Critiques
"So, way down here, in the crushing darkness, you have a shambling zombie that thinks it's a man from Toronto and a hand tool with the personality of a dead scientist, and both of them decide to focus on hope, and not despair. I mean, yeah, world ended, and yeah, they're robots, but there is no reason they can't roll up their sleeves and do something productive. This was the moment that won me over on the game completely: There is nothing more profoundly human than looking at an impossible situation and figuring that, oh well, you might as well give it a shot, anyway, right? To have these, I don't know what you'd even call them, chimera people, pieces of people, pieces of things, hatching a hopeful scheme together is about the most preposterous thing possible, given the reality of their situation, but part of the point of the game is that a lot of being human is ignoring the uncomfortable truths about ourselves. I mean, how often do you actively consider that you've got 30 feet of coiling intestine you're slowly pushing your poop through, right now?"
[On Call of Juarez: The Cartel:] "Techland, being Polish, might be deliberately recreating a parallel universe, where all the shit that tumbles out of Sean Hannity's
mouth is true, precisely because they see those stories the way they see our older stories about the American West — as a mythology that was never true, but is culturally allegorical. I used to have more faith that this country was moving away from jingoistic nationalism, but the opposite has been true. It's possible that, with a little distance and remove, this was more obvious to international observers of American television and pop-culture. The Cartel says some of the most unflattering things I can think of regarding the American character, but how many of those things are fully untrue, once you get past the insult of having it said so plainly?
It is certainly tasteless to include mass shootings, extrajudicial violence, and police brutality towards women and minorities with such casual frivolous representations of the acts, but I can't say that I don't recognize these things as specifically American problems and specifically American attitudes. [...] Call of Juarez: The Cartel is bigoted, spiteful, morally bankrupt, and intensely hypocritical. My deepest discomfort with it is not that I find it excessive in its representation of American attitudes — it's that I find it more familiar now than I ever would have been in 2011."
[On Call of Juarez: Gunslinger:] "It took three games trying to tell a Western like Hollywood might, before Techland landed on how to tell a Western like Hollywood can't, and I wonder if they would have gotten there at all if The Cartel hadn't been so justifiably hated. Business and branding usually make it so that subsequent games in a franchise are locked into a process of escalation, taking what came before and making it bigger, better, more. Gunslinger is smaller, weirder, less. Because of this it is more memorable and delightful than it would have or could have been if it had aimed to escalate from Bound in Blood and The Cartel."
mouth is true, precisely because they see those stories the way they see our older stories about the American West — as a mythology that was never true, but is culturally allegorical. I used to have more faith that this country was moving away from jingoistic nationalism, but the opposite has been true. It's possible that, with a little distance and remove, this was more obvious to international observers of American television and pop-culture. The Cartel says some of the most unflattering things I can think of regarding the American character, but how many of those things are fully untrue, once you get past the insult of having it said so plainly?It is certainly tasteless to include mass shootings, extrajudicial violence, and police brutality towards women and minorities with such casual frivolous representations of the acts, but I can't say that I don't recognize these things as specifically American problems and specifically American attitudes. [...] Call of Juarez: The Cartel is bigoted, spiteful, morally bankrupt, and intensely hypocritical. My deepest discomfort with it is not that I find it excessive in its representation of American attitudes — it's that I find it more familiar now than I ever would have been in 2011."
[On Call of Juarez: Gunslinger:] "It took three games trying to tell a Western like Hollywood might, before Techland landed on how to tell a Western like Hollywood can't, and I wonder if they would have gotten there at all if The Cartel hadn't been so justifiably hated. Business and branding usually make it so that subsequent games in a franchise are locked into a process of escalation, taking what came before and making it bigger, better, more. Gunslinger is smaller, weirder, less. Because of this it is more memorable and delightful than it would have or could have been if it had aimed to escalate from Bound in Blood and The Cartel."
"Far Cry 5 posits an America where a point of complete societal fracture is a novel thing, and that is just not the case. What's remarkable is that the country has survived this sort of miniature apocalypses in the past. What's fascinating is how it survived those times. Although Far Cry 5 goes to great lengths not to fundamentally criticize the country, the greatest slight it does the US is this blind eye to the elasticity of the American civilization... It is tempting to think that these heavy, heavy fractures [in 2018] mean the end of all things, but ultimately, it just means the end of what we've grown comfortable being around. There is an afterword coming — we just can't see it yet, and not knowing the shape of it is the root of a pervasive and constant anxiety."
"It's a matter of historical record that Hitler was tweaking out of his mind in the final year of the war. You think victory is gonna make a guy like that better? Again, I look back at Wolfenstein: The New Order and Death's Head comes across as a Nazi the way the Nazis on some level did want to be seen - misunderstood geniuses whose inhumanity is supposedly some sort of strength, not a failing. This, while being on the face of it a lot ruder than anything in the New Order, hews closer to the ideological truth of the situation, that the fascist worldview is so narrow and so constricted that they wouldn't know what to do with the world if they did rule it. There would be parades, there would be celebrations, then there would be boredom, then there would be pain, and then eventually there would be collapse."
"Weird and broken. 10/10."
"There was a bit of a susurrus on Twitter a while back when ultra-popular Twitch personality Tyler Blevins wrote, quote, "The phrase 'it's just a game' is such a weak mindset. You're okay with what happened; losing, imperfection of a craft. When you stop getting angry after losing, you have lost twice. There's always something to learn and always room for improvement. Never settle." End quote. While a lot of people called him out for being a horse's ass in this statement, I found it, in addition, to be kind of an interesting window into the way some other people see Win and Loss states. Speaking personally, I don't get angry at all, unless I have to do something over five times in a row, or else repeat greater than ten minutes of content in a go; if it goes over those thresholds I don't really get pissed, I just feel kind of empty and disconnected, because I feel like I've been wasting my time. Because, the thing is it is just a game: the skills required to master a game are not broadly transferrable, even if it feels to folks like Blevins to be reflective of your interior character, or that committing to getting better at the game represents a desire to better yourself. This is illusory — time spent perfecting your mastery of the game is time spent perfecting your mastery of that game alone. It is not time spent on a million other choices that could occupy your finite minutes on this Earth."
"It's easy sometimes to forget that the most powerful media of today did not start from a position of strength, they started from a position of passion, of enthusiasm, and not always the most skilled or complex passion. They began with the desire to have fun, and to make sure the audience was sharing in every moment of that fun. Even all these years later, creative fun is what animates these games; from the great moments to even the most frustrating ones. Its easy to pick them apart and talk about what's dated or cheap, I find it more meaningful to focus on what makes them so endearingly, enduringly wonderful anyway. So, if you're a Star Wars fun, and your first impulse is to get angry and start arguing about who gets to be a real fan and who's fake and what's objectively good or objectively bad, as if that had ever mattered to Star Wars at all, I want you to picture something. I want you to picture Kyle Katarn; old, happy, unbothered by any of that noise, kneeling in the dirt with the setting sun behind him, in a vineyard, far far away."
We all want to cling on, to linger, to be as we are forever. This is bad for us. Gradually, we all slip into the chill night that encompasses all. To meet it with open eyes and open arms is a frightening proposition, but it's a proposition through which a person might reckon with their existential position as a fragile, transitory thing more honestly.
"Universal appeal is poison masquerading as medicine. Horror is not meant to be universal. It's meant to be personal, private, animal. It should creep along the darkened hallways of your thoughts like a ghost, tickling the ancient parts of your brain that still have some distant concern that something, somewhere, will try to eat you. Resident Evil knows this. Time and time again the franchise has produced works of tremendous creative value; games that are historically important, games that are mechanical trailblazers, games that are visceral and effective horror. It's only Capcom's corporate ego that has the strength to topple those pillars, and smear its own good name. Or perhaps...the franchise's ego is deserved, perhaps it doesn't matter if the franchise shoots itself in the head, because it will simply raise from the grave again, hungrier, stranger. Will Rosemary go on to join Sherry, and Jake? Or will her path take her somewhere new? Somewhere more daring?"
Brotherhood of Steel [...] is the first pivot that the franchise makes towards having fully voiced and lip synced characters for all the NPCs, no matter how small the role. Which takes time, and takes money, and limits the amount of that kind of thing you can actually have in the game. Creatively a development team must pick and choose which ideas and characters are worth making the cut. They need to figure out how to tell the best story and create the most vibrant world with the most limited amount of resources and somehow, in spite of this, Mr Pussy made the cut. The Mr Pussy quest was passed through several stages of design! Someone had to write the Mr Pussy dialogue, a voice actress had to record the Mr Pussy lines, Ruby's 3D model had to be rigged and animated to convey the Mr Pussy quest to the player. Bad dialogue and bad ideas in a movie are actually more understandable because there are so many fewer steps and so much less expense to realizing a bad idea in a movie than in game development. Bad dialogue in books is most understandable of all, since all it takes is one person sitting alone having a brain fart. In games these things have so many layers of production to trickle down through before being fully realized! At some point, around some large office table, someone said something close to "I'm happy with how damage animations are coming but I haven't gotten any updates on Mr Pussy at all in a few days and I'm wondering where we're at with implementation!"
[The fact I can't "master" shooters] makes me, in the eyes of many viewers, completely unqualified to discuss games at all as a medium, and if there was any justice in the world I wouldn't even be allowed to talk about them. But there is no justice, and there is no Santa Claus, so I critique as I please. I'm going to tackle the Quake series from a narrative perspective, and there's nothing you fuckers can do to stop me.
Travelogues
"Desert Bus misses a fundamental truth of video games: the fantasy that counts isn't the fantasy that transcends Tucson — it's the part of the fantasy that says, 'You can do it how you like, and you won't lose your house and your job and your stuff.' That's what matters most of the experience. When done at the rhythms and speed of video game adventure, the lonely desert byways of the real world are no less fantastical and strange than anything portrayed through the expressionist math of those imaginary places.
...
"You ask a person, 'Which is more realistic: Skyrim or Desert Bus?' I think most people are probably gonna say Desert Bus, but you'd be a fool for it. Real life is never dragons and gold, but neither is it ever simply the blank route for Tucson to Vegas. All these fantasy worlds I've lived in my whole life, they're dreams made from the dust that coats my glasses and my dashboard and my windows. We already live in a fantastical place, we live on a strange world in a wide-open universe.
...
"Desert Bus had the wrong of it. The emptiness of the road from Tucson to Vegas was never the problem with reality. The problem with reality is that we so rarely get a chance to go out and see it for ourselves."
...
"You ask a person, 'Which is more realistic: Skyrim or Desert Bus?' I think most people are probably gonna say Desert Bus, but you'd be a fool for it. Real life is never dragons and gold, but neither is it ever simply the blank route for Tucson to Vegas. All these fantasy worlds I've lived in my whole life, they're dreams made from the dust that coats my glasses and my dashboard and my windows. We already live in a fantastical place, we live on a strange world in a wide-open universe.
...
"Desert Bus had the wrong of it. The emptiness of the road from Tucson to Vegas was never the problem with reality. The problem with reality is that we so rarely get a chance to go out and see it for ourselves."
"I'm from California, originally, and as a culture, we generally like to pretend we don't have any such a thing as history — and in some ways, that is true. California has erupted as far as pace of settlement and extent of development goes. When someone puts up a building, that's the first thing that's ever been erected there in a lot of cases, and even if it's not strictly true, the memory of what was there before is always short. One thing the new world of America offered that I think was appealing to European immigrants especially was an escape from having to live on the blood-soaked battlefields of years past. Of course that promise was immediately betrayed by the wave of violence and genocide that the Europeans inflicted on the indigenous cultures, but that sentiment never went away. It stayed persistent in the developing national spirit. American culture is somewhat defined by its refusal to look backwards, by its feeling that each day is a new day and should be judged as such. Europeans have lived on the bones of their ancestors for many thousands of years and many dozens of generations: it's in the art and the culture, from memento mori to the Gothic novel.
To me as a Californian, I find the juxtaposition of Packer's massacre site with the two cheerful houses next to it kind of silly and uncomfortable, but that's a naive way to see it. The frontier spirit says the wild land is yours to tame, that history is written through action in the present, but America is getting older, and it's getting harder to ignore that we've built our suburbs over old bones and dried blood, and that these old misdeeds are always buried and just under the foundation. If you live in any city of the old world from Berlin to Istanbul, you can't escape from that understanding of history, but out here, the vastness of the space tends to swallow the memory of past violence. There are thousands of years of native history we can't even include in the big picture because we killed everyone who could articulate those stories. That's across the entire expanse of the US. Not one state is without some past history of cruelty and exploitation in the name of the divine right of Manifest Destiny. Even between those Europeans who were so insistent that starting fresh was important.
The east coast of the US has its share of Walmart's and apartment complexes built over the killing fields of the Civil War, or the Revolutionary War, or the War of 1812, or some unnamed skirmish between angry drunks of the distant past. It sometimes feels as a 21st century American and a millennial that being American is like settling down in a haunted house: the paint is fresh, the view is lovely, the realtor assures you that everything is fine. But there are deep stains and secrets and noises in the night every time you drift off into the perception that you're safe and comfortable. Every city is built on bones, but why is it such a surprise to a California boy like me just how far up the bone pile I'm actually sitting?"
To me as a Californian, I find the juxtaposition of Packer's
massacre site with the two cheerful houses next to it kind of silly and uncomfortable, but that's a naive way to see it. The frontier spirit says the wild land is yours to tame, that history is written through action in the present, but America is getting older, and it's getting harder to ignore that we've built our suburbs over old bones and dried blood, and that these old misdeeds are always buried and just under the foundation. If you live in any city of the old world from Berlin to Istanbul, you can't escape from that understanding of history, but out here, the vastness of the space tends to swallow the memory of past violence. There are thousands of years of native history we can't even include in the big picture because we killed everyone who could articulate those stories. That's across the entire expanse of the US. Not one state is without some past history of cruelty and exploitation in the name of the divine right of Manifest Destiny. Even between those Europeans who were so insistent that starting fresh was important.The east coast of the US has its share of Walmart's and apartment complexes built over the killing fields of the Civil War, or the Revolutionary War, or the War of 1812, or some unnamed skirmish between angry drunks of the distant past. It sometimes feels as a 21st century American and a millennial that being American is like settling down in a haunted house: the paint is fresh, the view is lovely, the realtor assures you that everything is fine. But there are deep stains and secrets and noises in the night every time you drift off into the perception that you're safe and comfortable. Every city is built on bones, but why is it such a surprise to a California boy like me just how far up the bone pile I'm actually sitting?"
" Fictionally speaking, humans love a nuclear apocalypse because it's fast, dramatic, and total. It's easier to get people to agree to take action against it because they just can't keep keeping on if it happens. Environmental apocalypse is harder to grapple with because it happens slower than we perceive and it's frankly pretty easy for most people to just keep driving into work and back in the face of it. If the salt marshes disappear - when the salt marshes disappear - it won't be humans who face the consequence. It'll just be a slice of voiceless biodiversity that took millions of years to create and just centuries to kill. The asphalt of the road and the bricks of the old chapel will persist just fine. Life after an environmental apocalypse can be life as usual, just diminished from what life used to be in such a small way is to be broadly imperceptible to a majority of people that makes it easy for people to say 'who cares?' Who will speak for the Blackwater Wildlife Refuge, among all the other problems we create for ourselves as humans?
The disappearance of flora and fauna are hardly the biggest outrages perpetrated in the swamps after all. Here in the Blackwater was where one of the great American heroes of the Civil War was born and shaped into who she became. Born Araminta "Minty" Ross, Harriet Tubman was held as a child slave right here on this exact farm, not five minutes from the Blackwater Wildlife Refuge. Her owners were a family called Brodus who beat her repeatedly even though she was just a child. It kind of surprises me that this is still a farm at all. How can you keep tilling the soil when it's blood that once watered the crops? Isn't it awfully uncomfortable to have people come up to the interpretive plaques and consider the vicious legacy of slavery and then just kind of wave to them from your tractor? Or maybe that's just the South, so full of old wounds and half-forgotten crimes that a person just gets numb to it."
The disappearance of flora and fauna are hardly the biggest outrages perpetrated in the swamps after all. Here in the Blackwater was where one of the great American heroes of the Civil War was born and shaped into who she became. Born Araminta "Minty" Ross, Harriet Tubman was held as a child slave right here on this exact farm, not five minutes from the Blackwater Wildlife Refuge. Her owners were a family called Brodus who beat her repeatedly even though she was just a child. It kind of surprises me that this is still a farm at all. How can you keep tilling the soil when it's blood that once watered the crops? Isn't it awfully uncomfortable to have people come up to the interpretive plaques and consider the vicious legacy of slavery and then just kind of wave to them from your tractor? Or maybe that's just the South, so full of old wounds and half-forgotten crimes that a person just gets numb to it."
