2011 Year in Review: Game of the Year

This year… has been interesting… at least from a personal perspective. But I digress, let’s talk about the games that I have played.

Catching Up on Classics: Partem Deum <—(I likely butchered that)
Last year, I picked up a Playstation 3 and set to work playing and reviewing a multitude of modern classics. I’ve continued that trend, albeit on a much larger scale, extending it to the current generation of games. In this year alone, I have played both Mass Effects, Red Dead Redemption, Oblivion, Minecraft, LIMBO, Splinter Cell, half of the Call of Duties, Dragon Age: Origins, Super Meat Boy, Jamestown, Portal 2, Resistance 2, Left 4 Dead 2, Vanquish, Terraria, Torchlight, inFamous, fl0wer, Bioshock 2 and Heavenly Sword. That barely scratches the surface.

I borrowed Red Dead Redemption from my friend Devan, and I had limited time to spend with the game and barely scratched the surface. I completed the campaign up to the <SPOILER> death of John Marston, but never played the postgame missions with Jack </SPOILER>. Nonetheless, the 20 hours that I did enjoy with the game were memorable and satisfying. Going into the game doubting that a New Mexican desert could make for an interesting environment, I was shocked to discover that Red Dead Redemption had one of the richest and liveliest game worlds to be seen in a game. Its a game that I regret not owning myself and an easy recommendation to anyone.

I bought Super Meat Boy at a Steam Sale approximately one year ago, and I have not yet beat the second world. Nonetheless, the intense difficulty and low punishment-factor not only makes SMB one of the most challenging games of the year, but one of the most consistently playable. Your reflexes will be challenged, but not your patience. This is a fine casual game that anyone should have on their hard-drive for the time between classes.

I liked inFamous. While I felt that Empire City was a bland and uninteresting place, the game redeemed itself with excellent action, buttery-smooth controls and fun powers. I wasn’t that pleased with the jarring storytelling, but was entertained through the entire duration of this flawed classic.

I hated Modern Warfare 2, the scattershot plot, rage-inducing multiplayer, cliffhanger-story and agency-robbing set-pieces failed to carry over what made the first Modern Warfare one of the best shooters ever made. That said, I did have fun with Black Ops. The conspiracy-laden story was entertaining, clear and understandable. While still linear and filled with hand-holding,the game was not as egregiously unreplayable as the previous game. For all the bashing I put on this series for spawning an unsustainable trend of copycat shooters, Zombies makes this game a guilty pleasure of mine.

My Personal Game of the Year

I have not yet played Skyrim, Battlefield 3, Arkham City or Skyward Sword, so I cannot include them in this part of the post. But for the sake of thought, here are my three top games of 2011.

Minecraft was the second 5/5 I awarded on this blog, and for good reason. It holds shocking emotional impact and touches the player’s soul in an unexpected way. The lonely freedom the player experiences is liberating in its childlike gleefulness. It is a brilliant game filled with brilliant ideas played by brilliant people. Don’t let the allegations of an unintuitive tutorial dissuade you, running the game in windowed mode with the Wiki available in the background completely alleviates this problem. The possibilities, like in life, are endless.

I love the Mass Effect games, while a mixed bag from a moral perspective, the endearing characters, epic narrative and lovable world work together to make a remarkable impact on the player. Mass Effect 2’s release on the PS3 early this year brought this brilliant series and its varied denizens to a new audience. I grew attached to a certain Scientist Salarian named Mordin, his caffeinated manner of speaking, affable dialect and homicidal humor ingrained his character into my heart. The same can’t be said about a certain Miranda Lawson, I didn’t shed a tear when that pretentious and unsympathetic douchebag was left for dead in the center of the galaxy. 

Portal 2 is the best puzzle-game ever made. The apotheosis of a movement initiated by the first Portal and expanded in Braid and LIMBO, the game exemplifies the positive trial-and-error aesthetic. The game is unspeakably difficult, but the intelligent construction of the puzzles promote rigorous experimentation and never fails to be fresh. The game is reinforced by genius writing, hilarious characters and a unique cooperative mode requiring the use of two brains. Portal 2 is great, and that does not even touch on the deep and involving feminist subtext that got even my Ethics teacher interested.

And the Winner is…

And this is what makes any Game of the Year decision so difficult. Portal 2, Minecraft and Mass Effect 2 are all great fun, intellectually and emotionally gratifying and vastly different. One is a the apotheosis of intelligent play, another is a immaculately detailed fantasy world and another is, like life, what you make of it. All I enthusiastically recommend to all and consider to be immaculate examples of brilliant game design and if I could, I would give trophies to all the studios responsible for the games and knit sweaters for their respective producers, but I can’t. So, with a smidge of regret, I declare that:

Portal 2 is my personal game of the year. The choice was difficult, and while Minecraft kept me awake through the wee hours of the morning and I will never stop loving Garrus, only Portal 2 transcended its ludic constraints to become something indescribably moving and impactful. Portal 2 was, unlike the other games, perfectly paced and never repetitive. This was an important year in gaming, and while the medium does suffer from the repetitious annual releases of gratuitously and self-indulgently violent multiplayer shooters, Portal 2 shines among these games as a beacon of hope for the medium. Play it, and look to the wide-open future with optimism.

Thank you and Merry Christmas to all!

~Kevin

Mass Effect 2 Review

I have discussed my dear Mass Effect series before on this site from a philosophical/moral perspective and praised it for pushing morality beyond binary norms of good and evil, instead critiquing player’s actions from a deontological and teleological perspective. While that stood as more of a critique of the game as a literary work, here I will discuss the game from a more traditional, “review” standpoint.

Yet, before we begin, I must make a single, absolutist statement. Buy Mass Effect 2, the game is a wondrous journey into a richly imaginative universe populated with interesting characters and incredible worlds.

Gameplay

From a gameplay perspective, Mass Effect 2 is an amalgam of third-person shooter and role-playing game tropes, its main gameplay sections being divided into combat and conversation. Fighting is done in semi-real time, allowing the player to pause the action at any point during a battle to assign commands and cast “spells”, when played in real-time, Mass Effect 2 operates very similarly to a cover-based shooter, forcing the player to dance in and out of cover with visceral grace. Upgradable powers and experience points level out the game’s RPG elements, adding the strategic depth of character development to the game. Ultimately, Mass Effect 2’s combat engine creates a perfect marriage of RPG and shooter elements, and as a result, what we have is a fluid cover-based shooter with enough tactical depth to recall classics like Diablo and Knights of the Old Republic. While it is true that Mass Effect can be considered to be a “casual-ized” and “dumbed-down” RPG, this works to the game’s benefit, having fewer opportunities to level-up and fewer points to allocate makes upgrade decisions more meaningful.

Nonetheless, combat is marred only by questionable friendly AI. While there are squad commands for holding positions, advancing and retreating, these do not necessarily work, and when left to their own intuition, oftentimes fail to use cover. It is truly jarring to see your feeble, mage-type character vault over a barrier to engage a horde of Krogans using his weak pistol.

Where it comes to conversation, Mass Effect 2 radically simplifies discussion through its “Paraphrase System” and its dialogue wheel. Up to six dialogue choices can be chosen from a radial menu, each of them summarized in brief on it. While this does reduce the amount of reading one has to deal with, it does create some awkward moments when the paraphrased choices fail to embody the tone and nature of the inherent dialogue choice. And as a result, Mass Effect 2’s conversations are imperfect.

Where the game’s conversations do excel at, though, is the narrative impact that each interaction has. Relationships between characters can be built or destroyed, and the choices that the player will make will have far reaching impact far beyond the scope of the immediate games. As a result, the Mass Effect trilogy feels less like a series of self-contained games, but rather a single continuous story meant to be played from start to finish. Indeed, the narrative power afforded to the player by the game justifies the name, the player has a Massive Effect.

That said, Mass Effect 2 suffers from a few technical faults. One such problem comes in the form of load times, which, while not monumental, are still annoying in environments that require many map-transfers or reloads. This is especially problematic in the multi-leveled Normandy. Crew member reside on each of the ships different floors, and suffering a 45 second load time to converse with each floor of characters remained a severe turn-off to the game’s best aspect.

Furthermore, a few technical problems, such as slow-loading textures and glitchy collision detection on vehicular levels are inherited from the game’s predecessor. This however is rare and occurs only during a few select DLC chapters.

Story

Mass Effect 2’s story ties directly into the events of the first game, thus, it comes as highly recommended to experience the tale of the first game before plunging into Mass Effect 2. (The PC version is $20 on Steam and has relatively tame system requirements for an action-RPG, I was able to run it on a 2.0 GHz Pentium Laptop with an integrated graphics card.) That said, Playstation 3 players can download a beautifully drawn interactive comic book summarizing the events of the first game. What tames this prospect is the fact that the comic does little to emphasize the moral weight and impact of the game’s choices and characters, and thus, while the player might understand the first game’s story, little in way of emotional connection is established.

That said, Mass Effect 2 takes place approximately two years after the events of the first game. Protagonist Jane Shepard is killed by a passing alien ship before her charred body is captured by Human-Supremacist organization Cerberus. Aliens called Collectors from deep space are abducting human colonies and Shepard, now a galactic hero from her exploits against the Reapers of the first game, must investigate the problem and assemble a team to deal with it. What follows is an epic and very personal saga involving a multitude of realistically written characters. Surprising plot twists keep the story interesting with every mission, and the battle to attain each crewmember’s loyalty is both moving and entertaining. A wonderfully realized universe is filled with imagined histories and lore. One of the best aspects of Mass Effect is its “Codex”, an encyclopedia of lore so well written that the game’s optimistic sci-fi universe seems to be a viable place to spend one’s imagined life.

Calling the character arcs “interesting and realistic” does little to describe the depth and care put into their creation. Characters are exceptionally well written and feature incredible voice acting. Through idle conversation and active “loyalty missions”, the player must develop a relationship with each of them, and by the game’s conclusion, the player will feel like he has made a lifelong friend of these virtual characters. Particularly memorable is the saga of Garrus Valkarian, a Turian operating his own version of justice on the crime-ridden planet of Omega, his long-ingrained memories of revenge and injustice characterize him as one of the game’s most interesting characters. Mordin Solus, a hyperactive Salarian doctor, who initially comes off as a source of comic relief, contributes strongly to the game’s extensive lore by his regrettable involvement in the Genophage, a synthetic disease that severely damaged the galaxy’s population of Krogan. While the game may be dark in tone, intense drama and self-referential humor are done with such great care that exploration is fun and rewarding.

One of two problems that can be said of Mass Effect’s narrative is that the paraphrase system occasionally creates moments where the player does not feel in control of the conversation. This is especially apparent during conversations with potential romantic partners, where Shepard will invariably open a conversation with a flirty line whether or not the player wants to participate in a romantic subquest.

The second problem comes in terms of the game’s morality system. While eschewing a single, sliding-morality meter in favor of two meters for respective “paragon” and “renegade” choices. The two are meant to symbolize the player’s tendency to adhere to either deontological and teleological ethics in given situations, which, in theory, is a great idea that will eliminate binary morality. What makes this problematic is that situational choices are still binary in nature. Players who adhere to the deontological path are portrayed as noble, kind and heroic, whereas players on the teleological path see their Shepard’s behave selfishly and cruelly, forming Sith-like facial scars. This reduces what was intended to be a multifaceted and realistic version of morality into a binary one.

Graphics and Audio

From a graphical perspective, Mass Effect 2 is an artistic and technical triumph. Alien races are convincingly portrayed and go far beyond the “Muppets in Space” the original Star Wars was decried for. Even more striking is the diverse variety of worlds that the player will traverse through. The Asari colony of Illium evokes Coruscant’s skyscrapers with saturated blue and purple to create a very cosmopolitan-feeling planet. Similarly, the red and brown streets of slummy Omega work wonderfully to showcase the decrepit imagined history of crime-filled ghettoes and gangs. The post-apocalyptic wasteland of Tuchanka is impressive in the scope of destruction it has suffered, and the memories of a previous civilization are evident in its Varren-infested surroundings. Each planet is artistically unique and impressive, making for an imaginative diversity of styles unheard of in most games.

Technically, Mass Effect 2 is far improved over the first game. Facial animation is incredibly detailed and bridges the uncanny valley with grace. Lighting, particles and textures realize the artists’ vision with skill and finesse, and Mass Effect 2 is one of the prettiest games on consoles… at least when its not hit by one of its exceedingly rare graphical glitches.

From an auditory perspective, Mass Effect 2’s cast of skilled voice actors is a treat for the ears. An inspired performance by Jennifer Hale as Jane Shepard is a highlight, her tonally intense yet open style connects the player to her actions wonderfully. Seth Green’s “Joker” and Martin Sheen’s Illusive Man also give wonderful performances, conveying respectively the character’s sarcasm and mystery with finesse. Sound effects and music set the emotional tone well for combat and conversation, adding to the intensity of the game’s battles.

Conclusion

Mass Effect 2 is one of those games that will take over your mind and inhabit your thoughts and daydreams. With a cast of lovable characters, an inspired universe and visceral-yet-strategic combat, Mass Effect 2 surpasses its predecessor with aplomb and solidifies its place with RPG-greats like Chrono Trigger and KOTOR. Play this game. 4.75/5

Morality in Video Games: An Analysis of Absolutism, Deontological Ethics and Moral Relativism

Since their inception, narrative-focused role-playing games (RPGs) have concerned themselves primarily with player interactivity with the game-world and the freedom to interact with virtual worlds and their inhabitants in any number of ways. Inherent to this aesthetic of immersion is player morality and his/her relationship to the artificial inhabitants of these virtual worlds. In the past decade, a scintillating crop of games has arisen from studios such as BioWare and Obsidian; these games turn morality into a central mechanic through which fun is derived. By presenting an ethically ambivalent game-world wherein player choice dictates the very fate of these virtual worlds, questions of the reward-punishment nature of these games, as well as the games’ strongly deontological inclination arise. Morality in video-games is thus a rather problematic aesthetic with its own share of contradictions in player-agency, subjectivity and moral absolutism and relativism.

An Introduction
BioWare's Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic (KOTOR), while not the first game to have had an integrated morality system, has one of the most historically significant. The game immersed its players in a rich sci-fi universe set 4000 years before the events painfully depicted in The Phantom Menace. Its narrative revolved around the adventures of an amnesiac republic soldier trying to prevent a great evil from unleashing an ancient superweapon. The game carried with it a great sense of player-freedom, allowing the player to approach story-situations in any number of ways. When on a mission to rescue hostages from a Sand People enclave, one is given the choice of killing the Sand People and saving the hostages or trading moisture vaporators for the hostages. While this concept of player-agency is admirable, the stark black-and-whiteness of the game's philosophical position seems rather shallow and un-nuanced.

Perhaps what made KOTOR such a great game was its consistent ability to give the player the illusion that his/her moral choices had major consequences and ramifications. The strong writing gave the player an illusion of importance, and despite the superficiality of the player’s actions in the real world, the decisions that the player had to make had real weight and impact on the gameworld and how NPCs (non-player characters) react.

Nonetheless, how NPCs react to the player and the direction of the ludonarrative (the part of the game story that the player can control) and subquests seemed to be the only impact that the player had on the game. Ultimately, KOTOR still follows a fixed linear narrative with multiple endings. No matter how good or evil a player is, the game will always reveal its major twist on the Leviathan, and it will always conclude with an epic showdown on the summit of an ancient space-station. While NPC perception and ludonarrative nuances could be impacted by the player, KOTOR lacked the range of narrative and moral dynamism expected from the best RPGs. As a result, KOTOR’s vision of moral freedom remained rather constraining in comparison to other games.

Deontology, Moral Absolutism and Games
Perhaps the most appalling ramification to come out of integrated morality systems in role-playing games is the starkly deontological approach to ethics that these games take. (NOTE: I by no means mean intend to portray deontology as a black-and-white affair in this post, ethical approaches in reality represent a more nuanced balance between deontology and teleology, these games however, seem to take a stance of moral absolutism) In the vast majority of morality-centric games, a player’s ethical choices take the place of a sliding “morality meter.” Player actions add or subtract points from the “morality meter” and depending on where the player stands on this “morality meter”, specific dialogue options and narrative paths might open or close. Fallout 3 puts this mechanic in the form of “Karma Points” and Mass Effect in its “Paragon/Renegade” system.

The sliding “morality meter” mechanic represents an overly deontological approach to ethics that ultimately renders choices as black and white, universal laws being given without understanding or context(albeit, most such games draw such universal law from the real world). By rewarding or removing morality points from the meter, the game developer essentially decides what is moral and what is immoral. Thus, being an ethical person in these virtual worlds requires absolute conformity to the universal laws set forward by the game developers. Dissent from the moral norms established by developers results in punishment by morality point loss. While in other genres this may be acceptable as it expresses the developer’s worldview on ethics, in a genre as grounded in the mechanics of self-expression, exploration and moral freedom as the RPG, this sense of deontological moral absolutism is heavily problematic.


Spoilers ahead. At the climax of Fallout 3, President Eden gives the player a vial of an anti-mutagen agent to insert into Project Purity. The anti-mutagen agent will eliminate all Super Mutants and Ghouls from the Capital Wasteland, thereby restoring the area into a pre-war state. The game considers this to be an immoral decision and deducts Karma from the players that take this course of action. The moral decision in this case would be to sacrifice oneself in order to activate Project Purity without the anti-mutagen agent, giving purified water to mutants and non-mutants alike. In this context, Bethesda, developer of Fallout 3, advocates a Peter Singer-esque form of utilitarian altruism, that philosophical worldview being the universal law that the game advocates and judges its players actions on. Approaching Fallout 3’s situations from any other kind of ethical worldview, say, Randian Objectivism, could result in the player losing Karma for an action that they believe to be moral. Fallout 3, a game which in many ways, offers unprecedented freedom to the player, ultimately judges the citizens of its virtual world by its own categorical imperative. While the player might be free to “be the bad guy,” the philosophical motives of the player remain rigidly entrenched in the beliefs of the developer.

Moral Relativism Much?
A great ideological conflict between gamers and game-developers arises over the definition of morality. Even then, a totally teleological approach to ethics would defeat the purpose of morality being a central mechanic in role-playing games, relegating gameplay to no more than moral relativism. How then, can a logical balance be made between ethically challenging gameplay without demanding the player abide by unfamiliar ethical systems?

Bioware answered this question by offering a wider range of possible quest-arcs and endings in Knights of the Old Republic and Mass Effect, each of the possible paths of action offering its own pros and cons and none of them offering a specifically clear-cut ultimate good or bad decision. One KOTOR side-quest revolves retrieving a runaway droid for a mentally unstable owner. Upon finding the droid, it argues that his escape was for the good of its owner, who had grown anti-social and insane upon growing overly dependent on its companionship. At this point, multiple Light-Side solutions can be reached, allowing for the player to express their view of the situation through their own moral perspective. One can kill and loot the droid for Dark-Side points, release the droid and hope the owner can become socially independent or capture and return the droid to its owner. While the outcomes remained black and white and the conditions players are judged by strictly deontological, the player is given a degree of flexibility to explore the nuances of moral dilemmas.


Other recent games have aggressively distanced themselves from moral absolutism. Another BioWare game, Dragon Age: Origins, addressed the problem by making its moral choices “aggressively grey.” Atari’s The Witcher (both games I have not yet had the opportunity to play) was marketed on “shattering the line between good and evil in a world where moral ambiguity reigns.” While deontological/absolutist games might squelch out dissenting worldviews with their view of “universal principles,” games that experiment with a teleological ethic remain just as problematic.

According to Michael Campos, my Junior philosophy teacher, such games “tend to take extreme positions of deontology and teleology.” Extreme deontology has the effect of predetermining what is moral, thereby categorizing contrary actions as immoral.  According to Mr. Campos, “our society is to an extent afraid of universal moral principles because it assumes static ethical standards, not taking context into consideration. Thus, attempted advancements remain problematic, The Witcher's catchphrase of moral ambiguity being synonymous to moral relativism.”

Escaping Moral Constraints

Ever since playing Pokemon, the role-playing genre has always been my favorite type of game. Fallout 3, in particular, stands out as one of the most immersive and engaging experiences I have ever had in a game. However, the root mechanic in the role-playing game is “role-playing,” that is treating the game world as our own and acting as a citizen of these virtual worlds. In order for these games to matter on a philosophical basis and be more narratively engaging, game developers need to re-evaluate the moral systems implicit in their games and the philosophical, not just moral, freedom that they offer.