antilogue

too many words - too few visitors

[antilogue-blog]

MODERN WARFARE

Crouched behind a barrel, frag explosion behind bulldozer ahead, type, play, hear shots close, come out of cover, shot. Killcam, red-dot sight sniper, probably MP45. Sprint to knife, stop to type, dead, no killstreak, respawn before finishing this sentence dead again, long crouch, see glimpse, aim down scope, wait, noone, wait, gutshot, headshot, kill confirm, shotgun casualty. Dead. Try for sip of lukewarm tea, try to type, killcam, killcam, airstrike, miss sniper shot, chocolate on keyboard, pull out pistol, kill shotgunner, stand still while typing sentence but want to go back and get streak. Stop typing. Stop playing. Kid singing on headpiece. American. Leave myself idling to go back and proof this paragraph. As hit last fullstop, match ends. DEFEAT. Second from last killcount.

672 EXP required for rank up.

Getting Match Quality. Getting Match Quality. Team Deathmatch. Bloc. Choose Class.

Gunshots, someone w/ shotgun. Grenade. Twin kill street, apartment building, grenades in doorway, mow down while spamming crouch. Whole round misses, shameful. No skill, twitchplay. Sprint ahead of team-mates, fragged. Noob. Sniped. Ghost pro, adjustable ACOG no-dot sight. Not sure what gun. Replay embarrassing, I run back an forth then die. Team-mates dying, annoyed that I'm standing still while I type this. Kill then get suicide bombed. Nil-point gain. 2 kills. Got the ghost pro, I think. Someone sprints behind me while I type, grab controller spin and fire. Too late. Building full of greens, safe to type for now. Enemy UAV airborne. Spyplane. See us. Shit. Time almost up. Tagged from behind. Team loses. 610 – 750. Still promoted. Master Gunnery Sergeant.

Total EXP earned 80.

New match. Let's do this Marines! We've taken the lead. Friendly airstrike on the way. Our UAV is down. Friendly chopper on the way. First kill for me, longshot no scope rooftop. Another airstrike. Burning tank, rockets, Apache? Shit, back to it. Noone on my point, solo, rooftop, flanking open. Assist kill rooftop no scope again. Still same life, no respawn yet. Slow game. Thirsty. Another UAV. LAG! Fucking lag. Waste whole round, position given away. Sniped from behind, ACOG sight. Fucking M6. Enemy UAV airborne, tide changing. Stop typing. More lag. Wrecked Iraqi residential provides cover, out in the open, small field, lime tree (lime?), dead again, standing still to type. Gold Desert Eagle this time. Always pricks with Deagles. Run into ambush straight off respawn. Can't see score, can't type, hand hurts. In-level promotion, straight kill firing from hip, flash banged, all white, whistling in ears, slowmotion, airstrike, dead. Game over. Second from bottom. Earned claymores. Good. Been waiting a while.

Total EXP earned 115.

Went back to edit typos, lost sight of lobby, don't know level or team. Go with assault class – safe choice. We take lead. Hiding behind dumpster to type this. First kill, forgot assault rifle's burst file, almost die. Die later, sprint wildly ahead not looking distracted thinking of deadline for piece. Get to rooftop. Sniped. Kill on way, only assist. No scope headshot full level length – pro skills. Enemy UAV airborne. Still not good enough. Stop to type, killed with AK47 red-dot sight. Killed standing still again. Spray and pray, hip fire killcam. Knife someone proneblocked, enemy airstrike dead. Mixing up sentences and lives now. Frantic. Can't finish sentences. Just running behind teammate for 30 secs, then game over. Contributed nothing. 3 kills. Good job Marines.

Total EXP earned 102.

Next level: Overgrowth. 10 players – had chance to catch lobby before loadout. Go with sniper – ghost-pro good in foliage. S.A.S. Crawling grass. All screen sprites of greenery, ghillie-suit camo working, 30 seconds standing still and no attention. See another ghillie on bridge. Not team, enemy, both scope in, he gets off headshot, duel is lost, switch class to heavy gunner. One kill on bridge, different ghillie. Respawn on bridge again, enemy UAV airborne, try to take bridge. Target neutralised. I am target. Same again. Change of tactics needed. Peek round corrugated riverwall, send mag into building through bust doorway, friendly chopper on way. Kill confirmed. Suppressing fire on doorway, no kills, 2 mags, kill off peripheral vision – challenge completed X-Ray Vision. Flash banged indoors, no screen, white, eyes hurt. Take bridge, airstrike flushes out ghillie campers. Friendly chopper on way. Single-shot bolt-action snipe kill – respawn at burning jeep. UAV online. Victory. Second from bottom on leaderboard again. Still not kicked – why not?

Total EXP earned 409.

Wrists hurt, more players join lobby, playing district – Iraq I think. Loadout. Feel heartbeat, saliva increase. Getting into rhythm, harder to type. First kill in alleyway, Iraqi insurgent. We play Marines. UAV online. 2 kills blur together then one has suicide pack, blows up and ends my streak. Airstrike on way 0 friendly. I don't hear. Someone RPGs me, misses, grenades, misses, I kill him, his backup shotguns me. Car explodes at respawn, then ACOG Scorpioned. Whole street empty, enemy UAV airborne, we move out, 3 together. Snipers in the bazar? Just mannequins. See someone jump from window. No shot, waste ammo, position giveaway, tagged by backup. First knife kill by fountain. Stop to write, killed. Worth it. Bazaar being held, jump fence, tagged on falldown. Flash banged, they still hold bazaar, sniped while disabled. Victory before can respawn, we are victorious. I am second from bottom of board again.

Total EXP earned 171.

Last match before wordcount, no time to edit previous, missed lobby, missed loadout, shit, snow, Russia, maybe. Spec Ops Class. Killed already, hip fire AK. Knifed after kill shot misses. Shamedeath. No teabag, still feels it. Get knife kill of own. Enemy wearing balaclavas, brutal. 2 kill streak, enemy UAV airborne. Kill sniping ghillie in brush. 3 teammates and me flush a single and hunt into open. All get assists, heli finishes. Enemy UAV airborne. Run into enemy in shed. One-on-one with shotgunner, try knife, miss, tagged. Pop up from shack tags me, M6 red-dot sight. Friendly ghillie pops up at respawn and saves with knifekill. Run under airstrike. Kid on headset yells a cheer. Cunt. Heli'd. Heli'd again. Hide, cover, airstrike, enemy air dominance. One quick kill from cover, run to knife during reload, don't make it. Enemy UAV is airborne. Waste mag, no kill, in open, shameful. Defeat. I'm top of leaderboard.

Total XP earned 111.

New match, busy editing. Gunshots distracting, headsets yelling. Sound cuts out, I look up.

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NOTICE

Player kicked.

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[antilogue-blog]

GOING TO AZEROTH PT.1 : MOTIVE

In late November 2012 I came across Helen Lewis' New Statesman article Why are we still so bad at talking about video games?  on the state of gaming criticism via r/Gaming, a sub-board of popular content cyclone Reddit. There, embedded in a list of posts mostly built around the 'screengrab + wordart caption = humour' template, I saw the hyperlink and thought 'this is something worth reading'. So, rather than the usual scan-and-forget-immediately treatment I give most Reddit content, I clicked through to the New Statesman website, read the article's lead paragraph, bookmarked the page and then, of course, forgot about it immediately. It's now mid-December 2012 and I've probably missed the boat on a timely response, but Lewis' proposition hasn't lost any of its urgency in the time it's taken to lose its place on the Reddit-Twitter feed rollover.

To do her a disservice, I'll abbreviate Lewis here: games have developed massively in terms of technology, yet not necessarily in terms of internal narrative nor the critical discourse surrounding them. Much games journalism, despite people like Kieron Gillen's efforts (Gillen pioneered the concept of New Journalism in gaming, urged writers to become “travel journalists to imaginary places” ) still revolves around a numerical scoring method, exemplified in the popularity of review-score aggregator site metacritic.com. Particularly lacking is the specialised critical analysis of genre gaming - where is the critic committed purely to the first person shooter, or example? Some people are trying to reshape the current scene, however, for example Naomi Alderman, who urges critics to find a language to discuss games in an intelligent way with non-gamers. But in conclusion, without concluding, is there a risk that, as designer Ed Stern has said, “They [games] just tend not to mean very much in themselves – because it’s spectacularly, trudgingly hard to make games mean things, not least because the big ones are made by so many different pairs of hands” ? Hopefully not.

The article provoked a lot of response and Lewis provided follow-up article on the 28th of November, How much games criticism does anyone need? in which she published the full extent of Ed Stern's response to her question. Stern's full response further empathises the impossible obstacle he thinks triple-A game design practices present to critics; “the games industry is even more risky (and risk-averse) than movies, has increasing numbers of plates to spin and is consequently ever-less willing to let light in back where the laws and sausages and games get made”. Stern is also sceptical about the basic critical worth of triple-A titles, arguing that these titles aren't of consequence because they aren't about anything, at least in a literary-critical sense. To be fair to Stern, he doesn't lay the blame at the feet of the in-house designers of massive EA-style studios, but rather the process of producing such commercially successful and demanding titles; “just getting the damn things finished on-time and on-budget and fun and sufficiently functional to not fall over is hard enough. Making them significant as well is something few developers seem to even get to attempt”. Hope comes, he proposes, in the indie game scene, where unrecognised, independent, often bedroom-based (or so the myth goes) designers create small, artistically-valuable games unswayed by the mechanisms of marketing and profit found in the larger corporate game studios.

The indie-game-as-antidote idea is popular at the moment, and you can see critics for widely read gaming review websites such as Gamespot beginning to be more demanding of franchised triple-A titles (have a look at their review of Resident Evil 6 or Call of Duty: Black Ops II) while simultaneously giving high profile coverage to indie games which present new intellectual properties, for example Braid or Minecraft. I was an remain suspicious of the celebration of indie-games to a certain extent. The worry is, I think, that certain aesthetics and tropes have now become associated with the notion of the indie-game (intentional pixellation, conspicuously nostalgic midi sound design) and developers are able to ride on the goodwill fostered by the genre's aesthetics and surrounding vocabulary of anti-corporatism people like Stern have produced to market derivative and/or cynical games, much in the manner of Urban Outfitters' mobilisation of 'vintage' culture or Coldplay's mobilisation of indie-rock culture.

My suspicions around Stern's faith in indie designers aside, he raises an interesting tactic for packaging games as cultural objects suitable for critical consumption. Why not engage with the fiction of the auteur film director, or indeed the early bedroom-based game designer, and “lionise lead game designers”. This to some extent already happens – Shigeru Miyamoto, designer-creator of the Donkey Kong, Legend of Zelda and Mario franchises, arguably the most important franchises in gaming history, has been deified by my generation of gamers, now operating for many as the face of Nintendo, despite always working within a wider development team.

But should we bother? Stern's penultimate paragraph asks if we already have enough gaming criticism, using the analogy of film's relationship with its audience; “Most people like movies, but they want memories and making-of anecdotes and blooper reel gaffs to trade with their friends, they don’t want to spend a day on set, or a week in edit”. He then finishes his response by stating “The video game as a medium is not going to gain cultural legitimacy or worth through the attention of critics or theorists, it's going to be because the games are good”.

The sub-proposition Stern makes here, that theory and criticism operate outside of the game design process, that they are superfluous to the process of cultural legitimation games will apparently naturally achieve, had me bearing my canines. The design process is inherently critical. Decisions such as whether an aesthetic asset sits comfortably within a game's art design, or whether a games internal narrative matches the intellectual property of a wider franchise, or even just whether a gameplay element works, these design choices rely on critical principles and self-aware discrimination. The field of design develops its critical logics and theories as matter of course, something which I imagine Stern, a designer himself, is fully aware of. However, figures such as Ian Bogost, Jesper Jul, pioneers of ludology (the theory of gaming) and influential theorists and writers, have worked and still work as game designers while existing as industry-peripheral commentators and 'critics or theorists'. The 'critic or theorist' is not inherently an exterior force, nor is the 'critic or theorist' a fully interior force; boundaries between design and criticism, writing for and writing about games are porous.

Perhaps Stern is railing against the figure of the intellectual tourist, coming to videogames from, say, sociology, to claim virgin territory and then legitimate it without understanding the technicalities of game design? If he is, I would point him toward toward Marc Auge, who, in his discussion of the post-modern non-place (a term I feel particularly suits the 'place' of the videogame), notes "it is among the solitary 'travellers' of the last century – not professional travellers or scientists, but travellers on impulse or for unexpected reasons – that we are most likely to find prophetic evocations of spaces in which neither identity, nor relations, nor history really make any sense" (Auge, p.87). After all, to those of us not party to the manufacture of videogames, the creation processes of virtual spaces, what option is left but to exist as a tourist in a mysterious land where identity, relations and history don't really make any sense? This is the position of the techno-illiterate gamer, unable to read code or script quest-sequences but enmeshed in multiple gameworlds since, in my case, childhood. Should I, and the many others like me who form the majority of gaming's audience, be excluded from discussing videogames in intellectual terms? I understand the fear of a kind of colonial legitimation by more established disciplines of theory. Do we really want a bearded professiorial bore articulating Ocarina of Time for us? I doubt it, but I also doubt the real existence of this figure. Such an overwrought worry is outweighed by the potential benefits of a critically and intellectually engaged audience, an audience which already exists.

As a further follow up to her initial question, Helen Lewis published, on the 3rd of December, Where to find good videogames criticism, a response from Brendan Keogh, games critic and academic, wherein he at cites examples of (almost entirely online) criticism at length to ultimately show that "we haven’t been bad at writing about videogames for a very, very long time".

It was however from the position of antagonism and general fuck-offness toward Stern's proposition that I decided to embrace Kieron Gillen's ethos and to pursue my existence as a travel journalist to imaginary places. Enthused by Gillen's completely unsubstantiated fictional endorsement, I decided to set out on a journey into what, for me, has always been the dark continent of hardcore gaming, lurking out beyond the fringes of civilised single-player console-based entertainment: World of Warcraft. Before I could set off, however, I needed supplies.