Hatred

[Hotfoot]

[youtube][/youtube]

Fucking hell.

Frigid and I had a discussion recently over what games allow you to do within them and what they encourage you to do within them. While I don't hold to the concept that games that allow for actions necessarily encourage them, there are ways that they either increase or decrease the chances of players committing those actions by way of the mechanics in the game. Grand Theft Auto, for example, lets you take money from people you kill and even parking meters you destroy, increasing the chances that players will commit those acts for those benefits. The disincentive, however, is police attention, which makes other actions more difficult. However, players interested in causing mayhem and looking for a fight will actively look to incite police attention, often for lack of better things to do. I myself would often load up GTA: VC just to engage in rampages because they were fun.

Games like Saint's Row 3 and 4 have made the violence over the top and ridiculous, turning it into effectively a cartoon. These aren't real people, they're caricatures. Watch_Dogs made the violence matter to a degree, but put you in the shoes of someone who, ostensibly, is trying to do more good than harm, and thus makes the people you need to kill generally unlikable sorts. Hitman lowers your score fairly dramatically for killing innocent civilians, and even for killing people other than your intended target, last I checked.

This game, meanwhile, aspires to be the next Postal. Blood for the sake of blood, shock for the sake of shock. Killing innocent civilians isn't an option that you might choose in the heat of the moment or because it's expedient, it is the point of the fucking game. Killing people who are begging for their lives.

You can make the argument that it's been done before, that shooters these days have all sorts of blood and gore, and that the only reason we are comfortable with them is that we construct unrealistic narratives about the foes that we fight within them being evil, and thus anything we do to them is justified. Hell, I just got finished playing Shadows of Mordor recently, and that game is all about gruesome, premeditated murder and vast killing sprees. But the targets are Uruks, not, you know, people. Even the few people I did kill in the game were people unquestionably evil, so it's okay, right?

We can have that debate, we can have a game that delves into the morality of the shooter as a whole. Spec Ops: The Line attempted that, and while I've yet to play it myself, all indications seem to me that it failed on numerous levels, because it made you do terrible things and then chastises you for playing the game. This game, however, makes you do terrible things because it thinks you want to do these things. For crying out loud the main character reads like any number of mass shooting perpetrators. One could make the claim that it's black humor or satire, but I don't honestly think that is the case just from first glance. Combine that with the fact that the developers support numerous hate groups, and, well, yeah. I don't see this game getting a lot of traction in the market, but I get the feeling it's going to light the mainstream media on fire now that news for it is spreading. It is literally a game that glorifies mass shootings, and while I doubt it will actually have any good lessons to teach on how to perform such a hideous act, that it seems to encourage it is likely going to be a talking point against games as anything other than brutal murder simulators, however poorly this game actually does in sales.

In short, fuck this game, fuck these developers, I hope they lose all of their money on it and never darken our door again.

[Lys]

If this Hatred game isn't meant to be black comedy then I don't see how it aspires to be the next Postal, not when Postal is pretty much nothing but black comedy. We're talking about a game that has a severed cow's head and a boomerang machete as weapons, where you can sodomizing cats and piss on people. It's surreal, cartoonish, and comedic, not some sort of serious mass murder simulator. That's pretty much the entire reason Postal works as a game (and movie), because everything's so over the top ridiculous you just can't take it seriously. If you remove the cartoonish and puerile out of it, then all you're left with is... well, whatever this Hatred thing is. I mean, fuck, that trailer makes me uncomfortable and that's from someone who actually liked Rampage.

We can have that debate, we can have a game that delves into the morality of the shooter as a whole. Spec Ops: The Line attempted that, and while I've yet to play it myself, all indications seem to me that it failed on numerous levels, because it made you do terrible things and then chastises you for playing the game.

Actually, that was the point. In order to deconstruct shooters the game must have a structure in common with them, which generally means linear story with few options. It's deliberate that the only way to avoid doing something in SpecOps: The Line is stop playing it, because that is exactly the same as any other shooter. That's why it's chastising you, because you're playing a game where you know you will do horrible things, and you keep playing despite it being clear there's no way to avoid doing them. If they had made the game such that you can actually avoid inflicting pain and suffering then it would not have been a deconstruction of the games that don't give you that option.

[Hotfoot]

Actually, that was the point. The only way to avoid doing those terrible things is to stop playing the game, so if you kept playing then yeah, it'll chastise you for doing so. The game is deliberately linear with few options because so are most first person shooters. Making the game such that you can actually avoid inflicting pain and suffering wouldn't deconstruct anything.

See, that's a bad mechanic for exploring the issue. By forcing the player in an interactive game to either play it or not, you're not actually creating an exploration of the thing in question, you are forcing them to take abuse for decisions that are beyond their control in a medium where interaction is the key facet of what separates it from other storytelling devices.

The model is fundamentally broken at it's core. To whit: I spend money on a game for the experience of playing it. If I don't play it, I don't benefit from it, and I have effectively wasted money. The message and story of the game are not ones that can be explored by me, there is no point to it, but the creators get paid regardless because they now have my money.

If a developer makes a game that is unreasonable to play for whatever reason, I consider it a waste of money because I did not gain entertainment from it. If the gameplay or story are intolerable, I feel I have wasted money. Usually, it's the gameplay that is terrible, but I've played more than a few games with utterly terrible stories as well.

If the game forces you to perform actions that you do not want to perform, it removes all agency from the game. Your decisions don't matter, because they were not a choice. I have played several games like this, and each time the game gives me shit in the story for the events in question, I remove myself from the game. The connection is lost, and my ability to care is reduced.

The argument that you can stop playing the game and that is a valid choice, however, does not work well with a $60 retail game. I will not pay $60 to let a game sit on my shelf. That's utter lunacy. I cannot begin to describe how stupid that is on the face of it. To say that not playing the game anymore is a valid choice means you utterly failed to explore the matter on any real level.

There are any number of ways to explore the lunacies of the shooter genre. You can poke fun at it, like Serious Sam, Eat Lead: The Return of Matt Hazard, or Battlefield: Bad Company. You can lampshade it, like Max Payne does on occasion. You can play it straight, like Deus Ex did, where it stressed that you were a police officer, not a mass murderer, with it's reveal that the original bad guys you were fighting against were, in fact, kind of the good guys, and that even the guys you ended up fighting later were not themselves that bad, some of them being people you used to work with.

Whatever take you have on it though, you have to allow for multiple interpretations of the material you present. That's what allows it to be an exploration. You present the tropes and expectations in slightly different lights, seeing if they still work or if they're just utterly ridiculous. You allow the player to interpret them and come to their own conclusion.

It's not hard to make players agonize over moral choices, or present things to them in a way that makes their previous actions seem cold and heartless. Dehumanizing the enemy is a big thing, and it can be combated or subverted in a number of ways.

Everything I've heard and seen about Spec Ops: The Line shows me that it was an absolute failure as an exploration into the medium of the shooter. It's an ugly, nasty game that wants to punish you for liking to play shooters, but is itself a shooter. That's hardly a compelling point of discussion.

[White Haven]

That's...not entirely accurate. Hotfoot. I do not known Spec Ops: The Line, but I have spent some substantial amount of time discussing it, as it is a subject that definitely warrants discussion. One particular scene comes to mind, a scene in which the player is asked to fire into a crowd of civilians to disperse them. You can, of course, go and do just that. You can also, however, fire into the air overhead, and they disperse as well. That fact is not telegraphed, so it's easy to miss, but that ties into the point it's trying to make: that by just blindly doing what you think is expected of you, you can miss the opportunity to not be a horrible person. I'm sure there are others; that's just what comes to mind from prior conversations on the subject. That's not to say you should like the game or its message, but I feel it's at least necessary to criticize it accurately if you're going to do so at all.

[Hotfoot]

While that one example may be true, from what I've heard it's filled with examples where it is literally impossible to move the game forward without doing terrible things. Had the game instead been filled with choices that were merely not obvious, it would be a different discussion. Granted, I'm not able to speak directly of such things, having not played the game myself, but I rather refuse to give money to developers who think that not playing the game is a valid choice I should give them money for.

[General Havoc]

Well I have played the game, and I'm afraid I can confirm Hotfoot's viewpoint on Spec Ops. The example above that you cite, White Haven, is practically the only such occasion in the entire game, and not-coincidentally one of its strongest moments. I however recall the occasion in which you are told to use white phosphorous to slaughter your enemies and proceed. Having by now caught on to the fact that the game was not playing by the usual rules, I spent an hour and a half trying literally anything else but WP, only for the game to drop infinitely-respawning enemies on me until I was forced to use the stuff, whereupon it told me I had murdered civilians and then accused me of moral failings for the rest of the game. Not the character in-game that I was controlling. Me, the player. Because I didn't give up and shut the game off.

An even worse example was to come, a sequence in which the main character is confronted by a visibly crazy person whom he has been searching for, who immediately co-opts the player into a raid on a water storage facility. There is no option given to not engage in this raid, nor to demand the actual answers you have been searching for from him, but you must accompany him on the attack, one which culminates in an actual rail-shooting sequence, during which the main character performs actions of such unfathomable naivety that I was literally screaming at the screen for him to do anything but what I knew by then they were going for. The character, of course, decoupled from the player's interests, then proceeds to do exactly what I did not want him to do, which the game takes as a license to browbeat its player for the remaining duration for being a sociopathic drooling fat nerd who kills imaginary people without thinking of the consequences.

Spec Ops is a daring game, but that's about all the praise I'll give it. The narrative is weak and shoddy, the gameplay decidedly average, and the "deconstruction" that everyone so praises it for is nothing more than the same tired old "murder simulators for budding psychopaths" argument that's been parroted about the game industry for a generation and a half. It has nothing to say except that shooter games are evil, and you are evil for liking them, ignoring the actual discussion of why such games exist and what their virtues and flaws are in favor of a blanket denunciation of its own audience. It drips with contempt for its playerbase, displaying messages to the player (not the character) like "Do you feel like a hero yet?" after physically forcing the player to either turn the game off or participate in war crimes. It carries pretenses of highbrow intellectualism, and then poisons the discussion it claims to want to have by insisting that by participating in the discussion, you are morally culpable for its circular conclusion.

Had it tried to present itself as a deconstruction of the shooter hero, by simply showing a man descending into madness by being forced to kill hundreds of people, then we might be onto something. But this is a game that equates power fantasies of any sort with sociopathy, and spits on you for having agreed to purchase its product. I hold Spec Ops: The Line in contempt, for that is unquestionably how it holds me.

[Lys]

In all honesty what I liked best about SpecOps The Line was precisely watching Captain Walker's desent into psycopathy and insanity. Mental degeration is one of my favourite genres for reasons I cannot quite explain, but there is so damn little of it out there that I'm forced to take what I can get. To me the mounting attrocities felt natural because, well, that's what the increasingly deranged and singleminded Captain would do, isn't it? So I agree with Havoc it would have been a better game if they had focused on that instead of berating the player for being along on the ride.

[General Havoc]

I'll agree with you there Lys that had the game focused on Walker instead of on the player, it might well have been genius. It DID show a man's mental disintegration through the usual tropes of the shooter genre very well. It DID manage to produce some memorable stuff in that field through excellent voicework and setpiece design. I just wish they had concentrated on that strength instead of deciding to piss all over their audience.

[Hotfoot]

A character's descent into madness can make for a very interesting game, and it has in the past. However, there are games that have done it better, and have done loss of player control in a better and more natural way. The various early Silent Hill games, for instance, the original Bioshock, and so on. They are far and few between as a matter of course because, well, it's difficult to do well. The primary issue, of course, being the nature of interaction with the game. Every mechanic of interaction is one, essentially, of choice, and while there are always going to be mechanics that are less about making a moral decision and more about making an arbitrary one, to involve players, they need to feel as though their choices matter, from the selection of their tools and techniques to branching storylines.

A shooter fails if every gun feels the same, or if they're not very effective against the enemy. An RPG fails if every choice leads to the same canned endings that are chosen at the last minute despite every other choice you've made along the way. While a story on rails can be quite good, games work best when the player is invested in the character. If you can connect with the character in some way, it will resonate with you on a deeper level. A game can still be a fine work of art and not do this, but the stories that connect with you in some way will always feel more powerful. Locking a first person game to the player's view, for instance, like in Half-Life, is an effective tool for keeping you in the game from the perspective of Gordon Freeman. The story is still linear, but because your character doesn't talk, you are free to have your own reactions fill in the blanks.

[Lys]

Stripped of its story, The Line is a bog standard, on the rails, shooter. It is no doubt well and competently executed and entertaining for much the same reason any other such shooter is, but it's still a by the book example of the genre in terms of gameplay. The only player agency to be had is how you dispatch your enemies with the tools at your disposal. Beyond that, it is the character who makes the major decisions of what to do and where to go, you're just along for the ride. I liked The Line because it made that character interesting, I wanted to continue following him down the road he was on, to find out where it took him, and what the trip would do to him. That was the main apeal, that here we had a game where a man forced into a path that sees him killing people dozens and dozens of people might come out the same at the other end. Player agency has nothing to do with this story, there was never any to be had to beging with.

[General Havoc]

And yet that doesn't stop the game from breaking the fourth wall every five minutes to berate the player for the terrible moral choices he is apparently making, despite the fact that the game does not allow for choice of practically any kind. If they had stuck to Walker, I would praise the game. But they did not. And I find the result a contemptuous mess.

[frigidmagi]

I think I got to side with Havoc and Hotfoot here. If you make a rails shooter you don't really get to berate the player for making shitty moral choices. Because you didn't give them any.

[Lys]

Well, yes, I was exclusively referring to the strengths of the game, the parts of it I liked and I thought it did well. We agreed that berating the player for their nonchoices is a weakness in the game, which undermines its strengths by separating the player from the story. That is a point that is not in contention. The argument I was making is that if the game had focused on that strength, player agency would never have been an issue in the first place, just as it is not in Battlefield Gears of Duty or whatever.

Though, on a tangential note, Hotfoot brought up the first Bioshock as an example of loss of player agency done well. This is a common opinion, but one that I do not agree with. The twist in the story that the main character was being manipulated all along was indeed a good one, but the fact that it happened in a shooter is no more meaningful to my eyes than if it had happened in a book. Highlighting the fact that the character never had any choice is meaningless because the player still wouldn't even if the character did. There is no gameplay distinction to be had between a character being mindcontrolled and their being driven by survival or revenge. In fact, Bioshock itself shows that to be the case, as Jack shakes of his shackles but the player is no more free than at the start of the game. In the end, the player doesn't get any more choice in Jack's gross decisions than if they were given two diferent versions of the same book to read. Bioshock makes for a good story, but player agency has nothing to do with it.

[General Havoc]

Well, yes, I was exclusively referring to the strengths of the game, the parts of it I liked and I thought it did well. We agreed that berating the player for their nonchoices is a weakness in the game, which undermines its strengths by separating the player from the story. That is a point that is not in contention. The argument I was making is that if the game had focused on that strength, player agency would never have been an issue in the first place, just as it is not in Battlefield Gears of Duty or whatever.

Yes, and the point I was making was that it did not focus on that strength. And by not focusing on that strength it resulted in a game that was badly broken, both narratively and in terms of overall experience. It's all well and good to discuss what the game might have been, but I was discussing the game as it was. This is a game wherein the developers publicly expressed the opinion that because gamers had a choice to turn the game off and not play it, continuing to play made them morally culpable for the choices of the protagonist in the game, whatever those were, which is sort of like arguing that people who watch Schindler's List are morally responsible for the Holocaust. Spec Ops was an awful game, one of the least pleasant experiences I have ever had while gaming, and the notion that the game is an act of genius because I didn't like it is one I've fought through before. As Hotfoot put it before, it is utter lunacy to take the position this game did, which was that wasting one's money and not playing the game was the only valid choice.

Say what you will about Hatred, the game that started off this discussion. It looks reprehensible and ugly, and I have no interest in it. But it does not seem to be trying to pretend it is something that it is not, nor do I expect to see a lot of holier-than-thou moralizing from the game's creators regarding how stupid the playerbase is for taking them at their word.

[Lys]

Let us review the thread of conversation, Havoc:

-I said that the best part of the game was watching Captain Walker slowly becoming increasingly psychotic.
-You agreed that the game would have been great if it had focused on that.
-Hotfoot also agrees that a character's descent into insanity can make for a good story, and then starts going on about loss of player agency.
-I point out that players don't get any agency to lose in the type of game that The Line is. Moreover, player agency has nothing to do with story of Captain Walker, and would not have come up if the game had focused on it.
-You state the lack of player agency didn't keep the game for berating players for their non-choices.
-I agree that this was something the game should not have done, but point out that this is not what I was discussing.
-You state that you're talking about the game as it is, not as it should be.

Well, I was talking about the game as it should be, not as it is. Specifically, I was arguing against the notion that if the game had focused on Captain Walker, player agency would have been a theme it would have had to deal with. It isn't, for the reasons I already outlined. That the game should not have berated the players for matters outside their control is a point that I have already repeatedly agreed with and am not attacking, so I don't see why you keep defending it.

[General Havoc]

Has it occurred to you, Lys, that I might just be bringing up such aspects of the game as are central to my experience of it? The same way you are? You had a fun time watching the story of Captain Walker. I had a horrible time experiencing the game berating me the entire time for being a bad person. I do not accept that my experience of it is somehow less worthy of discussion than yours, especially since Hotfoot brought the game into the conversation in the first place because of its attempt to deconstruct the morality of shooter players.

Given the amount of crap I get every time I so much as hint towards telling other people what to discuss, I would prefer not to have to ask permission for which aspects of the game I'm allowed to speak to. Particularly since I found no ability to enjoy the ones you referred to thanks to the ones I did. Talk up the fun you had musing on some Spec Ops that was if you wish, but I hated that game, and do not feel that my hatred of it is somehow unworthy of comment.

[Lys]

It's not that your experiences are unworthy of comment, it's that the flow of conversation was such that you seemed to be replying to arguments I wasn't making. I don't like feeling like we're talking past each other, nor that my actual comments are being ignored in favour of things I haven't said. I gather that wasn't your intention, which is why I was trying to clarify, but perhaps the fault was in how I read your posts rather than in how you wrote them.