This post is part of a series examining the relationship between videogames and the tragic form–today’s topic is the action-RPG Bastion by Supergiant Games.
MAJOR SPOILERS for Bastion follow–as before, if you haven’t played it yet I recommend you do so before reading this post. Continue reading
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This post is the first in a series examining the relationship between videogames and the tragic form–today’s topic is Terry Cavanagh’s excellent action-platformer Don’t Look Back.
MAJOR SPOILERS for Don’t Look Back follow–if you haven’t played it before, I recommend you do so before reading this post. Continue reading
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This post is the introduction to a series examining the relationship between videogames and the tragic form.
The tragic genre, along with comedy, is one of the oldest in Western literature. Classically speaking, a tragedy is more than just a sad ending–it’s a particular kind of story meant to inspire particular kinds of emotions in the audience. A story where the protagonist is miserable from start to finish, with no pretensions to changing their fate, isn’t really a tragedy–it’s just depressing. Similarly, a story that ends in tragedy due to circumstances beyond the protagonist’s control isn’t really tragic, either–that’s just a disaster. True tragedy, as argued most famously by Aristotle, requires that the protagonist bring the ending upon themselves through some crucial mistake or flaw. The tragic ending is a direct result of the protagonist’s own actions, which the audience can only sit helplessly and watch–yet this introduces a big problem for the medium of videogames, in which the audience is the protagonist. The mistake or flaw derives its power from the excruciating if only it leaves in the mind of the audience. If only Hamlet had killed Claudius when he had the chance! If only Oedipus had known his true lineage! If only Eve hadn’t listened to that stupid snake! Yet when the audience is the protagonist, what’s to stop them from avoiding the mistake altogether? How can we reconcile a genre that pre-destines the hero’s downfall with a medium in which the audience influences their every decision? How can we successfully weave together the agency of games with the inevitability of tragedy?
In the following posts, I’ll be taking a look at some games that attempt to do this, analyzing and discussing the various techniques they employ. Over the course of this series, I hope to show that videogames are no more or less suited to the tragic form than any other medium–they simply require different strategies than most narratives employ.
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The richest 1% of America’s population controls a disproportionate amount of its wealth–this is the idea that the phrase “we are the 99%” is meant to evoke. The obvious implication of the Occupy movement’s slogan is that this is a bad thing–but is it? Should we try to fix this disparity? And if so, to what degree? Would a completely even distribution of wealth be ideal, or is a little inequality actually a good thing to have?
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Current conventional models of education place heavy emphasis on the material and intellectual aspects of our world: the realm of facts and figures, action and reaction, of the basic functioning of our external, physical reality. Even our country’s politicians can agree that this system is in grave peril and needs serious reform, but while reformers debate how best to fix its intellectual shortcomings (which certainly do exist), no one seems to be concerned with the far more serious deficits in our system’s personal and social aspects.
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So I recently bought a game I was very exited about playing–I’d hoped to write a review of it here in the next week or two–but when I downloaded it I discovered that I couldn’t play it because my operating system was too old. “Great,” I’m thinking, “so instead of costing me ten dollars on Humble Bundle, it’ll cost me three hundred or something at a Mac store?” Having to buy new operating systems every time the one you’re running gets out of date has always been a scam perpetuated largely by Microsoft’s monopoly on the OS market, but I had never felt it so strongly before. The introduction of alternatives like Chrome OS and the proliferation of always-up-to-date web applications has made this business model seem not only inconvenient and forced, but unnecessary as well. Then, just as I was thinking I would finally bite the bullet and at least see if I could get a cheaper second-hand copy on Ebay or something, I discover to my delight and surprise that Apple’s newest operating system, OS X Mavericks (guess they finally ran out of cool-sounding cats?) is available to download free on the app store! All hail the Age of the Internet! I only hope Microsoft has the courage and intelligence to follow suit with their next operating system.
Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going off to play Gone Home. Look forward to a review of it here in the coming weeks!
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It’s no secret that most new year’s resolutions fail. The reason is less well-known: most people resolve to do something differently in the coming year (e.g. lose weight, improve their relationships, get a raise), but make no concrete or detailed plans for how to do it. The most effective new year’s resolutions are not vague aspirations, but commitments to specific habits. The reason this works is threefold: first, specific goals are better than vague ones because they let you measure your progress. If you resolve merely to “eat better”, it can be difficult to tell if you’ve succeeded. (Better than what? What does “better” mean?) If you resolve, on the other hand, to lose 10 pounds (and keep them off–another common pitfall of new year’s resolutions), you have a specific measure of success.
The second reason specific habits are better is the habit part: changes are more effective if they’re consistent. In addition to specific measures of success, goals that can be broken down into smaller pieces and made into a routine are more effective, because once they’re routine you no longer have to spend conscious effort on them. Defaults have incredible power for this very reason, and making a commitment into a routine takes advantage of that power. A new behavior done once is an exception–a new habit becomes part of who you are.
This leads me to the last, and possibly most important reason why commitments to specific habits work better than vague promises of improvement: they act to alter not just your behavior, but your self-image. This is the same thing that makes hypnosis (and, to a lesser extent, self-affirmations) effective: it changes not just your behavior, but your fundamental conception of who you are. This is deep magic: a behavior or commitment affected for someone else’s sake will never be as strong as a change in belief. The most effective way to make a change in your life is to start thinking of yourself as the kind of person who makes that change. In that sense, then, the most effective resolution is not to ask yourself what you want to do differently, but who you want to be differently. To that end, here’s my new year’s resolution for 2014:
I resolve that I am an
I chose to be Attentive because I’ve noticed recently that I tend to operate on autopilot a lot, not paying full attention to whatever I’m working on. Sometimes that’s okay, if I’m paying attention to something else (presumably something more important) instead. But more often these days, I find myself running on autopilot just because I can, and that’s simply lazy. So, I am resolving to be someone who gives my full attention to whatever it is I’m working on at that moment.
I chose to be Hardworking for similar reasons. In college, one of the biggest lessons I learned was how to procrastinate on a deadline–to my misfortune, I discovered that I could often get away with simply not doing a lot of the work, as long as I did well enough on tests and other assignments to keep my grade up. Unfortunately, that’s not how the real world works: if I miss a deadline at work, the project doesn’t just go away at the end of the semester. So, I’m resolving to be someone who works hard to accomplish whatever I commit to, and to do my best to get it done on time.
I chose to be Ambitious because I want to make an impact on the world someday, and because I look up to and admire people with similar ambitions. It may be idealistic to want to singlehandedly change the world for the better…but then, only idealists ever have. So, I’m resolving to be a person who has high expectations for myself, and who’s never satisfied by the status quo.
Finally, I chose to be a Creator because I wanted to re-affirm my commitment to art and invention. When I was a small child I wanted to be an inventor–someone who brought their imaginings into the world of reality. As I got older I realized that literally being an inventor was not the only way to do that: it was possible with art and science as well. What’s important to me is not necessarily the method by which I influence the world around me, what’s important is merely that I do. So, I am resolving to be a person who uses their mind and hands to make their thoughts visible to the rest of the world, to actively change it for the better. In other words…to be an artist.
What are your new year’s resolutions?
Notes:
[1] Yes, I’m aware that this makes me “A HAC[K]”
Digging through some old emails I found an article I’d read years ago that said basically this same thing, only better.
When you see your reflection in a mirror, why does your right become its left, but top and bottom stay the same? I’ve seen this question answered a number of different ways, but the explanation that makes the most sense to me is also, I think, the simplest: mirrors don’t reverse left and right. They reverse front and back.
Since “left” and “right” are subjective,[1] let’s simplify the discussion a little: imagine that you’re facing due north and there’s a mirror in front of you. If you jump up, your reflection will also jump up–no reversal. If you step one foot sideways, to the east, your reflection will also step one foot to the east: not reversed. But if you step south, away from the mirror, your reflection will move north–the opposite direction.
The reason mirrors seem to reverse left and right, but not up and down, is because when looking at our reflection we automatically imagine ourselves in their position–that is, turned around both left-right and front-back. This habit comes from a lifetime of interacting with other people and having to interpret their “right”, “left”, “front” and “back” in terms of our own. When we see our reflection, we reflexively identify it as another person, identical to us in every respect, except with all their features on the “other side”–e.g., a mole on the left side of your face is on the right side from your reflection’s “point of view”. But it is not the mirror that makes this transformation–it’s us, when we mentally turn ourselves around and put ourselves in our reflection’s shoes! We are mentally reversing our front-back and left-right, but the mirror reverses only the first.
Think about looking at yourself with a video camera. Here, left-right and front-back are both reversed (if you’re facing your recording, that is–if you’re looking at yourself from the back then nothing will be reversed). If you move towards the screen (e.g. north), your recording moves in the opposite direction (e.g. south); if you move to your right (e.g. east), your recording still moves in the opposite direction (e.g. west). The same goes for text printed on a shirt: in a recording, front-back and left-right are both switched, just like they would be on another person, so the text is legible; but in a reflection, only front and back are switched, so–just like a transparency sheet viewed from the wrong direction–the text appears “backwards”.[2] To prove that the text on your shirt is not reversed left-to-right in a mirror, you could remove the shirt and point it at a bright light so that you can read it from the inside (in other words, the back–but with the right sleeve still on your right and the left sleeve still on your left). The text will look just like it does in the mirror: front and back reversed, but left and right the same.
Feeling enlightened? Confused? Got a better explanation? Let me hear it in the comments!
Notes:
[1] As a child, I once asked my parents how people knew what side of the road to drive on, to keep from crashing. When they told me “you drive on the right”, I was still confused–“whose right?” I thought. It took me a while to realize that it didn’t matter–if you’re traveling in the other direction, “right” is on the other side. This is not an intuitive idea.
[2] If the image I linked is confusing you, think about it this way: the text on the transparency is viewed from the front, so it is perfectly readable. The mirror “sees” the transparency from the back, so from its perspective the text is reversed front-to-back (just as it would be if you were looking at the other side of the transparency). But the mirror itself reverses front and back when it reflects the text back to you, so the reflection still appears legible because front and back have been reversed twice.
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I recently came across an article by Jeff Atwood (of Coding Horror) on how to be successful. It opened with a line of advice that I really liked: “Always Be Jabbing. Always Be Shipping. Always Be Firing.” The idea behind this advice is that as long as you keep moving forward, no matter how much you suck you’ll eventually be successful.
I’d like to add another word of advice along these same lines: Always Be Testing.
My problem (and I’m guessing there are many of you out there who share this problem) is that it can be very easy for me to trick myself into thinking that I’m making something when I’m really not. The degenerate case of this is errands like doing laundry, taking the dog for a walk, writing thank-you notes, organizing your desk, etc. These are all legitimate things to be doing and they can be fairly important, so it feels much less like procrastinating than just sitting around on your butt playing videogames or watching TV. But if you’re doing them in order to avoid other, more important work, then it’s still procrastination–only worse, because you feel like you’re getting something done.
Unfortunately, there are even more subtle ways to procrastinate while still feeling productive. Perhaps the most insidious of all is the type of procrastination where you’re producing like crazy, but you’re not doing any testing. Maybe you’ve written a 500-page book but are afraid to read it (let alone give it to anyone else to read). Maybe you’ve been practicing an instrument in your basement for months, but you won’t let anyone listen to you play. Or maybe you’ve written a few hundred lines of code without once actually running your program. There are a number of reasons people do this, but probably the most common is fear of failure or rejection. Well, the bad news is that you will face failure and rejection. Your writing will be torn apart, your playing criticized, and your code broken in a dozen different ways. Here’s the problem, though: without testing, producing is just an errand. It’s something that has to be done, of course, but it’s not the most important part of building something. Just as the most important part of writing is reading what you’ve written, and the most important part of architecture is construction, the most important part of programming is testing your code to make sure it works.[1]
What I really like about the “Always Be Testing” aphorism is that (along with the other three Jeff mentions) it’s applicable not just to writing or programming, but to life in general. If you’re not making things, you’re not improving and you will never be successful–and if there’s no chance of something going wrong, then you’re not really making things. Anytime you suspect you may be procrastinating by doing something that feels like work but really isn’t, ask yourself “what will happen if I mess this up?” If the answer is, “basically nothing”, then you are procrastinating. When you make something, you introduce a permanent change to the world–which means mistakes are permanent, too. This can be scary, but it’s a necessary tradeoff: without the possibility of failure there can be no such thing as success.
So what does that mean in practice? It means you should always have something that’s ready for an audience, even if that audience is just your closest friend, or you as your program’s first user. For writers, it means constantly getting feedback on new revisions. For architects, it means making scale models at each stage of the design process. And for programmers, it means always having some small program working and complete enough that you can run it and see if it does what it’s supposed to. Again, this isn’t just good programming practice, it’s good practice for life: start small with something tangible, then work your way up from there.
In the end, that’s all success really is.
Notes:
[1] Obviously, you still have to write the code first, and buildings need to be planned before they’re built. My point is not that planning and preparing aren’t important, my point is that until your code works or you have a standing building or your art has an audience, you have not actually made anything–you have merely prepared to make something. A shoddy building that’s nevertheless standing is infinitely better than a building that never gets made, no matter how perfect its design.
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In Search of Secrets 
