21st Century Ballet: P.N.03 and the Grace of Repetition

P.N.03 immediately feels strange. A lusty woman who infiltrates futuristic techno-military bases and shoots lasers out of her palms in rhythm to sweaty electronic music? It can only be Japanese, and the impulse is to dismiss it on these xenophobic grounds. It is foreign, unfamiliar, and uncomfortably hard to control. And so repetitious––what use could it serve?

“You can’t take an adult seriously when he’s debating you over why Twilight vampires are O.K. with sunlight,” Joel Stein wrote in the Times’ Room for Debate column, speaking to the obsessive and encyclopedic nature of people who are fans of the imaginary. This logic has eaten at me through my young adult years. I often felt pressure to give up things that seemed useless or impractical, video games chiefly among them. You could make a very convincing argument (and by convincing, I mean an argument a lot of people would likely buy into) that the kid who sits in an arcade mastering Galaga or Donkey Kong are frittering their lives away. Read Anna Karenin, you dorks.

I can see now that this viewpoint has always been indefensible, but for video games of yore that survived on unflinching repetition, the accusation seems more cutting. How could you defend doing the same thing over and over again when you’ve got nothing tangible to show for it?

PN03 is a game that helped me reject this dopey rhetoric.  It’s an antique, repetitive third-person shooter mostly built around racking up giant combos and mashing the Gamecube’s wonderfully giant A button as much as you can. This is hard, mostly due to how inefficiently the game controls. I would say the hallmark of PN03 is its difficulty, but with the advent of Dark Souls and Demon’s Souls, crushing difficulty isn’t much to brag about. I haven’t played Dark Souls or its older brother, but what I hear most often about those games is how rewarding they are to conquer, an infinitely uphill battle.

PN03 isn’t really about the sweet release after a long and arduous victory, but more about becoming familiar with a system, if only for its sake. It represents the video game tradition of repetition almost perfectly, requiring you to constantly mash the shoot button over and over, throwing you into series of sterile, samey environments until the thumbs ache. It reminds me of learning to ride a bicycle, or how I might feel if I tried to learn to ride one today as an adult, two decades later.

Learning how to ride a bike is possibly one of the most frustrating things, and it’s probably because it engages an untrained kinesthetic sense we hadn’t yet found a need for. It forces us to wobble, to fall over, to scuff, and to maybe look silly in a bunch of protective gear. And once we’ve learned, it’s not something we think about ever again, probably because it was enormously frustrating.

But PN03 makes me remember what it’s like to fail again and again at something that is, performed at its best, a thoughtless and pretty sensation. Playing the game feels as wobbly and ham-handed as stepping onto a bike for the first time: Vanessa, the female protag, moves only in straight lines, stopping whenever she shoots or moves left or right, which she will only do in bursts. Explaining the way Vanessa moves and how constricting it can be is like describing riding a bike to someone who never has. Imagine attaching your body to a metal frame that must always be moving forward to keep from falling over; imagine trying to shoot giant robots without being able to move freely.

This isn’t hard because it is tuned to be so, but because it is just hard to understand. It requires some wobbling and scuffing. It’s our fault. But, like riding a bike, finally learning to understand the constrictions is a stipulation that I actually came to enjoy and that shows me a method of movement that feels wholly unique. At that point, PN03 then looks prettier than it feels. When controlled well, Vanessa dances through strippery motions as she shoots, ducks, and dodges. It is a 21st century ballet, a triumph of mechanical repetition. What was once a matter of fierce concentration gives away to the joyful, repetitive thrum.

The intimacy of this knowledge has little practical use, and not even in the experientially artistic way that I might get through reading Anna Karenin or something like it. PN03 is orthogonal to emotion in the same way riding a bike is: learning to understand how the game works is a slow and grueling process that engages me on a level like not much else can because it is primarily mechanical. You can argue how worthwhile it was to achieve that kind of thing, but there it is, a grace of the modern era.  We get on a bike, we start to move, and the opposing revolutions of our feet don’t imbalance us in the slightest. And maybe that’s pretty neat.

“I appreciate that adults occasionally watch Pixar movies or play video games. That’s fine. Those media don’t require much of your brains,” Stein writes. “Books are one of our few chances to learn. There’s a reason my teachers didn’t assign me to go home and play three hours of Donkey Kong.” In the end, the most indefensible part of this line of thinking is that it encourages us to not seek what there is to be found in the creative, to not burrow weeks into Donkey Kong and see what we find.

It was frustrating understanding PN03, but I’m thankful for this renewed sense of learning and the intimacy of this useless knowledge. I’m happy I went after it. I occasionally pop the game in again, returning to it for its own sake, just to try and understand the dance.

Suicide, Sheriffs, and Smash Bros.

During finals week of my last semester in junior college I was called into the county Sheriff’s office and yelled at. I was working part time at my town’s newspaper and had written a story about a woman convict who’d leapt from the vehicle moving her to incarceration. I’d written that a witness thought the vehicle looked like it was moving over the speed limit and that the woman seemed to sustain serious injuries.

“This is bullshit!” the Sheriff yelled. Somewhere in editing, the article lost the attribution of that information to a third-party witness and instead seemed to credit the information to the Sheriff’s department. The information turned out to be untrue––the woman was relatively fine, and the vehicle was within speed limits––but the police hadn’t been willing to comment at press time. Had it been clear that it was the opinion of the witness and not fact handed down from the Sheriff, it would have been a non-issue.

The nuance of this was hard to recall when a high ranking lawman was raising his voice at me. I sheepishly apologized and tried to explain the problem and that I would publish a correction, but the situation stung. He threatened to cut all ties to the paper, effectively undoing a decade’s worth of relationship-building my predecessors and managing editor had delicately worked to preserve.

I have never liked conflict. I keep the peace rather than confront others. Fighting games have always seemed to playfully and brutally embody the dirtiness of conflict, and I have never liked them. Aggression is a valid emotion, but expressing it through physicality has never appealed to me––in real life or otherwise. The only fighting game I’ve ever liked is Super Smash Bros., and for reasons having nothing to do with aggression or conflict.

The culture of fighting games exemplify the things I hate most about video games: trash talk, dismissiveness, and the expectation that one needs to be “good” at a game. If it weren’t for Smash Bros., I wouldn’t understand the appeal of this phenomenon. It happens when you become enraptured by the feel of a game’s mechanics, which is something that’s possible with any game, be they a game of platforming, shooting, or solitaire––but when it happens on a competitive platform, those mechanics suddenly become grounds to boast and challenge others.

I’m less into Smash Bros than when I was younger. Granted, I’m still only 19, but there was a time when every day after school was dedicated to Smash Bros. I’ve played Brawl, the Wii version, for over 230 hours and Melee and its N64 counterpart nearly as much. I feel as though I could write a lengthy book on the way Smash games work, knowledge that could only exist for a mechanical medium such as a video game.

Still, most people who play Smash Bros probably experience something very different from me. While it’s a step up in accessibility from most fighting games, I suspect most people approach Smash Bros to witness the smorgasbord of Nintendo jizz that constantly explodes all over the screen: It’s less of a fighter and more of a playground. And really, it’s sort of remarkable how well all Nintendo’s distinct IPs are able to fit cohesively on the same screen together in a way that doesn’t feel completely gross. Donkey Kong can fight Marth, Jigglypuff can fight Peach, and Snake can fight Sonic, and it’s all a visual delight. Each character fights in a way that makes sense for them, and when you combine it all with the nostalgia for 20th century Nintendo, it’s hard to resist.

Smash’s control scheme is appealing in comparison to other fighting games: a handful of buttons and button combinations will produce something similar for each character, no need to memorize quarter-turns or lengthy inputs. Every input gets a response. There are two attacks, each modified by a direction via the analog stick. That’s it. Plus, you can jump and dodge, but really, it’s easier than it sounds, and the “Mario-and-friends” aesthetic makes it incredibly inviting. I’ve never had to force a friend to play Smash Bros. with me (not that I make a habit of forcing people to play video games with me).

The original Super Smash Bros. on Nintendo 64 was probably the most fun I ever had with a video game when I was younger. As a Nintendo child, the thought of having every character I loved collaborate in the name of kicking ass was dreamy, a place of complete control I would have loved to stay in forever.

Nintendo announced at E3 2011 that a new version of Smash Bros. is being developed for its upcoming console, the WiiU. Like Brawl before it, I suspect the WiiU version of Smash Bros. will be the most extensive and graphically realized iteration yet. I wonder whether I’ll embrace the new version. Returning to Smash Bros. today is like reliving that magical, formative moment when I first picked up a controller and watched the screen dance to my whims. It is an artifact from my childhood, periodically updated and revised to remind me of the dull logic video games first presented me with.

Despite the robust mechanics, Smash Bros. is a very childish game. For all its violence, Smash is presented in the most innocent way possible: there is no blood or real pain, only cartoon slapstick. Characters don’t die from unbearable pain or failing organs but only when they are hit so hard that they fly away and twinkle as they disappear, only to reappear next match.

With Smash Bros. I feel the immediate sense of control that I miss as an adult. I suspect everyone has a game for him or her that, when they find again, makes them feel sad. Smash Bros. is a collection of my childhood imagery, ideas from a time when conflict manifested itself as a diorama of fun and playfulness. The idea that another person could be irreparably angry with me was far off.

The woman who leapt from the car taking her to prison sent me a letter a month later. “I was trying to kill myself,” she wrote. Her handwriting was childish and full of errors. “I wish I were dead.” While the Sheriff’s department did nothing wrong, my misprint could have been used in litigation against them, reflected badly during midterm elections, been cause to reexamine convict transportation, gotten someone fired, or had other sprawling, unintended consequences for things I hadn’t even considered. And more importantly, I hadn’t even considered she’d wanted to die.

Like all good Nintendo games, Smash Bros. obviates any hint of angry Sheriffs and broken relationships to the outermost edges. Adult life is mostly the reverse: the buzzing swirl of ideas to remember each and every day slowly sublimate the childish place where the world itself seemed childish. Sometimes it’s nice to admit I wish I could return there, a place where someone would never willingly throw themselves to asphalt, and I would never have to defend my depiction of it.

You, Me, and More Me: the Jerk I Become in Borderlands

One of the most serious arguments I’ve ever had with my friend J was over Borderlands. He was playing Lilith, a Siren with a bent towards elemental weapons while I was Roland, the medic and support class. We found a new sub-machine gun, J’s specialty, and I ran in before him and snatched it up.

The ensuing argument was over which of us could make better use of the weapon: I argued that he’d had plenty of SMG guns, and, besides, it wasn’t even an elemental weapon, and he could stand to let me have a nice SMG in my arsenal. But no, my class was designed for shotguns and combat rifles, he argued. His class optimized SMGs.

It morphed into an argument of whether I was willing to be a team player, and then a larger argument over what kind of behavior should be expected out of two people who thought of the another as ‘good friends’. Good friends let each other have nice weapons, I said. Good friends set aside themselves for the good of the team, he said.

The argument ended when he hit me in the stomach, hard. My friends and I don’t hit each other. That’s now how we are. I don’t mind being touched, but it had been a long time since I’d ever provoked anyone enough to want to hit me. He socked me, and we moved on.

Borderlands is my favorite shooter for this reason. The underlying idea is fine and all––a four player, first-person co-op shooter with RPG elements and a loot system fueled by thousands of guns––but it’s the emergent meta-game of Borderlands that makes it memorable. The game on the screen is a fairly basic first-person shooter, but the game we’re playing on the couch is more like Risk. I’m making alliances, negotiating loot and calling others out––there’s rarely enough loot to go around, and so when my “friend” swipes a fancy new gun, I’m without tangible reward for all my work, and suddenly I dislike my friends.

I wouldn’t play Borderlands alone. I have, and it’s okay. The skill points and loot system make for an addictive experience, but nothing more. The reason I hang onto Borderlands is because I like what it brings out in me. My favorite past time is to sit and talk to others, but there are some parts of us we won’t and can’t admit to, not until we’re tempted with the promise of something we want, something tangible we didn’t know existed and that we don’t want to share. The lighter, more diplomatic parts of ourselves come out more easily in conversation while our more confrontational bits only begin to ooze under pressure. That’s a kind of conversation I didn’t expect to have with others in Borderlands, and it was stressful once I found it.

However, that hasn’t been my experience every time. I’ve played through the entire game four or five times, each time with someone different. Playing with some friends is like playing a game of dismissive hot-potato, where we all take turns criticizing each other; other times it’s a poor substitute for one-on-one interaction. When I played through the game with my roommate B, we were completely polite and were sure to never screw the other over. It was a distraction for us, and excuse to not talk as intimately as we could have.

Let's not talk.

Borderlands’ ending is clever. The game baits you through a dozen hours of fetch-quests with a buildup of useful loot, promising a treasure trove of rewards at the final boss’ demise. I remember how angry I was when the dust had settled after that last fight and realized we’d been cheated into expecting a reward that was never there. Like a dog hunting its next slab of meat, the glowing pinata break of weapons that spilled from every dead enemy was something I searched for willingly, and when it wasn’t there, I became angry. It’s almost scary how easily I relinquished myself to that hunt. It happened so quickly, as though some part of me were waiting for it.

Coming of Age: Mass Effect 2 and the RPG

“Nothing that is vast enters into the life of mortals without a curse,” Sophocles wrote. In Timothy Ferris’ Coming of Age in the Milky Way, he recounts how humans have come to know their role in the universe, where we stand and for how long we can likely hope to continue. The most uncomfortable realization of the last few centuries is that we exist on an incomprehensible scale, one bigger than we could imagine and built with blocks smaller than we might ever perceive. The curse of this knowledge is the desire to argue against it, to search for a larger meaning, one where our role matters more.

In that light, I wonder what’s the point of calling something  a ‘role playing game.’ In what video game do you not play a role? When we enter into a system of rules, we agree to be the protagonist––it’s implicit in our participation, and the core tenet of protagonism is that they are necessary; their role will change something or accomplish another thing. Even in abstract, plotless games like Everyday Shooter, Electroplankton, or Inside A Star Filled Sky, there’s a role to be played as survivalist, creator, and progenitor.

What do we mean when we say role playing game (RPG)? Who knows, but misappropriation or not, it hasn’t stopped us from exploring what we mean by it, and Mass Effect 2 is a worthwhile exploration of the term. A good rule of thumb might be that RPG implies a latitude in the way story can unfold––depending on what choices the player makes. This isn’t always true, but it’s true in Mass Effect 2: you’ll always save the world in the end, but which of your friends are left standing beside you is the real variable.

Video games are nothing without mechanics, and Mass Effect games can be divided into two sets: conversation and combat. You can talk and you can kill. Talking includes dynamic, close up camera angles; paced conversation; and the option to investigate people’s backstories and react emotionally and morally. Killing includes shooting all manner of guns and using all manner of super powers to outwit interstellar goons. Mass Effect 2 contextualizes these core mechanics of conversation and combat around helping other people, and it goes a long way in making hokey space plots into something genuinely engrossing.

Here’s a good structure for a video game: as Commander Shepard, you’re tasked with saving the world from an impending, mysterious doom. You can’t do it alone, so, chop chop, better pony up a cast of super-friends to help fend off the stinky evilness. It’s contrived in the way science fiction can satisfyingly be, and assembling your cast and gaining their loyalty is an opportunity to become emotionally intimate with other people, which, in hindsight, really ought to be a prerequisite for “save the world” stories. No one saves the world alone.

The RPGs I grew up playing were always an exercise in imagination: the best examples are the Chrono Triggers and Final Fantasy’s, games whose epic ambition was always clearly at loggerheads with their little SNES cartridges. The ambiguous pixel sprites were an abstraction of something much bigger than could be visually communicated: “Here’s a story about saving the world, and we’ll tell it in cave paintings.” It worked though, mostly by my part to imagine beyond the blocky limitations. I could give boss battles the proper grandeur in my mind while the screen was more a pantomime than the literal interpretation.

Believe me, I appreciate the opportunity to participate in a modern, sci-fi epic, but some parts of this effort can be harder to swallow than others. The mentality behind modernizing the RPG seems to have been to make the screen more literal. The designer has done the imagining for you: the sheen is onscreen now. It’s all realized! And aren’t you glad? Look at all this, it’s just for you.

Part of me is cynical about the fight to realize an ever-growing scale, mostly because it’s not a fight I think we can win. The amplification of technology will always be momentarily impressive, but the reflexive qualities of technology are timelessly surprising and delightful. I think Mass Effect wants to impress me through its scope, but I find myself more swept away with the technology that lets me look closely at others and watch them react to my decisions. All these graphics look the prettiest they ever have, but I’m most impacted by the way they make me feel about myself.

There’s no better vessel for that in Mass Effect than the conversation system. The game feels most alive when you’re talking to others––due in large part to the close framing of your conversation partner’s face. Technology here lets us render our characters in high graphical fidelity, but it only matters insomuch as we can interact with each other. It amplifies something that could have been achievable with less.

The parts of older RPG games that inevitably have mattered most to me were never things inhibited by their technology. RPGs promised characters and story, an inherent capability of any proper medium, regardless of technology. What older RPGs lacked most to me was a compelling way to interact with the game beyond killing things––these games speak through their combat systems and contextualize them with surrounding plot and characters. Technology wasn’t keeping that from changing, but in Mass Effect, it happened to change as a consequence of new technology. In other words, we should have been more creative with our gameplay back then, and sometimes new technology can be the thing to wake us up to that.

It’s the space drama and conversation why I enjoyed Mass Effect 2. It’s like playing Grey’s Anatomy with aliens: who really gives a damn about the plot, but the chance to interact with other creatures and people, to learn about them and express yourself against them? It’s a welcome change from conversation that’s nothing more than a sidelong way of pointing the player towards the next combat scenario. And while dialogue is a forefront of video games now, seeing facial reactions as a visual representations to my button presses feels a little magical. Sometimes this simply results in learning some static backstory, but it’s nice to be able to learn more about others if I want to, for whatever reason. Still, it’s the opportunity to actually interact with others that makes me care. Mass Effect 2’s conversation system works best when it accounts for the emotional impulses to be angry, sad, benevolent, selfish, or whatever. Other times, it conforms every option under the “renegade”, “paragon”, and “neutral” responses, and then I get bored having to think in those terms.

Combat and killing things is still very much a part of Mass Effect 2, but it’s at least more satisfying on a subconscious, narrative level, and so I can swallow the hours and hours of shooting more easily. My stance on shooting in video games has always been that it had better be in service of something bigger––shooting just to shoot is a hard sell for me––but Mass Effect 2’s shooting reinforces its sense of scale and camaraderie. Any combat is bookended with soap opera theatrics, conversations and scenarios where I must recruit and befriend an intergalactic super team. The action between that is an expression of those people as friends. For talking to these people about their problems, they’ll help you solve your own problems, and while that just happens to include convoluted shootouts with other alien races, I always got the sense that they’d all be just as willing to housesit or lend me a cup of sugar had I asked.

As expressive and interdependent as the conversation system in Mass Effect 2 can be, none of it translates to the combat. I like fighting by my friends, but the way I treat them and relate to them while fighting has no bearing on our relationship. If a teammate goes down and I fail to revive them or attend to them quickly, why aren’t they frustrated later? Why don’t I have to pick up the pieces caused by my inattentiveness? If my team makes it through unscathed, shouldn’t we like each other more for it? None of the morality in conversation makes it to combat, either. If in conversation I believe in a hierarchy of goodness, why don’t I carry that to my life on the battlefield? I don’t believe that someone who is pedantically nice would murder so readily, nor that the needlessly mean person would be so attentive to his or her teammates.

Perhaps I’m asking for too lifelike a system, but playing Mass Effect 2, I want to believe in it as though it were that lively. For all the effort BioWare has made to literalize, modernize, and redefine the RPG, I’m still expecting more from the system, imagining it more than it really is. I want to see more of myself in it, for it to respond more and revolve more around me. Even in a sci-fi world where we have begun to come of age beyond our own galaxy, I still want to know that I matter, to see my imprint on the universe and the indelible imprint it has left on me. A refute to the sky-wide evidence that I could be gone in an instant, and it would not matter. Of all our expressions of a role playing game, this might be the most haunting.

Every Video Game I Own (Sort Of)

I bought my PS3 in October 2009 because I wanted to play Uncharted 2. I’ve amassed a good amount of games since then (unfortunately even sold a few). Fresh off college and associate’s degree in hand, I’ve decided it’s high time I put down some thoughts on the games I put time into. I took every game I own on PS3 (and a few Wii and Gamecube titles), mixed them up, and randomly ordered them. Over the next few weeks I’ll be writing a bit about each game – I’m going to try and do a game a day, but if that schedule sucks and makes me hate my life, I’ll probably switch to once a week.

Why should you read? Well, I’ve got some variety here. I don’t want to give the full list – it’ll be more fun that way, I promise – but I’ve got 27 games and a near gamut of genres. For example, this first week, I’ll attempt to bang out my feelings on Mass Effect 2, P.N.03, Wii Fit, Borderlands, Fallout 3, and Smash Bros, and Heavy Rain. The reason I decided to do this little project is because every game I own is–for the most part–in my collection for some reason or another, and I feel differently about each one. If you like honesty and articulation, that’s this. And I was practically built to do it.

That’s my pitch: 27 games over the next few weeks. Comments and clicks make the going easier, so please, let me know if you have something to say or want to talk about anything. ‘Cause really, there might be nothing better than discussing video games.

Once more, here’s the list for the first batch. I’ll periodically reveal more of my upcoming schedule as I go on, too.

1. Mass Effect 2
2. Borderlands
3. P.N.03
4. Smash Bros. Brawl
5. Fallout 3
6. Wii Fit
7. Heavy Rain

Conversations with Code: How to Talk to a Video Game

If there’s an idea that’s supplanted any other in my 19 years of life, it’s letting go of “right” and “wrong”. Correctness is an idea I run up against everyday in my life, and it’s not one I believe in anymore. I was raised on the idea that in every moment there was a “right” and a “wrong,” and that the distinction was always present, always important. It is frustrating to meet people my age who still cling to this bit of dishonesty. It’s my pleasure to talk to all kinds people and learn more about them, but conversations with an absolutist are always a little lethargic.

Deus Ex: Human Revolution is a game that feels built from rejecting this absolutism, instead asserting the idea that you can be satisfied by whatever it is that satisfies you. It’s a game about empowerment, but not in the way video games have traditionally come to be. Although it’s possible to take on the violent, overly-aggressive persona that’s typical in video games, it’s just as possible to become the antithesis — a pacifist problem-solver, a manipulative two-face, and the shades found between. It’s not the first game to offer branching problem solving, but it might be the first to do it meaningfully on this scale. It validates this kind of game design as something that can be entertaining, artistic, and wonderfully satisfying.

Human Revolution is a game about transhumanism, the idea of binding biology and technology to transcend our biological limits. Here’s a question we should be asking: are we defined by our limits or our willingness to move past them? In 2011, the concept of human augmentation is mostly hypothetical compared to how it appears in Deus Ex. We’re far from fully-functional synthetic limbs, augmented senses, and machine-like strength. Our idea of augmentation exists only in minor ethical issues like drug enhancement or steroid abuse, but they’re the progenitors to the kind of questions Deus Ex poses. Drugs and performance enhancers are a step toward a dream-like singularity of technology and biology, a time that will beg us to define our humanity and whether we’re willing to transcend it.

The exciting part of Deus Ex is that this ethical issue is occasionally buried in the gameplay. Deus Ex can be described as an action-stealth RPG, and less descriptive still is that you can hold a gun, and you can shoot people.

The game is best described by its augmentation system: in Deus Ex you play Adam Jensen, ex-SWAT and augmented human whose DNA luckily removes him from the need for Neuropozyne, one of the nasty inconveniences of human augmentation that requires regular dosages for the augmented to stay healthy. You upgrade Jensen with better augments that help him deal with obstacles in his environment. Most augments make Jensen a better killer, but many work to make the more pacifist choices prettier, too. The game lets you circumnavigate direct conflict if you like, leaving the adrenaline of gunfights for the satisfaction of being quiet and humane.

As always, the decision whether to shoot someone will always be more interesting than the mechanics it takes to do it, and Human Revolution embraces this if you let it. Gunfights are always an option, one for which the game won’t punish you but will give you fair consequences. What augments you give Adam Jensen will determine the easiest way to handle them.

Even as it encourages pacifism, it’s frustrating that the meat of Deus Ex pivots around violence. As a narrative on the ethics of augmentation, it’s a disingenuous blind-eye to the kind of experience living as a mechanical human being might be. Human Revolution’s best moments are when your actions dredge up some ethical conundrum with no right or wrong answer, and the gunplay and violence will only occasionally do that.

Violence is conflict at its breaking point. When Deus Ex allows you to negotiate the space between conflict’s beginning and end, its design sings. Perhaps you will decide the fate of a prostitute whose handlers want her to become augmented against her wishes. Perhaps you’ll need to confront someone’s prejudices over human augmentation. These situations might include violence, but it’s important to recognize that they don’t require it. When Deus Ex understands that, it feels like something significant; when it forgets that, it’s forgettable.

Would you ask for this?

And so Human Revolution’s boss battles stand directly against the ethos it builds for itself. These dull sections ask you to kill unthinkingly, and they are best ignored. It’s a shame that these encounters are here – they blemish an otherwise admirable game – but the upside is their inclusion highlights just how silly the idea of a boss battle is in 2011. There’s something startlingly inhuman about letting clip after clip of bullets into a person, openly evil “boss” or no. Why are we always humanity’s last hope against an epic situation? It’s a dishonest crumb of manipulation that’s survived into modern game design, and here might be best evidence of it. And yes, perhaps there’s still room for this antiquity, but that room is smaller than it once was. We are growing old for it.

It should be noted that the art of this game is beautiful. Jonathan Jacques-Belletete (and everyone involved) combined the baroque sensibility of the renaissance with sleek, cyberpunk chic, and the game is worth playing for that alone. In one section Jensen enters the most cultured corporate office I have ever seen. If you must quibble over the character’s stiff animation and robotic faces, at least enjoy what they’re wearing. I have never more wanted to start wearing trench coats.

Deus Ex: Human Revolution gives you the power to transcend human limits and then, at its best, confronts you with the implications of what it would mean. I’d like it more were it less predicated on action and gunplay, but I’m told that’s asking too much. It seems to me that anyone who enjoys shooting people will best be served elsewhere anyway. Why not let us indulge more in fumbling through the moral gray ground? It is, for video games, unfamiliar and welcome.

Deus Ex is not just a jumping-off point for a conversation about the ethics of transhumanism, but a conversation in itself. Above all, this is what I want a video game to be: a conversation, an exchange between player and author, one I can thaw out at and have at any time.

The best conversations are fraught with disagreement, or, at least, the spirit of it. I learn more when people disagree with me. One of the great joys of life is to be presented with something strange, murky, and unfamiliar, and to articulate how you feel about it. These are rare to find from people, much less in video games. When I’ve found them, they have been, at best, a few hours, usually a few minutes. But here’s a conversation that is interesting, exciting, dark, and even troubling – for over a dozen hours. I feel more human for having had it.

Shooting Horses in the Face; or, How Bioshock Infinite could be great

How do you make a story about shooting people interesting? Whilst video games have long been synonymous with violence, they’ve never been nearly as synonymous with shooting a gun as they are today. Games are often pixelated representations of conflict at its boiling point: they take place at a moment that has already exhausted every method of resolution not including the death of other human beings. Where is the room for a story in a conflict that’s always at its breaking point?

At first look, I’m inclined to be impressed by the new Bioshock Infinite trailer. There’s a lot of glitz and twists on the idea of aligning crosshairs, shooting and killing people. There are new mechanics to bring objects into existence from other dimensions, new guns to shoot at people, rollercoaster expressways to ride and riots to start. Technologically, these things have never existed in a video game before. We’ve been able to shoot people in the face for years now, but we’ve never been able to do it in a floating city, and we’ve never done it so fancifully in such a way.

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