Week 8 -- Video games and player positioning

Killing Is Harmless, e-book cover.

Note before: There are a few links to gameplay videos so obviously if you're interested in playing a game listed with a link, don't click the link as it may have spoilers!

I decided to jump ahead this week and find a resource related to an essential Player positioning reading for week 9. As much as I kick myself for it, video games are my passion (I should flag that I sometimes have games open overnight, so those hours aren't accurate!). Games now, with their graphical enhancements and the level of complexity, have become the new creative medium for storytelling. And with GTA V rivalling Harry Potter and Twilight in terms of launch sales, it is clear that video games have just as much confidence in storytelling and narrative.

Player positioning is especially apparent in this book-length work of games criticism on the revolutionary third-person shooter Spec Ops: The Line. Killing is Harmless: A Critical Reading of Spec Ops The Line is an essay that runs through Spec Ops: The Line as if it were a Let's Play and adds commentary that is more on the state of the shooters genre in games as a whole, and the player positioning within Spec Ops: The Line.

In the introduction, Keogh (2012) comments on the shooters genre and its criticisms:

"Of course, critics have been critiquing shooters for years. Even those of us that sincerely enjoy shooters can’t shake the feeling that there is something fundamentally unsettling about them. Even though most of the articles I write about shooters are praising positive things about them, I always feel obliged to add caveats. The Modern Warfare trilogy is an absolutely magnificent example of how to tell a scripted story in a videogame—even if that story makes absolutely no sense and the trilogy completely alienates and vilifies the stereotypical Russian and Arabic enemies in really problematic ways. The Gears of War games are a terrific example of how to convey a game’s tone through its core mechanics, with its seminal cover system evoking the intensity and claustrophobia of an utterly futile war—even as the games laughably ask us to weep for a character’s dead wife moments after he trash-talked an enemy while stomping on his brains. Far Cry 2’s open vistas and persistently uncontrollable skirmishes give an intensity to its violence matched by few games—even as it chooses to depict a nation without civilians, a conflict without collateral.

There’s no shortage of shooters that want to be about something. But very few shooters are brave enough to look in the mirror—or to force the player that enjoys shooters to look in the mirror—and question what they see. Not to pass judgment. Not to ask them to change their ways. Just to understand what is going on here. To appropriate Abbott’s post, it is high noon for shooters to take a long, hard look at themselves." Shooters are one of the most popular games genres (especially first person shooter, but they are by and large the same in mechanics, just different camera angles) and they are often seen as the 'popcorn movie' genre of video games due to their smaller reliance on narrative than set pieces and taking out numbers of enemies to get to a checkpoint."

A sub-genre of this which Spec Ops: The Line belongs to is the modern military shooter. Game critics have taken a strong dislike to these in recent years for their lack of originality, linear gameplay, the emphasis on killing for reward and the lack of narrative. Game critic Keogh focuses on Spec Ops: The Line for its aim to position the player in a way to look at how these games make you, the player, feel as you play in this seemingly hollow and morally dubious genre.

"The Line is a shooter about shooters. It makes some interesting commentaries on modern warfare and Western interventionism to be sure, but what I got out of it most were questions about the shooter genre itself — the questions that other shooters either willfully ignore or simply don’t think to ask. Is it really okay to be shooting this many people? Does it actually matter that they aren’t real? What does it say about us, the people who play shooter after shooter, the people who have a virtual murder count in the thousands of thousands, that these are the games we enjoy playing? What does it say about us, as a culture, that these are the kinds of games that make so much money? The Line isn’t interested in answering these questions; it is interesting in asking them. Or, rather, it is interesting in having its players ask themselves these questions. Just like the many times that Walker is forced to look at his reflection throughout the game, The Line forces the player to look at their own reflection in the television set. It turns its focus outwards to not ask questions about shooters as they are designed but as they are consumed."

Narrative in games are a bizarre thing. The gameplay and the narrative must complement and there is a oft-wrongly used term (ludonarrative dissonance) for when they don't. This idea fits in with player positioning as you may be placed in the body of a problematic character when playing a game, or you may be a 'good' character who must do bad things (like kill lots and lots of people) to reach your goal (see: modern military shooter).

BioShock Infinite is an excellent game for player positioning as the player's own identity and values were revealed to be completely different as the game progressed. Tomb Raider, as the Jimquisition's game critic Jim Stirling (2013) outlines, fell victim to ludonarrative dissonance in player positioning as the character of Lara Croft is portrayed as a "scared archaeologist forced into a situation she was ill-equipped [for] was offset by gameplay in which she was cutting people's nuts off and scoring headshots with arrows".

Tomb Raider, screenshot.

Like these, Spec Ops: The Line puts you in the shoes of a soldier who in a notable scene must make a choice between throwing down a gas attack to pass by enemy troops or shooting them outright. Unlike other military shooters, Spec Ops: The Line makes the player question their own character's actions. For example, if the character makes the choice to use white phosphorous on the enemy troops, you find out that you have also hit nearby civilians, and the player, as the character, must walk among the dead soldiers and civilians. Keogh argues that games like this question the effects of the actions in these games and the seeming unquestioned mass slaughter of enemy soldiers in modern military shooters as the only way to win.

Spec Ops: The Line, screenshot.

Player positioning is in all different games.

Portal positions the player in turmoil over a cube, as you assume the role of Chell, a woman trapped in a science facility that undergoes testing a 'portal gun' that creates portals around the map to play with the laws of physics. An interesting experiment from the developers was on the voiceless, seemingly inert yet subtly personified companion cube that serves as both in-game training for how cubes were important in the portal puzzles and as a narrative foreshadowing of Chell's fate. The player is positioned through the voiceover's use of terms like 'euthanised' and dark humour in the 'independent panel of ethicists' to feel for the cube in this weirdly emotional scene as we must destroy it after one test chamber. The developers noted its psychological similarity of this death to the milgram experiment and the scene of HAL-9000's death in the film 2001: A Space Odyssey. The player is being placed in the same way as 2001: A Space Odyssey and the milgram experiment positions, to consider the choice as to whether to 'euthanise' the companion cube.

Video games can have a deeper level of positioning than movies or books as they offer a fully interactive narrative. You are not a stationary onlooker, you are fully involved in these works 'directing' the flow of the story yourself. These video games can tell sweeping stories like GTA V, or the smallest, most heartfelt stories like Gone Home, or frightening tales like Outlast, but most of all, they involve the player in the story and position them to feel and think with both the game mechanics and narrative.

As game company Valve have indicated, games are having an increasing role in education, and these techniques of player positioning serve to embrace that level of immersion in storytelling that's been prevalent in recent games.

Reference:

Keogh, B. (2012). Killing is Harmless: A Critical Reading of Spec Ops The Line [Kindle Edition]. doi: 978-0-9874007-1-0

Sterling, J. (2013, 17 September). Lugoscababib Discobiscuits  [Video file]. Retrieved from http://www.escapistmagazine.com/videos/view/jimquisition/8105-Lugoscababib-Discobiscuits

Images:

Bitgamer. (2012). Spec Ops: The Line review [Image]. Retrieved November 1, 2013, from http://www.bit-tech.net/gaming/pc/2012/07/18/spec-ops-the-line-review/1

CNET Australia. (2013). Tomb Raider [Image]. Retrieved November 1, 2013, from http://www.cnet.com.au/tomb-raider-339343554.htm

Crikey. (2012). Killing Is Harmless: new avenues for game criticism [Image]. Retrieved November 1, 2013, from http://blogs.crikey.com.au/game-on/2012/11/22/killing-is-harmless-new-avenues-for-videogame-criticism/