Ntuple Indemnity

I can’t believe I missed the whole hullabaloo over at Roger Ebert’s (here, here and here) about whether the interactivity of video games preclude the medium from being considered an art form until I heard about it via this morning’s Penny Arcade. You probably don’t need me to point this out if you read this space regularly, but this is one of those precious few debates I live for. And yet the readers who had the time to respond dote on nothing but such platitudes as commercial appeal, the emotional involvement of the audience as a subject and the skill of the craftsmanship behind the work’s constituent partitions. Shallow, shallow, shallow.

I didn’t expect Ebert, of all people, to fall back on a correlation between art and the precision of authorial intent. I guess it makes sense, though, since the great advantage that film has over live theatre – and I say “advantage” to mean an objective freedom of control and artistic license, not as a value judgment – is that the frame of a projected image, the focus of the cinematography and the mise-en-scène on the whole make it a highly constrainable format for delivering something intended. The most gifted directors don’t just control what happens on set: they control how the audience perceives the set. (This is where I’d ordinarily say, “Hear that, Chris Columbus?”, but then the guy made Rent and earned himself a “Get Out Of Blog Free” card for his efforts.)

It’s also interesting that the first article linked above cites Steven Spielberg’s views on the matter, when Spielberg overwhelmingly favours the cinematic constraints that he so deftly employs, to the point where it is his rationale for not joining his colleagues Messrs. Cameron and Lucas in the resurgence of interest in 3D filmmaking. This isn’t a criticism, just an observation. The other thing to note is that the kind of games Spielberg discusses when speaking of the medium’s limitations is only one segment of what interactive design now offers.

I’m highly critical of the recent trend in video game design and criticism that has favoured a drift towards imitating motion pictures and, in general, movie-envy: from cutscene to task to cutscene. Game-stories are becoming rote and linear, all while filmmakers like Fernando Meirelles and Christopher Nolan are making great strides in freeing cinema of linearity, in the tradition of Orson Welles. This is why I endorse Nintendo, and demonstrate a sense of corporate loyalty to the aging Kyoto powerhouse the likes of which I only offer Pixar: their game design philosophy is still driven by the sort of interactivity that creates a story as you go – within finite constraints that are at once inductive, offering infinite possibilities. It goes back to the story-plot distinction, and too often nowadays the two are conflated.

I’m not saying the cinematic paradigm is invalid. Hideo Kojima, who kickstarted it with Metal Gear Solid, basically got into the business as a second choice after film. But the consequences of establishing movie-envy as the goal of the video game business is an overwhelming focus on production values and presentation, and more to the point, realism – hence why you see celebrity voice acting up the wazoo and the Xbox 360 leveraging high-definition visual output. It’s also why you see the likes of Matt Casamassina knocking Nintendo for its insistence on text over voice work, ignoring that the dialogue-bubble polyphony of Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door is in fact just as valid as the comic books from which the game borrows its narrative device.

Recently we’ve seen the emergence of the “sandbox” paradigm, its most public and controversial incarnation being the Grand Theft Auto franchise. (For my part, I think Animal Crossing is a better example, because it dispenses with progressive “levels” or “missions” entirely and establishes a complete dependence on a player’s responses to the pseudorandom.) And for all the talk about whether or not the identification of player with character has a residual effect on real-world behaviour, people still talk about the game-player as a freakishly involved and active audience member.

I would contend that the player is a performer. And to dismiss the possibility that a video game can be art based on its interactivity is to simultaneously dismiss as art all that we consider performance. In drama, the fact that a theatre company produces any manner of creative interpretation on William Shakespeare based on the dialogue transcriptions of the First Folio doesn’t invalidate a study of the script itself. Nor does it invalidate a study of Shakespeare as an artist simply because his input is never fully authoritative.

If you look at music, it doesn’t even exist without performance – and the constraints on performance are less and less rigid. I’m going to play the card that everybody who talks incessantly about music loves to play: John Cage, 4’33”. It’s a piece composed entirely of rests, and the sound dwells in the ambient response of the audience: coughing, chatter, confusion. The audience’s contribution, often ignored, comes into the foreground without asking.

Of course, there’s no shortage of people who still insist that aleatory à la Cage is not art. To be perfectly cynical, I think that’s a byproduct of an unconscious layman’s definition of art that has nothing to do with intent, craftsmanship, or anything quantifiable about a work outside of its context. I think most of us privately define art as directly proportional to the difficulty of its creation. We tell ourselves that computers are incapable of art, because art has to be harder than anything merely programmable. We tell ourselves that an abstract splatter painting, beyond its other crime of not representing anything outside itself, is not art by virtue of my-daughter-can-do-that. Vonnegut parodies one extreme in Breakfast of Champions, Rabo Karabekian’s The Temptation of Saint Anthony (two perpendicular strips of neon orange tape on a green canvas).

But if we want to look for an example of improvised performance apart from its originator that we would indisputably consider art, we do not need to look any further than jazz. It doesn’t matter that bebop reduces to a bunch of noodling bound by mechanical laws of tonality and set over Coltrane’s “Giant Steps” or the bridge of “I Got Rhythm”. If you take a look at what bebop does with rhythm changes, there is no more “I Got Rhythm” – the melody’s been surgically airlifted, and the chords have been substituted with functional analogues. But Gershwin still wrote it, and we still think of him as a composer, the composer.

That’s what it means to play a video game: improvising over changes somebody else wrote, using an instrument somebody else made. And you can go nuts with however many choruses you want, but the original composition draws you back home to a destination that may be ordained. The emphasis on the performance does not devalue the foundational construction. Art can still exist within accident.

Few games actually do that, though. Most of them are crap.

While we’re on the subject, for those who are wondering: there is exactly one computer game that I think has unquestionably achieved the inconsistently-awarded honour of Literary Work, and its name is Grim Fandango. As with all the classic LucasArts adventures, of which it was the last of the line, the game is heavily scripted, and for the most part the player engages in sequences of dialogue choices that do end up being deterministic. But that determinism doesn’t detach the actions of the player from the progression of scripted action, and as a drama awaiting private performance on a personal computer, Fandango is unparalleled.

The Citizen Kane of video games? No, I wouldn’t say so, since the influence of Citizen Kane on filmmaking, beyond its killer script, lies primarily in form as an accessory to story; the same goes for Watchmen, the Citizen Kane of comics. The Casablanca of games, maybe, for its achievement as a superbly-written character drama where every line counts for something and contributes to a larger thematic fabric. It’s a noir tragicomedy on par with its non-interactive peers.

Why nobody has matched its storytelling excellence in the seven years hence is anybody’s guess.

This doesn’t even scratch the surface of what I have to say on the matter of video games as art, but I’m sure I’ll return to this again with a lot more depth.

Well, wouldja look at that: Chicken Little hits the sweet spot, a $40M figure that could be spun for good or ill depending on who’s doing the publicity. I was going to crunch the figures and pull up a few comparisons, but as usual, Jim Hill has already done it.

My review of Jarhead is in today’s Gateway, and the editorial staff is as on the ball as ever when it comes to excising my litany of tasteless puns and Mock Turtle simile soups. As always, if you have a grip on what my blogging style is like, you can probably identify what’s mine and what’s not. My impression of the film remains intact, though: amusing as a style piece and an evening’s entertainment, but in attempting to be more serious and dramatic than its only cinematic cousin (David O. Russell’s outstanding experiment, Three Kings), conventional to a fault.

There’s also one specific item of trivia I don’t mention, because it doesn’t belong in a review, let alone any piece for a general audience. It is, if at all possible, even more obscure than Docking Bay 327 in Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, which I alluded to under nearly identical circumstances.

Jarhead has, to my knowledge, the first explicit reference to Metroid in a theatrical feature film. It’s a bit of a throwaway, because… well, it’s actually in error, though made as a figure of speech and not with the presumption of being factual. One has the impression that William Broyles had a little gap in his screenplay marked, “Name of popular video game from circa 1990 goes here.”

The scene runs thus: the marines are sitting on a jumbo jet to Iraq and discussing what is it they’d be doing instead if they weren’t gallavanting off to defend freedom and pop some ragheads. “Sitting at home trying to get to the ninth level of Metroid,” one says. “You know what happens when you get there?” replies another. “Nothing. You go back and do it all over again.”

Thematically, it hits the nail on the head when it comes to encapsulating Jarhead‘s attitude towards war: escalation, redundancy and repetition. Only Metroid doesn’t have levels; in fact, the series is so notoriously nonlinear that there’s an entire video game subculture dedicated to exploiting pathways unintended by the designers. So the point is totally lost – it’s no different from claiming rock and roll had stale chord progressions, and mistakenly citing the Beatles – but hey, they tried.

Tetris would have been a better example. On the original Game Boy release, the ninth level was murder.

In other news, Nintendo’s worldwide Mario Kart DS servers are online (though nobody has the game except for Nintendo and the press), and their Wi-Fi service website is live, and the documentation reveals a lot about how it will work. Hits: day-to-day, game-by-game stat tracking on the Web; a sporting interface not unlike the software that comes with most wireless LAN cards; WEP key setup that doesn’t suck aside from the pain in the ass of having to punch in my entire 128-bit hex key instead of my clever passphrase. The promised one-touch setup only applies to proprietary Buffalo routers at partner hotspots, though I suspected as much.

Misses, neither of which apply to me: the drivers on the USB connector for those without Wi-Fi are Windows-only (presumably under the assumption that since Macs have built-in wireless, users probably have a network going already – or maybe it’s just shortsightness); and for those of you who care, no WPA. The website also gives pretty bad layman’s advice for securing a home network (using your phone number as a hex key? Please!) but that’s the price of selling cool toys to the non-technical.

Also, if the Wi-Fi configuration software is embedded in the game cartridge, does this mean I have to punch in my setup all over again come Animal Crossing in December? Or does it write the profile settings into the DS firmware? If they haven’t finalized the Wi-Fi implementation until now, I’m guessing it’s the former, which would be a pity.

I have Mario Kart DS on pre-order, so I’ll give it a spin next week. Whether or not I report on the experience here will depend on the length of said spin, or perhaps its angular momentum. For now, it’s back to civilization – or maybe just back to Civilization.

It is a fact that roughly a third to a half of the posts I sit down and write for this weblog never see publication. They are exclusively of the long-winded and moderately analytical sort, and I abort them for various reasons that differ from case to case. Suffice to say, not all of my candidate entries are founded on fully-formed ideas. Periodic abandonment is the price of writing for an ambiguous audience in such a manner that it is the words, not their personal association with the writer behind the digital curtain, that propel a subject with an efferent and centrifugal element of interest. The alternative is to reduce this place to yet another highly localized jokestop with an occasional amusing link to stick-figure cartoons that offer frighteningly-plausible proposals about how I might pay my way through college, and that I shall not do.

I sat down to write a gut-reaction post about the Nintendo Revolution controller pretty much the minute it was revealed in Tokyo Thursday night (with a spot of latency on account of receiving information through a correspondent and the press), embellishing it with dangling questions that were at the time unanswered for those of us sitting at home. This never got finished, as information kept rolling in all night, be it from the official press release or a direct-feed clip of Nintendo’s own concept video. By morning, there was a webcast of the entire hour-long Satoru Iwata keynote complete with synchronized presentation slides, and IGN posted a detailed FAQ answering most of the inquiries I had in mind.

(If you only click on one of those links, make it the video. It’s a doozy.)

By the same morning, online opinionation of the controller design was extensive enough, and diverse enough in both polarization and heat, that most of what I was originally going to post was redundant anyway. A lot of people caught on to the obvious implications: foremost among them, lightsabres. One observes that if LucasArts can get its act back together and not eschew the Revolution as it did the GameCube the past year or two, wireless lightsabre dueling is the obvious way to go. Of course, LucasArts isn’t getting much of an act together at all, which is why these guys are developing Sam & Max adventures and they’re not. But no matter – the point is, it’s not so ingenious that nobody thought of it, but it’s exciting enough that everybody wants it. So there you go: for those of you who are Nintendo sceptics – lightsabres.

It should be obvious by this point that my own thoughts on the subject retreated into a plain-text document where they could be tucked away and safely ignored.

From the standpoint of a traffic whore, this may seem counterintuitive, since gut reactions that suck in the immediate swarm of Google hits have a consistent record of inducing spikes in visitation rates sharp enough to impale a child of Ungoliant. But traffic whoredom is not my game; there’s some excellent coverage out there already, and I’m not going to compete with it. I think the impact of a reconfigurable and ambidextrous motion-sensing television remote has already been felt by the sheer depth of discourse it has inspired in its wake.

People are thinking about the video game business again and whether or not Iwata’s premonitions of doom about the heat death of the industry on the parapets of a lightning-struck tower are founded. Thought, like touching, is good. The soundest critique I have read distills the Nintendo philosophy to a cycle within which the Revolution controller is just the twelve-o’-clock bell of another iteration: seeding genres and letting other rivals populate them, resulting in the growth of the industry and a net gain for all or most.

As a side note of linguistic interest, it seems – from the official marketspeak from all parties involved in the console wars, of which the Nintendo press release is only a single instance – “hardcore” has been fully embraced into the lexicon of business rhetoric in the gaming sector.

From a more personal perspective, specifically as a game consumer removed from the question of whether the “remote controller” is an omen of death or rebirth… I think this is grand. First of all: lightsabres, baby. We’re talking about onscreen Jedi combat any way you swing it.

It’s more likely that the first killer app to adapt controller movements to melee weapon combat will be a Zelda title; I here assume that one is already on the drawing board, even though Aonuma’s team isn’t done yet with Twilight Princess. The 3D generation of Zelda adventures feature a masterful control scheme complete with context-sensitive lock-on actions to circumvent the nuisances of navigating 3D space with a device built on a 2D plane, but one of the design elements that never played out was the library of fencing tactics that resulted from certain button combinations: horizontal and vertical slashes, forward thrusts, spin attacks and the like. The distinctions are fun to play with, but are rarely necessary aside from poking Gohma in the eye every now and then. The combat system was a lot deeper than documented, but little of this is obvious. (How many of you knew you could do a spin attack with the Skull Hammer?)

Well, now we have an interface for navigating 3D space using an input device that operates in – get this – 3D space, and we have a motion-sensing system for total control over fencing techniques. One wonders, though, if Link will still be a left-handed character once under the command of a right-handed player.

Many are floating the question of the extent to which the eccentric interface will alienate multiplatform third-party developers. This is all part of a larger numbers game and is irrelevant to me as a game player.

Third-party support is a business concern, not a consumer concern. A lot of pundits out there make note of how owners of Nintendo systems almost exclusively buy Nintendo’s first-party titles, showing disproportionately overwhelming resistance to multiplatform releases that fare somewhat better on the Xbox and PlayStation 2. There are exceptions – Capcom’s Viewtiful Joe and Resident Evil 4, Namco’s Tales of Symphonia, EA’s perennial major-league statistical simulators that pass for sports games – but games like the first three I just mentioned are exceptional product; plus, they all started as GameCube-only titles.

The conclusion that is typically drawn from this curious observation is that either the GameCube is adopted as a second (and secondary) console, or Nintendo players are just a bunch of prepubescent kids. It’s certainly not a question of horsepower, as the PS2 is consistently overperformed by the other two. But these oft-heard excuses are gross oversimplifications. The real reason Nintendo satisfies, albeit to a niche (or more accurately, a wide array of differing niches), is because their appeal blends entertainment with almost pretentious arthouse sensibilities. It’s not the approach that attracts the largest market in raw numbers, unless you’re Pixar, but it helps retain a core audience that keeps the brand alive while it expands into nooks and crannies nobody even thought to consider. Call it the Apple stratagem.

In today’s segment of Penny Arcade, Jerry Holkins (“Tycho”) remarks that “for a couple generations now their systems have been (at least, outside of Japan) a kind of dedicated shrine to their own games, games that shame the rest of the industry with their polish, their palette, and their playability.” That pretty much sums up the real incentive for playing with the proverbial power: Nintendo, its first-party squadrons and immediate third-party allies are like real butter. Once you’ve had a taste, you can never go back to margarine. Is it a dream to live in a paradise where load times are a myth, Koji Kondo melodies fill the air and Hunter Metroids frolic in the skies? Nintendo’s world is that paradise. Some would call it a paradise lost. I say it’s regained.

If I buy one console next generation, it will be the Nintendo Revolution. It’s not because I have unswerving loyalty to Nintendo as a hardware manufacturer, because I don’t; owning Nintendo systems is an effect, not a cause. There are many critics out there who have repeated the claim that games are a software-driven business. True, but diversification of hardware is the condition that permits diversification of software, and that’s why it is no folly to laud the Revolution at face value. I have unswerving loyalty to Nintendo as a software developer, and have been well rewarded for it time and time again. Guess which platform you’ll find playing host to their interactive delights.

I’m not saying that the Xbox and PlayStation lines have nothing going for them, but while they have fairly substantial software libraries – something that will no doubt continue with the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 – when it comes down to it, the number of top-quality titles for each console is about equivalent. Then it boils down to a matter of taste. Will it be Metroid Prime, Wind Waker, Resident Evil and Paper Mario? Or will it be Halo, Ninja Gaiden, Jade Empire and Knights of the Old Republic? Or will it be Grand Theft Auto, God of War, Katamari Damacy and Metal Gear Solid? For the informed one-console consumer, that’s half of the choice. The other half is the forecast – the projection of what is to come, and which exclusively-bound software studios you can rely on to generate consistently stellar output.

It’s safe to say that unless investing in all three comes at almost no cost relative to your financial statement, you’ll miss something – so the real variable to consider is what you can’t afford to miss. And there’s no way in hell I’m missing Nintendo.

Going into the next generation, Nintendo retains a quantity advantage of its own: while its first-party release schedule is sparse, it won’t get any sparser, since the philosophy behind the Revolution’s design is to avoid driving development costs through yet another roof.

The unique interface would remove any Nintendo-PC overlap if there were any to begin with, and there isn’t – something that puts Nintendo in a considerably different position from the Xbox. Let’s admit this much: the Xbox is a machine for PC-style games – some of them excellent – that are better on a controller than a mouse and keyboard. It further succeeds because it avoids the seriously and perhaps irreparably flawed upgrade model that is killing the PC game business. At the same time, some games that would otherwise help justify an Xbox hardware purchase happen to play better with a mouse and keyboard; Knights, I’m looking at you.

If developers that prefer the conventional controller setup decide to abandon Nintendo, that would be a crying shame, but it won’t add as much appeal to the Xbox 360 and the PS3 as it properly should. If money were not an issue, one of the two (if not both) would be worthy of consideration out of technological fetishism alone. If you don’t believe me, watch the Metal Gear Solid 4 video and come back when you’re done slobbering. Everybody notices the quality of the textures and real-time cinema-quality effects, but what truly thrills me is the scope of imagination on display that validates the hope that yes, the next generation can provide designers new freedoms of expression the current one does not – so long as your imagination is capable of filling that expanse, in which case your name is probably Hideo Kojima.

The obstacle here is that Microsoft and Sony are trying to price one another out of business in the most peculiar way – by raising prices so high that buying the other guy’s console second is an impossible proposition. Xbox 360 retail bundles in Canada – for the real thing, not the skeletal Core System designed to rip off people who don’t take the time to read about what they’re getting for their hard-earned money – are easily going to cost upwards of $700 ($500 for the system and over $150 for bundled games and accessories that will undoubtedly be exactly the ones you neither want or need, plus the Mulroney tax); Ken Kutaragi has been prancing about for months telling everybody how elite and unaffordable the PS3 will be, so that’s almost a given. Then again, the PSP was considerably cheaper than expected. Then again, the DS slaughtered it anyway.

The result? Unless Nintendo really screws up on the first-party software end – and I don’t believe they will, given their stellar track record of telling everybody else how to make video games, then waiting a few years before telling everybody all over again – I now have enough information to say that I’ll be their customer twelve to eighteen months from now, and for financial reasons, likely theirs alone. Seeing the Revolution controller has solidified my endorsement, and I am eager to see what games they’ll come up with for the slender contraption.

As some readers may have noticed – and whoever they are, I admire their persistence in providing return traffic in the face of abject futility, however motivated by ennui it may be – this alleged weblog has been less than rife with recent activity of late. As pleasurable as it is to thumb my virtual nose at virtual people in this besotted cyber-realm with only words as my weapon, I must admit it has not in contemporaneous times been my first and foremost love.

Advance Wars: Dual Strike is not my first and foremost love either, but it is most of what I have been galvanizing to fill the few extant temporal vacuums that betray the character of the astute hobbyist. It is, in short, probably the most enthralling video game I’ve played on any system this calendar year – the dream strategy title for those who prefer patient and methodical turn-based analysis to the rapid improvisation of an RTS, but can spare neither the time or the commitment to get mired in late-game micromanagement. For a crude associative description: think of it as a Sid Meier game with everything removed except combat and cold, hard cash. As a result it moves a lot faster, but has just enough depth to open the possibility of dragging out a battle to be settled by attrition – and you will sit through the ordeal without realizing how many hours are going by outside your soap bubble of virtual warfare.

In a way, the various incarnations of Advance Wars – and this one in particular, given the tangible manipulation of pieces offered by its supplementary touchscreen control scheme – mark the natural evolution of the tabletop board game, with all the conveniences of the digital age as their selected adaptations: interchangeable and editable board layouts, automated calculations in the place of twenty-sided dice, and artificial intelligence robust enough to provide competent opposition when there exist no other DS owners within a radius of thirty feet. I almost wish Dual Strike were released with support for Nintendo’s global Wi-Fi network to launch in November, but it already provides a bountiful playing experience as it is; besides, the scale of multiplayer matchups it makes possible have a tendency to result in disconnections and dead batteries.

And now for something completely different. As you may know, Disneyland celebrated its 50th anniversary this summer after a year of renovations and refurbishments – and boy, was it worth it. I’ve had the good fortune of visiting the resort on numerous occasions, and it’s never looked so good. The original rides are now decorated with gold-plated anniversary cars (or horses, or teacups, or whatever applies). There’s a museum of Disneyland memorabilia with such exhibits as blueprints and schematic artwork, every variety of admission ticket from every era, and a cheesy but insightful doc short hosted by Steve Martin and Donald Duck.

Classic Disney scenes are on display throughout the park in the form of photo collages assembled from the visages of animators, staffers and guests, each of them consisting of two to ten thousand images. As you enter Main Street, there is a grandiose two-level monochrome collage where these photographs congeal into the faces of the men and women who were with Uncle Walt’s empire when it began, which in turn compose a still from “Steamboat Willie”. I’ve found an online archive of these exhibits, and the one I just spoke of is here, but a mere JPEG does not capture the sheer ambition of the monument. Nor does a photograph show you that the Haunted Mansion collage glows in the dark. There are wonders to behold at this happy place, and this is just one of them. There are others.

The fireworks, for instance. Nowadays, we are so accustomed to pyrotechnics that it’s easy to be disenchanted at how fireworks, while still magnificent once you delve into the constructed choreography of a given display, all look and feel the same. Sure, the last decade or so have brought us the odd laser projection every so often, but we are fundamentally looking at the same old centrifugal fractal patterns set to Tchaikovsky, right?

Well, since 17 July, Disneyland has restored genuine spectacle to the ancient art of synchronized rocketry. The proverbial magic is back. Sparks fly over the repainted Sleeping Beauty Castle to the tune of “When You Wish Upon a Star” like the opening titles of a feature film, but live and right in front of you. Tinker Bell zips around the parapets. And it’s all narrated by Mary Poppins – that is to say, Julie Andrews.

Then the display becomes a sort of interpretive dance of light and sound, a whirlwind tour of Disneyland attractions representing each of its sectors (though “It’s A Small World” is noticeably absent, and the New Orleans sector is underscored by Joplin’s “Maple Leaf Rag” played, not surprisingly, too fast). There’s a broadside battle waged right over the heads of the audience for “Pirates of the Caribbean”, and if you sit close enough you can see the Jolly Roger aglow on the Matterhorn’s peak like a distant Bat-Signal. “Star Tours” has laser cannons and explosions of green flame that light up the night set to John Williams’ end credits to Episode IV. The Frontierland shooting gallery features ducks with targets on them projected on the castle itself, which move about and seemingly get shot down one by one. And so on.

I’ve never seen anything like it. Chances are you haven’t either, unless you paid the House that Walt Built a visit of your own in the last seven or eight weeks.

If you plan to visit Disneyland anytime in the near future, or if you’ve never been there – make it so and make it soon. The “Happiest Homecoming on Earth” celebration is supposed to last until September 2006, according to the five-part golden anniversary retrospective that was posted at Jim Hill Media the same week I was in Anaheim, though by next summer’s end the top-billed novelty may have tapered off somewhat.

You really do have to see those fireworks show. My description does it about as much justice as a Klingon court-martial.

I haven’t devoted any of my recent blog-writing to what’s going on in wide-release cinema, in spite of having seen a passable, if less-than-usual quantity of major films of the ones that hit theatres between May and August, that quantity being eleven and a half. (The English dub of Howl’s Moving Castle is the half.) I attribute this to two causes. The first is that July and the better (or in this case, worse) part of August were for all intents and purposes dead, and all rumours of a box-office slump are for once both patently true and justified. The second is that the big films of May and June that were any good, a surprising number of them, turned out to be phenomenal; simply praising these achievements is a monotonous and redundant activity, and critiquing them intelligently takes too long.

Perhaps I will at some point offer a synoptic assessment that gathers and dispenses with the lot, but not today. For now, just go see the most satisfying film of the past few weeks, and certainly one of the best of the year. It’s called The Constant Gardener and it stars Lord Voldemort.

You’ll notice that updates here have been sparse. This is because rampant speculation about Horcruxes aside, there is nothing terribly newsworthy going on aside from free agent transactions in the resuscitated National Hockey League (about which I am much less qualified to discuss than I would have been twelve years ago) and censorship crusades against video games I admittedly don’t care about.

There’s no shortage of people crying foul about First Amendment rights in the midst of the recent three-pronged assault against Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, the unfinished and unreleased Bully and inexplicably, The Sims 2. Okay, so Jack Thompson is a bit of a nutter, but ad hominem aside, it’s important to realize that he does have a point. Read on.

Guillaume Laroche writes:

If one needs power to invoke special measures for 18+ material, but one lacks said powers, then the highly limited use of the AO rating so far is simply a reflection of the ESRB itself – that it realizes it can’t impose anything and can only act as an interest group for responsible sales by merchants. What then would suddenly warrant an AO rating for San Andreas? None other than public pressure. Because it has no legal weight, and is therefore only tied to its own standards, the ESRB can follow where public opinion – which is in most cases, on any topic, highly general and filled with stereotypes and few personal experiences – tends to direct itself. This is most disappointing. While following public trends is good in democracy, if you are an organization sworn to the objective, criterion-based evaluation of a product, all exterior influences must be excluded for you to do your job correctly. Otherwise, not only are you unjustly according ratings for certain games, but you are also eroding the very foundation of your principles, all in the name of appearing positively in the public eye – your rating system becomes nothing more than a clever corporate marketing trick for the companies.

Never mind legal weight – public pressure is absolutely an acceptable foundation upon which these decisions should be made. Mr. Laroche bemoans that an inadequately informed but vocal public distorts the objectivity of a criteria-based rating system, but what he neglects is that public consensus is what determines those criteria in the first place. Matters of good taste are always subject to debate, and you can quote your Foucault left and right about how silly it is North American society just won’t shut up about how sexuality is such a discursive no-no, but like it or not, freedom of speech does not exist in a vacuum. The standards of the public citizenry compose the ether that permits its operation.

Freedom of speech thrives in an environment where the boundaries of discretion and good taste are upheld by the community and abibed by on the part of the artist or speaker’s voluntary self-restraint. We can see this right now with the removal of Karla from the Montreal Film Festival lineup – not instigated by a single legal ruling or injunction but by the threats of concerned sponsors that they would revoke their support for the event. It is within the rights of the parties involved to pitch, make and distribute such a film, but it is also within the rights of exhibitors to refuse to screen it.

In the United States, the function of bodies like the MPAA and ESRB is to act as the counterweight in the system – which is not to say that they are any less fallible than government-imposed censorship, but on principle they justify the absence of state involvement. It’s a common misconception that because compliance with a ratings board works on an opt-in basis, the system is toothless. In numbers, the distinction between an M for Mature and an AO for Adults Only is the difference between 17 and 18; in reality, as with the MPAA’s distinction between R and NC-17, it’s a red flag to exhibitors and retailers that effectively reads, display at your own peril. The fact is, retailers and exhibitors do play ball.

Less compliant and less enforceable are the distinctions lower down the chain, like letting kids unaccompanied into R-rated films or selling M-rated games to their actual target market, teenagers. Decisions on what to do with a product once it has been stocked are made much further down the chain of command by people who don’t have as much to lose, and don’t have the same interest in self-preservation. Below the M, game ratings are there to inform the consumer and nothing more. If it so turns out that a violence warning drives a sale, so be it – the duty of informing has been fulfilled.

What threatens the system are schmucks like the boys at Rockstar, who in effect cheated the ESRB, and wholeheartedly deserve the consequences of being – pardon the pun – exposed.

The thing that separates video games from comic books, commercial music and films is that software is not readily subject to inspection. There is little direct, nonlinear access to all the content presented without rigours of reverse engineering that would be of a far bigger scale nowadays than poking around an 8-bit NES ROM for beta stages and unused sprites. Contrast this with a film, which you can sit down and watch, cut here and there, add this or that. In terms of content that is accessible in a standard consumer’s-eye-view playtest, you’re looking at a time investment ten or twenty times greater if you want to report on a whole game exhaustively. There is dialogue in Animal Crossing that doesn’t trigger until after a year of playing (and some that doesn’t appear until after a year of not playing).

With the Hot Coffee issue, we run into a bit of ambiguous territory because the content in question is not “accessible by design”, for all that is worth when PC gaming thrives on player communities that toy with the code and some console gaming circles make a sport out of breaking into secret areas on media that are not so tangible. There’s a world of difference, though, between Rockstar passively whimpering, “But… but… they weren’t supposed to unlock that even though we left it on the disc!” and, say, Eidos taking legal action to block distribution of the player-created “Nude Raider” patch that has been at large since 1996. Here’s a hint: one of these is more responsible than the other.

The other thing one should notice is that rampant piracy prevents any action akin to the San Andreas recall and relabeling from actually preventing kids from accessing game content they are not supposed to see. Indeed, the value of the illicitly traded good appreciates. This pitfall is not sufficient to negate the value of the tangible consequence: punishing the developer and publisher by precluding them from profiting further from the material.

But I’m not here to retread old ground, because that’s just not the sort of thing I do. San Andreas asked for a slapping, took it and liked it; let it be. I don’t think one could reasonably deny that freedom of expression is worth protecting. That is a different and more general question than whether or not sex and violence in video games is itself worth protecting. I say it’s not. The explicit glorification of social taboos and scenarios that demand sociopathic behaviour are never necessary causes to make a game fun, or even good.

If the short history of video games has a golden age, it is undoubtedly 1985-95, the decade that Nintendo ruled with an iron fist aside from a brief tussle with the Sega Genesis, which I’ll get to in a moment. Nintendo didn’t invent the modern electronic game, but it saved the business after Atari ran themselves into the ground. And it wasn’t because they came up with directional pads and A and B buttons, either.

No, Nintendo’s strategy was a little something called the Seal of Quality – a misnomer, since it was not a guarantor of quality by any means, though that was a large part of its appeal. It was their insurance against what happened to Atari: the flooding of the game market with the likes of Custer’s Revenge. If you wanted to develop for Nintendo’s hardware, you had to meet certain standards. While in theory this was a weapon against bad games, in practice, Nintendo’s grip on its licensees permitted its American division to act as a censorship body in the years before the ESRB was founded or had any reason to be.

Nintendo of America’s content regulations were not something to be taken lightly. In the localization of Final Fantasy VI (released as Final Fantasy III on the SNES), all the pubs were referred to as “cafés” and verbal references to death were removed entirely – bold, it seems, for a game that sunders continents and even stops to deal with teenage pregnancies and attempted suicide. But the fact is, in spite (or because?) of having to relegate its mature themes to innuendo, the game is no less a classic.

Contrast this with Mortal Kombat, the major catalyst for the mid-’90s resurgence of talk about federal game regulation, and the establishment of the ESRB to deflect that move. Sure, Nintendo removed the blood and put “sweat” in its place, and consequently lost a mountain of sales to Sega, which marketed itself entirely on being edgier than that merry band of mushroom-eating prudes (for whom it would be writing software a decade later, one observes). It wasn’t such a big deal once people realized that the series had nothing to go on aside from its infamous Fatalities and went back to playing Street Fighter II. In fact, the best MK game wasn’t an entry in the series at all, but the Macintosh shareware parody Pong Kombat 3. My point here is that the presence or absence of content not appropriate for children does not determine a game’s entertainment value. Controversy drives sales, no doubt, but sales don’t ensure that a game stays played. You don’t see the more realistic, more violent Mortal Kombat at salsa competitions, now do you?

Extreme as they may have been, what Nintendo’s policies ensured at the time was that publishers of titles for their systems could not promote a game by leveraging shock value. It forced them to innovate in other ways. Ultimately, the censorship programme was almost singularly responsible for Nintendo’s precipitous plummet in the North American market in the post-ESRB era, even after its discontinuation; but as bad as it was for the company, my, was it ever good for games. It proved they didn’t need to be explicit to be great.

It was good for games in the same way that Hollywood censorship in the first half of the century led to the production of some of film’s most beloved classics – pieces revered for their control over the narrative possibilities of suggestion. As I previously mentioned in my discussion of Sin City, the entire genre of film noir established itself by addressing a dark contemporaneous reality full of horrible people, yet invoking the power of concealment in doing so. What happened was that filmmakers developed a more sophisticated language of cinema flexible enough to accommodate the controversial. If you look at Elia Kazan’s staging of the rape in A Streetcar Named Desire, you might get an idea of what I mean. That language of the medium became the foundational influence of everything that was hence filmed.

To be perfectly clear, this is not an argument in favour of censorship any more than a rape that produces good children is a justification for rape, to paraphrase Gayatri Spivak’s (arguably flawed) denunciation of colonialism. One could hardly suggest that the film industry revert to a censorship model now that the leading edge in filmmaking is to push the limits in a way that makes sense in terms of story. Requiem for a Dream requires its graphic depiction of drug use; The Passion of the Christ requires its copious and explicit Jesus-flogging. Neither film could do without what cannot accurately be called excesses.

But the film industry has earned its keep, whereas the realm of video games clearly has not. There are filmmakers that relish in excess, and some of them, like Tarantino or Rodriguez, have almost transformed it into a stylistic element of sorts – but film is very aware of its own history. Regular filmgoers are completely desensitized to the common sight of firearms nowadays, but if you take a master like Steven Spielberg – there is a scene in War of the Worlds where he makes one gun as frightening a sight as it would be if somebody pulled one out on the street one day. That’s how it used to be done, and he evidently understands that. And Hollywood producers won’t soon forget that when they got of control and peppered the summer of 2003 with over a dozen action sequels, each claiming to be more explosive than the last, a clownfish with a lucky fin outgrossed the lot.

Video games have hardly any history at all, and most developers are actively engaged in burying it. The preservation and availability of classic games is atrocious, particularly for the PC where everything is a horsepower race. Nintendo leverages nostalgia for sales, but their rivals have successful business models that rely on making the Kyoto giant look old-fashioned. New games sell by making old ones look obsolete, not just in aesthetic terms but by testing the limits that old games were afraid to test. The industry is so obsessed with newness that gloss is now an acceptable substitute for fun.

The video game business in North America is in serious need of a revolution, and by that I don’t mean a little black GameCube with a top-secret controller (although it could certainly help). The trend right now is one of consolidation and stagnation, because the major players are in it to making things bigger, flashier, more visceral, and just more. It should tell us something that “rag-doll physics” was the most exciting buzzword for a whole generation of graphics engines, when as brilliant as it is from a purely technical perspective, it amounts to little more than making enemy soldiers crumple properly in response to a tidy headshot. It’s uncanny that Thompson is picking on The Sims, given that Will Wright is the closest thing the industry has to an artisan.

Aside from the financial losses incurred, I see it as a positive thing for government and media attention to keep the video game industry on its toes. Ideally, developers should be self-censoring, significantly moreso than they already are. It reduces to the distinction between violence and gratuitous violence: gratuity. Right now, gratuity drives the industry. It shouldn’t have to.

I introduce all of the above in order to answer this question: can a Grand Theft Auto game be as fun without subjecting the entire industry to the vitriol of activists that demand the same kind of state involvement that crippled the comic book industry in the 1950s? Can such a game even exist? At the end of the day, need it be so controversial?

I’m speculating here, but I think that while it is certain that the GTA series has a lot of sales momentum thanks to its high profile as the reigning eight-hundred-pound scapegoat, it only became that popular on the strength of its design and not its content. If controversy had the power to move units by itself, Postal would be a viable franchise, and people might have actually bought BMX XXX so Acclaim would have gone bust in less of a hurry. But controversy can’t carry a game, and not all virtual lawbreaking is of the same appeal.

GTA is notable for its versatile, freeform nonlinearity; you can hop around doing whatever you want, driving any car you see on the street, and exploring at your own pace and leisure. If you wanted, you could spend all your time in Vice City delivering pizza on a motorbike or earning your keep as a paramedic, and it would amount to a quite pleasurable diversion; in fact, proponents of the series would argue that all the criminal activity is strictly voluntary.

On that I disagree; voluntary as it may be, it is coerced. Unlike the Knights of the Old Republic series where choices that lead to good or evil produce equally favourable circumstances, GTA is designed to encourage unlawful activity by providing it with a progression that offers equal or greater reward (part of which is the escapist reward of doing something you could never pull off in real life), but at little greater risk. The deterrent consequences of being arrested or killed are so light as to be negligible.

If the concern is that GTA glorifies and encourages sociopathy, then the solution is to attack the model of encouragement. I hypothesize that a game that permits you to just as easily rule a city by more lawful (if still mildly unethical) means and steps up the risk of doing otherwise would be a far superior experience and the logical extension to the GTA core design, because only then would it offer true flexibility and real choice. It wouldn’t quite fix the issue that the player’s mobility is premised on the ability to carjack anything in sight with impunity, but it would be an improvement. Gangland massacres would be playable, but would be less of a need. Uninformed parents buying it for their kids is something that remains unsolved, but that’s what high-profile public pressure is for – to inform where ESRB ratings fail to do so.

Lawful activity in an open-ended urban environment can still be fun, as demonstrated by GTA itself. At the same time, the possibility of breaking the law remains in a way fundamental to the GTA experience. For a game like this to be truly free-roaming, as soon as you get into a vehicle it has to take into account that you might run some red lights, collide with the odd fire hydrant, and maybe, just maybe, even hit somebody. So somewhere, there has to be a compromise – and that compromise boils down to a question of gratuity. A game that is built around an entertaining concept of interactivity only requires so much sex and violence to operate, and developers should keep in mind where that benchmark of reasonable requirement stands.

Take-Two and Rockstar have plenty of things to brag about when it comes to their games and their place in the history of interactive design, things other than how they let you enact a cop-shooting fantasy. They choose to sell them that way, though, marketing what trouble their games stir up instead of what their strengths are. I don’t think it’s the right choice, or even a necessary one. And as long as they lead the industry in that direction, the likes of Miami Jack have a very good leg to stand on.