On Portal

I contributed 1up.com's current cover story, Essential 100 

I understand that, due to space limitations, the site was unable to publish my second-opinion submission in full. I've blogged the original text below:

GLaDOS is condescending. She thinks you're stupid, and insists that you play the way she wants you to play. Indeed, she doesn't want you to complete the game. A terrible game designer is a terrifying villain.

Dressing you down for behavior that developer Valve actually condones, GLaDOS is, of course, the perfect conduit through which Portal's terrific, real designers apply reverse psychology to deftly nudge you in productive directions, and compel you to complete the game. Portal's sophisticated soft paternalism masquerades as overbearing maternalism. What this means is that, like GLaDOS, these designers undoubtedly saw Aperture Science's testing facility stymie and aggravate players. However, instead of throwing their hands in the air and sacrificing their vision with intrusive, heavy-handed hints and other fatalist admissions of the failure of their design, they went back -- many, many times I imagine, because all development works this way, and because Portal is as bold as it was novel -- and improved their work without compromising its integrity.

The results are puzzles that can perplex without confounding; and for players, the mastery of a new skill that requires the cultivation of an intoxicating, alien mode of thinking. In the beginning, you’re told not to poke around behind the curtain, (and by that I mean you’re really being prodded to behave subversively). By the end, you’re both defying GLaDOS, and, perhaps, surprising the game’s designers by arriving at genuinely original solutions to problems.

Playing Portal is like learning another language. The instant you complete your first challenge without whispering intentions to yourself, without tentatively testing conjugations, and seem simply to arrive intuitively at a correct response is the instant you add Portal to your list of greatest games.

A personal appeal from Gary GuyGapes

As a gamer, I don't pretend that a stone-faced fake soldier doing knee bends over another guy's face is scandalous.

Let me tell you about last night. I still play the parts of characters I create on the spot over VOIP in Team Fortress 2. Rory Manion and I tend to take turns, with one of us coauthoring the goonery in Ventrilo, while the other talks to people playing the game. This time, Rory convinced one particularly uptight player that he was promoting the growing sport of competitive gaping. (Anyone unsure of what gaping was could turn to the wall that was likeliest to attract attention, and see Rory's TF2 “spray”: a photo taken from Something Awful's FYAD forum that depicts a wiry man squat on a catastrophically colossal dildo.) Let me be the first to insist that there's nothing funny about passing this picture while on your way to capture a flag. But when the Red Letter Media reviewer's voice calmly explains that the photo is of gaping champion Gary GuyGapes and his record-stretching performance at this year's Planet of the Gapes invitational, I pause. And when the same person flawlessly fields every incredulous question he raises, revealing that he's GapeEscape.com's webmaster; that he's a third generation competitive gaper whose grandfather pronounced “I could do this professionally” after falling on a railroad spike; and that although opioid use is banned -- “open-oids” in gaper slang, and for reasons that I trust are obvious – if he becomes the Barry Bonds of gaping, then so be it; I laugh out loud. And when that one particularly uptight and unsuspicious player is sanctimoniously screaming that his forebears fought in world wars while Rory's character and his clan shoved shit up their bums for sport it becomes hard to breathe. To cut the crap, you can't convince me that I'm out of touch with gaming's childish abrasiveness.

“As seen on TV” is a sure sign that something that was once funny is now far from it. Unfunny people always think that celebrities certify funny. It never worked that way when dad appropriated the shit you said, and I don't know that it does when awards shows adopt them. Parents and actors are unflattering mirrors: when you find your reflection in them, you know you need a makeover. So tonight, we'll shun the scatological with the characters we create.

The Last Will and Testament of Noted Games Journalist Kevin Beverage

Someone's going to take games pundit Kevin Beverage seriously. Scary as it is, that's the point. Beverage is best when he's lost online, among other crude, moronic, and dishonest bits written about games. The reader who stops and thinks to himself that, although more misguided, this is a lot like other journalistic generalities he's read, is halfway there. Those who recognize satire when they read it can decide right away whether Beverage's alter ego, Rory Manion, elicits a laugh or a welp. Predictably Rory isn't proud of half he writes. As his friend, I'm biased in his favor, and besides, being unemployed, he'll gladly go where I don't dare. Unfortunately for him, though, these aren't places where major websites with massive audiences are willing to take risks.

I asked Rory for permission to post two unsuccessfully solicited Kevin Beverage articles on my blog. Here they are, unedited:

Nuclear Launch Detected
The Juche is Loose
By: Internationally renowned games journalist and pundit Kevin Beverage, PhD in Important Topic Contemplation, Harverd Correspondence College and Chiropractor

Like most gamers, the moment I heard about the tragic sinking of the Republic of Korea corvette Cheonan in the contested Yellow Sea, my heart went out to the bereaved survivors in the Blizzard financial department. I had an almost uncanny suspicion that the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea—or North Korea, as we in the industry like to call it—was behind the attack. Such agitation could lead to war, and a war between North and South Korea threatens to take more lives in a week than fan death and LAN center brawls claim annually, and that can’t be good for Blizzard’s bottom line or the longevity of professional StarCraft. With that in mind, I cast a fretful gamer’s eye eastward, and think the unthinkable.

Though I’ve done no research on the topic, I think it’s safe to panic over the thought that of the 10,000-plus DPRK artillery batteries aimed at Seoul, several thousand are probably zeroed-in on any number of e-sports stadiums. And though I’m no expert on military ordinance, I also feel confident in asserting that a 150mm howitzer shell landing in the middle of a StarCraft tournament might be detrimental to even the most focused player’s clicks-per-minute. The damage done to the gaming reputations of Korea’s most famous competitors could be catastrophic. Some experts have put the potential number of Facebook friends lost by affected ‘Craft professionals in the tens of thousands, a staggering number just vague enough to inspire terror without warranting corroboration.

Should their reputations survive the shelling, the threat of compulsory military service looms large for displaced e-thletes. Or at least I’m guessing it does, I can’t really be bothered to look up the Republic of Korea’s stance on military drafting. Nevertheless, I assume that StarCraft experts will be in high demand due to their superhuman logistical prowess and micro skill. Though the possibility of losing an entire generation of ‘Craft experts to war is daunting, one can’t rule out the psyops (psychological operations) benefit to fielding a “gosu” corps of trained StarCraft strategists.

There is a silver lining to this menacing cloud of gaming despair. While the various e-sports stadiums in South Korea, being of immense strategic value, are undoubtedly targeted for immediate devastation by DPRK hardware, the numerous LAN centers scattered throughout the nation will be more difficult—if not impossible--to neutralize. The gaming idealist in me can’t help but choke up imagining the remnants of Korea’s professional StarCraft elite feverishly pounding away at hotkeys amidst the smoldering ruins of their former home cities, desperately seeking meaning for their shattered lives in the warm glow of a monitor screen. The movie rights alone ought to net a hefty sum, hopefully offsetting any financial losses from missed StarCraft 2 sales opportunities. But I’ll leave that for economists to ponder.

Reached for comment on this important man, a man whom I believe to be the Republic of Korea’s Electronic Gaming Commissioner said, through a translator: “Are you f***ing kidding me? Who is this? Don’t call this number again.”

The Last Will and Testament of Noted Games Journalist Kevin Beverage
By noted games journalist Kevin Beverage

The opinions expressed herein are rarely endorsed by anyone anywhere.

If you are reading this will, I, noted games journalist Kevin Beverage, have perished. Most likely I was done in by my years of hedonistic excess; hoisted by my own gaming petard, as they say. Maybe I suffocated in one of my several indoor ball pits, paid for by decades of hard-hitting games journalism. Or perhaps I have been found nude and supine in my subterranean gaming palace, asphyxiated by an HDMI cable. If so, please ignore the controller on my crotch, and pay no mind to the Pocket Pikachu chirping mournfully from somewhere in my colon. I died as I lived.

Throughout my storied career, nothing has filled me with more pride and intense self-satisfaction than my charitable donations to Child’s Play charity--except telling people how much I donated to Child’s Play, Twittering about the thrill I get up my spine after donating to Child’s Play, shaking my head in silent judgment of those who don’t know the good works of Child’s Play, and altruistically--publicly, usually shouting--requesting that people make Child’s Play donations in my name rather than give me gifts. It warms my heart to think that, after years of being derided as myopic sociopaths whose entire sense of self-worth is tied directly into the public perception of their chosen pastime, gamers worldwide now come together annually to hurl mud in the eye of their detractors by selflessly purchasing video games.

Because when you really think about it, if the charity you support isn’t acting as a public relations tool for your hobby, what’s the point? If I can’t use my generosity as an emotional bludgeon to savagely batter the perceived foes of my beloved gaming, why should I even bother? I could give my scads of games journalism payola to indigent youths, or auction off my Olympic-sized swimming pool full of Shrek SuperSlam promotional t-shirts for cancer research, or whatever, but anonymous individual kindness will do nothing to salt the wounds of the many foes I believe to be misrepresenting my beloved gaming community. Besides, past attempts to force Game Boy cartridges into Salvation Army collection tins have led only to savage bell-whippings, so it’s not like I haven’t tried.

And so, being of sound body and superb mind, I do hereby bequeath my gaming estate (once it has been converted from Gamestop trade-in credit to cash) to Child’s Play charity, the only charitable organization on Earth cognizant of what really matters to gamers: Netting press accolades for assuaging the boredom of hospitalized children via colossal handovers of cash to massive entertainment corporations.

The Modern Warfare 2 controversy to come

For weeks, not one television network took the trouble to examine the context in which Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor made the “make policy” and “wise latina” remarks that fed this summer's 24-hour news cycle. I can only imagine how they'll handle footage captured from the forthcoming Modern Warfare 2 in which players unconscionably massacre civilians during a terrorist attack on an airport. If they weren't willing to sit through the Duke University and Berkeley Law School speeches from which Sotomayor's commentary was stripped, they certainly aren't about to play a videogame before using it to tar an entire medium by association.

Of course, without that context it's impossible to come to any worthwhile conclusions (including whether developer Infinity Ward was courageous to include intellectually challenging content that can sustain complicated readings; foolhardy in its assumption that meaningfully violent videogames can come of age in the present reporting climate; or crass in its belief that no press is bad press). It is, however, fair to frame questions. A few that come to my mind include:

Would an alternative approach effectively “establish the depth of evil and the cold-bloodedness of a rogue Russian villain” and “add to the urgency of the player's mission to stop them.” What if the scene, for example, cast the players as a counter-terrorist who monitors the massacre while en route to the airport where he will engage the enemy? And what, if anything, will the answer tell us about the differences in reading a novel narrated from a monster's point of view, and in acting monstrously in a videogame where the player presumably has other options?

What happens when the player turns and attacks the terrorists? Do they die, or does the game end then and there (since the story sustains only one outcome and the bad guys need to live in order to play their part in the escape scene at end of the level)? If the latter, must we comply with the terrorists to complete the mission and continue the story? I don't see why not when the character we play is destined to die.

Must we commit mass murder to appreciate the extent of its evil?

Is the scene's ending intended to serve as absolution not only for the character -- a CIA agent complicit in mass murder even should he never fire a shot -- but also for the player who presumably will want to “kill” the part of himself that played such a role?

The One and Only Right Review

Calculations conducted with data obtained from the user commentary sections of videogame review websites conclude that the following constitutes the optimal critique of every game ever released. Feel free to paste it where appropriate.

The One and Only Right Review

I'm the wrong writer for this review. I've given the game a score it doesn't deserve: too stingy because I'm biased against the platform it's supposed to sell; unduly generous because I hoped to hide my bias towards the competing console. I've been bribed to deny that the game sucks; bribed to say that it does indeed.

I'm an imbecile. My score doesn't match the aggregation site average which, to indulge one co-conspirator, I wanted to raise. Actually, I intended to reduce it in order to satisfy the other.

My editors are morons. Instead of assigning this review to a fan of the genre who wouldn't have naively mistaken imitative mediocrity for innovation because he hadn't already played the eleven other games exactly like it, they gave it to me: a cynic who, having played and appreciated almost every game of the genre ever released, has unreasonably high expectations.

I evaluated a sim according to arcade standards, and I expected simulation in a goofy arcade game.

Had I played more than a mere 40 hours prior to collecting my $60 check (which may or may not arrive in three months) I'd have noticed that the game takes an irreversible turn for the worse on the third replay and redeems itself on the fourth.

I neglected to dedicate individual paragraphs to the trophies and achievements, the customization, the cutscenes, the voice-overs, the Havoc physics, the pause menu, the patented and groundbreaking player abilities bullet-pointed on the press release, and if not these then everything else that the discerning readers who choose to use the comment function on this site point out while proving that they are, in fact, far more qualified to have written this review.

Now the credibility I never had is as good as gone. This website and/or magazine was demonstrably better before its former writers and editors departed to become the despised new regimes at rival websites and magazines.

Primal Fear: Haunted by Ghosts of Predators Past

Office Space's copier notwithstanding, machines aren't as satisfying to fight; flesh and blood is better. It seemed self-evident when I said it during a discussion about game A.I.s in general. Now, after some serendipitous reading, the assertion makes even more sense. Forget about Cylon skinjobs and the sentient supercomputer HAL 9000. For the time being, it's machines that neither look nor behave like they're alive that I have in mind.

“Have you ever wondered why normal adults living in urban environments like Manhattan are liable to be terrified of snakes and spiders, while being quite blasé about dangers like cars and cigarettes?” David Livingstone Smith asks in The Most Dangerous Animal: Human Nature and the Origins of War.

His answer agrees with Barbara Erenreich's: “[H]uman beings are haunted by the ghosts of predators past” -- which is to argue that we evolved in environments where it paid to be aware of animal predators, but not the technology that we would invent millennia later. And so, as Smith writes, high-grossing movies like Jaws, Alien, Predator, and Jurassic Park “arouse primal emotions within us. We respond to these films because they resonate with ancient fears of being hunted and eaten.”

While we are, without doubt, able to imagine nightmares such as a demented car that intends to drive donuts over our corpses, these scenarios lack a snarling dog's ability to automatically elicit hair-raising reactions. The Resident Evil games get this and use it to frightening effect. Crocodiles, snakes, and spiders are among the menagerie of clawing, biting, or stinging animals that menace us in the series' current incarnation. RE 5, of course, capitalizes on the psychology of fear in other ways as well.

More than any other species, ourselves included, parasites and viral organisms have historically made mankind miserable (the Spanish flu eliminated 50 million of us in only a year and a half). It is correct to object that, while we can see macroparasites such as tapeworms and leeches, the microscopic monsters that create measles, leprosy, and Lhasa fever have until very recently remained invisible to humankind. Remember, though, that their transmission vectors – rats, lice, blood, feces, rotten flesh – are both obvious and elicit instinctive revulsion across cultures.

There's more to zombie imagery than this peculiar power to induce disgust. Smith writes that “it is typically thought that the contaminated object transmits its filthy essence to anything that it comes into contact with.” Bear with me, as this becomes fairly complicated. Essence (Aristotle called it substance) distinguishes what a thing is from the qualities that it has. Dogs have four legs, for instance, but can lose any number of these and retain their “doggy-ness.” In other words, a hairless, toothless, three-limbed dog remains in our minds' conceptual “dog” category despite his setbacks. This essentialist thinking finds its home in the notion that humans have souls independent of the bodies that they inhabit (and, perversely, in the tradition that held that a person was black or Jewish on the basis of one-eighth of his or her “blood”).

Zombies -- the converse of our hypothetical canine -- are superficial humans who've lost their human essence. The ubiquity of made-up monsters that appear to be people but in actuality aren't – consider werewolves, vampires, witches, changelings, Cylon skinjobs, pod people, T-800 terminators, and demon-controlled children to name but a few -- proves the concept's immense power over the human imagination.

If you agree with Smith; copious evidence canvasing all of recorded history; and the research of psychologists who study post-combat stress disorders, it is essential for soldiers and communities to dehumanize the enemies who they destroy or whose destruction they condone. We compare our foes to the same dangerous and disease carrying animals that trigger the instinctive fight-or-flight and disgust responses detailed above. Zombies literalize the picture that political propagandists paint when attempting to activate our anti-parasite modules in preparation for war -- which brings us to the disquieting nature of another note that Resident Evil 5 strikes. The title not only features fearful animals and contagious pathogens that create monsters in people's clothing; it blatantly turns people who in relatively recent history have been relegated to a sub-human status and held as vectors of barbarity and disease into barbaric disease spreaders.

Preserving past blog entries, part one

Originally published: April, 2008

Racist imagery in RE5 trailer?

Posted: 2008-04-13 15:18:46.257

Message board reactions to Newsweek blogger N'Gai Croal's thoughts on Resident Evil 5's controversial trailer miss much of the point.

To say that previously released Resident Evil games featured rabid mobs of Spaniards and Americans of mixed ethnicity simply won't do. To many Americans, an animalistic, homicidal white man is an anomaly, and an animalistic, homicidal black man is a recognizable "type" with historical and institutional precedent. This is what Croal refers to when he says "the imagery is not the same. It doesn't carry the same history, doesn't carry the same weight." Some discussion of the taxonomy of stereotypical, racially insensitive, and/or outright racist imagery of blacks -- such as revolting notions of sambos, minstrels, and savages, as well as the spiritual and moral mentors to non-black figures who feature in many Hollywood movies -- might have preempted much of the reactionary posting that is appearing online. However, I understand that it is not the Newsweek writer's obligation to provide crash courses in black history for an American audience that ought to know better.

Imagine a series of tycoon games in which the object is to control a state's banking and financial institutions and then exercise increasingly powerful political lobbying power. The first game in the series features white characters. Its sequel, however, focuses on corporate fat cats with stereotypical Jewish features. The same entrepreneurship lionized in American culture as the embodiment of by-their-bootstraps success is something else entirely for the stereotyped Jewish character because of historical context and because the same socially constructed categories have been used to oppress and separate Jews from people of other ethnicities. As it retells an age-old story, the game of Jewish tycoons perpetuates notions that have been used in part as justification for the expulsion and extermination of Jews across Europe from 15th century Spain and Portugal to 20th century Germany, Poland, and Russia.

No matter how academic this might sound, all Americans are familiar with the concept. We know that is it different to use a racist, sexist, or homophobic epithet against a person of an ethnicity, gender, or sexuality who the term was never intended to slander, than it is to use the same word to attack another person of the ethnicity, gender, or sexuality that it is intended to wound. Resident Evil 5's trailer is no racist slur-- the point I'm attempting to make is the all-importance of context to meaning.

Unlike Croal, I am not yet convinced that the trailer depicts non-zombie blacks as "all dangerous men, women, and children" who "have to be killed." But I do believe that its imagery does invoke, if not directly draw on, our familiarity with and interest in films like Black Hawk Down, as well as the real world tragedies in Sudan's Darfur region and Rwanda (where black Hutus have in fact murdered perhaps as many as a million black Tutsis and moderate Hutus, often with knives and machetes). The potential problem is that while action games are perfectly able to adapt some of the intensity and chaos of these situations to the purposes of interactive entertainment, they're miserable at handling complicated social, political, and historical contexts. (Similarly, where Black Hawk Down succeeds as an action movie, several critics accuse it of shortchanging the socio-politics of the Battle of Mogadishu.)

At the moment, neither Croal nor I have any idea as to how Resident Evil 5 will handle its suggestive themes. We aren't sure whether it will in some way acknowledge the terrible baggage attached to the real atrocities that lend its scenes such emotional power or simply mine these as videogame thrillmakers. Beyond this specific game, there exists the danger that -- over time, and across multiple iterations -- well-meaning pop culture creations will distill the specific and complex character of conflicts such as Darfur's into the general and simplistic trope of a malicious black mob armed with machetes.

I say well-meaning, because in the case of videogames, current technical limitations restrict the extent to which a developer can paint complete pictures. For instance, it is both easier and more cost effective to render convincing opponents in games like Resident Evil or Call of Duty than it is to breathe believable life into non-combatant characters who go about the business of day-to-day living. This is one reason why we find no NPCs in Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare's middle-eastern cities, even as the game's missions lead players through the very homes and workplaces of vanished people. And should Infinity Ward have decided to populate its levels with anyone other than armed militants it would have faced the challenge of preventing players from shooting innocents -- a circumstance undoubtedly closer to life, but one that would have risked depicting American and British soldiers as war criminals, as well as forcing players to restart missions after each incident of indiscriminate fire. The trade-off, of course, is that COD 4's unnamed Saudi Arabia is inhabited exclusively by angry Arab gunmen.

While I would be surprised if RE5 does not include a few black NPCs who fill sympathetic supporting roles fleshed out in non-interactive cutscenes, I'm not counting on in-game villagers to flee their zombified and cannibalistic former neighbors.