Neolithic Agriculture and the Modern Gamer

Let's talk about monoculture. For everyone not up on their Mesopotamian agriculture practices, monoculture is a method of farming in which the same crops are planted on the same plots of land, year after year after year. It's simple, tidy, and utterly unsustainable. 

As it turns out, different plants require different nutrients. Each will take certain nutrients out of the ground and put others back in. This isn't a problem for the first year, or the first five years, or mayber even the first twenty. But after too many years of sustaining one kind of plant, the plot of land no longer has the stuff that plant needs to sustain itself. The crop has literally exhausted its own ability to exist.

But there's a solution. Farmers living in 6000 BCE might not have been educated in the modern sense, but they knew their work. And without knowing why, they understood that by changing the crops grown in a given field from year to year, they would ensure it remained productive for years to come. 

The concept of monoculture has an important lesson to teach in practically every field. In economics, we understand that all enterprise requires demand to sustain it, and in media, novelty and interest function similarly. The common element here is a single idea: any practice any field, from farming to banking to film production, has an expiration date. Stagnation might seem easy easy or tidy or traditional, but it's a surefire way to run yourself out of a job in the long run. The only cure is change.

Now imagine a world in which not committing murder is a radical choice. Where by the simple act of not killing any old person on the street out of convenience, or random malice, or sheer impulse, you have managed to distinguish yourself as a model citizen.

That's the current status of video games, on a whole. In the current culture of game design, offering a narrative where the player does not commit murder is a radical choice.

I don't want to retread the tired and false argument that video games are murder simulators that warp our youth into deranged lunatics. But when I can look out on a field of triple-A titles and count the number of games that don't require killing on one hand, count the number of games which aren't power fantasies on one hand - there's something wrong. Monoculture in media is just as unsustainable as in agriculture.

Say you're a moviegoer. Movies are important to you, because you grew up with them, and they're not just the medium with which you're most familiar, they're also a cultural signpost. You identify with characters from movies, you go to movie conventions, and you met most of your friends through movies.

Now imagine that 95% of movies coming out were horror films.

And to be fair - you like horror films. Some of you favorite movies are horror films. But when horror films are that inescapably abundant, you might start to long for a nice comedy. Maybe even a drama or a biopic. And even though you've asked for it, even though every non-horror movie to hit the silver screen makes millions because there's just no competition, practically every studio out there just keeps cranking out horror films.

And after years and years of this, you start to wonder: are movies even worth it anymore?

That's what it's like being a modern gaming fan.

(Well, plus some seriously toxic communities that I'm not even going to poke a stick at here.)

While there's nothing inherently wrong with violent video games - indeed, many of them are quite good - when there's nothing but violent video games to be seen, that's a problem. That much uniformity and saturation is just bad for the medium. It hurts fans, who lose access to a vast breath of potential innovation that just isn't being produced. It hurts game studios, who lose profit due frustration on the part of fans and talent alike. And artistically, it stifles new and unique narratives, choking the potential of one of the most versatile forms of media ever created and making serious discussion of video games as an art form all but impossible.

To be fair, indie gaming community has been making strides in this direction. A resurgence of narrative-driven games, of Tetris-like games too abstract for violence to enter the picture, and of thoughtful explorations or critiques of the medium has loosened the stranglehold of monoculture on modern gaming. 

Still - I'm sad to admit it, but this never such a glaring problem to me until I played a game which both critiques the omnipresence of violence in games without requiring the same violence from the player. (That game is Toby Fox's phenomenal RPG Undertale, which systematically questions aspects of videogames as a medium I've never before seen attacked.)

The most dangerous thing about monoculture is how easy it is. Some of it might stem from laziness, some from tradition, but I'd estimate the bulk of it is a simple matter of failing to challenge assumptions so deeply-ingrained we don't even think about them. Beating monoculture is not a matter of asking unasked questions, of opening doors that were closed. It's a matter of asking questions that haven't even been considered - of building doors where once we saw only walls.

And then, once our new doors are in place, finding new walls to knock down. 

Dark Chronicle: Fixing the World

                Games do setting better than any other medium. While novels or films might pay some attention to their setting, a game is its setting, just as a novel is its text. Games communicate everything through their settings, so the setting has to be strong and memorable. Luckily, they’re well up to the task. To take advantage of the medium’s natural strength, many games focus on exploration, which is why Minecraft works. But exploration isn’t the whole story. Most exploration-heavy games like Mass Effect or Legend of Zelda still have a clear goal that gives them a sense of impetus and progression, and marks the boundary between a sandbox and an adventure.

                Adventures are about how the heroes become the people they need to be, and about the consequences should they fail. Not all involve travel, but many do, because travel links the heroes’ development to its impact on the world around them. Travel both causes and represents change: the process through which the heroes become the people they need to be. Video games do this fantastically well, because when players interact with a setting, they empathize with it. When Minas Tirith falls in Return of the King, we mourn the heroes’ loss of their home. When the Citadel falls in Mass Effect 3, it’s the place itself we mourn. We’ve connected with and protected it for three games, and when we can’t save it, we feel responsible. We feel like we’ve failed, and we want to take it back. We want to rebuild it.

                We can talk about how saving the world is important, necessary, but no medium can get us as personally and emotionally involved in saving the world as games. Books and movies make us want to save the people in the world, but only games make us want to save the world itself. They make their world our home, and we don’t want to let it break.

                But what if it’s already broken?

                In Dark Chronicle (also titled Dark Cloud 2), a 2001 action-RPG for PS2, you play as a young man named Max, who builds and fixes machines and carries a mysterious red stone around his neck. Max lives in Palm Brinks, a cozy industrial-age walled town closed off from the outside world. Though its railroad once brought in a booming age of exploration and growth, it’s since been shut down, the town gates sealed. The community is tight-knit and warm, but static: few residents know or care much about the world outside. Assassins soon try to take your stone, and you flee the town through the underground aqueducts.

                You step outside to find a world stripped of civilization. Using the railroad your mentor helped reestablish, you travel farther and soon meet Monica, a girl who carries a blue stone to match your red one. Monica is from the future, and grew up on the losing side of a great war against a figure known as Griffon, who has been wiping out humanity across time. Only Palm Brinks remains in the present. The stones have the power of time travel: Monica’s blue stone allows her to jump a hundred years back in time, while Max’s red one allows him to travel a hundred years forward. By using both in tandem, you can plant the seeds of civilization in your time: small settlements that will come into bloom in hers.

                Just because you’ve left Palm Brinks doesn’t mean you’re gone for good. The city is home. It’s a foundation to build on and a cushion to fall on. It supports you when you need to rise, and it’s there to catch you when you collapse. Palm Brinks is that world’s heart, and the love that went into building it oozes from every cobblestone and storefront. No area exemplifies that like the once-bustling train station. With the railroad line shut down, no trains go in and out, no passengers line up, and no clerks sell tickets. Still, the city maintains it like the day it was built. It’s gorgeous and baroque and empty: a place of motion, held in place, filled with potential that could break free with the spark of an engine. Like the world, it’s dormant, not dead. That the developers put so much effort into one area makes Palm Brinks a place that we, the players, care about. It’s not just somewhere we have to go back to; it’s a place we want to go back to, a place we want to protect. It’s not just Max’s home. It’s ours.

                Having a home means you’re not afraid to fall, because there are people who will catch you. The people there give you a place to come back to, and in return, you give them a place to go. Your task is to rebuild civilization, and you can’t have civilization without people – but the only people left are in Palm Brinks! They’re kind people, good people, but they’re complacent, and before they’ll venture out with you, you need to understand them and help them with their problems. You show each of them you care, and they learn to care as well, not just about the people around them, but the world as a whole. You’re the one that builds the settlements, but they live in them and bring them to life. Your adventure becomes everyone’s adventure, and once you’ve helped them become the people they need to be – helped them care, fixed them – they fix the world themselves.

                The people in your settlements aren’t the only ones making things better. There’s a beautifully cyclical nature to the way you rebuild the world. Once you’ve built your friends new homes, you travel to the future to find that over a hundred years, what you’ve built has blossomed under their care. Their descendants in turn give you tools and knowledge that you can carry back to the present and use to help the settlers. Ancestors nourish descendants and descendants nourish ancestors, building between them a world far better than the one that was lost.

You don’t just rebuild the world; you don’t just rebuild the world. You unite two groups of people, creating each other across a hundred years of history, to bring the world through its darkest hours shining brighter than it ever had before. To fix the world, you fix the people in it. You teach them to care, but before that, the game makes you care in a way no other medium could. It shows you a broken place, a beautiful place, a place full of loss but brimming with potential, a place you fall in love with, a place you can make better. And like the train, all it needs from you is a spark to come alive. All it needs for you to do is interact.

And you do. The rest follows.

Mass Effect 3: How It Ended, and How I Wasn't Angry

So if you know me in anything more than passing, you're probably familiar with my astounding lack of knowledge of most things pop-culture related. See, I grew up in absence of TV, and almost all of my media exposure was in the form of books and video games. 

I AM getting better at it, though! This partly involves working at a media and culture magazine, and partly involves furiously catching up on Things I Need To See. Mostly shows. Occasionally movies. And on very, very rare occasions, games. 

Specifically, certain very high profile games which I somehow missed.

Anyway, last weekend I went up to Boston to visit some friends who happen to possess a certain game system I lack, with a certain game I've been dying to finish for a year and a half. And as luck would have it, a certain winter storm trapped me there with little to do but finish that game.

So I'm happy to announce that in my latest round of Catching Up On Media Several Years Too Late For Anyone To Care...I finally finished Mass Effect 3.

(I know I often discuss at length the Nature and Meaning of whatever bit of media I'm analyzing, but I'm going to assume you know how Mass Effect 3 ends. I knew how it ended before I even started the first game. If it's not a spoiler to mention that Snape kills Trinity with Rosebud, this isn't a spoiler either. My point is, if you somehow avoided the colossal storm of angry nerds yelling after the game's release, and you don't want spoilers, now is your last chance to stop reading.)

(Okay, I can see you didn't. Good!)

Even after dying six or seven times in the grueling penultimate battle - even after dying several more times against the final (very weak) enemy because I had played as a Vanguard and this fight me to actually aim at something - I finished Mass Effect 3.

It was a wonderful and immensely experience, and...

(I'm now stuffing my ears with wax in preparation for the inevitable tide of Nerd Rage.)

(Speaking of Nerd Rage, I'm going to be consistently referring to Shepard as female. If that bothers you, you should probably do some serious thinking about your personal opinions on women and why you hold them.)

...I'm not counting the ending out when I say I iked it.

I can understand the problems that a lot of people had with the ending. It was imperfect. But I don’t think its flaws were nearly as serious as the bulk of the audience seems to think. All in all I’m about…80% satisfied with it.

But because the bulk of the audience seems to have developed an cultish dedication to shitting on the ending, I feel like I have to answer that.

So. Let’s talk about the 20% I didn't like.

There were two major I could see with the ending. First was the change in tone between the intense, emotional, and philosophical clash between Shepard, Anderson, and the Illusive Man and the almost serene atmosphere of the scene following it. As I saw it, this reflected nothing so much as Shepard's utter exhaustion. She's not just tired, she's so tired she can't even feel it.

That  worked because the Crucible was always going to be a moment of transcendence, and to accept that sort of moment, to really understand it, we have to be at our lowest. To accept the miracle, we have to first accept that the situation is beyond our control. Mass Effect 3 is about bringing the entire galaxy to this point. That's what the Crucible is. It's a shot in the dark, a prayer, because nothing else will work - and at the end, Shepard accepts it. She can rest.

But it is a change in tone, and it's a sudden one. Jarring, even. And for some people, that can break immersion.

The other problem was that the writers didn't seem to put much thought put into what Synthesis would actually mean.

I don't have any problem with the fact that Synthesis existed. The Crucible was this Big Thing We Don’t Know What It Does, which would naturally to several options, any of which would be drastic, even transcendent moments that altered the very nature of this universe

Destroy was always going to be on the table, because that was Shepard's original goal. Control was going to be an option too, because that was the Illusive Man's goal. But both are awful! The writers did well to recognize that. Destroy doesn’t fix anything in the grand scheme - it takes care of the Reapers in the short term, but does nothing to stop them from coming back. It's not a step forward; it's a step back. A Shepard who chooses Destroy is the one who looks over the precipice, sees the new world that could be, and backs away. It's passive, and it's cowardly.

Control is worse because, to quote the main villain of Fullmetal Alchemist, the whole point of it is to CAST GOD DOWN FROM THE HEAVENS AND BECOME A PERFECT BEING. It's the height of arrogance. There is a reason Control is the Illusive Man's goal, and it's the same reason he's a villain. Sure, you can say it’s better because Shepard is better, but that’s EXACTLY THE SAME ARGUMENT THE ILLUSIVE MAN MAKES. That he deserves to rule the universe  because he's BETTER than other people. Which should be a pretty big damn hint that it's wrong.

(And the less we say about Refusal, the better.)

No, the correct answer always had to be something truly transcendent. An active choice, a choice to move the world forward, but without arrogance. Synthesis was clearly supposed to be that option. It needed to be there.

But…I don’t think the writers really fully thought through what it actually entailed? Or if they did, they didn’t work hard enough to make those thought processes clear to us - basically, they got lazy.

Yes, there needed to be a moment of transcendent, universal change. But why did that moment of transcendent change SPECIFICALLY have to be the union of synthetics and organics? I’m sure there are arguments, good ones - but I’d like to see them within the actual game. And I'd ideally like to see them made by someone who ISN’T A REAPER.

I's okay though. It's okay.

I’m like 80% satisfied.