#vidjergames

Switched On SNES - A Link to The Past

Cosmo - Zelda: Ocarina of Time Speedrun

Jeremy Parish - Tomodachi Life and Emergent Heartbreak

“The baby grew up and moved out,” I texted to Cat.

“No. No, no, no,” she replied. And as soon I landed back home the following evening, I let her watch the slideshow. She didn’t say anything as the pretend milestones of our pretend family’s pretend baby’s pretend life flickered past; we simply sat in mute disappointment.

I found myself surprised by the visceral reaction we both had to the game rushing our Mii’s baby through to maturity. It’s not like we really thought the caterwauling digital child was real. Maybe it was a mistake to give her such a meaningful name, but even so we’re clear on the lines between fiction and reality. We didn’t even see it as some kind of omen.

I think, in part, the letdown came from the game simply hitting too close to home. We’d like a real family, but we’re not getting any younger, and it gets difficult once you reach our age. Having this little digital infant arrive only to take off mere days later hit a little close to home, too reminiscent of the times we’ve thought, “Maybe this time,” only to be let down.

Cf. Jenn Frank’s “The Map Is Not the Territory:

Tomodachi Life is a game about avatars.

More important, it’s about the avatars you create. It’s entirely about how you choose to remember others.

The problem with nonfiction writing—the problem with remembering anything, ever—is that, with each act of remembering, the photograph might fade. With enough remembering, the mental image dissolves completely.

With enough remembering, I am left with an oversimplification, an abstract map of a memory. I am left with a mess of so many sentences about a person, with just a cartoon of a face.

I cannot remember my birth father’s face.

That’s a fair enough critique of Tomodachi Life, but I think Jeremy’s story illustrates the opposite point: sometimes the map is the territory. The simulation of Jeremy and Cat’s life was a part of Jeremy and Cat’s life.

Aevee Bee - Arrangement of Omission: Fire Emblem

Breakdown of how the best game of 2013 is really a potboiler:

Fire Emblem isn’t any more or less designed than any other narrative but it is designed with respect to the technology of a video game. It has all the important story beats—there’s a mysterious rival, there’s a Maltese Falchion, there’s an ancient evil, and reasons to get involved keep piling up. Everyone’s trying to prevent the war, but something keeps pulling them in at the last minute. You can even see how narratively important it is to have the Avatar character, how they are able to make the commentary and observations and ask the questions that Chrom and the others can’t. Fire Emblem’s plot is bare bones, so much so that the sparseness of it it is noticeable. A villain appears, is defeated, leaves a clue to what they’ve got to do next, etc. It provides enough hook for the player to be genuinely interested in what’s going to happen in the next mission. There’s building drama and high stakes for the characters involved, but it’s skeletal, and only a few characters are actually at any point present in it.

That is on purpose, and it’s also barely noticeable in practice, because the characters are so very present in their support conversations. What Fire Emblem gets to do, as it is a game, is write a fairly bare bones, page turner plot as vehicle for an enormous cast of individual characters, the interactions between which comprise far more of the game’s word count than any of the events that they actually star in. This is what the game is “really” interested in, what the game is about, and the specific choices of the plot revolve entirely around supporting that emphasis. Fire Emblem: Awakening is actually a super neat case study—like if someone completely dissected the character development from the plot and rearranged it in four dimensions.

The issue of internet sexism is a sad one, but fairly well described at this point. More interesting to me was this comment made by Coates:

To the extent that voiced sexism is held in check, it's held by social sanction. Barack Obama did not think it a good idea, for instance, to cheer on the guy who yelled, "Iron my shirt!" to his Democratic rival. Larry Flint incurred bipartisan wrath for his portrait of S.E. Cupp. The point here isn't that social sanction totally abolishes sexism, so much that it at least makes it contested ground and socially perilous.

A Democratic senator can not, say, go on national television and tell Sarah Palin to go bake a pie, and expect the world to laugh along with him. But on the Internet, it is held that you should be able to express whatever you want, and it turns out what a good number of people most want to express is a hatred of perceived female power.

He adds,

A culture of broad anonymity is a problem. People need to be accountable. If it were up to me, everyone here would have to post under their real name. It would likely cut the community in half. But it would double its quality.

Let's do what I always do and turn this around to the question of authenticity. Who is the real self? Surely, says modernity, your really real self is the you who you are under all the masks. And how better to get at that animus under the persona than by stripping off the social conventions that hold the animus under their thumb? And yet, look at how ugly the results of such stripping away social restraints are.

Well, maybe people really are authentically terrible? But isn't it better to turn this question on its head and say that the restrained self is the real self and the unrestrained monster born of anonymity is the false self? Because if we want to elevate "authenticity" as a positive value and hold that authenticity is superior to inauthenticity, then the results of authenticity should be higher than the results of inauthenticity.