Tomb Raider (2013): Surviving a Tutorial

I started to play the new Tomb Raider recently and as I already knew the first hour or so is a series of non-ending QTEs. And as I already knew too, the brand new Lara Croft is represented as vulnerable and terrified as opposed to our usual invincible arrogant hero. What I didn’t know, though (but should have guessed), is that these two elements are quite contradictory: simply put, a hand-holding, heavily scripted, QTEfest’s tutorial does not convey, at all, vulnerability and terror. There was not one moment during that whole sequence where I felt vulnerable because everything was so scripted and pre-determined that nothing seemed threatening. At least not to me as a player: I was watching a vulnerable character, yes, but I sure wasn’t playing one. In fact, the few moments I was playing, in control of Lara, I was just like the usual invincible confident hero I played before in every other third-person action game – I mean, how can I fail at pressing W? I know where the W key is after all. Pressing W for half-an-hour can feel meaningful when playing Proteus, because this minimalism suits the contemplative experience the game offers, but it doesn’t work as well when you’re running to get out of a cave which is falling around you: the triviality and impossible-to-fail action of pressing W just doesn’t match the representation of chaos and imminent threat on the screen. 

The opening sequence of Tomb Raider (the first twenty minutes in particular) is as bad a case of ludonarrative dissonance as it can get, cramming in as few minutes as possible all the biggest problems with how AAA videogames envision interactive storytelling nowadays, which is a bit sad because the intentions were good (I want to play a vulnerable character for a change) and the writing is above average, for the most part, so let’s honor this eloquent case study by taking it apart.

Lincoln (2012), Steven Spielberg

I didn’t have a proper conclusion for my two articles on Spielberg’s cinema, but now I found it with Lincoln, his last film, which happens to be also a good follow-up to my last post on ethics. I must say that this is not exactly a review, because I want to focus mainly on one scene that I will use to introduce a new angle from which we can view his cinema; in lieu of proper criticism, I’ll add some general observations at the end.

As always with Spielberg, his movie is an answer to a former one; in this case, Lincoln replies to Saving Private Ryan (among others, but especially). Both movies open on a similar representation of the war: in SPR, it was a long virtuosic set-piece of the Normandy landing, the most famous scene of the movie but also the worst. A little nuance would be in order, but with its presentation of violence in a frontal, ostentatious manner, this fluid camera moving cleverly around the scene, travelling from the characters to the gruesome death of unknown soldiers and back to the characters, as if this violence was taking place especially for this omniscient camera, which always happened to be at the right place at the right moment, with all this technical skill on display, well this whole landing didn’t seem chaotic or arbitrary anymore; instead we felt mostly the absolute mastery of the filmmaker, who was using all his ingenuity to set-up the most impressive spectacle possible (and it is impressive, but this doesn’t really serve the purpose). Lincoln begins on the bloody fields of the Civil War, but this time the violence lasts about one minute: Spielberg turns away from the war itself and heads towards his main character, a Lincoln discussing with two black soldiers. From now on, the filmmaker isn’t interested in the action, but in the ideas behind it (which, incidentally, coincide with his announcement that he will no longer make action movies).

To Kill Or Not To Kill

In the past week, I’ve been having a little back and forth with Joel Goodwin on his blog Electron Dance about ethical choices as they are currently depicted by videogames. As my answer to his last comment grew and grew, and as I realized that I was not arguing anymore, but restating Goodwin's argument in my own words, I thought it would be best to develop it here more fully, as a sort of addendum to my article on The Illusion of Choice.

 

I first intervened on his blog (on the last part of his excellent series on Dishonored) to comment on this comparison: “The ethical choice of Dishonored and Bioshock is artificial, as worthless as the "trolley problem", a popular thought experiment in ethics. Here's the cut-down version of the trolley problem: five people will die unless you throw a switch in which case only one person will die. There are variations of the problem but basically Spock said it best with "the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few"” My main argument was that the ethical choice in these videogames is more meaningful than the trolley problem because they appear in the context of a precise narrative. In a sense, we should not considered these choices from the point of view of the player (what would I do?), but rather from the one of the fictional character controlled by the player (what would Corvo do?), just like in any other narrative medium dealing with ethics – and unlike the trolley problem, which exists in a vacuum. I still agree with that part, but I would retract from the rest of my argument now and propose instead, as Goodwin did, that this narrative meaning doesn’t make these choices less hollow. In fact, such a context is exactly why we should not even qualify them as “ethical” in the first place.

Videogames as Possibilities

Let’s resume what I said in my last two articles: on one hand, the representational aspect of videogames is always shifting, in the sense that the moving image in front of the player is different in each playthrough, and that no two players will ever see the same game in the same way. On the other hand, we should not forget that the mechanics governing the movement of this image are quite fixed, and are not wholly under the player’s control, because it is the designer who decides how much freedom exactly he’s going to allow in his game. Our question now: what lies between these two extremes of the player’s agency and the designer’s control?

In one word: possibilities. So, here’s my proposal: instead of Sid Meier’s “game as a series of interesting decisions”, let’s try out “game as a series of interesting possibilities”. Or even better: “a good videogame is a series of interesting possibilities”, because I’m thinking mainly here of videogames (although I think this qualitative statement can also stretch out to traditional games), and I’m less trying to understand what games are than what games are good at. Truth be told, I’m not fond of definition (that’s usually when name-dropping Wittgenstein is expected), and this is not a rigorous academic paper, so consider this idea as a modest proposal, without any presumption of being all-encompassing or definite. Still, I have my reasons: I prefer thinking in terms of “possibilities” because it stands closer to this intersection of player and designer while “decisions” puts the focus on the player. These decisions have been designed beforehand, so the designer is not completely neglected in Meier’s canonic definition, but it’s the player who ultimately decides, and therefore the emphasis is on him. “Possibilities”, though, is probably closer to the designer’s end, because he created these possibilities in the first place, but it also represents how the player sees a game, how he experiences it: “this or that may happen, I may do this or not, etc.” Also, “possibilities” is more inclusive since it can cover these so-called not-games like Proteus or Dear Esther, in which the player doesn’t have a lot of options, even though these games are rich in possibilities (the procedurally generated island of Proteus or the random selection of the fragmented narration in Dear Esther). It thus removes the idea of challenge, which I do not find necessary: to use a classic example, how is Snakes & Ladders challenging? The player has no decision to make (he merely follows the dice), but the game is fun because of its numerous possibilities, which are born out of the game’s design, the careful arrangement of snakes and ladders on the board.