The last episode is called “The City That Dares Not Sleep”, was written by me, directed by Jake RRODkin, and made by lots and lots of people at Telltale. I haven’t gotten to play it yet (and probably won’t until I get back from Georgia), but I’m looking forward to it. What I saw during recording the DVD commentary looked like they knocked the presentation up several notches.

My favorite joke in the game, assuming it stayed in: look at the TV screen in the arm controls. Or the based-on text. I’m also happy that it managed to cram in references to Space: 1999, The Wrath of Khan, every previous Sam & Max game, R’lyeh, Fantastic Voyage, The Beast Must Die!, William Butler Yeats, two of Steve’s gags from brainstorming, rampant misogyny, and poop jokes. Definitive proof that Roger Ebert was wrong.

It’s an even-handed article, but there are two pretty clear targets for criticism: focus testing and, for lack of a more convenient word, sexism. I was reminded of Alexander’s article by a post by my ex-coworker Brett Douville’s blog talking about the focus-testing aspect of the story. I don’t have much to add, there, since it’s fairly straightforward: big companies make decisions based on focus testing; making decisions based on focus-grouped metrics and sales figures is deadly to creativity and innovation; individual developers, and studios seeking publishing or buy-out agreements, need to know the extent a publisher makes decisions based on focus testing, so they can decide who to work for or who to make business deals with.

I will say a couple of things, though: first, focus testing isn’t inherently evil. (Whether Activision is, is still up for debate). It’s easy to decry it as the most obvious example of The Suits keeping down The Creatives — I’ve done plenty of decrying myself — but if used correctly, it can be extremely valuable. Back before they merged with the taint of Activision, and were still just known for making preposterously well-balanced and polished games, Blizzard touted frequent play-testing and iteration as one of the keys to their success. Same with Valve, who is, at the time of this writing, yet to make itself known as evil. “Creative control” is laudable up to the point where you’ve clung to your own personal vision at the expense of everything else — the trick is being able to distinguish when you’re getting useful feedback from when you’re getting arbitrary meddling.

And speaking of arbitrary: would focus testing and publisher interference be given so much attention if the situation had been reversed? If a studio had been developing a game with a male space marine as its lead character, and the publisher had insisted that it be switched to a woman, for no better reason than because “women are under-represented” or even “games with chicks sell better,” would that get such a negative response? I’m skeptical.

The only other bit I wanted to mention from Brett’s post was in response to this: “It’s also worth noting that this article received more than ten dozen comments, which is far more than any other news item in the last week or so… clearly this touches some sort of nerve.” And I’d say yes, it touched a nerve because it was designed to: sexism + the current Evil Giant Corporation in the minds of videogamers + creative control ripped from honest developers == instant internet indignation. But I’ve got to point out that the bulk of those ten dozen comments — at least the ones I got through before I remembered why I never read blog comments anymore — were a couple of cranks having a typical pointless internet message board argument. Whenever you’re dealing with Things People Say On The Internet, it’s important not to confuse quantity with quality, or relevance.

And hey, quality over quantity is a good lead-in to what I really wanted to talk about: the sexy, sexy business of making videogames.

Portals versus Rifles

While making the case that games with female main characters do so sell well, Alexander mentions Tomb Raider, Metroid, Mirror’s Edge, and devotes a whole paragraph to Portal [bolding mine]:

And though Portal’s first-person mechanics emphasize the game’s interface and not its jumpsuited leading woman Chell, the Valve team went one step further with GLaDOS, the female-voiced AI whose villainy stemmed from maternal instincts gone twisted. Now GLaDOS is on the fast track to becoming one of gaming’s most beloved characters, and the overwhelming reception for Portal’s originality — plus major anticipation for the sequel — demonstrate that “females don’t sell” could indeed be false logic.

This was the part that caught my attention, because it undermines the entire rest of the article. For starters, I think Alexander is conflating the critical and “mind-share” success of Portal with its financial impact. I don’t know the exact numbers, and I don’t doubt the game has done well for the company. But I can all but guarantee that the types of publishers that are looking to focus groups for their creative decisions are going to be trying to emulate Grand Theft Auto 4 and Modern Warfare before they look to a game like Portal.

Second, I would love to see the industry learn lessons from Portal and follow its example. But of all the interesting things about that game, the fact that the lead character and villain are both “female” is the least relevant. Is this really the prime example of how we can reach better representation of women in games?

The main character is a complete cipher, even more devoid of personality than Gordon Freeman. Her gender — and the use of the phrase “take your daughter to work day” — is completely arbitrary. It’s a case of favoring representation over relevance. Much like how it’s become standard practice to use “she” as the gender-neutral third-person pronoun, e.g. “If a customer wants to buy a beard trimmer, she can find one at Target.” It’s every bit as arbitrary as continuing to use “he,” no more correct but now with the false connotation of being more “respectful.”

GLaDOS is more of a character than Chell, but there’s a problem with that, too: she’s not female. She is, as pointed out, a female-voiced AI. I wouldn’t call out Bobby Hill or Bart Simpson as increased exposure for women in the media, and whenever I’m waiting for a BART train or I reach someone’s voicemail, I don’t think “Girl Power!”

As for GLaDOS’s personality, I think that the idea of “maternal instincts gone twisted” is an enormous reach. I’ve played through the game twice now, and I never once perceived any aspect of femininity in the GLaDOS character. If anything, it varies between phone-operator-neutral, and sarcastic dude in his mid-30s. That could be because I knew going in who wrote the game, or it could be because of my own bias. By the end of the game, I pictured not a female AI or even a computer, but one of my ex-bosses, and I wanted nothing more than to destroy him/it completely. But whatever the case, there’s no dialogue in the game that suggests a maternal relationship.

So the question is: are you just looking for games that have arbitrarily female characters, or have something inherently feminine? Portal is, for the most part, a non-violent game. It emphasizes problem-solving over direct violence. If you want to get Freudian with it, you have a gun that shoots holes instead of bullets. One of the main characters is a box with a heart on it. The game involves baking. At what point does this kind of analysis of a game cross the line from “equal gender representation and empowerment” to “insulting sexism?” I just know that my own take on Portal is that it’s an absolutely brilliant puzzle game that was written like an Old Man Murray post. That’s a compliment, not an insult, but it’s still the direct opposite of “feminine.”

Ciphers versus Sex Objects

So how about the other examples? Samus Arun from the Metroid series is about the worst example possible, considering that the big surprise of the first game was that she was a female at all. If your main character’s gender is secret, you can’t use it as an example of gender making a difference.

Lara Croft? Alexander delivers a good line in saying that the recent incarnations “show more spine than skin,” and I’ll have to take her word for it, since I haven’t played any Tomb Raider games since the first one. And in the first one, she was the worst kind of female character: she was female solely to titillate the predominantly male audience, and her value was measured only in how much money she’d inherited, and how she could do the same things that men can do.

I haven’t played Mirror’s Edge, either, but even on the surface I can recognize it as a step up. (Or maybe leap up followed by a backwards roll?) I never saw any press devoted to the fact that the main character was a woman — or for that matter, an Asian who isn’t a wise sage or a math genius. And it’s not completely arbitrary that she’s female, either: the game requires a lead character who’s athletic, limber and flexible, the opposite of the huge-necked Gears of War dudes.

Because it’s a fairly subtle distinction: I acknowledge that Alexander is not making the case that female characters sell games, just attempting to refute the claim that games with female characters don’t sell.

But there does have to be a stronger justification for making a character female than just “it does no harm” or even “there aren’t enough female characters in games.” I’ve seen too many cases of its being done to pander; for the sake of arbitrary tokenism; or lazy, disingenuous faux-feminism.

In my own experience, I’ve written male characters for games and been asked “why not make him a woman?” It contributes nothing, and it puts the writer on the defensive: suddenly I’m having to defend what was originally an arbitrary decision against an equally arbitrary decision, or otherwise I’m misogynist or at best, insensitive. When it’s completely arbitrary, like Chell in Portal, then there’s nothing gained or lost, so sure, why not make it a woman? But if you’re taking an existing character and insisting on the change, you need to be able to justify changing the “he” to “she” or it’s every bit as pointless and damaging as Alexander’s example of changing “she” to “he.” (Example of a valid reason for the change: if you can get Angelina Jolie-level box office).

My Soul is in the Lost and Found

I’ve got to acknowledge that everything I say is going to be immediately suspect, since I’m what Roy Blount, Jr. calls the most politically-incorrect demographic there is: a white, English-speaking, Christian male from the southern United States. But I’d like to see a game that lets me play as a well-made female character, because that’s a big part of what games are about: letting people do things they can’t do normally.

And you wouldn’t believe it after hearing how under-represented female characters are in games, but there’s actually a ton of games that let you play as a female character, many of them huge sellers: World of Warcraft. Fallout 3. Mass Effect and Mass Effect 2. Dragon Age: Origins. The Sims 3. You don’t hear much about that, and for good reason: it’s almost purely cosmetic. Granted I haven’t played Mass Effect long enough to get to the hot hot girl-on-girl scenes, but from what I have seen, it makes no difference to the game whether Captain Shepherd is a man or a woman.

I tend to make male characters, but when you get right down to it, it’s for the same reason that a lot of guys make female characters: it’s not who they want to be, but who they want to look at for the next 10-50 hours. I don’t know how it is for female players — and I’d like to hear, in the comments — but among male players, there’s a choice between role-playing escapism and good, old-fashioned exploitation, and each aspect gets roughly equal play-time.

For a perfect example of that, look at Half-Life 2 and its episodes. I said that Chell in Portal is a cipher, and by all accounts, Gordon Freeman should be as well. But he’s definitely not — it’s one of the best-written games available, but it’s still every bit the escapist wish-fulfillment that GTA and God of War are.

Like Chell, Gordon Freeman is completely mute and very rarely (if ever) seen in the game. And let’s be honest here: Gordon Freeman is a borderline idiot. He’s constantly falling off things or running into danger. He’s ostensibly a genius physicist, but he has to be given explicit, repeated instructions on how to press buttons or walk in a straight line. Still, the other characters are constantly commenting on his genius, praising him for accomplishing the most basic tasks, or flirting with him. (I picture him as the videogame equivalent of Jon Hamm’s character on “30 Rock.”)

In a different game, Alyx Vance could be precisely the kind of strong female character that people have been clamoring for. But here, she exists only to support Gordon Freeman, both physically in the game’s combat, and emotionally by being incredibly turned on by his silence and complete absence of personality. When she’s not macking on Gordon, she’s lying unconscious waiting to be rescued by him, or she’s getting weepy about her dad. It says a lot about how well she’s written, modeled, animated, and voice-acted, that you tend not to notice that she exists solely for the benefit of men.

While we’re lamenting the fact that publishers chase after a simplistic idea of what will sell to the still-predominantly-male videogame audience, it’d be a good idea to make sure that what we’re hoping for isn’t every bit as simplistic. Nobody in good conscience is going to propose cooking games and dating sims as “see, girls can play their own games!” But do we want the distinction between male and female characters to be as superficial as hair color? Do we want to measure the quality of a female character in terms of whether she can fight and shoot as well as a man? Do we want to keep the genders completely interchangeable, and make sure that 52% of games have female lead characters and 48% have males?

I think it’d be a lot more interesting to play a game that actually has me playing as a woman, to a degree that it makes a difference. What does that mean, exactly? I dunno, since I’m not a woman — that’s why I’d need to play the game to know what it’s like. Would that game sell? I bet it would, as long as it were a good enough game. Would it sell as well as GTA4 or Modern Warfare? Probably not anytime soon — we’d have to make more games that genuinely appeal to women before there’s enough monetary incentive to make higher-budget games for women. Until then, you can just try it out, and focus test the hell out of it.

The games that get the most play-time on my phone are the ones that support portrait orientation (Drop 7, Words With Friends, Helsing’s Fire, Bejeweled, etc), partly because I can jump in for a quick game while I’m otherwise occupied (read: on the toilet). If a game only supports landscape or plays better in landscape, I treat it more like a “real” game: I only start it up when I’m ready to devote a big chunk of time to it. If you play games on your iPhone, iPod Touch, Android phone, or whatever, help me out by answering the poll.

(If you feel inclined to explain, feel free to leave a comment too).

Maybe “hate” is too strong, but it’s fair enough to say that the first StarCraft and I have a troubled history. The troubles went way past any one game, though; this was an abusive relationship that soured me on an entire genre. Maybe an analogy will help clarify:

Before I played StarCraft, it was a completely alien concept that I could be bad at videogames. I mean, I can and will lose games if pitted against another human, and there are things like racing games that I’ll never be good at because I can’t be bothered to care. But the idea that there could be a videogame with robots and spaceships and lasers in it, that I could play by myself against the computer on normal difficulty, and lose? Inconceivable!

It wasn’t a quick and merciful smackdown, either, but a prolonged bare-assed spanking. I’d believe I was doing fine and then slowly, systematically, and rigorously corrected. My breaking point? As early as the third mission in the game, where I’d have to defend a base against Zerg attacks for 30 minutes. I’d try it over and over again, each time thinking Now I know what I’m doing! and each time waiting 25 minutes until my inevitable destruction.

I don’t even want to think about multiplayer. I’ve seen otherwise relatively normal people sit down in front of StarCraft and become transformed, like a cyber-nano-hacker from a syndicated sci-fi series getting jacked into the FutureNet. Their eyes glaze over, their fingers begin furiously tapping keyboard shortcuts, things start blowing up and they’re freaking out over choke points. Even if it were at all possible for me to win against that, there’d be no joy in it, I’d be more machine than man at that point.

So by the time StarCraft 2 was announced, you’d think I’d have learned my lesson. Here was a game tailor made for the Blizzard obsessives who get obscenely fixated on damage per second. For people who’d spent the last 12 years playing this game, presumably making it past the third mission. Screenshots of the sequel were almost indistinguishable from the original (and from each other). It was, by most accounts, more of the same.

But I bought it anyway. And it is, indeed, instantly recognizable and familiar. And I did progress through a couple of simple missions that convinced me I knew what I was doing before hitting one that had me defending my base against Zerg attacks for 20 minutes.

Except this time, I did it. I definitely haven’t gotten better at RTS games in the years since the first game, so I can only figure that Blizzard applied their usual level of exhaustive playtesting to the game to make sure that people like me could play.

The single-player campaign on normal difficulty is right at my level of comfort: easy enough that I haven’t given up in frustration yet, but not so easy that I feel as if I’m being patronized. Plus, the single-player campaign feels like a real game, not just a series of levels tied together with cut-scenes that say “Look How Much We’ve Seen Aliens!” You can choose between different missions to take, there’s a little bit of character building and customization as you collect research and money to make unit upgrades, and you get to hang out in different rooms of your own spaceship.

All the cut-scenes are done in engine, too, which is kind of astounding. It’s fairly standard redneck space marine stuff, but it looks great. And the storytelling within the missions is a huge improvement on the first game’s, too. My first reaction when seeing the game in action was that I’d spent far too long seeing games with short development cycles. There’s a ton of content in StarCraft 2, and you can see all the years of development on the screen.

People better-versed in strategy games could describe the mission balance, unit variety, player matching, and multiplayer. I’m still early in the game; currently in the middle of a mission that has me defending my base against zombified colonists that only come out at night. That’s about five or six missions in, and each one has had its own hook to make it seem distinct. And even if things go downhill from here, I’m happy that the game’s already accomplished the impossible: I’m actually having fun playing the single-player campaign of an RTS. Everything looks, sounds, and feels like StarCraft, except I’m actually looking forward to getting back into it.

Now they just need to hurry up with Diablo 3 already.

I’ve actually been surrounded by it for more than a year, since I was working at a studio continuing the series. And after sitting in on a couple of early design meetings, and reading posts on message boards, and reading reviews and retrospectives, and playing the special editions, I was forced to come to an unsettling conclusion: I don’t like the Monkey Island games anymore.

Inevitably, that’s going to be perceived as embittered grousing on my part, or at best an attempt at “I’ve outgrown adventure games” posturing. But I assure you that that’s not the case. There’s no shortage of people complaining and criticizing on the internet, because it takes absolutely no skill or intelligence to say something sucks. I don’t see the point in just knocking something, because there’s nothing to be gained from it.

No, for me it’s more like being the one person in the crowd who stares at the Magic Eye picture and squints and crosses his eyes until they water but just can’t see the dolphin that everyone else is raving about. Actually, it’s more tragic than that, since it’s coming from someone who used to be able to see it.

The Tales of Monkey Island series was in good hands, because the team was full of people who loved the Monkey Island games (at least, the first two). They could give details on even the most fleeting moments and briefly-seen locations in the games, where the names of the islands, governors, and various pirates weren’t just places and characters in a story but part of a collective consciousness. They had several favorite scenes — several of which I’d forgotten — and could explain not only what happened but how and why they worked so well. It was the best kind of egoless enthusiasm for the games, driven to make a worthy successor no matter what the constraints.

And for a while, I thought it was simply the case that I’d shared that enthusiasm, and then gotten it all out of my system while working on an earlier continuation of the series. But after hearing some people talk about the games, I’m not so sure. During the brainstorming for the Telltale series, and then again in Richard’s essay, people would talk about the “darkness” of the games. That the magic of the first two games was tied to the combination of anachronistic slapstick humor and a darker, more sinister story of ghosts, voodoo, graves, ominous fortresses, and menacing villains. Chris Remo, master of the concise encapsulation, said “I never really associated the Monkey Island games with comedy (I rarely actually laughed) so they aged well for me.”

Which implies that it’s not just that I can no longer see the dolphin, but it wasn’t even a dolphin that everybody else was seeing. It was a great white shark with rail guns on its fins. And powered by a Nazi brain. It’s bad enough not to be able to join in on nostalgia; it’s worse to hear that your nostalgia isn’t even as cool as everybody else’s.

I bought the special edition of the first game when it came out, and I played through it, and it was kind of painful. I could still vividly remember playing the original on my Amiga in college, and I could remember thinking that it was unlike anything I’d seen before. So it was frustrating trying to revisit it and being, well, frustrated. And annoyed. And simply not enjoying the early-90s comedy stylings as much as I had in the early 90s.

But the second one was always my favorite, so I bought the special edition for that as well, twice even. (They really should’ve labeled the iPad and iPhone versions better). And I played through the first fifteen minutes or so, and stopped, and I’m reluctant to dive back in. Partly because adventure games don’t appeal to me as much as they used to. Partly because I still remember some of the puzzle solutions, and I’d miss getting the “a-ha” moment of discovery. Partly because I used to be able to appreciate it as a series of corny jokes and goofy animations, but those don’t entertain me anymore. And mostly because I’m pretty sure my memory of the game is better than anything that could possibly be delivered.

(For the record, it’s not just nostalgia. Sam & Max Hit the Road has gotten better with age, and the animations of the Cone of Tragedy and Sam reading the robot instruction manual still crack me up).

So the comedy no longer works for me like it used to. The drama that other people seem to see has never worked for me. And I’m definitely not crazy about the puzzles; at one point I had the patience to spend minutes or hours working out some obscure adventure game puzzle solution, apparently, but those days are long gone. I’d almost think that my opinions were lining up with one of the writers on Rock Paper Shotgun, something I never thought possible.

But that’s not it, either. Paradoxically, playing through the special editions and not particularly enjoying them has given me a new appreciation for them. Nothing can survive that long on pure nostalgia; there’s got to be something that made those games (especially the second one) stand out in so many people’s memories.

That something, I think, is the sense of experimentation that comes from figuring out how to do something genuinely new: using a videogame to tell a story. Not to mimic a movie or a cartoon, not to use story as context for gameplay, and not as a backdrop for puzzles. Plenty of people (including, I believe, the guys who made the game) have tried to single out one aspect or another as the element that defines a Monkey Island game, but it doesn’t work without that overriding sense of purpose. The meanwhile cut-scenes, the insult sword-fighting, the dialogue trees, none of that’s as interesting or as novel as the environment that made them seem like good ideas.

Maybe there’s a lesson there: developers need to get out of their comfort zones and put themselves in situations that require more novelty. The Monkey Island games weren’t the first to use cut-scenes, dialogue trees, or adventure game puzzles, but I believe they were the first to recognize them as tools to tell a story instead of just elements of a videogame. Instead of putting so much thought into what a character says in this interactive dialogue, maybe we should take a step back and ask whether an interactive dialogue belongs here at all.

So I’m not anxious to jump back into Monkey Island 2, but I’m not going to dismiss the continued appeal as nothing more than nostalgia for a genre long since made obsolete, either. It’s more of a mindset than anything else, and that’s something that doesn’t require any particular group of people, isn’t tied to any particular genre, and isn’t something that could only happen in the 90s before budgets got big and games got complicated. I suspect it just requires a willingness to throw out formula and experiment.

But the problem with Limbo is that it sets such an extraordinarily high standard for itself at the beginning, and the rest of the game doesn’t live up to that. I’m not sure that it’d even be possible to live up to it. You’re dropped into the game controlling the silhouette of a small boy in the middle of the dark woods. The premise is that the boy is in Limbo, looking for his sister, but the only way you’d know that is from the description text when you buy the game; there’s no story setup, no voice and almost no text in the minimalist presentation. So you begin by walking to the right, and you soon encounter the first of the thousands of things in Limbo that will kill the boy, instantly and brutally.

You’ll die a lot while playing the game. It’s not an issue, since you’ll simply restart at the most recent checkpoint, and the checkpoints are, without exception, placed perfectly and predictably. But the die-and-try-again cycle is pretty indicative of the entire game. At the beginning, it works brilliantly: the deaths are sudden, gory, vicious, and even callous. It creates a sense of dread and apprehension more effectively than any game I’ve played since Silent Hill 2: this is a genuine horror game, one that makes the increasingly photo-realistic attempts at horror games seem clumsy and amateurish. I was taken in completely, startled every time a trap snapped shut, wary of walking any further. And even though I’m not particularly put off by spiders normally, I was genuinely repulsed by the ones in this game.

But as you go further in the game, that shock and feeling of apprehension wear off. Seeing the boy get killed just becomes a minor impediment, and you impatiently tap the A button to give the puzzle another try. And that’s the other thing: they become puzzles. Early on in Limbo, everything feels natural and perfectly integrated into the experience — as with any other puzzle game, you’re presented with an obstacle and all the pieces you need to get past it, but everything feels as if it’s supposed to be there. The further you progress, however, the more the puzzles seem contrived and puzzle-like.

And it’s a shame that that’s a complaint, because Limbo is an excellent puzzle game. There are only one or two puzzles that I’d call unfair, and the rest range from very good to genius. And “genius” isn’t an exaggeration — many of the puzzles and obstacles later in the game are the best I’ve ever seen in a videogame. What’s more, almost all of them are presented perfectly: it’s clear within seconds what the obstacle is, you’re given ample room to experiment instead of passively waiting for the a-ha! moment, and you’re given adequate feedback all without words or voice. There are perfectly subtle clues and hints throughout; one example is the minimalist soundtrack, which kicks in during the later puzzles to give you the rhythm you need to get past an obstacle.

I was extremely impressed with the game design, especially as I’ve gotten more and more frustrated with the wordiness (see: pot, kettle) and lack of challenge in videogames. Limbo is difficult, but with just a couple of exceptions, it’s never unfair. The challenge is in being forced to think; with most of the obstacles, after I’d figured out what to do, actually executing the solution was straightforward. And the solutions were frequently clever and satisfying, and for the first time in years, I actually felt smart while playing a game.

But it was still a game, where before there’d been this completely engrossing and captivating experience. I stopped empathizing with the little boy and started getting frustrated at the mushy jumping physics, or the extra jumps he’d unpredictably take at just the wrong moment, or the fact that he’d never learned to swim, or how long it took him to respawn after he was crushed by a giant weight or impaled on a spike. I encountered too many puzzles where you have to die at least once to even see what the obstacle is, so I stopped dreading the deaths and started seeing them as inevitable trial-and-error. I stopped thinking about secret caverns and spooky woods and scary spiders, and started thinking about platforms, switches, boxes, and physics puzzles.

If Limbo had been released with just the last 70% or so of the game content, then it would’ve been an ingenious puzzle game, a little on the difficult side, with amazing art and beautiful presentation. And it’s still one of the most impressive games ever released on XBLA. But after being so completely taken in at the beginning, I have to wonder what a game would be like if it could take that sense of dread and exploration and complete immersion in a nightmare, and carry it through the entire game.

(And for an example of what I mean by perfect presentation of a puzzle, I’ll describe my favorite puzzle set-up after the break. It’s spoiler territory, so best not to read it until after you’ve “finished” the game).

The whole business with the mind-controlling worms was brilliantly presented, and those sequences alone make it a mandatory play-through for anyone making games. Because it hits the trifecta of Videogame Storytelling Mastery: it conveys everything you need to know subtly, non-verbally, and interactively.

When it’s first introduced, it’s shocking on a couple of levels. You see one of the other little boys coming towards you, but he’s not attacking. He flings himself into a pool of water, and you’re left to think: zombies? In a game like this one?

Then later, you’re actually hit by one. It’s not done as a cheap surprise or for shock value: you can see the thing hanging from the ceiling, you’re reasonably certain it’s bad news, but there’s just no way to get around it, you have to walk forward. As soon as it hits, the view subtly changes to confirm that you are being mind controlled. Is this another death, or a puzzle mechanic?

The first thing that happens is that you’re walked away from the direction you want to be headed, to confirm that it has taken control. And you walk directly into your first clue: the shaft of light that burns the worm and makes you change direction. At this point, the game’s told you everything you need to know about the worms, all in a few seconds, without saying a word. (And it’s thrown in a red herring of sorts. I spent a good bit of time trying to get the boy trapped in the sunlight, thinking that prolonged exposure to light would help).

After that, the game follows the Law of Super Mario and presents the same thing two more times, but with an escalation each time that’s so clever and subtle, you don’t realize you’re being Videogamed. It’s gone from being a puzzle on its own, to being a complication that’s overlaid on top of another puzzle. And the last time is particularly well-done, giving you a hint of your end goal before snatching it away.

It’s more than a little unfair to criticize Limbo when it does so much so well, but in a sense the game is its own worst enemy. After seeing it so confidently master some of the hardest things to get right in videogame communication, it’s frustrating to be sent back to pushing crates around and avoiding laser-sighted gun turrets.

Even if edutainment isn’t your thing, you should at least check out the demo — it’s available for PC/Mac OS X/Linux as well as the Xbox 360 in the Xbox Live Indie Games section. (And it’s only five bucks there, which made it a sight-unseen purchase for me). The graphic design is phenomenal as always, and I was a fan right from the title screen.

Air Forte takes some of the characters you run into in Flotilla and re-casts them as subjects of a kingdom whose multiples, words, and countries are being stolen. As the best pilot in the kingdom, you’ve got to take off and find the missing multiples while avoiding the mines. The story’s presented all in comic book format, set to a perfectly inappropriate surf guitar soundtrack.

As for the educational merit, I don’t have a kid present so I can’t comment one way or the other. (It was, however, an unwelcome reminder that I’ve forgotten all the multiplication tables). And I have to be a jerk and point out a couple of errors in the grammar sections — “smiling” can be a noun, and “lunch” can be a verb, for instance. But for me, the game wins on presentation alone, and I loved every second of it.

If you’re wondering about platforms, flying with the Xbox 360 controller is a lot easier than with the mouse.

I never would’ve expected that the follow-up to Flotilla would be an educational game, but that’s the consequence of dealing with an unrelentingly original game developer, I guess. At this rate, Blendo could release a game that’s nothing but quick-time events and I’d still be on board from day one.

The game is Helsing’s Fire by developer Ratloop, published by Chillingo. It’s a puzzle game in which you destroy creatures of “The Shadow Blight” with a combination of Professor Helsing’s torch and his assistant Raffton’s tonics. The puzzle is positioning the torch so that your target creatures (and only your target creatures) are hit by the light of the torch, and then using the matching-colored tonic against them. It’s a simple, clever, and surprisingly engaging mechanic that I’ve never seen in a game before.

It’s a good thing the mechanic is so novel, because the puzzles themselves take a long time to get interesting. The entire first screen of the game is no challenge at all, and it takes a while for the game to start throwing new complications at you. In effect, the first 20 or so puzzles play more like a “software toy” than a puzzle game. But the puzzles are generated randomly, so you’re free to keep experimenting.

That sense of experimentation is the most interesting thing about the game, since it’s so rare for puzzle games. Typically in a puzzle-based game, you’re expected to think of a solution first, and then start interacting with the game to put the solution in motion. In Tetris, you find where the piece fits, then move it into place. In Bejeweled, you find the match, then click or tap on the screen to make the swap. And in an adventure game, you stop and think about what item works with what object, then try the combination to see if it works. It results in the player “switch modes” throughout, alternating between passive and active, and it can be a turn-off. On the other end of the scale, you’ve got physics-based games, where the developer just sets up a condition and lets you do whatever you can think of to hit on the right solution. That has its own set of problems, since to me it always feels like I’ve just interacted with a simulation, instead of interacting with the developer — there’s too much randomness involved to make me feel like I’ve accomplished anything.

I think that the torch in Helsing’s Fire does a great job of splitting the difference: you’re constantly moving the torch around, seeing how the light interacts with obstacles, actually playing the game. Not just staring at a screen waiting for inspiration to hit.

And even taking all of that into account, the puzzles aren’t even the best thing about Helsing’s Fire. The presentation is fantastic — you can tell that the developer’s a fan of Mike Mignola’s work on Hellboy (and Edward Grey: Witchfinder), which earns it double plus extra points with me. It’s not just in the artwork, either, but in the tone of the whole game. It doesn’t take itself seriously, but isn’t filled with desperate attempts at humor, either. The dialogue’s clever and used sparingly, and the music carries the tone throughout, blending a contemporary-sounding track for the puzzles with a title-screen track that reminds me of a 16-bit Castlevania game.

And best of all: the victory screen for each puzzle has Helsing and Raffton giving each other a fist bump or high five, one of those completely gratuitous touches that can send a good game over the top.

According to the credits, only two people worked on the game, but you wouldn’t know from playing it. It’s got a professional level of polish to it while still feeling weird and novel enough to be an indie project. And it’s only a dollar, so there’s absolutely no reason not to recommend it. Even if you breeze through all the puzzles, you’ll be entertained while doing it.

And episode four of the new season, Beyond the Alley of the Dolls, is going to be released next Tuesday, July 20. It answers all kinds of questions, like, “What’s with all the Sam clones at the end of episode three?” and “Who is the mysterious Mr. S that Stinky was talking to?” and “Who is the ominous Dr. Norrington?” and “How many of these things are they going to make, anyway?”

As it turns out, the post came in response to a video of a TED talk given by Kellee Santiago of thatgamecompany, one that was forwarded to Ebert because it calls him out and attempts to refute his argument.

Like Ebert, I’ll say that Santiago is a good speaker who delivers an engaging presentation. Unlike Ebert, I’ve played and loved the game Flower, thatgamecompany’s most recently-released project. And unlike Ebert, I’m making an effort to understand where Santiago’s coming from instead of instantly dismissing her claims and acting as if I’ve “won.”

Still, I’d have to say that Santiago’s defense of games as art is about as unconvincing as it could possibly be. She starts with a statement that games are art but can’t hold up any great examples to compete with the great masterworks of other media — a mistake, because judging the merits of one medium in comparison to another one is entirely missing the point.

Next she uses a modified version of the “games are still young” argument, comparing them to cave paintings. That’s always seemed completely empty and without merit to me, both for the reason Ebert gives to refute it — many cave paintings have a representational quality that resonates even today — and because it’s unnecessarily defeatist. We don’t have to wait and see the great games get made; they’re already being made.

Lead by Example

Then, she gives a cursory overview of three games, including Braid and Flower and an assertion that they’re art, based on a weak and easily-dismissible definition of what “art” is. Here I do have to admit that I got a kick out of Ebert’s dismissal of Braid as having “prose on the level of a wordy fortune cookie.” Not because I particularly hate the game, but because it’s the perfect example of How Not to Do It. It wears its art game pretentions on its sleeve, and is so frequently trotted out as “Hey Look At How Much Art This Is” by people eager to have video games justified, that they’re afraid to acknowledge its flaws.

In particular, its biggest flaw: that wordy fortune cookie prose, which just makes it glaringly evident the game’s “meaning” isn’t delivered via its mechanics, but simply reinforced by them. Here you can read about a guy regretting past mistakes, and here you can play a plat former where you can take back moves. Unlike, say, Shadow of the Colossus or even BioShock, where the “meaning” of the game becomes evident directly through the player’s actions in the game. Here is a game which you gradually discover is about choice when confronted with the choices you actually made — or more accurately, weren’t permitted to make — over the course of the game. All that said, Ebert did Braid a disservice by dismissing it based on his own archaic definition of what a “game” is. “Taking back a move” is indeed a cop-out in chess; it’s not a cop-out when “taking back a move” is one of the game’s core rules.

But Flower is a much better example of a game as art. Santiago explains designer Jenova Chen’s motivation for the game, and the idea of the balance of nature that he was trying to convey. It’s a work that conveys meaning from a creator to an audience via the properties unique to its medium — you can debate whether it’s “good art” or “bad art” all you want, but that game fits any layman’s definition of what “art” is. If you dismiss Flower as not being art, then you’d have to dismiss entire schools of visual art as well. Ebert again gives it a cursory dismissal based on the fact that he doesn’t like it, asking questions that could be easily answered by either playing the game (it’s not that long, Roger) or even looking it up on Wikipedia, and again holding it to his definition of what a “game” is, not any definition of what “art” is.

Market Impact and Critical Acclaim

After what would’ve been a compelling example, Santiago then defends the games in terms of their financial success and critical reception. I can only assume that she figured if the defenses of them as “art” didn’t take, then any defense would do. Ebert — correctly, I have to say — lays waste to the idea that critical and financial response have anything to do with the nature of art, so the less said about all that, the better.

Who Cares?

So now, Ebert’s mentioning the hundreds of responses to his post (I think his last claim was over 2000 at the time I wrote this), many of which just call him out for being old-fashioned. He acknowledges that he stirred up a hornet’s nest, when the whole thing was supposedly in response to a reader’s e-mail message, and he’s somewhat disingenuously claiming to be bewildered by the response. (And, I’ve got to point out, he’s being kind of a dick about the whole thing, but considering how many angry video game players he’s had to listen to over the weekend if not the past few years, I’d say that he’s entitled).

The fact is, though, that none of those responses are going to make a difference. Obviously, the “you just don’t get it, man!” approach is going to fail, and the “games are art because I cried in Final Fantasy VII” tack isn’t going to fare much better. Part of that is because of Ebert’s obstinance, and part is because he doesn’t give much to work with. At least in the last go-round, he gave people something to chew on: a pretty astute (for a non-gamer) argument about authorial control and the role of the player, based on an interesting (but I think too limited in scope) definition of what a “game” is. Here, he’s just shooting down points raised in a 15-minute video and hundreds of indignant responses.

But there are a couple of interesting parts:

Why are gamers so intensely concerned, anyway, that games be defined as art? Bobby Fischer, Michael Jordan and Dick Butkus never said they thought their games were an art form. Nor did Shi Hua Chen, winner of the $500,000 World Series of Mah Jong in 2009. Why aren’t gamers content to play their games and simply enjoy themselves? They have my blessing, not that they care.

There is, obviously, a good bit of condescension there: a disingenuous cry of “what’s all the fuss over little old me?” along with “go ahead and enjoy your little games while the rest of us appreciate true art” and “I am not familiar with any sports personalities of the last two decades.”

But the basic question is key, and that’s why the argument’s valuable, and that’s why I’m making a point of it instead of joining the chorus of people throwing up their hands and saying “Not this again!” The question is: why do you care?

Why are you offended when someone like Ebert delivers a public dismissal of your hobby and/or career as not being “art?” Are you trying to change his mind? Are you looking for validation from someone else? And is there possibly something that you’re not quite getting from video games that you feel is missing?

I’m not asking in the “why bother?” sense, either: I think it’s an important question to ask. If you’re the type who is bothered by someone claiming that games aren’t art, and you don’t just dismiss the argument, or say that “games are just entertainment” or “they only need to be fun and nothing else,” then start asking the right questions and arguing the right things. Don’t just say “this is how Ebert [or whoever] is wrong,” but “this is why I care.”

Why I Care

The reason I care ultimately breaks down into a tautology: it’s important that games be recognized as art because games are art. That is: people are already using games as a medium of expression; they have been for years. I’ve seen them, I’ve played them, and I’ve been affected by them enough to try and build a career around them.

And you won’t be able to create one of those moving, expressive masterworks unless you set out to do it. Art is about communication, but it’s not about looking for someone else’s validation of what you’re doing; it’s about your own definition of what you’re doing. (Ebert attempts to dismiss this by dismissing Santiago’s definition of art in terms of intent: she says that the great works are driven by an intent to communicate meaning; he responds that a lot of awful works are driven by the same intent, which is a completely facile non-argument). If you aim to create diversion or entertainment, that’s the best you’ll achieve. If you think in terms of “product” and “users” and market-share or critical acclaim, then you’ve imposed an artificial limit for yourself.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with pure entertainment, as long as you don’t get locked in the mindset that meaningless entertainment is the best you could possibly aspire to.

Take film, for example. You’d be hard-pressed to argue that Edison’s movie of a man sneezing is “art” by any useful definition of the word. (And to stave off the “games are still young” argument: you can say the same thing about countless home videos on YouTube). But if you stopped there and took it as a given that that was all the medium was capable of, then you’d never have seen masterworks like Rear Window or White Chicks.

No, Seriously: Games are Media

And despite what I said earlier, it’s still helpful to point out “this is how Ebert [or whoever] is wrong”:

One obvious difference between art and games is that you can win a game. It has rules, points, objectives, and an outcome. Santiago might cite a immersive game without points or rules, but I would say then it ceases to be a game and becomes a representation of a story, a novel, a play, dance, a film. Those are things you cannot win; you can only experience them.

That’s approaching something useful, not just curmudgeonly “what’s with the kids and their video games these days?” but something like a genuine definition of where Ebert’s coming from. It’s easily refuted by anyone who’s played games in the past 15 years, but it’s actually a pretty good starting point for explanation of games as media.

For convenience, take a film that’s universally accepted as “art:” Casablanca. That is clearly a representation of a story, but it hasn’t ceased to be a film. So why can’t someone say the same for a non-abstract, narrative-based game?

You could translate Casablanca into a game, giving it rules (characters can’t come back to life after they die, Sam can’t suddenly become the romantic lead), points or status (Rick’s met Ilsa, Rick’s met Lazlo, Rick’s made it to the landing strip), objectives (get Ilsa past the Nazis), and an outcome (a hill of beans). With any story-based game, “win” or “experience” isn’t an either/or proposition: you win the game by experiencing it. (Note: this would be a lousy game, please don’t make it).

And that, of course, is only one type of game. To compare it to the history of film, a purely linear narrative-based game is the equivalent of filming a stage play: there are advantages to doing it in one medium instead of another, but it’s not fully exploiting the possibilities of the medium. And there are sufficient examples of games that are exploiting the possibilities of the medium; The Sims is the most successful, both artistically and, coincidentally, financially.

I’ve read interviews with Will Wright where he says that as he was developing what later turned into The Sims, he wasn’t preoccupied with making art. (Although I’m pretty sure that several of his collaborators were interested in making art). The key, though, is that he wasn’t preoccupied with any preconceived notions of what a game is or what a game can be. There’s no reason to suspect that a simulation of computer people would be all that fun or interesting, much less that it could become a satire of suburban life and relationships. But as with any art, you know it works when you see it.