My name is Evan. I write all day for my job. Sometimes, I feel like writing other things. When I get a chance, I'll try to re-post that content here. Enjoy!
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Congressional Republicans are refusing to recognize the legitimacy of a democratically-elected President and crippling the effectiveness of the Judicial branch in the meantime.
Earlier this week, I wrote again for Paste Magazine, this time about the GOP’s latest trick of basically threatening to dismantle the Supreme Court.
A few weeks ago, I launched the podcast Now Screaming, in which my co-host Liz and I set out to watch every single horror movie currently streaming on Netflix. It’s been a fascinating journey thus far, as we’ve already run the gamut from timeless classics to worst-of-the-worst schlock. New episodes come out every Tuesday, and I encourage you to check it out at nowscreaming.com, as well as on iTunes or Soundcloud or wherever else your podcast loyalties lie.
A Series of Questions Concerning the “Anti-Establishment”
I wrote at Medium about the persistence of the leading “anti-establishment” Presidential candidates, and how moving forward, things are more muddled than ever.
First-time guest Evan Culbertson joins the podcast to lend their extensive knowledge of Iranian film to our game but less-familiar hosts. There's a lot to unpack here, and each of those items has the
I was on last week’s Let The Right Films In podcast, talking primarily about Asghar Farhadi’s A Separation (one of my favorite films of all time), but also a myriad of other topics - The Martian, CW’s The 100, The Revenant, and more!
Earlier this week, I reviewed Guillermo del Toro’s latest film, Crimson Peak, over at The Sports Collective. As much as I enjoyed the film, I found myself left wanting a great deal more. You can read my review below:
It’s hard to walk out of Crimson Peak, the ninth feature film from Mexican director and guru of horror, Guillermo del Toro, without feeling a bit conflicted. On one hand, we should almost laud the film on principle: big-budget, original genre passion projects – especially ones this earnest and ambitious – are few and far between. In our present era of uninspired franchises, adaptations, and threequels, we should almost be thankful that a movie like Crimson Peak exists (especially given its director’s track record). On the other hand… Oh, what this movie truly could have been.
First things first, let’s get a plot synopsis out of the way (despite telegraphing many of its twists and turns from a mile away, the film would be even less fun spoiled, so I’ll keep it brief): In early 20th-century New York, Edith Cushing (Mia Wasikowska) is an heiress aspiring to be the American Mary Shelley (in her own words). Much to the chagrin of everyone around her, Edith (having been visited in her childhood by the ghost of her dead mother) prefers the macabre to the romantic… That is, until English baronet Thomas Sharpe (Tom Hiddleston) sweeps her off her feet and whisks her away to his family’s estate, Allerdale Hall, where he resides with his sister, Lucille (Jessica Chastain). “Where I come from, ghosts are not to be taken lightly,” Thomas broods upon first meeting Edith, and to be sure: the dilapidated, ancient Allerdale Hall is everything you’d want out of a haunted house, right down to the incalculable number of rooms, black moth infestation, and forbidden basement. Furthermore, the house sits on top of a now-defunct red clay mine, from which scarlet mud oozes up through the ground (thus, the film’s title – a nickname for the estate). The Sharpe siblings, enigmatic and aristocratic, are hiding a Very Dark Secret™, and of course, Edith is presented with unspeakable horror as she wrestles to uncover the mysteries of the house and its inhabitants.
If this seems like pretty standard fare, that’s because it is – del Toro certainly isn’t reinventing the wheel here, relying on atmosphere and homage (to Jane Eyre, to Jacques Tourneur’s I Walked With A Zombie, and to countless other gothic romances), as well as the strength of his own distinct aesthetic, to keep this film afloat. And to Crimson Peak’s credit, what it does well, it does excellently; del Toro has molded every inch of the set to his precise specifications, creating a gorgeous and endlessly fascinating stage for his drama to play out upon. The film’s greatest strength is the convergence of its decadent production design, opulent costuming, and elaborate cinematography. Every frame is meticulously beautiful, and I walked out of the theater wishing I had hours more to spend in the seemingly unending corridors of that house. Like the blood-red mud seeping through the walls of Allerdale Hall, every inch of this movie is oozing with del Toro’s vision.
However, beautiful though it may be, Crimson Peak unfortunately feels empty, particularly in its back half. This is due in part to the fact that this script (penned by del Toro and Matthew Robbins) is completely devoid of subtext, and feels regrettably disinterested in character. Edith is a worthy (if unsurprising) heroine in the first half, but once her illusions of domesticity begin to unravel, she goes through the exact motions you expect her to, without any real sense of identity undergirding them. Thomas is appropriately gloomy, but little more than a mysterious mannequin, and Lucille is in desperate need of palpable motivation for her smoldering menace. Furthermore, there are very few actual surprises here – the film coasts on the spookiness of its atmosphere, but never actually approaches “scary” territory. Crimson Peak is woefully mis-marketed as a horror film, and viewers expecting a thrill ride will be sorely disappointed by the messy, languishing tone poem offered up here.
Thankfully, in spite of its script, there’s a lot to love about the little things: Jim Beaver is pitch-perfect as Edith’s concerned father, and Jessica Chastain simmers spectacularly throughout, giving the film’s best performance. Del Toro, ever the auteur, makes every moment – a sweep through the foyer; a lingering shot on a sinister tea tray; the burbling of blood-red clay up from beneath Hiddleston’s elegant sole – unmistakably his. The gore, too, is brilliant and visceral – from a letter opener through a cheekbone to a colony of ants devouring a butterfly, Crimson Peak is properly gruesome throughout.
Del Toro, even when wrangling the supernatural, makes deeply personal films, rooted in the warmth and wonder of humanity. This is why the lack of depth here feels so supremely disappointing, even in the face of so much other brilliance. His best works (The Devil’s Backbone, Pan’s Labyrinth) engage the past as a complex thing to be reckoned with, terrifying though it may be; in Crimson Peak, it’s that clumsy, overdetermined script standing in the way of real revelation (and it’s probably worth noting here that Robbins was also the co-writer of del Toro’s worst feature: the misanthropic, middling Mimic). “The ghost is a metaphor,” Edith insists (multiple times). Alas, a director this accomplished should know better than to get caught up in such amateurish exposition: your audience can figure that out for themselves; instead, remind us why we care.
What we’re left with is a grandiose, vivid construction of a film that falls short of brilliance. Where other reviewers (or misled moviegoers, expecting more traditional horror fare) may lament the film’s reliance on mood and dearth of actual scares, I actually applaud del Toro’s restraint on that front. However, it really does fall short in terms of character and depth – especially considering the high bar he’s set for himself. At the end of the day, I really enjoyed Crimson Peak – I just find myself wishing del Toro had done a lot more with this opportunity.
Earlier this month, I previewed the NL Wild Card Game between the Pittsburgh Pirates and the Chicago Cubs, over at The Sports Collective. You can also read it below:
For the Pirates and Cubs, who face off Wednesday night in Pittsburgh, it probably seems pretty unfair. Pittsburgh and Chicago finished the 2015 campaign with 98 and 97 wins respectively, good for the second and third-best records in baseball – and yet, only the second and third-best records in their own division. The Cardinals fought their way to 100 wins, and never had less than a 46.9% chance of winning the division. Pittsburgh and Chicago have done a tremendous job despite playing catch-up all season, but in MLB’s new playoff format, close still means no cigar. For both teams, it all comes down to Wednesday night, winner-take-all.
So what are we going to see in this game? Well, for one thing, excellent starting pitching. Cubs starter Jake Arrieta is coming off perhaps the best half-season in history, ending up with a 1.77 ERA (2.35 FIP) and 236 strikeouts in 229.0 innings, and is the likely NL Cy Young honoree. Pittsburgh’s ace, Gerrit Cole, has slightly less gaudy numbers (2.66 ERA / 2.60 FIP, 202 Ks in 208 IP), but is a worthy opponent nonetheless. Per Fangraphs, the only NL pitchers better than Cole in 2015 were Arrieta, his fellow Cy Young candidates Clayton Kershaw and Zack Greinke, and a man who came within a throwing error and a hit-by-pitch of two perfect games. The pitching matchup alone blows “must-see” out of the water, to the point where it’s probably one of the best playoff matchups we’ve ever seen.
Beyond their aces? Turns out that we’ve still got two pretty awesome teams on our hands. The Cubs run out one of the most exciting young lineups in baseball, highlighted by likely NL Rookie of the Year Kris Bryant (.275/.369/.488, 25 HR, 6.5 fWAR/6.0 bWAR) and Anthony Rizzo, the most clutch player in baseball. Future superstars Addison Russell, Kyle Schwarber, and Jorge Soler help round out the core of a hot-hitting team that seems poised to play in many postseasons to come. Meanwhile, the Pirates rely a little more on their stars, though it’s never a bad thing to have to count on perennial MVP candidate Andrew McCutchen, even if he is outpacing the rest of your lineup. Francisco Cervelli in particular has been a revelation, hitting .295/.370/.401 in his first season in Pittsburgh (after 7 years as a backup Yankee). Oh, and by the way: on top of that, he just happens to be the best pitch-framing catcher in all of MLB.
Ultimately, this adds up to two pretty evenly-matched teams, and a lot of little factors that are really hard to quantify for such a small sample. While Cubs skipper Joe Maddon is widely considered to be one of the best managers in baseball, it’s hard to predict him having too significant of an impact on a single game. The Pirates were 53-28 at home this year, but the Cubs were baseball’s best road team at 48-33. The Cubs’ bullpen produced 3.6 fWAR this year, while the Pirates’ bullpen was worth 3.4 fWAR. All of these nearly-negligible separating factors mean that this game very well might come down to exactly what we’d expect: an excellent starting pitching matchup, with two exciting lineups ready to leave their mark on the postseason. If I have to make a prediction, I’d have to say that the most obvious scenario is, indeed, the most likely one; I expect Arrieta to continue his unbelievable stretch of dominance, and wipe out the Pirates’ lineup long enough for the Cubs to eke out a victory.
But enough about this wildly unpredictable single game, which, baseball being baseball, is almost as likely to go 15 innings with Arrieta and Cole giving up 10 runs each as it is to be the pitcher’s duel I expect it to be. What happens next? Well, in this case, to the victor go the spoils of…a series against the Cardinals, where they’ll have to prove their worth yet again against MLB’s best team. Thankfully, neither team is too afraid of St. Louis – the Cubs went 8-11 against them this year, while the Pirates fared ever-so-slightly better at 9-10. While it’d be unfair to call the Cardinals’ 100 wins a “fluke,” they have benefited remarkably from historically-great cluster luck on which they can’t continue to rely. Plus, history is not necessarily in favor of the Cardinals making a deep postseason run. Both the Pirates and Cubs look pretty well poised to take on St. Louis – in fact, by third-order win percentage, both teams would actually be projected to be better than the Cardinals, all factors considered.
Sure, the Cardinals’ persistence has been admirable, but they’ve played their worst baseball over the past month (15-16 since the beginning of September), and while the Pirates or Cubs probably won’t annihilate them, this is a much more even matchup than it might initially seem on paper. The Cardinals have the benefit of likely only seeing Arrieta or Cole once in a 5-game series (since both teams will have to burn their ace on the Wild Card Game), and Adam Wainwright is back with a vengeance – even if only out of the bullpen – but the Pirates and Cubs are both too good for a fifth straight NLCS appearance to be a sure thing. Plus, if I’m the Mets or Dodgers, I’m not thrilled about the idea of facing either of these teams in a 7-game series. Nobody wants to face a team this talented, even if they didn’t happen to outplay the other division winners while stuck in a loaded NL Central.
Maybe it’s silly to bet against #CardinalsDevilMagic, but there are no teams better-positioned to knock out St. Louis than these two NL Central behemoths. As unfair as it is that one of these exciting teams is going home Wednesday night, we can thankfully expect this one game to be as spectacular as can be. As for the winner? I’d expect to see a lot more of them this October; it’s gonna be a fun ride.
Back in September, I wrote about why Bryce Harper is the 2015 NL MVP, regardless of the narrative Yoenis Cespedes has built up for himself, over at TheSportsCollective (formerly CouchCoaches). You can also read it below:
It’s about time to put this notion to bed before things really get out of hand.
There’s a very silly idea going around right now: that Yoenis Cespedes deserves the NL MVP. Yes, the Mets are on fire. After this week’s sweep of the Nationals, the Mets are seven games up in the NL East race – and while we can probably attribute a healthy amount of that margin to Matt Williams’ incompetence, there’s no denying that the team is firing on all cylinders right now. And yes, Cespedes has been a star, cranking out a .312/.357/.675 line and 14 homers so far in his 36 games since being traded from Detroit.
Aye, there’s the rub: 36 games. Many people would agree that 36 games can’t quite compare to the full seasons offered up by Bryce Harper, Joey Votto, Paul Goldschmidt, Nolan Arenado, or Anthony Rizzo – all of whom are having magnificent seasons. As impactful as Cespedes has been on the NL East race, there are several worthy players who have been shining in the NL all year long.
However, let’s consider for a second a fair point: being traded between leagues mid-season shouldn’t necessarily disqualify a player from winning the MVP award. After all, it isn’t the player’s fault if they excelled all season, but their team happened to move them for one reason or another. So let’s have a look at Cespedes’ full season. If we do that, then by fWAR, the only players more valuable than him have been Mike Trout (AL), Josh Donaldson (AL), and…
Oh, yeah. Bryce Harper.
If this is a fair fight – Cespedes’s 138 games against Harper’s 132 – then a clearer picture emerges about why Cespedes has no chance:
“Hold on!” is what you’re probably shouting at your computer screen if you’re an intelligent baseball fan. “That’s only a comparison of their offensive stats! Everything a player does on the baseball field should count towards their MVP candidacy!” You’re very smart, and totally right. Let’s look at defense, baserunning, and “total value” metrics:
Cespedes has a unanimous lead over Harper in both defense and baserunning, though Fangraphs (UZR) thinks the difference is more significant than Baseball-Reference and Baseball Prospectus do. Even considering these other factors, Harper’s offensive performance puts him head-and-shoulders over everyone’s favorite BBQ-er in terms of total value. It’s worth noting that not only is Harper in the midst of the best season a 22-year-old has had since World War II, his pure offensive performance this year may go down as one of the all-time greats.
So if Cespedes gets credit for his whole season, and still hasn’t been as valuable as Harper, then his MVP candidacy basically comes down to intangibles. Unfortunately, one of those intangibles – team performance – seems to matter a lot to voters. Many people seem to think that the league MVP should come from a playoff team. We’ve been through this before: it was oh-so-recently that Mike Trout was robbed (twice) because the Angels didn’t make the playoffs. And to that point, the only legitimate NL MVP candidates on postseason-bound teams are Rizzo, Andrew McCutchen, and… well, I guess, Cespedes. Clayton Kershaw and Zack Greinke might both merit serious consideration, despite being pitchers, except that it’s hard to argue one of them is so far above and beyond (like Kershaw was last year) when they’re both so good.
The problem, of course, is that team performance shouldn’t affect individual player awards. The BBWAA voting guidelines specifically say so. It’s a convenient narrative that the collapse of Harper’s Nationals has coincided with Cespedes joining the Mets in time to catch fire for five weeks, but neither player controls the team’s outcome. Hell, look no further than Wednesday’s box score, where Harper hit two dingers and scored all of the Nationals’ runs, but still couldn’t overcome Drew Storen.
Intriguingly enough, the last time the league MVP came from a non-playoff team was 2008, when Albert Pujols won out over a field that included a man who found himself in a similar position that Cespedes does now: Manny Ramirez. Ramirez was traded to the Dodgers on July 31st, and in his 53 games in LA, hit .396/.489/.743 with 17 homers, good for a 221 OPS+, and about 3.0 WAR. The Dodgers won their division, but Ramirez finished fourth in MVP voting – and let’s be honest: Cespedes hasn’t quite lived up to the “Mannywood” magic. Harper’s been just about as good as Pujols was in 2008, so there’s even precedent for him to win the MVP in spite of his team’s shortcomings.
So basically, the argument for Cespedes-as-MVP requires two pretty big concessions: first, that his full-season performance should be counted (which is debatable), and second, that the MVP should always come from a playoff team (which is incorrect).
That’s not to say that Cespedes hasn’t been one of the best players in MLB this year. He certainly has, and if he keeps it up, will get a lot of deserved downballot MVP votes. If you care about narrative, then I grant that there’s no doubt that he’s contributed greatly to the Mets’ storming of the division – but so have Travis d’Arnaud, Curtis Granderson, and Michael Conforto, all of whom have been spectacular over the past month. Not to mention how excellent Jacob deGrom and Matt Harvey have been at the top of the rotation; the Mets sport the fourth-best team ERA in the league this season.
I get it, Mets fans. This season has been an absolutely delightful surprise, and there’s a lot to be excited about. Cespedes has been really really really good, and it’s cool that the Mets, despite modest pre-season expectations, are headed for their playoff series in nine years. But right now? Sorry, guys: it’s Bryce Harper’s league and we’re all just living in it.
The Last Of Us: Interrogating Ethics Across Familiar Landscapes
Our collective cultural fascination with the living undead may have reached a breaking point. As the vampire craze of a few years ago dissolved into the current onslaught of zombies, it's gotten the point where you can't look around without realizing just how mainstream these instantiations of supernatural horror are - in movies, on television, or in literary fiction. Zombies - and not just the ones wearing search-engine glasses - are everywhere. Not only are we, as a society, familiar with the tropes and metanarratives of zombie fiction, we're collectively pretty exhausted with them. It often feels like every permutation of "surviving the zombie apocalypse" has been exploited and run into the ground at this point, and any innovations on that narrative are few and far between.
Enter The Last of Us, a Playstation 3-exclusive released earlier this year that tries to do just that. TLOU combines the intimate, personal terror of survival-horror gaming with the action-oriented gameplay of a third-person shooter. The game falls under the general "zombie" umbrella despite the fact that (like other "zombie" media like 28 Days Later or Left 4 Dead) in it, the apocalyptic threat is a biological pathogen that comes from a mutated strain of the Cordyceps fungus, and has nothing to do with dead people returning to life. It's hard not to be skeptical of the seeming cash-grab aspect of releasing a "zombie" game in 2013 (even though Telltale Games's adaptation of Robert Kirkman's The Walking Dead was among the most critically-acclaimed games of 2012). However it might look from a distance, though, TLOU is a fascinating and complex game that presents an important example of how contemporary videogames can use seemingly played-out media tropes to innovative ends, and to say something new about narrative, ethics, and gaming itself.
TLOU builds on much of what developer Naughty Dog built in its previous Uncharted franchise - third-person, adventure-puzzle gameplay interspersed with high-action, heavy-artillery gunfights; monumental, detailed plots that stretch over vast expanses of geography; believably-handsome brown-haired male protagonists… and yet it feels nothing like an Uncharted game. Among the many things that TLOU gets from the three Uncharted titles is its cinematic scope; however, where Uncharted was a summer blockbuster adventure flick, TLOU is its twisted, dark, somewhat nihilistic psychological horror movie cousin. Its graphics are gorgeous and remarkably realistic, owing in part to the excellent motion-capture performances of Troy Baker and Ashley Johnson, as well as the beautiful environmental design (particularly the stylistic variations between the destroyed cityscapes and lush forests you have to navigate as you progress through the game).
But plenty of games are beautiful, and even more games are fun. Yet there's almost no dissent about TLOU's achievements as a major video game. The game is among the most critically-acclaimed releases in recent memory. It received over 50 perfect scores from reviewers, won several "Game of the Year" awards and was dubbed "a beacon of hope for its genre." Most critics were in agreement that TLOU was an important game, with film site Empire even claiming it as "gaming's Citizen Kane moment." While the game has received particular praise for its film-like narrative and cinematic design, there are more cinematic games (Heavy Rain, for example, is a game that was praised for its gorgeous, film noir feel, even to the point where it received backlash for being "more of a movie than a videogame"), and TLOU isn't content to stop there - it has its sights set even higher.
Most post-apocalyptic survival narratives feature "everyman" protagonists that force the audience to consider their own role in navigating such desperate circumstances. TLOU starts out looking like it's going to follow in that same vein - the game opens in the first few hours of the outbreak, where the player controls a precocious twelve-year-old girl, Sarah, attempting to escape with her father, Joel. When Sarah breaks her leg in the chaos of fleeing the city, the player takes control of Joel, as you run through the streets while carrying your daughter; this prologue concludes with Sarah being shot by a soldier maintaining the quarantine zone, as she dies in your arms.
Cut to twenty years later, where Joel has survived the pandemic thus far and is a smuggler living in a government quarantine zone on the East Coast. Opening the game thusly is a coy move on Naughty Dog's part; it's almost impossible not to empathize with Joel losing his daughter and coping with that loss while fighting to survive for two decades. The gameplay further stresses Joel's "everyman" status - he doesn't aim a gun with the precision and steady hand that a soldier would, he reacts to injuries fairly realistically, and his physical strength is somewhat limited (the game frequently requires that you prompt your AI partner to help you move objects and climb the terrain). His trauma feels real, and he seems relatable - his oblique references in early cutscenes that he's had to do questionable things over the years don't feel out of the ordinary; the player understands (having seen this post-apocalypse schtick before) that desperate times call for desperate measures. Joel's reluctance to shepherd a 14-year-old girl (Ellie) across Boston reads as survivalist practicality (with the memories of his own lost daughter echoing in the distance); his gruff demeanor and harsh treatment of Ellie as he escorts her across the country to track down a resistance group (the Fireflies) in search of a cure (she's immune to the virus and therefore is humanity's best hope for producing a vaccine, because again, the familiar tropes are key) come off variantly as skepticism, self-sufficiency, and survival instinct.
This is a lot of plot summary that sets up where TLOU really shines, as it subverts this assumption of familiarity in a clever way: it masquerades a tale of humanity and survival where you fight across the country in order to save the human race. However, as the game progresses, the player begins to realize that Joel is a remarkably disturbed character. His quest to "save the world" (once he embraces it) gives him a moral high ground to justify his insane behavior; he remains completely untroubled despite killing hundreds people to accomplish his goal. To further complicate things, despite the game's setting amidst the "zombie" apocalypse, the large majority of the people you kill (as Joel) along the way aren't infected - they're fellow survivors themselves trying to reconcile their morals in order to continue living in a post-apocalyptic wasteland. While the game emphasizes stealth over "shoot-'em-up"-style mass violence, it never really offers an alternative to Joel's "kill or be killed" logic. Anyone and everyone that stands in your way needs to be neutralized in order to prompt the cutscene that allows you to move to the next level.
This gap between the ethics of player vs. character is an inseparable part of countless video games - but most games offer no attempt to bridge it; it's just a part of the fiction of the gamespace, and rarely commented-upon. TLOU implements what Miguel Sicart termed "closed ethical game design." That is to say, the game doesn't allow the player to impose their own personal values onto the constraints of the game's limited and highly-determined ethical experience. This is in contrast to "open ethical game design," which, while it allows the player to play an immoral character, distributes ethical responsibility such that the player's own morals do dictate the ethics of the experience (see, for example, the Grand Theft Auto franchise, or even role-playing games like the Elder Scrolls series or Mass Effect). Navigating this separation between player and character is tricky, and it's why so many games don't even try. Often, game developers forgo character complexity (and therefore, potential customer unrelateability) in favor of the aforementioned "everyman" protagonist. Even when players can't directly identify with their playable characters, they're often inoffensive, flat protagonists that barely impact the player's enjoyment of the game and allow anything problematic to slide into the background. This is also why so many video-game protagonists are nearly-indistinguishable white men. TLOU, with its nondescript white male protagonist, is not exempt from this frustrating sameness. However, it's worth asking if the game invokes the trope on purpose in order to subvert it (after all, its apparent "everyman" generic whiteguy turns out to be a sociopath).
TLOU has no interest in fostering such player complacency. Even though the player is forced to enact unethical behavior in order to progress, the game never lets you forget about the consequences of your actions. This is in part thanks to game's deployment of Ellie (and her innocence) as a foil - she comments on the countless dead bodies, asking "what if they had families?"; she constantly disrupts the fiction that allows the player to dismiss the people you kill as merely obstacles in your path, and to ignore their corpses as video-game scenery. Even though the player can't comfortably self-insert with either character, it's Ellie that continually serves as a jarring reminder of the magnitude of the narrative's violence. When Joel eventually gives her a handgun about halfway through the game, she adapts to killing enemies fairly quickly, even though she continues to express misgivings about turning the gun on other human beings. Late in the game, Joel is incapacitated, and the player (as Ellie) is forced to hunt deer with a bow and arrow for food. She encounters a pair of survivors in the wilderness with whom she trades food for medicine, at which point they reveal that a few weeks prior, members of their camp had gone out for supplies, never to return; the few survivors reported that most of them had been slaughtered by a man with a gun and a young girl. While few games make a point of addressing the body count left in the player's wake, here TLOU brings you face to face with the fact that you - through gameplay, not a cutscene - were responsible for the decimation of this survivors' camp in the previous section of the game.
It's not merely the ease with which the player murders hundreds of people that makes Joel such a problematic character. When Ellie is kidnapped by these men, the player once again takes control of Joel, who eventually takes two members of their camp hostage; in a cutscene, he brutally tortures them for information as to Ellie's whereabouts before violently murdering them. The player has no control during this sequence, and it's at this point that we feel most divorced from the insanity of Joel's behavior. Joel manages to rescue Ellie from the camp, but our affective response to our protagonist is never quite the same - the rapidity with which he resorts to such brutality and extreme onscreen violence sticks with the player, even after the hours of killing already under their belt. (A screen in the pause menu informs the player exactly how many people they've killed - 537Â in my first play through - and how, exactly, they died.)
Again, this complication of gaming ethics is not new - even if TLOU deals with it more explicitly than most, it's still a variation on an age-old problem. What really highlights the game's unique approach to narrative, gameplay, and ethics is its ending. Upon reaching your goal - the Fireflies' research hospital in Salt Lake City - Joel is knocked unconscious, and awakes to find out that Ellie is being prepped for surgery. To create a vaccine for the infection, the Fireflies intend to remove a Cordyceps sample from her brain, killing her. Joel, refusing to let Ellie die, fights his way through the hospital - killing dozens more along the way - before reaching the surgery room, murdering an unarmed doctor, and escaping with an unconscious Ellie in his arms (mirroring your attempt to save Sarah in the prologue). In a cutscene, you also kill the Fireflies' leader, essentially wiping out the progress of any efforts towards a cure. In the game's final sequence, Ellie wakes up and Joel tells her that the Fireflies didn't need her and had given up looking for a cure, as the two of them make their way back to civilization. The game closes on Ellie's face as she asks Joel if his story was true (he sticks to his lie), and her reaction leaves it unclear whether or not she knows the truth.
TLOU makes its players enact a narrative in which they abandon their local morality in order to save humanity from the brink of extinction, only to have its protagonist change its mind at the last second and doom mankind because of his own twisted personal attachment to a surrogate daughter. It pulls the rug out from under you without ever giving the player an opportunity to intervene in this narrative. And yet, to claim that the protagonist is revealed as the game's "villain" does it a disservice; in fact, TLOU rejects such a good/evil morality binary. The player is never truly invited to judge Joel for his decisions, and must check their external ethics at the door, so to speak, in order to participate in this narrative space. Furthermore, the game leaves plenty of ambiguities that make identifying any consistent morality difficult: did Ellie consent to sacrificing herself, or is she just being used by the Fireflies? Does her consent even matter, as she's a child, and it's purportedly for the "greater good"? To complicate things further, the game begs the question as to whether or not humanity is worth saving. Again, most of the humans you encounter in the game are violent, and many of them are themselves surviving by "unethical" means. The survivor group that kidnaps Ellie are revealed to be cannibals - and yet, within the logic of their reality, their cannibalism is out of necessity to survive and is justifiable, in their eyes. The "humans are the real monsters" twist is another horror trope, but very rarely does media respond to that fact by actually killing off the species.
TLOU is an utterly unique experience, if only for how it subverts player expectations, turning survival-horror narratives on their head in order to co-opt the player into an disturbing - albeit realistic - space in a way that only video games can. It's utterly immersive and remarkably personal in its troubling emotional realism, and yet it calls attention between the gap between the player and the playable character in fascinating and innovative ways. It problematizes the morality binary in a way that few games are willing to challenge their audience, and is a testament to the potential narrative and experiential innovations that the medium can provide. It was also, in many ways, a huge risk - a brand-new intellectual property and a platform-exclusive in an era where neither of those things tend to work out well (The top 10 best-selling games of both 2011 and 2012 were all from existing franchises; only three of the 20 [Halo 4, Gears of War 3, and Just Dance 2] were platform-exclusive, none of which were PS3-exclusives). And yet, Naughty Dog's gamble appears to have paid off, as The Last of Us is both one of the year's best-reviewed and highest-grossing games.
We could use more games like The Last of Us - models of experience that challenge their players to reconcile actual potential narrative and ethical complexities and indeterminacies, while managing entertaining gameplay and impressive graphical design. It's a high standard, but it seems like the one that videogame culture needs right now if, as Ian Bogost argues, contemporary media culture as a whole is "mired in a permanent adolescence," and videogames only need aspire to reach the cultural conversation on an even playing field. Bogost specifically cites "Iron Man's turbines" and "Katniss Everdeen's arrow," but the comic books and genre fiction that he cites as "bigger and more mainstream than ever" also includes our undeniable collective obsession with the zombie apocalypse. By that logic, The Last of Us is ahead of the curve, using the dominant language of mainstream narrative media to both challenge and reinforce the tropes that constitute that language, and is doing all it can to push the conversation forward.
After my previous post on First-Person Tetris, I came across an AV Club review of Kraftsow's game; I felt the review was noteworthy as part of the conversation surrounding this intriguing phenomenon (read it here). The brief article does an adequate job of contextualizing it as a variant - one of many, they're quick to point out - of the popular original game. They also do well to address the fact that what sets "First-Person Tetris apart from its peers is its propensity to "give [its players] motion sickness." Not only is the review dismissive in tone, but its criticism is unproductive; it provides the same level of uncritical discourse you might expect (and find) from message-board commenters across the Internet. Furthermore, it seems arbitrary and unnecessary to assign a letter grade to First-Person Tetris, in part because it relies so heavily on intertext with an already-established game as well as the player's own experience with that game. In fact, I find that any attempt to rate such an experience on an objective scale very much misses the point. For the most fun experience, twirl around in your office chair for 30 seconds, then see how long you can read the article without throwing up… B-
"Videogames are narcissistic," Ian Bogost claims in his free-form review of the art game Proteus. His argument is predicated on the fact that film/television/books are more alienating than videogames in their narrative method. Unlike games, they're not models of experiences, but fixed depictions of them. Games put you - the player - in control, and, as Bogost points out, "without you the game grinds to a halt." This crucial thing that games have that other media don't - gameplay - has led to numerous debates throughout the years about the gulf between "gameplay" and "narrative."
In the inaugural issue of Game Studies (in 2001), Jesper Juul problematizes the relationship between games and stories, fleshing out some of the disparate approaches to making sense of that connection (or possible lack thereof). He invokes Alexey Pajitnov's 1984 puzzle game Tetris as an example of a game completely divorced from narrative, as it offers no fiction to frame its gameplay. Juul even thinks that if the player wanted to construct a narrative to explain Tetris, it would be a bit of a stretch to invent an actor to control the falling bricks. This abstraction, which would pose a problem to the audience in any other form of media, seems second-nature to the player. We don't need a narrative to play Tetris and enjoy it, and so we just revel in the simplicity (and, perhaps, inanity) of its gameplay. It's this distinction that led Juul to conclude, in a separate paper (in 1998), that games and narratives are "very different phenomena" and are always in conflict with one another.
Of course, this is familiar territory: the Ludology-Narratology "debates" raged for years and were highly influential to the discourse of game theory (even though, as the title of Gonzalo Frasca's 1999 paper, "Ludology meets Narratology," reminds us, it's somewhat fallacious to view them as an absolute binary). Self-dubbed "Ludologists" (a term Juul himself has adopted and re-appropriated for the title of his own blog) want to look at games on their own terms, rather than holding them to the standards and discourse of narrative media. And yet such a strict position appears (at least in 2013) as somewhat unnecessarily adversarial - even if games aren't themselves stories, they often have stories - and doesn't "gameplay" also include world-building and level design (which have narrative elements) in addition to controls, mechanics, and physics? (Bogost himself argues that the whole Ludology-Narratology binary was "a trick" to hide the "formalist agenda" of game studies.)
Even though he discusses the game in terms of its abstract gameplay and lack of apparent story structure, Bogost ends up assigning Proteus a narrative, anyway: "a game about being an island instead of a game about being on one." However, he also points out that its "gameplay" is similarly thin, arguing that Proteus barely requires active participation in order to reap what it offers by means of sensory experience. Bogost is interested in the game because of the challenge it presents to the player's sense of human agency, and the game being "about 'you.'" He also claims that many will likely dismiss it as "not a game" without taking it at face-value as a challenge to our sense of what a game is. While that seems an interesting enough experiment (and Bogost explicates it well), what do we do with the old standard: Tetris? While we certainly don't need to reconcile its lack of narrative underpinning, it remains an interesting problematic in the face of both quote-unquote "narratology" and the purported "narcissism" of gaming.
Bogost claims that Tetris (in addition to other abstract "puzzle games"), even without a protagonist, is still about "you" because "'you' are the pretend god in control of a manipulable world upon which meaningful force can be exerted." His contention that games are inextricably player-centric because they do so often rely on active interaction is valid; however, by that logic, other media objects (films, books, etc.) are also user-driven, as they are meaningless absent an audience. However, this is an enormous ontological question that I have neither the space nor time to flesh out here (furthermore, it is unproductive to the point of this post). But Bogost's attempt to contextualize Tetris still feels unsatisfactory, as it relies entirely on narrative contexts that are completely external to the "text" (i.e., the game itself).
What, then, do we make of First-Person Tetris? Of the countless variations on the original game, David Kraftsow's First-Person Tetris is of particular interest because of how it inverts the familiar structure of Tetris to problematize this question of context. The rules and objective are the same - manipulate falling blocks of various shapes so as to arrange them into rows: upon completion of a row, it disappears, as blocks continue to fall at increasing speeds; if you fail to clear rows fast enough, the blocks stack up until they reach the top of the screen, at which point the game ends. (There is no "winning" at Tetris - the blocks keep coming, even after you've accrued the maximum possible number of points.)
However, in First-Person Tetris, rather than rotating the falling blocks, the player rotates the screen itself. The space bar rotates the game screen clockwise 90 degrees, as the blocks continue to "fall" down, up, or sideways. It's remarkably disorienting, but once you adjust to the new permutation of the system, it proves to be quite fun, at least as a novel way to approach the original game. But the reason why First-Person Tetris is interesting from a game theory perspective is because it doesn't resign itself to being just a game you play on your computer screen. Its graphical interface positions the game on a screen-within-a-screen, a small Toshiba television set in a carpeted room somewhere. The game's design is based on the 1989 release of Tetris for the Nintendo Entertainment System, and, sure enough, an NES sits in front of the television, a controller wire extending towards "you." Whereas Tetris itself is contextless, a program embodied within whatever platform you use to run it, First-Person Tetris is bound by the details of the setting it creates.
By presenting the game on an artificial television, Kraftsow's game both provides its own narrative frame while creating a level of distance from the "game itself." It self-consciously reinscribes the player into the gaming experience - and back into Bogost's original point about the ever-present player-subject. Furthermore, it also involves the player in a very specific sense of nostalgia: Even the music is an homage to the NES game - the three options that soundtrack First-Person Tetris are repetitive 8-bit variations on the three musical selections players could choose from in 1989. Between the simulated "warmth" of the living room, the familiar brand names, the VCR (complete with precariously-stacked VHS tapes), and the specificity of the experience, First-Person Tetris intentionally puts itself in conversation with our memories of a gaming experience we've had before.
That being said, it's worth pointing out that the game's purported premise betrays its mechanics. This narrative situation would necessitate the actual physical rotation of a player's head in ways that are physically impossible - perhaps "Perspective-Shift Tetris" would be a more cromulent title. The name continues to be misleading, as First-Person Tetris is not actually Tetris from the block's point of view, either. However, this latter concept is approximated by the game's "Existential Crisis" mode [pictured above], which zooms in to focus on an individual piece as it falls. This removes all context for a given block's location, and provides an additional challenge to the player, as it's extremely difficult to keep track of where blocks have been placed on the screen. The joke, of course, is that the "Existential Crisis" focalizes the game through the individual block as though it had autonomy and subjectivity. Even so, the player retains agency, and thus the game never quite delivers on the "First-Person" promise. This is also by no means a flaw - a simulator that would actually focus on the journey of a block from the top to bottom of the screen, without the ability to control your movements, wouldn't be particularly entertaining. (Though perhaps the "self-as-gamepiece" concept would be a clever idea for a story for An Aura of Familiarity.)
Even so, the importance of First-Person Tetris's "narrative" lies in the way that it frames the experience itself as a simulacrum of the experience of gaming. It doesn't answer the question of what Tetris's narrative would be, instead cleverly side-stepping that question altogether by envisioning the player's context as the context of the game. That being said, perhaps this is more of an interesting thought experiment than a tangible, conscious innovation in gaming. Gadget TV deemed the game "pointless," even in while praising it, and just because their tone is somewhat dismissive, it doesn't mean they're wrong. As far as mainstream culture is concerned, it's not ultimately a productive effort, per se, though it doesn't necessarily need to be.
Furthermore, the Narratology-Ludology spectrum may no longer be an especially useful apparatus for exploring games. In recent years, the conversation has been expanded to focus on the interaction between players, gameplay, and narrative - books like Juul's Half-Real (2011) have explored the relationship between formal elements and structure, fiction, and player's own subjectivity. Meanwhile game theorists continue to debate the evolving place of video games across media and mass culture. And yet First-Person Tetris, even in its relative simplicity, introduces fascinating questions about how we think about gaming, narrative, and nostalgia, all the the while remaining (to me, at least) an enormously satisfying experience - to the point where I'm no longer interested in playing "regular" Tetris.
Kraftsow's other projects (of particular interest: YooouuuTuuube, BeckettBot, and +1 my like button) are similarly interested in recontextualizing familiar systems (specifically, internet phenomena) in ways that defamiliarize the user from those systems. For example, he riffs on the trend of sharing cat videos and .gifs (because, after all, what else is the Internet for?) with his blog of Unremarkable Cat Videos. Among all this, Kraftsow has insisted that one of his primary goals is to build "fun things that reach a lot of people." And First-Person Tetris certainly accomplishes that goal - while simultaneously complicating the way we think about gaming. That's certainly good enough for me.
Perhaps the most powerful argument set forth by by Ian Bogost in his 2011 book How to Do Things With Videogames comes in its conclusion, "The End of Gamers." After spending the previous 150 pages exploring the enormous potential of games as they relate to a variety of projects and discourses, he describes (and advocates for) a process by which gamers disappear altogether. This isn't as counterintuitive as it initially sounds, because, for Bogost, the material dissolution of "gamers" as a category entails videogames permeating contemporary culture to a degree such that in place of "gamers," "we'll just find people, ordinary people of all sorts. And sometimes those people will play videogames. And it won't be a big deal, at all" (Bogost 154). Bogost is merely referring to the imminent acceptance of games into culture to the degree that books, movies, and television shows are.
"The End of Gamers" is a catchy (and effective) tagline for this phenomenon, even if it's subject to the specificity of Bogost's definition (to be a "gamer" is "consuming games as one's primary media diet or identifying with videogames as a primary part of one's identity"). We're not quite to the point where gaming is considered as a discourse on the same level of other mass media, nor has the medium worked its way into people's everyday lives the way that other media objects have. Granted, this process is delicate - in "Perpetual Adolescence," Bogost warns that the mainstream immersion of games into society could, if handled improperly, potentially end up with games as "bad television shows and novels—bad television shows and novels with button pressing." However, it doesn't take too much looking-around to see the beginnings of this "End of Gamers" at work.
The "gaming-console-as-entertainment-center" aspirations of the major console developers - Sony, Microsoft, and Nintendo - date back to at least the previous generation, as the Playstation 3, Xbox 360, and Wii were all capable of streaming video, playing music, and browsing the internet in addition to playing games. The Wii was among the first explicit instantiations this "End Of Gamers" process, as it demonstrated Nintendo's concerted effort to attract everyone - from hardcore gamers to those who had never played video games before. The Wii chose to forgo processing power and graphical capabilities in favor of mass appeal, an emphasis on social interaction, and an attempt to unify all media-consumers by bringing them to gaming. (For more on the Wii's development and deployment as a platform, see Jones and Thiruvathukal's Codename Revolution [2012].)
However, it's the most recent console generation - the WiiU (released in 2012) and the Playstation 4 and Xbox One (both released in November of this year) that makes the omnipresence of videogames seem especially imminent now. For example, the Xbox One comes with a built-in Skype client for videoconferencing, as well as a voice-command interface that controls nearly every aspect of functionality. Both the PS4 and Xbox One support DVD and Blu-Ray discs, and all 3 consoles feature internet connectivity, streaming video services, online gaming, digital-download capability, social media integration, and plenty more features that I don't need to list. The PS4, in particular, is making an interesting push to unify online social experience, as every PS4 controller features a "Share" button that connects your media activity to social networking. Meanwhile, the WiiU utilizes both the user's television as well as an auxiliary GamePad, complicating the "second-screen experience" in an interesting way. As Bogost articulated in a column for GamaSutra, with the WiiU, Nintendo "has domesticated the wildness of the present moment in video games, consumer electronics, the internet, and home entertainment by caging them out in the open."
Bogost wrote at length about the PS4 earlier this year, and posited that perhaps the most important thing about the console is that it feels familiar, rather than innovative. In that same article, he points out that "innovation must be ceaseless to be coherent," and so the relative ease with which the PS4 seems to assimilate itself into our lives as a sign both of our no-longer-begrudging tolerance of planned obsolescence, as well as of the absolute inextricability of videogame consoles in media culture. As he claims:
"In order for a technology to become widespread and familiar enough to have broad influence, it must begin to disappear. We must use it more than we talk about it."
This is right in line with his vision of the future of games he outlines in How To Do Things…, as he claims that videogames do "many things" "every day, whether or not people notice them" (Bogost 153). Bogost is arguing the same point about this current generation of console gaming - that we're headed towards one device that can support the "high-gloss, big budget videogames" while maintaining enough mainstream appeal to "tick the boxes of current trends." Of course, the PS4 isn't truly ubiquitous yet, and Bogost occasionally rushes to sum up what most gamers "really" want as "to shoot aliens and play Madden NFL on PlayStation, just like they mostly want to see explosions and watch football on TV." Yet he makes a lot of very good points: the demystification of games he describes in his book appears to be manifesting itself firsthand in the basic hardware we're purchasing. As he articulates, "Every 'next' thing shouldn't have to be a revolution. It can just be what comes next."
All this might seem on first glance like Bogost riding a hobby-horse, articulating the same thing over and over again as different instantiations of it arise. However, this conversation is no longer just happening in game-theory circles. This New Statesman article argues that "gamers" as a designation of a social group has outlived its usefulness, as "the 'gaming community' is no longer a homogenous group," and soon "'gamers’ will be a term that encompasses every gay and transgender person, every girl and woman, every politician in the cabinet, everyone with a title in the House of Lords, every teacher, nurse, banker, social worker, dustman and paedophile." Granted, it's possible Bogost is a bit too eager in anticipating and describing this process. But there's no question that "videogame culture" is slowly but surely disappearing as it becomes a part of "culture," period. We're on the verge of an ontological shift disguising itself as a technological and commercial one, and needless to say, it's going to be quite interesting.
