

Clearly I disagree. My impression of F.E.A.R. 2’s fear mechanics is that of a development team trying to expand upon an established model without being slavish to it. These changes, I believe, were constructive enough to be mistaken as design flaws, rather than seen as the innovations they were.

After one of the best title sequences ever, F.E.A.R. 2 opens on a jump scare reminiscent of its predecessor. Similar moments are found throughout. While hopelessly tropic (as in “trope”), the hallucinogenic quality of the scare instills a sense of distrust; that is, the moment warns against the pretense of “safe zones,” even if the surroundings suggest otherwise. It promotes an anxiety not unlike that of Amnesia, but by different means, that underscores the game’s scare mechanics and on which the scares rely. Thus, while one may say that the immediate use of a jump scare is cheap, I believe that it is carefully chosen in part because its jarring nature produces the adrenaline needed to build tension. In this regard, the opening of both F2 and Amnesia are not that different. The genius is that the game uses a familiar mechanic to do so, but then subverts that mechanic later, sidelining it as one of many potential techniques used to promote fear. Thus the game produces initial tension using familiar terms – an implicit agreement between the game and the player about what kind of scare may be expected – but in subverting this expectation the game becomes more volatile, and the possibility of lasting impression emerges.

This reflects one half of F.E.A.R. 2’s approach to horror, misdirection, which is best understood in relation to the other: structural dissonance. After that initial scare, the game withdraws its aggression, dropping the player off at an innocuous, but affluent company building. Again, this doesn’t stray far from the first, which was chided on its ubiquitous office spaces. The next few minutes are a case in understatement. There are initially no rustling papers, no random objects moving, no bumps in the night. Rather the player is left with the inherent eeriness of an abandoned public space, something which most can relate with, and the tension of not knowing when the game will turn things on its head, but the assurance that it will. These first five minutes are important, as the anticipation of fear is left to build exclusively within the player. The emptiness of the building hints at menace in its many dark corners, but none is explicitly shown. The game doesn’t tell you what to afraid of, instead allows one to fill that space imaginatively. On a first play-through the effect is akin to the monster-in-the-closet effect. The initial shock has the room to fester into something more threatening in the mind of the player.

Menace arrives in equally understated fashion: the solitary corpse of a security guard. The scene’s brutality suggests chaos, which manifests soon after in a brief firefight. A few more firefights ensue between this and the hammer fall, about 20 minutes in, but all are pretty tame and brief – interruptions in the ominous vacancy. Throughout the game, F.E.A.R. 2 maintains the cadence established in this early section: Scenes of fright or combat are bookended by lengths of exploration. These in-between sections have an internal arc, beginning relatively benign, allowing the player to shed the cathartic adrenaline of fear or fighting, whichever came before, and start to build anew the anxiety of expectation. In this regard, F.E.A.R. 2 has a Hitchcockian approach to its imagery, knowing that the affect of a scare depends more on the turning of the screw than it does the reveal.

This throws the considerable power given to the player in F.E.A.R. 2 into different relief. If my intuition holds, catharsis is necessary to maintain a sense of vulnerability. Tension needs to release the pressure from time to time if it isn’t to be overcome. In this way the gunfights in F.E.A.R. 2 has a secondary (it is a shooter at heart) function in relaxing the tension, or diverting it to a different, less threatening, type. Diversion, indeed the power element itself, paradoxically serves to keep the anxiety of horror from becoming stale. Even here we can see that F.E.A.R. 2’s power is its misdirection. Naturally one expects an encounter, or a string of encounters, with the paranormal at the end of an expository section. This is often true, but is also occasionally subverted for a firefight. The fight serves to relax the player, in turn making the sudden appearance of the paranormal even more affecting. In sum, I believe the structure of F.E.A.R. 2 to be very intentional, showing an approach to horror that respects the role of catharsis in the production of fear.

But let’s consider content for a moment. F.E.A.R. 2 is stuffed with uncomfortable imagery, but on the first playthrough one is likely to miss half of it. This is often cited as a design flaw, that our view isn’t directed enough to experience the “scare”. In the first, scares were orchestrated like a well-constructed film; the most memorable moments were those where the purview of the player was confined to a particular space, all the while maintaining the sense of player control. Thus, while our gaze was directed to what we were intended to see, it felt as though we had ourselves stumbled across the scene. Amnesia, by contrast, directs perspective by briefly taking over player control. This lessens, in my estimation, player investment. In any case, F.E.A.R. 2 is different from both, and take a more open approach. Scares occur in less confined spaces, introducing the possibility of missing the effect. Sometimes these moments have cues, but often they do not.

Let me recall an experience with this mechanic. Having finished the game in 2009, I had a good friend come out to my apartment to begin his own campaign. In one early area, where a shift in lighting dramatically increases the sense of oppression, my friend was carefully stepping around a fountain in the center of the space, (rightly) expecting a bait-and-switch if he were to jump in. Anxiety made him cautious, and he was looking for an alternative route to the other side. He eased up to the pool, but then turning around and stopped. In front of him was an object that neither of us noticed before, and it took us a moment to realize that it was Alma, her glowing yellow eyes juxtaposed against the black and dark red of the room. This lasted only long enough for her appearance to register, wherein she disappeared with a subtle audio cue – something of a drop in frequency. My friend yelled, paused, and had to leave the computer for a moment. I too yelped and nearly dropped my beer. I had played the same scene before, had the same initial anxiety, and similarly explored the region before entering the pool and never encountered Alma. I’ve since played the game again, and feared her appearance only to not have it occur even while expecting it.

You go first

This highlights the subversion of type I mentioned: the inclusion of many, and maybe randomized, but not accentuated scares. When you experience this type, like my friend, the discovery is not feigned, giving the moment a particular punch. My impression is that Monolith wanted to make something that fans could return to and have a fresh experience. Other “subversionary” types could be mentioned, but I will spare your time. I will say that the ghoul encounter in the high school, where the adult Alma appears in frame, only for a frame, in tandem with the flickering fluorescent lights remains one of the most intense scenes in gaming I have ever played: an unholy cacophony of imagery and sound. This sequence alone is worth the commitment, but the scripted events surrounding it are not half bad either.

Let me point something out. In all cases, I was armed. See, I found F.E.A.R. 2 affecting indeed because of a certain vulnerability it imposes, but one that persists in spite of the considerable abilities the game affords. The object of horror rejects avoidance by intentional means, even if those means are restricted to running and hiding. And this gets at my main point

Fear is not directly dependent on a sense of potential harm.

A good case study in juxtaposition is the excellent Moira Asylum stage in Thief. The first half is a spookhouse par excellence, mounting tension like the stage to which it is an homage: the Shalebridge Cradle. The second half finds Garrett evading some monstrosities, and loses some of its horrific potency in the process. Meeting something tangible, a “real-world” object that may be avoided, comes after an uncomfortably long stretch of unavoidable phenomena that hints at something more sinister. Or, the introduction of baddies, creepy though they are, pulls one into a place of familiarity, which for me acted as a break from a pronounced feeling of dread caused by a situation where laws of tangibility didn’t apply. For me, the idea of an unpreventable pursuit of something beyond our limits is more frightening than the threat of player harm.

Now, being a Lovecraft-inspired story Amnesia has this idea baked in, but it provides a backdrop for the horror, a framework for comprehending it rather than being the object of fear itself. Still, I found the game tense, atmospheric, pretty scary, and at times disturbing. There is a shining moment near the beginning where the player sees an early gatherer in the wine cellar. The bloody thing just watches, waiting, and the player being backed into a corner, can only hope to not be seen. Yet, if one ventures out, the gatherer will break into malicious sprint. Such a marriage of imagery and palpable threat created a sense of immersion rarely experienced. I’m not saying Amnesia is an unworthy horror title; what I am saying is that the current staple for horror gaming should not be understood exclusively, and when it is, it weakens the experience.

But if there’s something to this, then the most effective scares tiptoe around an idea, a flirtation with a transcendence we are both drawn to and repulsed by. But for this another post is necessary…

Happy Gaming.

On Graphical Stupor

A bit of a confession.

I am a sucker for visual splendor. I will append the initial severity of my criticism to whatever I am watching if it makes me go, “Ooooo, look at that!” It is for this that I own the first Silent Hill movie. Perhaps it’s an Achilles Heel of sorts.

As far back as I remember being a PC gamer this was an issue. Before my conversion to PC, it didn’t really matter, though I was always careful to buy the console that looked to have the higher fidelity. But I hated playing Half-life in software mode, each of those pixels pretending to be textures were another jab to my flawed pursuit of a “pristine” experience. Thus, I spent a good deal of my 13th year researching video cards, and vowed not to play Half-life or Unreal without a shiny new Voodoo 3.

A source of envy

(And for those fellow kinsmen of this wonderful era in PC gaming, I did eventually settle on the Voodoo 3 solely for its Glide API capability, which Unreal favored)

My current build I spec-ed for Crysis 3 maxed, which it handled beautifully, and it made me smile. But there’s something funny about schmancy graphics in games, and I think it has some parallel in cinema. Films like The Abyss, T2, or Jurassic Park introduced us to computer imaging in the best way possible, showing us that our disbelief can be fooled into belief. And we liked it. Initially, the novelty worked through sheer spectacle, its capacity to show us what could only be told before. But with sophistication comes normativity; and with normativity, familiarity. A new Star Trek showed us a planet imploding into a black hole. The image is haunting, but fails to carry the feeling we got when we saw a brachiosaurus for the first time. Spectacle eventually must give way to creativity for the medium to retain its relevance.

So too with gaming. A particular milestone for me, of recent history, was in the first Crysis when I realized that I was leading a battalion of tanks on a charge while half of the entire mountain ahead of me was falling away to reveal an alien stronghold. Such experiences of sheer, often ridiculous, spectacle can be truly something to behold in recent generations of gaming. To be sure, the gaming form has a safeguard missing from cinema in its interactivity; the hammer fall moment in Crysis 3 was pandemonium, and elicited in me sensations unavailable in other mediums. However, there is some similarity, and even in my relatively limited exposure to the current generation of games, a sense of familiarity not unlike that which is experienced in the modern blockbuster.

This may have contributed to a dichotomy of sorts. On one hand, we have games whose purpose is to push the visual envelope. I liked Crysis 3, and recommended it to a friend, but only on the virtue of its visuals. The original Crysis was clearly, undeniably, a better game. Recently, the PS4’s launch title The Order: 1884 is another example. Having watched it played on a 4k, 60″ screen, I can say that it is truly astonishing to look at, but gameplay and story wise, the sense is that it remains pretty conventional: not bad, just not that memorable. On the other hand, we have still fine looking games that spend less time on visual panache, and more time on clever storytelling or gameplay, often through creative or minimalist visuals. Recently, I played through Bioshock Infinite, which I would argue is as impressive visually as Crysis 3, but not because of its level of detail (which is still impressive). It’s engine is older, crustier, but used in a way that maximizes its versatility, and the results while polarizing are certainly memorable. Some in this camp actually seem to be statements against the hi-fi approach. Journey comes to mind.

This is not to criticize any developer, necessarily, or say that creativity must come at the expense of strong visuals. What I suggest is not a rule. I do suggest that it is a rare thing to find a game that effectively pushes the envelope of both creative storytelling and the graphical horizon. Perhaps it is safer to focus on one rather than both, as such efforts are potential financial sinks; I wonder how the initial sales and press of Mirror’s Edge affected EA and Dice’s development approach, even if the game is brilliant in hindsight. And perhaps, in the time of such advancements as we see today (the “Snowdrop” engine, for example. Good grief.), trying to do both is simply too mammoth a task for most development studios. Not being a developer myself, I can only guess at the incalculable difficulty in trying to create a video game.

Now, that said I return to my initial point. I remain a sucker for good looking games, and still wish to play them as they are intended: maxed right out. My install of Skyrim was almost immediately modded to the gills and ENB’d, which also makes me smile. Ultimately, these reflections serve as an overture for post about two games I’ve been pontificating: a triple-A, well reviewed one I am playing, and an independent release I just finished. Both are visually exquisite. Considering the experience of both, and how visuals contribute, shows me much about the artistic actualities, and potentialities, within current era gaming. The twilight of spectacle for spectacle’s sake marks the dawn of something greater.

To the uncanny, er, Red Creek Valley

A Brief Note To My Followers

Few though you are.

First, I am grateful for those that found some reason to bookmark this page, and happy that my random thoughts have resonated somehow. I hope that this continues to be a compelling nook to escape to now and again.

Second, some of you follow because you like theology. Some because you are gamers and like to think. I suppose this reflects my own interests: I am a theologian-in-training who is also a gamer, and movie buff, that likes to think deep about such things.

My point is that I ask for a bit of patience, and also a bit of openness. I plan on posting some thoughts on the problem with the “popular news” culture that we are bombarded with when we log into Facebook. This will seem strange to my gamer readers. I also plan to write about the evolution between Crysis and Crysis 3, and what this says about us. This will seem strange to my theological crowd.

But, perhaps there is something that benefits all. To borrow a phrase, to read on even when the topic seems foreign is to attempt a “fusion of horizons,” to learn from the other with the posture that there is truly something to learn.

Until later…

In Retrospect, Part I: Dishonored

Often while I was there, I wanted to leave. When I wasn’t there, I wanted to be.

This was often how I felt about Dunwall, that plague-ridden, rat-infested city of Dishonored. It was also beautiful, in the same sense as Fincher’s Seven. And it afforded me a type of introspection that few, if any, games have before. I’ve played lots of games.

Let’s expand the boundaries of my blogging a bit.

Oh well, honor for all

Of the big and the small

Well, the taller they stand

Well, the taller they fall

We live for today

But we die for the next…

(from the end credits song, “Honor For All”)

For the uninitiated, Dishonored is an assassin simulation. Well, not a “simulation,” in the same sense as Jane’s USAF or something; Bethesda still wanted to make a game that appealed to the masses, which they did. In the game, you don the (likely soiled) boots of Corvo Attano, personal bodyguard of the beloved empress of Dunwall, on the eve of the city’s implosion. The empress, the glue holding the city together, gets murdered by a guild of assassins and you are framed for it. Most of the game you will eavesdrop on conversations about how much the population hates you. It’s a tale about righting wrongs, trying to find social (and personal?) redemption, and vengeance…if that’s your thing. I’ll spare the narrative details.

Corvo Attano. Life of the party.

The conversations I mention serve as a bit of measure of the game’s texture. It is almost unrelentingly gloomy. Oppressive gloomyness. Half the population are sick with a terminal plague which you see signs of in droves; I was truly shocked with the introduction of the “plague wagon” located in a part of the city whose context reveals the city’s seriously dark artery. Those that aren’t sick are usually rich, and barricade themselves from the rest. Some of these revel in the dubious “benefits” of the plague. The will-to-power following the empress’ death is carnivorous.

Love is a distant aroma at best

A withering smile that’s stuck deep in your vest…

But, you know, it’s also fun. The gameplay delivers: it’s fast, slick, engaging, and grants the player some true pleasures – like “blinking” (teleporting over a distance) behind a guard who just glanced you but before he could pin an ID, rendering him unconscious and leaving unnoticed. Adding to this is the magnificence of the art direction. I mean that. Some whine about the “low-res” textures and cartooney colors. But look at what you gain! Every corner is filled with stuff to look at. There are countless corners and crannies to explore, and these are often lit with a painter’s eye. The vistas are panoramic wonders. It is eye candy at both the grand and the nuanced, and for a game that requires immersion, I have never played one whose setting felt so genuine. Because of this care in craftsmanship, it felt as though you only saw glimpses, neighborhoods, of a massive place. Compared to Thief 3 (which I love, mind) which expects you to suspend disbelief about the city’s size, Dishonored convinces. Dunwall didn’t exist for the player. The player exists within the belching, gritty, corrupt, massive maw of Dunwall.

But so what. This has been said differently elsewhere. Let me tell you what sticks with me, days after I finished it.

Okay. So there is a meta-mechanic to Dishonored. It may be its strongest element, and certainly is the most controversial: the inclusion of a moral scale. Such things aren’t new. My earliest memory of one was the original Jedi Knight, where your kill quotient would determine where you fell on being a jedi of the light, or a sith, so to speak. Dishonored’s version is dynamic; the city changes accordingly to your approach. More kills, more corpses, which means more plague rats, and vise versa. I’m sure that the effects extend beyond rat numbers. Heck, even the art direction changes; the weather for the last mission is affected by your decisions.

Where some are crying foul regards where, in my estimation, Dishonored tries to make a statement using this scale. To my knowledge, there are three endings. The “good” ending requires a “low” chaos rating, meaning you aren’t knifing every guard, gang member, and aristocrat you come in contact with. The middle ending is rather bland from what I gather. And for the tricky bit, an ending resulting from a “high” chaos rating is deeply unsatisfying.

Now, consider the paradox here. In a game where you play an assassin, whose primary missions are to kill people, to whom an unholy arsenal is given to find creative ways for doing so, we are strongly encouraged not to. As I see it, the unspoken rule about chaos/morality algorithms in games up to this point is that they remain value-neutral. There may be a “good” and “evil” route, but the judgment of which is best resides in the player. This usually results in some form of catharsis no matter the decision taken. Dishonored, however, suggests that merciless decisions result in a merciless outcome.

The craziest part, an this astounds me, is that playing “mercilessly” is more exhilarating. Killing results in an often frantic flight from the scene, where you are left to your wits, the landscape, and the toolset at hand in order to survive. These moments are undeniably exciting. Choosing the route of measure is long, careful, and sometimes painstaking. You are left with only two means to incapacitate, a choke hold and sleeper darts.

Is this a blatant error on Arkane Studios part, to push the player into a less-compelling (though far from boring) mode of play? Some say so. I think another point could be made, even if it was unintended. First, I have a hard time role-playing a character too far from my own convictions. To play as a raging nihilist is just too uncomfortable. But for me, Dishonored tested my convictions, hard. I always felt uneasy with going after a mark on the word of some guys, but things got grey when you set your boots to the cobbles. The deeper you traveled in each district, the more you uncovered dirt on the targets, and the more you felt justified in hating them. These characters walk comfortably in an absolute moral vacuum – truly, horrible people. Furthermore, when a target is “eliminated” the game gives you a slick, so-mo animation.

So, while I chose the noble route in effort to preserve Corvo’s humanity on the path of redemption, instead of vengeance, Dishonored made it very tempting to hedge on this, in every mission. Often, the non-lethal means are messy, perhaps worse than the murder, and sometimes I longed to find a creative way to invoke that slow motion. The point is, the game made me fight to maintain my commitment to non-lethality, even question it, and consider the long-term effects. And when I reached the end, struggling through the last (and perhaps the hardest) of these encounters where I finally chose justice instead of revenge I realized something.

My catharsis had less to do with the results of the good ending, and more with the fact that I fought to achieve a good ending. And cathartic it was. Do I wish I played differently for the sake of adrenaline? I do not. Now, I could be wrong, but Arkane and Bethesda seem to me to be the type that sends out a game only when it matches their intent for it. Maybe it was their purpose to have the easier path yield rotten fruit, and to make it hard on those fighting for something else, tempting them to give it up in a thousand different ways.

So perhaps behind Arkane’s curious, and bold, move is a very subtle message. One about how fighting for goodness and hope can be a long and narrow path, but one worth the fight.

Can you feel the new day rising

Climbing up the east horizon…

 

Just some thoughts…

In the vein of Pascal’s Pensées, but without the raw genius.

(Seriously, you should check it out)

 

Anyway, here’s some thoughts I had this morning about humility, grace, and reality.

 

1. If anything warrants a vocation, and if you are not in that vocation, it is more complex than you think. It is more complex than popular news media would lead you to think. You do not have mastery over it.
2. Even if one is steeped in a vocation, it is hard to attain mastery over even a single element.
3. Reality is bigger than present knowledge can teach us about it.
4. Be humble in light of what you do not know.
5. Grace is sometimes easier to give than it is to receive.
6. Grace is a mystery easily understood, but is never understood fully.
7. None are deserving of the love of God. But everyone is created worthy of love.
8. Reality lies not as much in the circumstance as it does behind the circumstance.
9. If you want disposable knowledge, seek out the newest meme. If you want to discover meaning, look to those things that have outlasted, and will outlast, pop culture.
10. Consider that place from which your words arise before you decide to speak.

Blessings,