As the walls that once housed the fuel containers of a small, EDF-controlled fuel depot fall and trigger a chain reaction of viscerally beautiful explosions before me, a solitary thought dominates my mind: I did this, and I did it alone. No scripting help from the game engine, no computer-controlled character holding my hand and telling me where to place charges and when to run, and no loss of control in the form of a cut-scene – and it is in this independence that Red Faction: Guerilla finds its apex.

But those details end up as irrelevancies as, even though some of them forward the engaging plot, they’re really just encouragements for you to go blow the hell out of something – and Guerilla makes this activity incredibly entertaining. Simple destructions, like swinging away at the foundation of a solar power array that stands a hundred feet tall, often yield unexpected results. Not the sort of unexpected where the rapidly-falling tower crushes you, no, although that occasionally happens – but the sort of unexpected that means that collapsed array falls into something explodey, which explodes, which then makes further things explode, killing a bunch of once-living things and showering the screen in glorious, beautifully-rendered carnage. It’s all really very gratuitous, but somehow it never quite gets silly – the graphical feedback and design ensure that, while things exploding are bright and vibrant, they always look just like you might imagine them to.

That I mention the killing of men secondary to structures is no accident; not only does the game generally only rarely require you to actually kill soldiers, it doesn’t really facilitate their slaying terribly well. That’s not to say that Guerilla is bad as a shootey-game, but rather to say that it’s average. The cover mechanics are straightforward and simple, ‘F’ is depressed to zoom in a bit and center your view, and the left mouse button does the shooting. Enemies find cover, lob grenades, and appear to possess an intelligence that’s almost human – but none of it is quite convincing. Once I pieced together how the enemy AI acquires and assigns targets, I found it pretty easy to avoid too much incoming damage by simply running the hell away.

Only, it doesn’t because you don’t have to do that ‘running away’ part. At least, you don’t need to keep running once your health bar fills up sufficiently. Sometimes, when completely and hopelessly overwhelmed, unlimited flight is the only viable option. But usually, you can kill all of the enemy soldiers. This is because, inexplicably, Alec is bigger, stronger, faster and more accurate than the EDF is. Having a badass protagonist is all well and good (who wants to play a weakling, anyway?), but it runs contrary to every bit of narrative the game throws at you.

Incidentally, you never need to run further than the nearest safe house – Red Faction camps – to ditch any pursuers. Even though these camps have about a dozen freedom fighters/terrorists at them, the EDF simply will not pursue you into them, which makes for a rather jarring experience when three times that many were in hot pursuit. These weird blips happen often, and have the nasty habit of utterly annihilating any sense of immersion that had been previously established. For example, one mission sends Alec to a desolate valley, devoid of all life and containing only a few construction supplies. After beginning the mission, a small Mechwarrior-like suit spawns. Upon entering it, hordes of EDF soliders attack, both on foot and in vehicle, and you are informed that you must kill 60 of them. Alright, no problem – a solid amount of good-fun bloodshed. Once the 60 are slain, however, the remaining EDF – which for me was easily two dozen – all disappear. Although I was relieved that I was going to survive, I was disappointed – didn’t I earn a glorious, rusted-iron-Mechwarrior victory or a painful, humiliating loss? Isn’t that the commitment that I signed up for? Quests like this – that terminate all evidence of their being upon completion – take the responsibility of survival away from both the player and the narrative, and I found that I greatly resented it Guerilla for it.

That’s the rub of Red Faction: Guerilla: really genuinely awesome physics modeling and world-breaking that gives the player total control over his environment, juxtaposed over a narrative engine that repeatedly removes this control and independence away from the player. An interesting, Marxist-fueled paranoid sci-fi thriller with hints of the film Total Recall that repeatedly tells the player how weak he is compared to the EDF and how heroic he is for overcoming them, juxtaposed over an engine that creates a player avatar vastly more powerful than any of the foes he encounters – even though, by trade, he is a mere miner. A beautiful, fully-realized world into which great care has clearly gone into the engineering of, placed overtop of painfully generic looking enemy soldiers that behave in sadly generic ways. This, I suppose, is the nature of life on Mars.

Head over to the Scores section for a more numeric look at Red Faction: Guerilla

But none of them – whether it be another rogue, an implacable paladin, or even the dreaded hunter – could instill in me the raw, unrelenting hatred that seeing a warrior could.

Not just any warrior, but one armed with an axe. And not just any axe, no, but a terribly particular one – the Arcanite Reaper. For a time, the Arcanite Reaper was the penultimate weapon of the warrior class. It was, at the time, ludicrously expensive to craft, requiring not only a host of rare and exotic materials, but also access – and coin to pay – to a blacksmith that knew how to forge the beskulled weapon. Neither the materials nor the blacksmiths capable of forging the thing were easy to be had, yet every warrior quested, fought and killed relentlessly to procure one.

Looking back on the item now, it doesn’t appear to be a terribly powerful weapon: 53.8 dps, +13 stamina, and +62 attack power. When viewed in light of the obscenely-powerful weapons found in Wrath of the Lich King dungeons, the Arcanite Reaper appears a paper clip with a rock stuck to it at best – but Azeroth was a much different place then. Due to a mechanic that was later changed, the speed of a weapon – 3.8, in the case of the Arcanite Reaper – influenced in an enormous way how hard a triggered ability could strike an enemy. Essentially, the slower a weapon was, the harder it could hit somebody – and the Arcanite Reaper was, and remains, among the very slowest of weapons in the game, with the total number of 3.8 speed weapons being easily countable on one hand. The other dominant factor in this calculation was the attack power of the warrior in question – but, generally speaking, if a warrior had the finances for an Arcanite Reaper, he probably also had the time and money to boost his other stats to Seris-killing proportions.

The warrior could not see Seris when she crouched in stealth. The warrior could not stop her from escaping into stealth. The warrior could not even stop the rogue from moving for long enough to kill them. But what the warrior could do was terrible indeed; even with relatively equal gear between an enemy warrior and I, he could kill me in as few as three swings of that axe – and both of us, no matter the warrior that I faced, always knew that. While I might manage to reduce the total health of the warrior by as much as half with luck, I knew that within ten seconds of leaving the comforting, black safety of stealth that I would be dead.

That’s why I decided to make a warrior.

To kill the hell out of rogues.

I never did get Icthus – the warrior – to the highest level. He never did get an Arcanite Reaper – by the time I began heavily investing time into Icthus, Blizzard had changed the way that weapon speed influences damage, so it was no longer the end-all-be-all weapon. This was also because, as I said, I never made it to the level cap with Icthus; rather, Iparked him at level 39 and fought with him in battlegrounds, which limit the teams – an enemy team and a team you were on – to ten players, each being in the level range of 30-39. Ironically, rogues wound up being perhaps my single most dangerous rival on the field of battle due to the way that high-level magical enhancements add to the class, but that’s a rather in-depth discussion poorly-placed here.

While I couldn’t necessarily kill rogues as easily as Seris had been killed, I was still fully capable of annihilating

almosteverything else in the battlegrounds. I was engaging in the practice known as “twinking,” which means that Icthus didn’t get any of his gear on his own – rather, my high-level characters got it for him, and then paid enormous sums of money to place magical enchantments on his gear to make him far more powerful than any level 39 character had a right to be. This had the result of making him vastly more powerful than any enemy found in the battlegrounds, barring those that were “twinking” themselves – and even then, none could compete with Icthus.

Except rogues.

This experience, and indeed set of experiences, I found to be among the most entertaining and adrenaline-inducing that I encountered in World of Warcraft. While my rogue had good gear and weapons, and ran with a pretty solid group of players, she never shined with the burning intensity that Icthus rather regularly did – and it never felt as though she shined as brightly. I believe that some measure of this was due only to my playing the warrior – that absolutely hated thing, that thing I’d been trained to despise, fear and hate since Seris was level 1 – that abominably powerful, bastard thing, the warrior.

But it wasn’t the warrior in and of itself; while a class able to dominate those around him, the warrior’s skillset, his appearance, his attitude – these weren’t the reasons would glow and burn with life while playing Icthus. That reason, I realized years later, was pretty simple: I was playing the hated thing.

I was the hated thing.

Recently, I’ve begun noticing that I often play classes, teams or factions based on similar reasons. While learning to play a new game, I inevitably learn to despise one or two of the class/factions/etc. Sometimes, it’s because they kill me repeatedly, and like Seris and the warrior, I simply cannot find an effective strategy and am thus forced to flee. (I did ultimately find one, but it required that the warrior and I be completely alone until I could bleed him to death with surgical precision – a very rare circumstance.) Sometimes, it’s because their skillset – when effectively utilized – enables them to be so slippery and quick that they are impossible to kill, and able to harry me until I die.

In Warhammer: Age of Reckoning, this Hated Thing came in the form of Choppas and Chosen. Due to how racial factions were designed in WAR, I was unable to play a Choppa or a Chosen – so instead, I played the Knight of the Blazing Sun, counterpart to Chosen, and the Slayer, the counterpart to the Choppa. Although both were axe-and-sword frontline fighters, they fell on opposite ends of the spectrum; Chosen/Knights were incredibly difficult to kill, and Slayers/Choppas were incredibly powerful.

Neither the Slayer nor the Knight were among my first, or even primary, characters – that honor fell to Bloodmoney the Warrior Priest. She was a healer, and died regularly to Slayers, and frustrated herself often trying to kill Chosen. While I enjoyed playing her, absolutely nothing I experienced in WAR brought me the raw, unrelenting joy that Othered Again – my Knight of the Blazing Sun – brought to me when he stood straddling the world like an unkillable titan, laughing as he deflected blows and spells with shield and sword.

Sure, Othered Again could take a lot of damage and hold a line and ensure his allies could annihilate his enemies from the safety of being behind him. Sure, Spacetiger Spaceslayer – the Slayer – could leap into a group of enemies, howl with rage and swing his two axes with a fervor only dwarves could muster, killing everything around him. But neither of these character-defining aspects were why I so thoroughly enjoyed Othered Again and Spacetiger Spaceslayer.

I adored them both because, as with Icthus, I was the Hated Thing.

Any given sentence contains within its confines a host of meanings; that of the topical definition of the sum of words, that of an intended idea implied both in and around the meanings established through topical definition and, often, as a consequence of this composite, a potentially unintended meaning.  I personally hold that any given writer or speaker is responsible for the overall understanding of his words, whether intended or not.  Generally, this holds up well enough in the day-to-day life of reading and hearing and understanding through transitions between media types do not prove difficult.  With this in mind, I’ve chosen to look at a presumably unintended implication of a particular computer game: Command and Conquer: Generals.

In C&C:G, the player chooses from one of three different armies, each having different units and structures, and each with the intent of killing the hell out of whomever deigns to oppose them.  This is pretty standard stuff as far as contemporary real-time strategy games go – since Starcraft, most major RTS releases have had, at minimum, three different factions/races that the player can choose from.  What separates C&C:G from most other RTS games, however, is that it decided to incorporate real-world factions, and all of the weight that each culture brings.

Those three factions are the People’s Republic of China, the United States of America, and the GLA – the Global Liberation Army.  As stated, each army has different units, although there are clear similarities amongst the three.  For example, all three of the factions have a basic, rifle-armed soldier that is responsible for doing a great deal of the grunt work that their factions require of them.  I am not particularly interested in the similarities of the three gun-toting grunt soldiers, but rather their differences – and even then, I’m interested only in the perceived and implied cultural differences among them as established by Electronic Arts, the game’s developers.

What I found to be the most interesting undertone in C&C:G are the voices of individual units.  Similar again to Starcraft, each unit has a different set of speeches that issue forth depending on what you order them to do, or even if one merely selects the unit.  The Ranger – the USA’s grunt soldier – says things like, “Always prepared,” “Ready for action,” and “We’ll lead the way.”  These are pretty standard tropes for American troops to fall back on, boyscout-like in presentation and always spoken from a position of military dominance.  Things get more interesting when one looks to the Chinese, however, whom say things like “We are the red guard,” “Defenders of peace,” and “China, do not forget me!”

The Chinese voice responses from units mostly revolve around China as a collective, communistic entity; the “we” invoked by the Chinese is entirely dissimilar to that of the American “we,” suggesting for the Chinese that they are part of a far larger organization that supersedes even the military conflict and harkening to the Red Army as a whole (and a key component of China), whereas the American “we” is simply “we” in the context of that particular military unit – the soldiers that are immediately present.  These strings can be found throughout the unit voices for both armies, China continually emphasizing Communistic and collective ideas and the USA considering its military force to be the sole consideration.

More or less, the two ideas presented here are clear and aren’t particularly controversial – at least, when one extrapolates China and Communism a few decades into the future.  What I do find to be particularly controversial, however, is the treatment of the third faction, the Global Liberation Army.

The GLA aren’t merely another player in a global war, but rather a similar extrapolation to that of China – only with various Muslim/terrorist groups found throughout the Middle East.  I do not use ‘Muslim groups,’ or even ‘terrorist,’ lightly, as every image and voice presented by EA for the GLA are inarguably Islamic stereotypes and extrapolations of current images.  Even the name of the basic grunt troop for the GLA – “Rebel” – is suggestive of something more sinister than anything either of the other two armies can provide.  As with the China/USA paradigm, things grow more interesting when adding another faction.

Almost every member of the GLA is suicidal and fanatical, with such choice phrases as “No cost is too great!” and “The higher order shall reign.”  The former hardly needs explanation; it’s a pretty clear image of a suicidal soldier fully-prepared to die for his cause.  Not to say that the Americans and the Chinese aren’t willing to do the same, but neither of these factions actually voice it with the conviction – or even voice it at all – of the GLA.  “The higher order shall reign” is also an almost-damning statement; although it doesn’t quite directly state it, when taken with consideration of the rest of the highlights of the GLA faction, it’s almost the same as saying, “Allah is the one true God” or even, “Islam will dominate everything!”  A final GLA quote, “Our courage will be seen by all!” is even further different from anything the other two factions say; whereas the USA and the Chinese are focused on securing military objectives, defeating their enemies, and winning battles with their voice-overs, the GLA seems to, inexplicably, be terribly concerned with how their actions are perceived by “all.”  “All” is another tricky term; do they mean the people of the world as a whole?  Their brethren soldiers and the enemy?  Just one of them?  Regardless, it shifts the focus from the intent of their actions and their goals and into the realm of public opinion.

This is particularly troubling because, while China and the United States arguably have a national identity, at least militarily, that is effectively portrayed by C&C:G, EA decided to instead use stereotype and fear to paint the portrait of a generic, Islamic nation.  Although in the course of the game it is stated that the GLA arises from no clear nationality and is made of a variety of groups, it nonetheless combines Wahabism with terrorism with absolutely no remorse, or even second thought.  Why is it that this region of the world – culturally, philosophically, and politically – can be represented through such gross and inaccurate stereotypes while the far West and East are not?  EA doesn’t say, and I would be remiss to put words in their collective mouths.

None of these ideas would be particularly relevant had the factions been based on fictional groups of people.  There’s a certain power in creating almost-entirely fictional warring cultures, as it allows statements like those above to be made without actually suggesting anything about real-world counterparts; creative and poetic license can go a long way.  But when groups are so clearly based from real-world groups, doesn’t that mean that anything said about them in the confines of the game are more or less also being said about them in real-life?

Not all Muslims – and certainly not all of the soldiers found in that part of the world – are fanatical, suicidal terrorist figures, and yet they are presented as such in C&C:G.  Why is it that the American stereotype attributes – egotism, a sense of entitlement, and an absolute belief in their superiority – aren’t displayed in as damning of terms as that of the GLA?  The same for Chinese collectivism; it’s looked down on in the game (especially when taken in consideration with the structures the Chinese have, like Propaganda Towers), but it isn’t given anywhere nearly the negative connotation that the GLA are.

Further emphasizing this disparity of tone and, indeed, likeability of the factions, are the units themselves; while I’ll not drag this post out even further by examining them, I’ll leave you with this: the auxiliary foot troop for the Americans is the medic, the auxiliary foot troop for the Chinese is the computer hacker, and the auxiliary foot troop for the GLA is, well, the terrorist – a suicide bomber that kills himself to do an amount of damage to an enemy unit or structure.

Here are some things that I want to explore over the semester:

1: Can narrative be an actual game mechanic? 1a: how, exactly, is a game mechanic defined?  Is this a flexible or rigid definition, or has it even been solidly established yet?

2: How in the world to talk about a game like Achron (http://achrongame.com/), which permits two opposing players to move through a window of time on a real-time basis.  For example, a structure that is capable of creating a new unit does so, and that unit travels backwards in time to before it was created – and it then destroys the building that created it, before it was created.  I have a mental image in my mind of how exactly to /think/ of this, but expressing it in words proves difficult.  Paradoxes are fun .. or something.

3: I take to the literary criticism school of thought that authorial intent is irrelevant, and that the only important detail in a work is what the author /does/ say, not what he tries to say.  This becomes more important as the length of time elapsed between the work published and the author’s death (hah) grows longer; we can never ask Shakespeare exactly how we should interpret the character of Feste in Twelfth Night, for example, and are thus left to contextual evidence and our own interpretations for validity.  Does this apply to video games, particularly when developer commentaries are so prevelant?  Is it at all fair for looking at games based on what they /could/ have done, rather than what they did?  I find the only relevant detail to be how the game exists in it’s current state – so how does that apply to game patches and downloadable content?  Can you judge World of Warcraft at release in the same way that you can in it’s current state?  As, ultimately, the patch is nothing more than the “author” trying to “get at what they really meant to do the first time.”

4: Should a game journalist/critic actually beat each game they examine, and if not, what percentage of a game should they complete before forming a solid opinion?  Book critics certainly have to, and to effectively analyze a poem one might spend hours on fifteen lines of text.  How does this apply to video games?  4a: I’m working with a theory that uses similar concepts to statistical polling; if one reads (samples) 33% of a book, can one draw reasonable conclusions about the book, as one could with populations of people?  Surely, the conclusion of story arcs can merely be guessed at, but is it fair to use that 33% (or whatever other number you like) to draw conclusions about the mechanics, dialogue constructions/political messages and styles as one, I would argue, can do with a book?