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.