In Fable 2, my character got real fat, real fast. It turns out that fattening food, in Fable 2, is plentiful and inexpensive and no one really explains to you how you're supposed to keep yourself slim and trim. It's a pretty clever encapsulation of real-world obesity problems, actually, and while I was somewhat rankled that I wasn't burning fat by doing all this exercise - you know, all these three-day journeys on foot, all that troll-slaying, that stuff - I really had no one to blame but myself for getting my character fat. The foods that fatten you are pretty clearly labeled, once you know what to look for, and the foods that slim you - just celery, it seems - are likewise easy to spot.

This is why thou art fat

It didn't help that, early in the game, I had realized that my default equipment lowered my "attractiveness" stat considerably. Lacking any other clothing at the time, I decided to maximize those stats by stripping my, ahem, female avatar down to her skivvies and basically leaving her that way for the entire game. Once, after I'd gotten pretty hefty, I considered buying new clothes, but the nearest store only carried these sort of Victorian-style dresses and powdered wigs... and can I just say? That stuff is godawful.

Look at that nonsense

It certainly didn't flatter the considerable carriage of my avatar, and by that time I'd grown sufficiently comfortable with my unfortunate physique that I decided to ride out the rest of the game in underwear as I slowly tried to slim down.

It's one thing to select a female avatar and make her run around bare-ass. I'm hardly the first guy to do that, and Fable 2 is hardly the first game to permit it. But the genius of Fable is the way it creates investment in the avatar's body. When I first started playing, she was just another person on the screen. Same as Mario, same as Cloud. She didn't become my character until the game started trying to take her identity away from me. I wanted to be a slim, athletic adventurer, and as soon as Fable 2 started holding me responsible for all the damn pie I was eating, suddenly I didn't have the body I wanted anymore. Over time I came to accept that I had this body because of the choices I made, and, given the option, I refused to cover it up.

By that time, I'd long since passed the point where you could accuse me of keeping my avatar naked because I wanted to ogle her. I was not a good-looking woman by that point, and if I'd wanted to maximize my aesthetic enjoyment, it would have been easy enough to cover myself up or start a new, pie-free playthrough. I kept myself naked as a reminder of the body I wanted to achieve.

As it happens, the thing that inspired me to finally play Fable 2 was an article on Gamasutra, written by a guy who complained that using long-range weapons made his (female) avatar increase in height. A dubious correlation, to be sure, but that wasn't his point of contention. According to him, he grew self-conscious about the way his avatar towered over even the tallest NPCs, going so far as to say that being this tall, as a woman, made him uglier, and lessened his enjoyment of the game. He didn't seem to realize - or appreciate, in any case - that the game was forcing him to wrestle with something some actual women have to come to terms with - something that real life would never force him to confront. That is the unique power of games. It's one thing to, say, watch a movie about a woman who's unhappy with her body. It's quite another to look at a character on the screen and say, That is my body and I am unhappy with it.

So did I go into Fable 2 anticipating that it would provide me with an ersatz understanding of what it's like to be a woman with body issues? Well, not really. I knew I'd end up being a tall chick, but that's not really off-putting for me. Becoming overweight, however, caught me off-guard and gave me an experience no other game has. Few games approach that level of depth and agency when it comes to the player's avatar, and while the Fable games may not be everything their players - or their creator - dreamed they might be, they're still unique and worthwhile.

The Mod Community

So the Modesty Survey has been making the rounds, and my perspective is, oh, good, here's something I can have an opinion on.

Now, I had a culturally Christian upbringing, which means my family celebrated Christmas and Easter, and at the age of fourteen I independently devised Pascal's Wager, and that motivated me to calling myself a Christian for a couple more years. Not that anybody asked.

These days I don't claim any religion, for three reasons:

1. I don't feel the need to associate myself spiritually with one denomination or another,
2. Speaking the name of my Bloody-Handed Empress would call down a plague of rot and ruin to the Earth, and
3. Again, nobody's really asking.

So I don't share a lot of spiritual DNA with the respondents to the Modesty Survey, which is a set of questions gathered from "Over 200 Christian girls" to which "over 1,600 Christian guys" responded. It's obvious, just by looking, that the survey was done with the best of intentions, and that the respondents were answering in good faith. Well, that, or that everyone involved is a troll and they're all just trying to incite cultural backlash, because, you know. Internet.

If you look at the periphery of the survey's website, you'll see that the sponsors of the survey, Alex and Brett Harris, are avowedly not trying to get any laws passed, or start ordering women around. They are, in their own words, "not telling you what to wear -- we're just telling you what we, as guys, have to guard against."

That's what it comes down to, really, in the Modesty Survey. The purpose of modesty, respondents seem to agree, is to prevent men's passions from becoming aroused and inflamed and veiny. Here's an excerpt from an exceedingly typical response:

"I find it so much easier to respect and talk to a girl who is dressed modestly. To see a girl dressed in a low-cut blouse or a tight-fitting shirt looks like she's inviting you to sin. At best it's inconsiderate of her brothers in christ. At worst it's deliberately tempting men who are trying to be righteous."

Now, I can't win any arguments with these people by arguing that sex and sexual thoughts aren't sinful. What I hope is a bit more negotiable is the question of responsibility.

Here's how I see it, survey respondents: you're asking these women to cover up something natural: their bodies. Your sexual thoughts, when you see those bodies, are equally natural. And yet you refuse to take full responsibility for keeping those thoughts under wraps. To hear some of these guys talk, that's an enormous burden. I don't see what the big deal is, personally; to me, sexual desires aren't troubling, any more than my natural desires to do things like eat or sleep or pwn noobs or txt whl drvng. Sure, those desires can be distracting, but I've long since learned to deal with them. The survey respondents, clearly, have not.

So where does the anger and frustration go when these men succumb to their desires? Here's what a typical respondent had to say about how immodestly dressed women make him feel:

Saddened; disappointed; sometimes angered. They're distracting good men, dishonoring God and marriage, and offering themselves cheaply--which makes me desire even more strongly a girl who is modest, who is valuable.

Really, dude? You got all that from a sports bra?

And that's a very, very typical response. Not all the respondents said that they were disgusted with immodest women, or that they didn't respect them, or that they tried to distance themselves from them. But a hell of a lot of them did. These men have so much indignation, such a feeling of betrayal, because the women they see on the street won't help them stop thinking certain thoughts. And that indignation, apparently not ugly enough on its own, spills over into all sorts of assumptions as to how she's "offering" herself.

It so happens that I was reading Persepolis when the Modesty Survey came to my attention. I mean literally while I was reading Persepolis, I glanced up at my laptop and checked some blogs, because apparently my attention span is so shot-to-shit that even a comic book can't hold me for very long. Persepolis, for those who don't know, is the true story of a young woman growing up in Iran in the 80's and 90's, where, among other things, headscarves were mandatory and revealing clothes were forbidden.

In one brief sequence, the author, Marjane Satrapi, is walking down the street, dressed just as modestly as the law prescribes, drinking a Coke. A Kuwaiti immigrant - a new arrival, after the then-recent Iraqi attacks on Kuwait - pulls up to her and asks her,

"How much? How much?"

because, you see, he thinks she's a prostitute. She explains to us, as her uncle later explained to her, that "[In Kuwait] women are so lacking in rights that for a Kuwaiti, a girl who walks outside while drinking a Coke can't be anything but a prostitute."

My point? Not that an online survey is tantamount to the dictates of a fundamentalist government. My point is that the appearance of a modest woman and the appearance of a prostitute are cultural inventions, and western culture no longer conforms to the perceptions of evangelical Christianity. Maybe you assume that tight jeans and a low-cut top signify that a woman has no morals, no empathy to the feelings of men around her, and no respect for herself. And you'll be just as wrong as the guy who looked at a young woman, covered head to toe in dark, concealing clothing, noticed the Coke in her hand, and was dead certain she was a hooker.

Inception

Perhaps you've heard of confirmation bias. Put simply, it's the tendency to seek out information that corroborates what we already know or believe. No doubt it was terribly important to human survival back in caveman days, when it wasn't wise to seek out "both sides" of the sabretooth tiger issue. And as recently as the 1910's, confirmation bias probably served humanity well in its dealings with the Kingdom of Fae. Faeries are fuckers, they've always been fuckers, there's no need to "see things their way."

But these days, confirmation bias is famous for nothing so much as being the reason people disagree with me on the internet. Not everyone has the good sense to get their news from the same source I do (namely, a transcript of Glenn Beck's radio show run through Translation Party), but even I fall victim to confirmation bias. Actively seeking out challenges to your preconceptions is hard work, and not always rewarding.

There's one area, however, in which I gleefully seek out opposing viewpoints, albeit purely in order to strengthen my existing opinion: movie reviews. When I see a really good movie, I immediately head to rottentomatoes and pore over all the negative reviews. Inception was no exce...

Ugh.

It wasn't a deviation from the norm.

Inception is a heist movie that takes place primarily in the realm of dreams. The first half of the movie begins in traditional heist movie fashion; we assemble the team of six, we learn their motivations (exoneration, money, money, curiosity, money, and money), and we see them plot their heist, laying out the dangers, the architecture, and the plan that will ultimately go wrong.

Inception's distinction is that the heist occurs inside the subconscious of the target. Also, it's not that the team is stealing an idea from the target's mind, it's that they're planting an idea. This requires them not just to enter a dream, but a dream within a dream within a dream. Why? Well...

There's a lot of rules in Inception, and I have to concur with the reviewers who have pointed out that most of the lines in the movie are dedicated to explaining how the dream world works. But that's not the weakness some reviewers seem to think it is; for one thing, plenty of traditional heist movies, or any movie centering around a complex plan, devote a great deal of screen time to explaining what they're about to do, what they're doing, and what they just did. The only difference is that Inception makes up its own rules. And I love that.

I'm a huge fan of any work of fiction that props up its fantastical elements with a coherent and consistent set of rules. Inception does this brilliantly, building its mythology on precepts that anchor each subsequent revelation to the overall narrative. That I managed to find the conclusion of this film - in which people plunge into concentric levels of the dreamscape - a wee bit predictable is a testament to how much sense it all makes.

Inception's detractors are a fairly diverse lot; of course, there's the people who say they didn't get it, didn't follow the twists of the narrative, the complex rules of the dream world. Well, sucks to be you. I paid attention and I understood the damn movie.

Admittedly, we all bring our intellectual biases to the movies; no doubt there are people who thought Primer was simplistic and over-explained. I'd engage them in a debate about that, but given their prodigious intelligence they'd probably win, or, failing that, kill me with their minds. The point is, I found Inception to be right at the sweet spot - mentally challenging, but not overwhelming - because I have experience absorbing that kind of fiction and because I was paying attention. Other people would find it too simple, others too complex. The preponderance of positive reviews, and the box office take, suggest that Christopher Nolan made the film smart enough, and no smarter.

Of course, not every negative review attests to losing track of the plot. Some claim to have merely been jerked around by it, arguing that Inception tries to keep the audience guessing as to whether what they're seeing is a dream or not. But it really, really doesn't. There's basically two sequences wherein the audience is meant to be surprised that they're in a dream, and both sequences are illustrative of the dream-delving experience we are meant to understand. And in any case, come on: you should come to a movie like Inception prepared to question whether each scene is really a dream, or the entire movie is a dream, or the entire movie theater you're sitting in is a murder/sex dream and the bodily fluids are about to start flying.

And at least one review pointed to gaps in the film's logic, arguing that they threatened the integrity of the film's logical architecture. Well you know what, negative reviews? There's gaps in regular architecture too.

They're called windows. CHECKMATE.

Actually, in spite of my best efforts I think that's a workable analogy. There's gaps, sure, but they don't compromise the portion of the logical framework that's responsible for holding up the story. Not to mention, filling them in would have taken more screen time and contributed nothing to the actual story. For example: one protagonist, in a dream, is ineffectually firing a gun at an adversary. Another protagonist steps up with a grenade launcher, dispatches the enemy, and chides his compatriot for not "dreaming up" better weaponry. So why not dream up even better equipment? Well, the short answer is that this is not a movie about people charging around in mech suits with death rays and impenetrable force fields, which would be the only realistic outcome of giving characters any equipment they wanted. Trust me on this one; I've run D&D sessions.

There's more, and probably better, arguments against Inception than what I've listed here. Probably the best is the accusation that the film lacks a strong emotional thread; personally, I found the internal struggle of the main character, and in particular that starkly literal way it was portrayed, to be extremely resonant. Even if you disagree, I'd say Inception is worth seeing just to see how all the pieces fit together.

Burch again, dipfuck. Oh wait that doesn't work nearly as well

Like Tim Rogers, who I like a lot despite (because of) the way reading anything he writes gives me the feeling that my brain's just been on the Teacup Ride with an open sack of dogshit, I'm increasingly convinced that Roger Ebert is trolling us with his poorly-argued, intellectually dishonest posturing on this whole "games-as-art" issue. And ever since Homestuck taught me that trolls are nothing but horned aliens occupying a different time stratum from our own, and that their online antagonism is just a poorly-planned effort to rescue themselves from some as-yet-unexplained apocalypse, my opinion on trolls has softened a bit. So me and Ebert, we're cool.

But I recently read an article by Anthony Burch, linked on Ebert's twitter, that agrees with him in a way I CANNOT ABIDE. He cross-invokes Heavy Rain and Se7en as his case studies in games and film, starting out like so:

Detective Mills, having lost everything dear to him, has to decide John Doe's fate. He desperately wants to avenge the death of his wife, but Somerset has warned him: John Doe wants you to kill him. He wants you to be overcome by Wrath.

What if we could choose whether or not Mills should pull the trigger? What if, as Heavy Rain so often does, we were allowed to decide not only what Mills should do, but subsequently who he is as a person, and what the overall theme of the film should be?

On the one hand, that'd be a satisfyingly difficult choice to make, in the context of a BioWare RPG or whathaveyou. No clear "right" answer. Could be a pretty suspenseful moment of contemplation for the player.

On the other hand, Mills is already his own character: he went through the entire film getting into arguments and beating up paparazzi. If the player made Mills put his gun down and let John Doe rot in prison, it'd be wildly inaccurate with his character, and it'd effectively demolish the thematic punch of the scene's true outcome. Se7en is (amongst other things) about the ubiquitousness of human evil, and how we can't truly separate ourselves from it. If Mills lets John Doe live, it becomes a story about a Really Good Cop triumphing over a Really Evil Guy.

Burch is arguing that a single decision negates the identity of Detective Mills, if that decision doesn't fall in line with Burch's expectations. But really, Mills doesn't turn into a Really Good Cop if he doesn't shoot John Doe. He becomes a Deeply Flawed Cop who Made A Decision to deny a Really Evil Guy the victory he was looking for. It's not a terrible story - maybe an inferior one- but clearly that wasn't the story Se7en was trying to tell.

But the fact that it was a decision is the whole point of that scene. It's a good choice for a discussion about narrative in video games, actually, since decisions are where interactive media has the almost-totally-unrealized potential to transcend traditional media.

Burch hints at the problem in realizing that potential - it's way, way too easy to make the right decision. The morality systems in most video games are often highly transparent, and you can pretty easily guess how your Morality Meter is going to swing based on your actions. Detective Mills' decision, for players, is a cakewalk, whereas in Se7en it's a gut-wrenching, ultimately futile struggle. But interactive media has the potential - as far-off as it might be - to make that decision almost as hard for the player as it was for Mills.

I don't know who's going to make that game; it'll be a hell of an undertaking to make that experience, pulling the player through a sicking lower-intestine waterslide of violence and psychosis and horror and plopping them down into a desert with a man at the end of their gun barrel and they want that man dead, dead, dead, dead and when you can inspire the feelings of loss and rage that Mills feels in that scene, something that tugs at a player's gut and forces them to pull that trigger, you'll have done something that no movie can do. But I don't know that anyone's come close.

Burch moves on to Heavy Rain, arguing that player agency, insofar as Heavy Rain provides it, is a choice between making the character act consistently or inconsistently.

Heavy Rain's player/avatar dissonance is even more pronounced when the player and the character desire different things. Say you're interested in getting the "best" ending, because you really want the Four Heroes trophy. Since you assume that getting to Ethan's son is the best way of assuring Ethan survives, you successfully complete the first four trials without difficulty.

Upon reaching the fifth trial, however, you find yourself in a pickle: the only way to get the final piece of the address is to force Ethan to drink poison, which will absolutely, positively kill him in sixty minutes (if you've already completed the game, please try to ignore the fact that it absolutely, positively does not). You want Ethan to survive so you can get that Four Heroes trophy, so you decide not to have Ethan drink the poison. But wait: you just created a version of Ethan Mars who is willing to endure intense physical torment and commit murder to save his son...but who won't drink some poison to completely ensure Shaun's survival? That doesn't make any sense. You wouldn't accept that if you saw an otherwise-consistent character do that in a film, would you?

Really? You don't see how that would work, dramatically?

You don't think it's potentially compelling for a father who's just gone through hell for his son to discover that his own life is the one thing he values above his son's? Think of how harrowing it would be for a father to learn that about himself. Imagine the guilt in his eyes when the other protagonists bring him his son, safe and sound, and he has to go back to his life with his son - a relationship that was already in tatters - knowing exactly what he would sacrifice for his son - and what he wouldn't.

If you don't think there's a story there, that's your problem. And player agency doesn't have to be a choice between upholding or subverting the integrity of the player character. With a sufficient investment of time and manpower, you could make a game where the player's actions truly shape a character, rather than just guiding a pre-made character through a sequence of misadventures. Ultimately, Heavy Rain only scratches the surface of what would be possible if you had thousands of people working on a game for infinity billion years.

Storytelling potential aside, though, it's true that the player's motivation differs sharply from Ethan's, even without the trophy. The player knows there are four protagonists and that the story can continue if one of them dies; they know that 1) they've got a shot at seeing the story end properly, with or without a living Ethan and 2) Even if Ethan doesn't get the last part of the address, the other protagonists have a shot at figuring it out. Both of those things cause the player to value Ethan's life in a very different way than Ethan himself would.

If you want Ethan's life to mean as much to the player as it means to him, you can't have the other protagonists. You can only have Ethan, and when he's dead, you fade to black and the story is over. Best-case scenario, you drink the poison (I'm going to pretend it really does kill him, because that's tons more fun), rush to the address, save your son, take him in your arms, and then - dead.

Worst-case, you don't make it there. Dead.

Middle-case, I guess you call the police and give them the address, and then dead. Is your son going to be okay? Eh, maybe. You're dead, you don't get to find out.

Or you don't drink the poison. Obviously that's still an option.

As for the sex scene, let me defend Heavy Rain in no uncertain terms by saying that, uh, yeah, the sex scene really didn't work for me. Didn't feel like the story had earned it. Didn't feel like these characters shared that kind of connection. It sucked. Can we agree that the shower scenes were pretty okay, though? Let's not be hatin' on nudity.

Wong again, jackass

David Wong wrote another damn thing about video games on Cracked. I have a lot of respect for the guy, and someday I will tell you the secret history of my life and the works of David Wong (hint: dicks are involved) but today is not that day. Today I want to focus on just one thing Wong had to say in this article:

"Don't tell me it's unfair to compare games to movies, either. When even Mario games come with dialogue and cutscenes, it's crystal clear that gaming wants to be a storytelling medium."

Well, I guess. But what does it really mean that Mario games are trying to be "storytelling mediums"? We're humans; we like stories. We are stories: I'm only the person I think I am because my memories tell me a story where I'm a brave, confident, sexy individual who cries when women talk to him. And nothing gets an audience's attention unless there's a narrative attached. You ever watched a commercial for Axe body spray? I have, because I occasionally check out anime on Hulu, and that's a demographic (or "mogra") that advertisers can be certain is failing to get laid.

A commercial that tried to advertise Axe without a narrative would go like this: "Spray Axe on your body and you will smell like cardamom and citrus and anime." Compare that to the way Axe is actually advertised: A moderately muscular guy, alone in his bathroom, looks quizzically at the can of Axe before spraying himself with a great choking cloud of the stuff. As soon as he sets down the can, the room around him begins to shift, forming into row after row of curves, as the walls of his bathroom reveal themselves to be formed entirely out of 19-year-old girls wearing body paint that, when they are in formation, makes them appear to be a solid wall of white brick. Pull back to reveal that the young man's entire apartment building is similarly formed out of women. Pan down to show that the lower levels are made of women further down the evolutionary scale: homo habilis, austrolopithecus, etc. Zoom in to the molecular level to reveal... well, you've all seen the commerical, right?

Anyway, the narrative is this: wear Axe and you will never stop having sex. Lots of other commercials tell the same story. Does that make commercials a "storytelling medium?"

Sure. But it doesn't make their goals all that lofty. And you shouldn't assume that every video game that ever told a story is reaching for the artistic stars. Sometimes the story matters: sometimes the story is merely good on its own, and sometimes it's woven into the gameplay in a way that strengthens the experience of both. But a lot of the time, it's just there to be a story. It's flavor; it's garnish. And this misunderstanding has to be responsible for - at minimum - two hundred and thirty percent of all the go-nowhere "are games art" flamewars on the internet, where people smugly point out that a lot of games don't have terribly good stories.

Mario games, and thousands like them, have who-gives-a-shit stories because the alternatives are:

1. Have literally no story, which is boring, and harder than it sounds, or
2. Have a really good story, which takes time and budget and, when your game is about jumping on platforms and your mogra includes 8-year-olds, usually isn't going to improve the core experience.

Some games do try to live or die by their stories. And, as little story as the Mario games have, the fact that they're about saving a princess from a dragon is not altogether lacking in cultural relevance. But if you're looking for art in the Mario games, it's not in the story. It's literally everywhere but the story: in the art, the music, the flow of the gameplay, the sublime surprise of seeing and understanding and sharing a new, bright world.

So, no: it's not fair to "compare games to movies," because games exist on a broader spectrum than movies. The games that can fairly be compared to movies, because they try to accomplish the same goals, are a relatively small subset of that spectrum. "Having a story" doesn't mean games are trying to be movies. It just means no one wants to play "Green Square Navigates 60 Inventive Arrangements of Black Squares."

As to Wong's point that games have a lot of maturing to do: I agree, of course. And I'll leave the game industry with this tip: you don't need to hypersexualize your characters. Crowdsource that shit, and let the internet hypersexualize them in ways you hoped were never possible. If Bayonetta had been realistically proportioned and modestly dressed in the source material, she'd still be a six-legged centaur with J-cups on Deviantart. And I think that's pretty cool.

The Tester: Reality Shows, Reality, and Level-Three Graphical Looseness

I work as a game tester. It's a job that doesn't come with a lot of extracurricular demands, but this is one of them: commenting on Sony's new reality show, The Tester.

Firstly, I have nothing to complain about. I am, in the world of game testing, uniquely fortunate. There's no other word for it.

Lucky, actually. That would be another word for it. Really, the English language is full of synonyms, I don't know why I even said that. So I'm lucky.

I work at a little place called Telltale Games. I say that without irony; it's really rather small. It's not Sony, and for me that's a good thing. I, and a handful of other testers, sit within spitting distance of designers, programmers, and 3D modelers, in an office space that possesses no real sense of hierarchy - at least, not so much as to be oppressive. In a larger company, not only would I not be seated within spitting distance of any non-testers, I would be professionally compelled to refer to it as "getting-spit-on distance," in acknowledgment of my status.

It helps immensely that Telltale is an episodic games company. THE episodic games company, really. Others have tried, and they have been poisoned. Uh, metaphorically. By market forces. Testing games gets tedious, yes, but in a monthly release schedule, the point at which the game gets tedious is followed pretty quickly by the point at which the game gets shipped.

But even at its best, testing's just a job. A weirdly fetishized job, yes, but maybe that's not so different from any reality show prize. Singing can be a lot of fun. Singing for a living? It is, I'm guessing, just a job. Some reality shows offer relationships, but relationships are not prizes. They're relationships, and if you won them on a reality show they are probably really quite bad relationships. There's at least some honesty in giving out money as a prize, because we all know what money does: it makes you happy forever if you have enough of it.

But I'm not going to say that The Tester is a bad idea. The internet has already tensed around the announcement, holding the show tight within a sphincter of reality. The Tester's target audience is savvy; they will not miss the blogs and the blurbs that are, even now, poised to strike down the Tester each time it lies sweetly about the humble profession of game testing. Ultimately, viewers will know more about the industry than they did before The Tester was aired.

Yes, I am an optimist. Maybe that's the real reason I like my job.

Blogging about the Simpsons

That's a screenshot from the most recent episode of The Simpsons.

The storyline of this episode concerns Grandpa Simpson's famous rambling stories, and the revelation that they are actually fascinating if you bother to listen to them.

I'm not sure it's a coincidence that an episode whose message is "old people have a lot to offer" was written by someone who thinks "computer" and sees a roughly ten-year-old Mac OS.