Video announcement

Yeah, it's been a pretty long time since I last posted anything here. Anyways, as stated in the last update thingamajig, I never gave up on writing, I just started up more new projects than I had time and energy to finish. Anyways, for the past month I've been working on a video about cinematics and multimedia in general in video games, which is now finished and can be watched here:

It's not unlikely that the blog won't see much use on its own for a while, as I aim to make more videos rather than blog posts, but I'll be uploading the script along with each new video just in case anyone wants to read them. Due to the subject matter, this one also dragged on for quite a bit longer than intended. Expect videos more along a length of 10-15 minutes focused on more narrow topics for now. Maybe the next one will be focused on one specific work of media, or a video game franchise, rather than a subject this broad.

As for the script for this one, I'll upload it in a separate post, maybe today, otherwise probably within the following couple of days. Enjoy.

Yeah, so i just disappeared for half a year or something

I started attending university the first of September, and then just stopped updating my blog at all. Rest assured that this project is by no means dead, only asides from having had little time and energy for writing until recently, I’ve run into a strange problem i haven't had before; I've got about 8 half-assed articles that I’ve sort of crudely written, but none of those are anywhere near being complete and instead of finishing them i just keep getting ideas for more unrelated content. Goddamnit.
Anyways, while I’ve recently run into some problems regarding my motivation for studying, I’m sorta starting to get back the desire to actually partaking in the non-existent "Video game analysis movement", and when i finished the pay-what-you-want NiTW[1] supplemental short game Lost Constellation[2] yesterday I felt myself thoroughly reminded of why I started doing this thing in the first place. Yeah, it’s time to get back on track. Hopefully.

Now, if I knew I had a specific audience reading this stuff I’d probably start a vote about what to finish first, but I don’t think there’s enough people around for that kind of thing at all, at least not yet, but at any rate I’ll let you know the current WIP articles and ideas for articles I have;

-An article about Sunless Sea and how it uses unconventional world-building, dialogue, aesthetic, perspective, and largely textbased gameplay to evoke uncertainty and fear in an unfamiliar setting.

-An article about Arma: Cold War Assault (Formerly Operation Flashpoint: Cold War Crisis) and why I believe it’s the most authentic military simulation I’ve played, and about why Arma 2 isn’t.

-An analysis and comparison of the Quest Journal in Morrowind, Oblivion, and Skyrim, and how it emphasizes on different aspects in the respective titles, especially in Morrowind as opposed to the later titles.

-A kind of shitty mish-mash of thoughts about the mod “Requiem” for Skyrim, and how the vastly increased difficulty works excellent, and how some of the shitty design decisions that went into designing Skyrims combat system to not be particularly challenging results in the player occationally getting trapped inside quest segments with enemies they cannot defeat, with no option to back out again. Seriously, I encountered enemies with regenerative health that I couldn’t even kill with godmode enabled because they regenerated health faster than I could hurt them, all while I was in the middle of crucial quest moments that didn’t allow me to just leave and return later because Skyrims design expects you to be able to kill mostly anyone you come across with little to no resistance whatsoever. Goddamnit.

-An article about Yume Nikki and how it uses its fragmented map design, intentionally broken and nonsensical game mechanics and internally inconsistent aesthetic as a representation of the severely troubled psyche of an isolated young woman.

-An article about simulation/management games, why I think they’re really fun and compelling, and how they represent different complex aspects of society and economy. Expect politics. Because politics is fun.

-An article about disturbing elements of world design and setting in Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask, of which there are many. It will not have the “Four stages of grief”-theory’s approach, rather I’d like to touch upon some of the aspects that a lot of people seem to overlook. Like this.

-I kinda want to write a longer, elaborate analysis and interpretation about the cartoon series “Adventure Time”, which I’m a pretty big fan of. It’s a really good series, it manages to be a tribute to so many different wonderful things at once while still building a universe with some really interesting characters. Almost everyone has psychological qualms, the show occasionally changes it’s style pretty radically between episodes, and there’s plenty of fart jokes to go around. It’s really good, I just don’t feel I’ve watched enough of it to write a fully fleshed out article, and I’d rather not half-ass something in which there’s so much good to write about.

-An article about the game "Cryostasis: The Sleep of Reason". There's much good to be said about this one, but i need to get it and play it through somehow, which is a bit of a fuzz because it got pulled down from Steam some time ago. Need to figure out how to get it before this one will happen.

-An article about the video game series S.T.A.L.K.E.R. This probably won’t happen anytime soon, there’s so much content and aspects of its design to write about that it’s insane, and there’s no way I’m ready to do something that large yet.

-Lastly, an article about the last of my three most beloved Eastern European postapocalyptic horror survival games (that is, along with Cryostasis and S.T.A.L.K.E.R), Metro 2033, its world building, its themes, how the postapocalypse is depicted both in the novel and the game, why it’s insanely good.

It’s quite a list, I know. My biggest problem at the moment is simply sticking with working on one project enough for me to actually finish it. Also, I’d kind of like to refine my blog, actually put in a bit of fancy visuals, or at least just a logo/avatar just for starters. I’m shit at drawing though, dunno how I’ll make that work. Anyways, as stated, I’m still somewhat alive, don’t know when to expect my next article, but I sure as hell haven’t given up on this at all, even if I haven’t finished anything recently I’m still working on stuff. Hopefully will get at least one of these projects finished at some point soon. Also, happy new year!

-Neo

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[1] God, i’m looking so much forward to this game, haveyouseenititlookssogoodohmahgawd-

[2] Available here http://finji.itch.io/lost-constellation

Papers, Please – Dystopian Bureaucracy and the fall of the Soviet Union

It’s been more than a year now since the full version of Lucas Pope’s now fairly well-known instant-hit indie game “Papers, Please” was released on Steam, and even though there are plenty of reviews about the game itself already, there are some fundamental concepts that I feel have been almost if not completely left out from any and all articles about the game that I’ve read so far[1]. This often seem to result in misunderstandings regarding the game’s theme along with the misconceiving of some gameplay mechanics as flawed or problematic in terms of gameplay balancing, while in my experience it’s clear that they’re designed so in order to effectively support the aforementioned theme.

 

Papers, Please, is, both in its Steam description along with its introductory text on Lucas Pope’s website, introduced as a “Dystopian Document Thriller”. It’s set in the year 1982 in the fictional communist state of Arstotzka, a country which has just finished a 6-year war with the neighboring country Kolechia. The division of the border Town Grestin into East and West is central to the setting, as the player takes the role of a passport inspector in East Grestin at a border checkpoint between the two when the border is opened for the first time after the war. The Inspector earns wages each day for each immigrant correctly allowed into Arstotzka, and the wages are used to pay for the needs of his[2] family. However, incorrectly allowing people through will result in severe penalties, forcing the Inspector to be precise and thorough. Being thorough is little of an option, however, as the Inspector must work very fast, processing as many applicants as possible in as little time as possible in order to maximize his wages each day. The core game spans a time period of a single month, starting at November 23., and maximally lasting until December 24., where holiday starts. The game progresses in difficulty as new regulations are enforced each day, making the process of locating potential discrepancies in the paperwork increasingly complicated.

It’s very obvious from the aforementioned setting that Arstotzka is a fictional parallel to multiple countries in the now-defunct Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR). The game is set in 1982, a time where the Soviet Union in our world was slowly succumbing to severe economic crisis. The setting in 1982 takes place merely 4 years before the Chernobyl disaster and 7 years before the fall of the Berlin Wall, both events which today serve as significant symbols of the fall of the Union. The crisis is largely central to the games setting, as the player experiences the consequences of an increasingly ineffective bureaucratic system working its way towards its own demise in a way that actually depicts it both in a fairly engaging and also reasonably nuanced way.

Bureaucracy, as mentioned before, is an important and extremely fundamental theme for the gameplay in Papers, Please, being fundamental in setting, but crucial in its core gameplay mechanics. Just to clarify, TheFreeDictionary.com offers a couple of handy, and in my opinion extremely effective definitions of the term, the most relevant to the subject at hand being this;

“3. An administrative system in which the need or inclination to follow rigid or complex procedures impedes effective action”

In my experience, however, it seems that the degree to which the game has been built up around this very concept has been largely ignored. Instead, articles seem to refer to Papers, Please as a game about mundanity, or about authority and the moral responsibility that comes with it, but that seems to me like viewing the casing of the game as its core. While those elements certainly are present in the game, and while they certainly play an important part in its design, they are not quite fundamental and certainly aren’t what separates Papers, Please from so many other games. Really, you don’t need to go much “deeper” than the Mass Effect series to find more or less difficult ethical choices, but Papers, Please stands alone with maybe a few much more obscure titles[3] in its portrayal of the downfall of an entire political and economic system. 

 

And while it’s a clear critique of the Soviet Union, it’s more nuanced than one might expect from, well, pretty much any game. Especially considering that there are next to no games whatsoever starring communists except for war games, and even then the portrayal of them are usually extremely antagonizing. For example I recall the horrendous atrocity that is the intro to the game Homefront, and even though that’s an extreme example it’s probably the most common one in games. One of the elements of Papers, Please that I really like is the fact that the player can actually complete the game while staying loyal to Arstotzka, something that isn’t normally the case in games taking place in clearly totalitarian societies. And even though the Inspector’s living and working conditions are clearly poor, during conversations with one of the security guards working at the checkpoint it’s implied that living conditions in the village the Inspector lived in previously are much worse and that problems in Kolechia are “ten times worse” than in Arstotzka. Additionally, an immigrant couple from the nearby country Antegria is overjoyed to finally have escaped from what the husband refers to as “Antegrian tyranny”. Seemingly some of the other countries have much worse living conditions than Arstotzka, and there’s no telling if life was even worse before Arstotzka itself became communist.

Jorji Costava serves as both a frustrating obstacle and a comic relief in the game.

Even more notable is the fact that contrary to what one might expect, at least what I did, a lot of the things that happen at the border checkpoint aren’t really all that extreme compared to what happens at border checkpoints in the west. The game tries quite a few times to encourage some level of comparison between the different neighboring countries rather than between East and West, but even then the comparison is totally legit. If you’ve watched any of those Australian or U.S. border security documentaries that seem to be aired all the time the methods used in Papers, Please really don’t seem worse. One of the climatic events during the demo was when the Inspector was ordered to search specifically Kolechians for weapons, something that would be in direct violation of human rights in our world, but even though that is the case I don’t think there’d be any doubt that an African or an Arab trying to get into Europe will be treated much differently than an American or a Canadian. The game even goes to show the outcry from the media the searches result in, leading to the “Search all Kolechians” instruction immediately being removed the following day. Along with this, being scanned for weapons or drugs, even in the way it’s portrayed in the game, doesn’t seem much worse than literally having your anus searched for drugs, something that real border security does have authorization to do, in however much of a civilized way that can be performed. The threat of terror attacks and smuggling is both in Arstotzka and in our world the reasoning behind such behavior, and it’s presented as real a threat in the case of Arstotzka as it is in most western countries today, if not much more so since the Arstotzkan authorities clearly lack the means to handle that threat, let alone just keeping people at the checkpoint safe.

The aftermath of the first terrorist attack on day 2.

Pointing back to the theme of bureaucracy, having to follow rigid procedures is exactly what the Inspector must do, all during the development from day 1 to day 2, day 2 to day 3, and so on. Almost all of the time the game doesn’t become more difficult neither because the player has to earn more money than what was needed to start out with, nor because his wage is lowered. The game becomes difficult because the terrorist attacks at the border in the wake of the Arztotzkan-Kolechian war forces Arstotzkan authorities to consequently institute new rules to counter it. And these rules are by no means introduced without reason, as the Inspector himself experiences multiple terror attacks in which people are clearly critically injured or killed.  But in turn, the constantly changing rules make it more and more difficult to process each applicant without making errors, which then, in turn, further eats away from the Inspector’s already barely sufficient paycheck. 

Effectively, the Inspector must work more and more in order to earn the same pay as he started out with initially. Design wise, it seems clear to me that the player is never meant to be able to work flawlessly, and the feelings evoked by finally failing to keep up with working conditions that are, quite frankly, downright unfair is in itself a big part of the game’s message. 

And that’s exactly why the game had to be designed to be damn near impossible to play without making mistakes, and equally impossible to play while being able to keep track of all the documents that must be inspected, and double-checked, and stamped, and handed back to the applicants, and so on. From the moment that I read the description of the game at Lucas Pope’s website it seemed obvious that this isn’t a game that can really thrive on being conventionally “balanced” in terms of difficulty, and most certainly not by being casual-minded or easy, because that would completely devalue it as a representation of oppressive life in a bureaucratic socialist state. 

Unsuccessfully trying to keep track of documents, passports and digits taking up more space than what’s room for on your desk, having to double-check statements of each applicant, frantically looking for the discrepancies that inevitably may or may not be there and holding your breath listening for the familiar sound of an M.O.A. citation ticking up onto your desk after processing every single immigrant are all examples of the stressfulness of being expected to do a tedious job that requires an absurd amount of effectiveness and inhuman attention to detail that only very few people are actually able to even do. While I guess that Papers, Please is more than possible to complete with only few errors if you play the game enough times to learn the limits of its structure and the sequence of the applicants that are scripted, or just play it on easy mode or something, I feel that it’s a game that kinda just wants you to jump in heads-first and try feeding your family in this crazy, paperwork-flooded world.

There is nothing to fear. Work hard.

Glory to Arstotzka.

*All pictures are screenshots taken directly from Papers, Please and edited by me.

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[1] Which is to say, not a lot. There is an interesting analysis by First Person Scholar, however, focusing on the game’s utilization of failure and victory criteria which you might want to read.

It can be found here: http://www.firstpersonscholar.com/the-art-of-papers-please/

[2] ”He” referring to the gender of the player character.

[3] Lucas Pope has made a few other titles based on the same universe.

Instead of finishing my current Article i just wrote This

Yeah, so I just felt that it was necessary to give a quick update on what’s going on at the moment. Although I’m experiencing a period of productivity in terms of writing that was unknown to me until I finally had somewhere to put it, it’s been a little while since my last (finished) article. Asides from discovering that the last subject I announced (in the comments on my Five Nights at Freddy’s article) demanded definitions and analysis that would require writing an academic book in order to properly examine and therefore being much beyond what I’m capable of, and this along with also ultimately being completely pointless, I’ve just started my university education. 

Learning about the Balkans is going to be pretty fun, expect much Serbia Strong.

Anyways, so this week along with the previous one has been a bit demanding both socially (meeting lots of people and getting very drunk) and also especially practically, since I need to move to København (Copenhagen) this coming weekend. I’m always writing whenever I have time for it, I just don’t know for sure in which days I’ll have time for it and in which I won’t. I just need to get settled, though, after that I should be able to organize my time a bit better. Also I need to not leave the charge cable for my laptop lying around somewhere stupid again.

Also, because the article I was working on turned out to be absolute shite, I’ve switched focus. Currently working on an article which is about Politely Requesting Documentation. It’s almost done, just missing a few clarifications and maybe a bit more refining, so hopefully I’ll make it good enough soon.

-Neo