Save the Robot – Chris Dahlen

Plenty of folks made fun of the run of perfect scores Halo 3 earned. I’m mixed: After a week of playing it every lunch at work and talking to people who are playing it almost around the clock, I’ll bet that the multiplayer earns the game that perfect score.

But then there’s the single-player campaign. Let’s face it: it sucks.

Okay, the 10 hours you spend on the game’s story can’t compare to the hundreds of hours some people pour into head-to-head fragfests and calling each other “faggggottttttttttttt” as the match winds down. But some of us like a story, and Halo’s has two problems. First, the pacing’s flat. The first game introduced the whole setting, and it followed a there-and-back-again arc that was really satisfying. Yes, the whole game is basically one scene repeated a thousand times: you run into a bunch of guys; you shoot ‘em. But the settings were so new and the pacing so perfect that it didn’t matter. Halo 2 had a few great set-pieces; jumping on the scarab while it walked down the street was a hoot. But so far – and I only have one chapter left – Halo 3 is just mopping up.

But there’s a story here too, right? A plot, and some characters? Well, let’s single out one reason this doesn’t work. The game tells its story almost entirely through cutscenes. Cutscenes are cheesy in any case – Half-Life made me hate any game that has to take away control to get its job done. But the particular problem here is that if you miss a line – say, because you had the volume down so you didn’t wake up your two-year-old in the next room – then it’s gone. Nothing in the game carries much of a story. Many games work well as (to use the alternate reality gamers’ analogy) archeological narratives: they tell the best parts of their story in clues and old artifacts. Unless I’m not thinking subtly enough, Halo just keeps pushing you to the next firefight.

Now, the details that do fly by add up to a story, but I don’t care about it. Master Chief has no inner life, and the world he’s in doesn’t have much to do with him. He’s a soldier, and he has to kill the enemy, but that’s as deep as it gets: we’re good guys, they’re bad. So all the details about the bad guys – who’s on whose side, and what they believe in, and why their ships are purple – don’t much matter. When the fungal people swoop in? They’re just grosser targets. And when shit starts blowing up – well, you don’t need to know Italian to get the gist of the opera, right?

I still subscribe to the concept of additive comprehension, where sequels and comic books and novelizations can flesh out one simple story into a whole universe. Clearly they did it with Halo. But just because something has a lot of backstory doesn’t mean the backstory’s worth a damn. The difference between on the one hand, Lord of the Rings, Buffy, Sandman, and the original Star Wars trilogy; and on the other, The Matrix, the later Star Wars trilogy, and a whole bunch of crappy blockbuster sci-fi films; is that the first have strong characters with internal dilemmas, and the whole world – the whole universe - resolves around them. The strong inner life makes you care about the complicated, infite outer environment. It gives you a reason to keep digging.

Master Chief is an iconic hero but I can’t say I identify with him. Bungie deliberately never lets you see his face. This is supposed to help you relate to him, and project yourself into his suit. But I find it more distracting that we hear his voice, and sit back and watch him do his own thing in the cutscenes. I know what Gordon Freeman looks like, but I never feel “outside” of him. The reason Halo 3 works so well as a multiplayer game is that it doesn’t have the tactics or complexity of a Gears of War, let alone the migraine-inducing checks and balances of Shadowrun. All you do is pick up a gun, run around and shoot people. Unlike the campaign, it sticks to what it does best.

UPDATE: My review is now up at Pastemagazine.com. Hard to say anything that hasn’t been said already, but I tried to say it differently.

Earlier this summer I wrote a press release for Slope, the new record by drummer, composer, and David Sylvian’s brother Steve Jansen. Just found it as the text of a microsite – nice stuff.

WNYC’s excellent (and daily!) music show Soundcheck invited me on to talk about politics and music, after they read one of my Pitchfork columns, Panic Ain’t A Slogan. They had Steve Earle on as well, and he was a lot funnier.

You can hear clips of Sufjan Stevens and The Books, as well as Earle. Unfortunately we didn’t have time to get to Cassetteboy’s “Fly Me To New York.”

Ever wondered what I sound like? Link to mp3’s and stream here.

Okay. I gave up on my 21 day regimen in Halo 2, as y’all probably guessed. I didn’t have time to keep up with it – too many new games got in the way, and now with Halo 3 in my hot little hands, there doesn’t seem much point.

The main point of the exercise was to get good enough to beat the guys at work. We play a couple rounds every day at lunch, but so far I’ve been humiliated again and again, and practicing at home was supposed to help. However, last week I made it to a third and then a second place finish – it seems I’m learning a few tricks. When I finish first place, I’ll be sure to post.

Meanwhile, thoughts on Halo 3 to come. I haven’t had much time to play, because I still have to wrap up Stranglehold … See? The game crit thing isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.

Yes, the news of lesbian sex in Mass Effect is hilarious. Was discussing it with a friend of mine, and noted that if they play it seriously – like, if you actually have to be interested in and talk with the female alien before a relationship starts, a la Knights of the Old Republic, then it’s probably not lezploitation; but if they award you an Achievement for making two girls kiss, maybe it’s not so serious.

Which got me thinking. You can earn achievements from any game on the XBox 360. But why don’t they hand out achievements across games? “Lifetime” achievements for honors that are beyond any one title?

- THE JILL SOBULE: Making two girls kiss, in any game, for any reason. 50 points

- SCHOOLYARD BULLY: Killing the same player in at least five games’ deathmatches. 100 points

- FRAG THE LIEUTENANT: Leading 100 of your computer-controlled squadmates or comrades to their deaths. 75 points

- MADE IN AMERICA: Driving only US-made vehicles in racing games. 100 points

- WOULD BUY SUSHI FROM McDONALDS: Play at least 3 Japanese RPGs on the XBox. 150 points

- BROKEBACK XBOX: Making boys kiss, in any game, for any reason. 500 points

Other suggestions?

UPDATE: Leigh and her readers at Sexyvideogameland took the ball and ran with it - check it out!

Count me in the legions of web 2.0 and game junkies who got pumped at the announcement of Raph Koster’s Areae’s new project, Metaplace. (Great round-up of coverage here.) And while the concept behind Metaplace isn’t way off what Koster has telegraphed over the past year at conferences and in interviews, it’s still exciting to see it go public.

Metaplace promises to create legions of new online games. But what it’s really churning out are worlds. Small worlds, big worlds, virtual reality worlds, worlds you only see through your cell phone, text worlds, 3-D worlds, worlds for a handful of people, and worlds for – what’s the last count for Warcraft? – 9 million+ subscribers. And while each Metaplace experience is supposed to combine people + games, what you get at the end of that really is a world.

If I had to name one thing that drew me to transmedia storytelling, it’s the prospect of new worlds. Instead of just a story with plot and characters, you have the potential for something deeper – a full, 360 degree environment where the stories take place. Plenty of standalone works build worlds. Lord of the Rings didn’t need the games, movies, and lunchboxes to create a world. Neither did ECM Records, or half my kid’s books. Very simple packages can create universes. As a game critic, I’ll admit the grades I hand out correlate eerily to how convincingly each game creates a fake place to spend time in – that I’m turned off by stuff like John Woo’s Stranglehold because everyplace you go feels junky and cut out of cardboard, while a tiny little miniature like Knytt (thanks, Leigh) will suck me in for hours. This is kind of like rating a restaurant 50% on the ambience, but isn’t that why you go back?

And alternate reality games are games, and they’re narratives, but they’re also worlds – worlds that layer themselves neatly over the real world. With one text message, you shift from the one to the other. And that’s the number one thing I want to see in Metaplace: Koster promises to layer worlds on top of each other, to let you jump logically yet magically from one to the other, to make this kind of “air smells different, water’s green, toilets flush backward and everyone speaks Japanese” context-shifting a quick and easy phenomenon – but not so easy as to wreck the feeling of disconnect.

As we jump from one experience to the other, we’ll probably have to change names and identities – but not too much. Because wherever we go, there we are – ourselves, under different names or avatars, or genders, or races, or – in the case of my Tabula Rasa redneck, classes – but there are common threads through all of them. And I’m not saying that in a mushy new age way: you’re actually tracked from one platform to the next, and every new, different thing you do winds up in the same database. (The machine is us/ing us, remember? That clip didn’t have a feel-good message – it’s more like 1984 with consent and a newsletter.)

This means that as we create our games, and play other people’s games, and set up our profiles, and have conversations, we are both visiting and creating new worlds. Worlds that overlap in countless and unpredictable ways, mostly thanks to the fact that we’re dragging them along with us. At a certain point, we become our own worlds – or rather, the worlds we create follow us like shells on a digital turtle. My world would look something like me as a kid reading my favorite comics or watching my favorite movies, in my bedroom, by myself, in my own head – and in my own world. I don’t know what it takes to bring that kid into contact with other kids – I sure didn’t figure it out at the time – but playing a game, with its formal rules of engagement, makes a great place to start.

A friend at work lent me all nine volumes of The Preacher, the classic, profane ’90s comic. Without any spoilers for the few of you who haven’t read it either, I finished Volume 3, which couldn’t have had more guns, more violence and more bombshells – but now that the story’s moved on, I’ve hit my favorite part of the book so far: the characters are just hanging out.

Many of my favorite serials hit a point where the characters are so familiar, so intertwined and most of all, so tired, that they need to take a break for an episode or so. Subtleties in their relationships come out. Quiet conversations and discussions replace the fireworks and sense of jeopardy. The tempo slows down, and we just get to spend time with these people.

I don’t know what you call these interludes, although Quentin Tarantino referred to something like it when he called Jackie Brown a “hang out movie” – there’s a plot, but the movie draws you in because the characters are fun to spend time with. In TV, traditionally each episode has a story and jeopardy. Ron Moore has complained that Battlestar Galactica almost always has to have a villain and some violence – the episode that introduces Lucy Lawless was supposed to be just characters, but he had to shoehorn in a bizarre little hostage drama to keep the action moving. I count myself lucky to have seen a season finale episode of Law & Order in the mid-’90s where the most formulaic, least character-driven show on the air gave the cast a chance to hang around in bars and talk about their lives and dead family members. The show closed with Jill Hennessy dying in a car accident – but until then, it was all tell, no show.

HBO has fewer qualms. Half of The Sopranos seemed to be “hang out” episodes; now that the series is over I can’t even remember most of the actual plots. I think somebody got whacked or something, I dunno. The problem with cutting your characters some slack is that it’s hard to regain the pace. The Shield is exceptionally good at keeping its cast busy: it’s not my favorite show on the air, but everyone always has a purpose. Contrast that with Buffy - what were Xander and Dawn doing by the end, anyway? – or in books, Harry Potter, where Hermione and especially Ron are the least interesting people in the book (aside from, well, Harry Potter). Snape and Neville own the finale, even though they’re on the sidelines of the series.

The audience gets attached to characters, So do the creators. After a couple marathon arcs it’s a pleasure for everyone to take a breather and set aside the danger, the villains, and give everyone time for gentler interactions and quiet bonding. It can get indulgent, and ratcheting the tension back up ain’t easy – but who doesn’t like a little pillow talk?

When I first encountered the now-famous “little sister” decision in BioShock, I thought it was kind of blunt: you kill the girl, or you don’t. A, or B. I’m a veteran of BioWare/Black Isle RPGs, with their matrix of alignment options that shift every which way by your subtlest decisions. Say you’re talking to a respected militant: do you show reverence, or stay neutral and reserved, or slam him with a snarky jibe? Dozens of these decisions litter your story and color the way you’re perceived within the game. Even if the ending doesn’t change much, the experience does.

By that standard, BioShock - with its blunt choice and its two extremely blunt endings – seemed kinda simple. I don’t think I even mentioned the little sisters in my review. But you know what? That choice with the sisters has become insanely popular. And I was totally wrong.

Choice is an interesting thing. (And btw, Leigh Alexander has a terrific column surveying a ton of games that tackle the issue.) Yes, the choices that get you through a game like Planescape: Torment are fascinating. For example, I remember at one point having to decide whether to peel some skin off my forearm to feed a helpless old zombie. There’s a moral dilemma that you don’t soon forget. I ponied up, and shifted a couple points toward “good.” It was an interesting moment – but the thing is, Planescape has tons of moments like this. I don’t even remember half of them.

And that makes it hard to talk about them. The genius behind the little sister gag in BioShock is that it’s a simple binary choice, and a compact personality test. If you ask a bunch of gamers what they did, you’ll probably get an even split – yet they’ll still have interesting reasons behind their decision. In short, it’s not so interesting inside the game – but it’s a sure-fire conversation starter when you’re offline.

I’ve been playing the Tabula Rasa beta (see my avatar, Pungent McGillicuddy, above). Richard Garriott promised that the game would offer ethical choices, where you’ll have two ways to solve a particular quest. Again, at first I thought that having only two options would be too easy. But I’ve gone through two challenges, and so far they’re rewarding. In the first case, a soldier on a base asked me to help him smuggle stims to some other troops. Instead, I turned him in to his commanding officer – the “lawful good” decision, also known as, “being a suck-up and a weenie.” The effect of this choice was to piss off all the other enlisted guys on the base.

With that in mind, later on I had the chance to track down some outcast alien and hand him over to his chief. When I finally found him, I let him go – angering the chief, but earning me brownie points with my human comrades, who want nothing to do with the internal squabbles of the locals. So this time, I was “chaotic good,” in other words, a “badass stick-it-to-the-man” guy.

Too early to tell what the cumulative impact of these choices will be. (Or whether I’ll stick with the game long enough to find out … .) But the decisions were fun to make – and maybe they’ll be fun to talk about.

BTW, another Leigh plug: we’d been talking about her Metroid Prime review for Paste. 200 words is too little to talk about the cult of Samus Aran, so she spun it into an Aberrant Gamer column that includes this game-winning line: “Could it be we don’t need breast physics to fall in love?” Read it here.

UPDATE: Logged in last night to Tabula Rasa, and when I got to the character selection screen, I saw ol’ Pungent there – in his skivvies. All his clothes were missing. I logged in and found him standing in the middle of a base, still in his underwear, waving an empty pistol around and looking confused.

Looking at the Beta forums, this is an infrequent bug that’s been striking people since the spring: characters get rolled back a level, regain some of their quests, and lose most of their loot. The game’s not gold and I’m not paying to play, so I make no criticism of NCSoft and Destination for having it in there, but man – I’ll never forget seeing my toon run around the base with his dogtags flapping yelling, “WHICHA YOU WISEGUYS STOLE MY PANTS?!”

UPDATE 2: US players to get an XP bump and “pants bonus” for putting up with the rollback problems. Now that’s service.

The other day, I read a blog post about the surreal new XBox Live Arcade shmup Space Giraffe. As if to justify its wholesale, mind-bending weirdness, game developer Jonathan Blow compared it to another “dense but worth the effort” masterpiece – James Joyces’ Ulysses.

Blow’s praise feels tacked on, like a “take that!” to the critics who don’t get the game. (I haven’t played it enough to know how I feel – but if Gus Mastrapa likes it, it’s probably worth the time.) But I was interested in the Ulysses nod, because Ulysses seems to come up in a lot of gaming conversations. I read it a few years ago, with the help of a guide to highlight the themes and references. I only bring this up to give me a little cred as I make a stab at explaining: why should gamers like Ulysses?

- It would make a great Quake level. Here’s the obvious one. In Chapter 10: The Wandering Rocks, Joyce follows 19 Dubliners as they walk through the streets of their city, and reportedly he went to great lengths to time their steps and trace their movements, making their run-ins throughout the chapter as accurate as possible. Ian Bogost was moved to recreate the whole thing on Twitter – though with bots, not Dubliners – and the whole thing sounds like it belongs in a Half-Life mod. “THE SUPERIOR, THE VERY REVEREND JOHN CONMEE S. J, RESET HIS smooth gravity gun in his interior pocket as he came down the presbytery steps … “

- It’s fan fiction. Like God of War, Ulysses is Greek myth fan fic – and because it’s a hit, it single-handedly legitimates the entire practice of fan fiction. Next time someone tells you that setting your first novel in the world of Stargate: Atlantis world is a crutch, just tell ‘em, “Well, think about Ulysses. That’s pretty damn good, isn’t it?”

- In its day, it faced censorship. Like Manhunt 2, Ulysses ran afoul of the law. In fact, to get past the censors in Boston, Joyce had to excise the section where Stephen Daedelus wrenches someone’s testicles off with a nunchuk.

- Readers inhabit a female protagonist. The chapter written from Molly Bloom’s perspective is my favorite. And I like to play female characters – like my new WOW blood elf, who looks like Han Solo with breasts and loves to knit on the battlefield. Well, that’s neither here nor there.

- It has rules. Each chapter of Ulysses follows its own set of rules and its own theme. Gamers love this kind of formal structure. You know how haiku is the top nerd form of poetry, because it depends on numbers? Same here.

And along those lines …

- It’s next to impossible to beat. Sure, it’s easy to get started on Ulysses. All you need is Homer, Hamlet, the Bible, and a city map of Dublin – hell, not even a new one – and you’re basically in business. But although it’s easy to learn, it’s difficult to master. Even Joyce scholars admit they haven’t figured out every symbol and reference in the book. You can chew through a lot of great novels in a weekend – I try to bang through The Moviegoer every couple years – but Ulysses demands a lifetime.

What self-respecting gamer could stay away?

The full text of Ulysses is available here.

The original, uncensored and deeply odd video for “The Chauffeur.” What is it about this song? It was always one of my faves – I loved the art-pop side of Duran Duran (see also: Arcadia, “Lady Ice”).

On my “todo” list is making a mix of great ’80s art pop, drenched with strange expensive synths and indulgent lyrics. Peter Gabriel, Kate Bush, Talk Talk and of course David Sylvian would make the cut. Other suggestions?