Monthly Archives: June 2012

THE ZEN OF VIDEO GAMES – The Cross

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[Warning: Minor spoilers for all three Max Payne games, one big Max Payne 3 spoiler, and one MAJOR Max Payne 2 spoiler ahead!]

If it hasn’t been made abundantly obvious to anyone who reads these things, I have a number of character flaws. Foremost among these being the proclivity for dropping my pants in social situations. I’ve been told, time and again, that this needs to be addressed. My response is always the same – if I didn’t drop my pants, who would ever see my penis besides me? I have a responsibility to share the beauty that is my penis with the world.

But for now, let’s put my genitalia aside, and talk about something a little more personal. As you know, this blog is all about self-exploration through the metaphor video games provide, as well as fomenting intelligent discussion, so once again, let’s get serious.

If you’ve read the previous ZOVG (love that acronym), you’ll have noticed that I had a problem with guilt – over being attracted to female nudity in a video game. Seems rather silly when I put it that way. It was a realistic-looking female, and she wasn’t a furry or anything, so if I hadn’t been attracted, I’d have to ask myself some questions about my sexual orientation.

My problem with it lay in how I instantly thought of her as a sex object and not a person. But again, she was a stripper in a strip club. This is what strippers do, they turn themselves into sex objects in order to coax more money out of stupid, lonely men. Sorry, but it’s the truth. Having said that, Mademoiselle’s strip club in Buffalo? Best BBQ wings I’ve ever had. Just sayin’.

The point I’m trying, rather poorly, to make, is that I have a tendency to give myself a hard time. I hold myself to a higher standard than I hold anyone else, and I hold myself to a higher standard than anyone else does. I’m the first person to blame myself when I screw up, and I’m the last person to forgive myself. It comes, I think, from growing up Catholic. We didn’t invent guilt, the Jews did, but we’ve pretty much gotten it down now. I’m not really Catholic anymore (I’m an agnostic, if you must know, but religion is a topic for another time), but some things obviously stuck.

Perhaps that’s why I identify with Max Payne so much. In the beginning of Max Payne 3, Max is heavily addicted to alcohol and painkillers. He’s obviously extremely depressed, but through the occasional line of narration, and look on his face, one can tell he blames himself for the deaths of his wife and daughter, Mona Sax, and even Detective Winterson.

A key scene occurs if you manage to find Winterson’s grave in the grave yard. In the previous game [spoilers!] Max found himself forced to choose between Mona and Winterson. With the little information he had, Max chose Mona, and shot Winterson dead. Later on, Max learns that Winterson was collaborating with that game’s main villain, but interestingly, when Max finds Winterson’s grave in Max Payne 3, Max laments that he’d made the wrong choice.

One of the most powerful scenes in Max Payne 2 comes at the beginning of the game, before you realize who he’s talking about. Max finds a corpse in the hospital morgue and confesses through narration, “I was a murderer.”

Even as far back as Max Payne 1, there’s hints that Max blames himself for the death of his wife and child. In a dream sequence, Max finds himself in the bloody bedroom where his wife died, and screams at himself “MURDERER! YOU KILLED HER!”, before charging at himself, guns blazing, and Max is forced to kill his other self. It’s all very mind-bending, but one thing is not in doubt: Max, like me, is overly hard on himself.

Granted, I’ve never had a wife and baby girl get murdered, and I’ve never been through any of the other horrific things Max has survived. In fact, in Max’s case, it’s probably more survivor’s guilt than any real character defect. I mean, he’s a moody bastard, there’s no getting around that, but there’s no real evidence that Max treating himself badly is something he did BEFORE people started dying.

Still, I can’t help but sympathize. I’ve hurt friends before. I’m going to do it again. I will cause them embarrassment, humiliation, emotional, and even possibly physical pain. And when I do, it will be soul-crushing to me, because I never intend for that to happen. My friends, my family, they’re the most important things in my life. With the sole exception of my penis.

And I know, even now, that I don’t really need to be so hard on myself. The last ZOVG, when I talked about pushing the girl into her chair? She didn’t even remember it had happened until I mentioned it. Numerous other transgressions against my loved ones? Forgotten within weeks, days, or even hours of it happening, and still, I hold myself accountable. Most people exude an acceptable amount of guilt until the incident has been forgotten, swept under the rug, as it were, and then go on. As for me, some things still haunt me today.

Again, just about everyone I know would forgive me, and for most of the big things I’ve fouled up, I have forgiven myself. But I still feel I HAVE to remember what I did, so I won’t do it again. And I fear sometimes that if I forgive, I will also forget.

Midway through Max Payne 3, the primary person Max was hired to protect gets killed. Max is about to have another night of binge drinking and self-hatred, but instead, he has a revelation. Max quits drinking that very night, and resolves to find the kidnapped girl, vowing that if he has to die to save her, he’ll die sober.

I think THAT’S the important thing, in the end. If you’re so mired in self-recrimination and doubt that you stop trying, not to go all Yoda on everybody, but THAT is why you fail. Even if I do the wrong thing, I’m going to make it up to them, and go on. Because giving up is even worse than whatever screw-up I feel bad about.

Keep on fighting, Max. I forgive you. Just don’t give up.

THE ZEN OF VIDEO GAMES – Getting A Brazilian

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[EDIT] This originally was posted with a story that, while obscured to a degree, wasn’t obscured enough, as it was possible to infer who the participants were. Those I have spoken to were kind enough to tell me to keep the article up and just rewrite the ending, but I wanted to trash the entire thing thanks to my profoundly retarded lapse in judgment of putting it up in the first place. My friend talked me into keeping it, so the ending has been changed, and this time no one could possibly know who I’m talking about – but be forewarned, it’s a lot more personal now. I feel the whole article is better this way, but I know I’m still probably being incredibly stupid. And that is a victory in my book. After all, who’s smarter? The fool who knows he’s a fool, or the fool who thinks he’s smart? [/EDIT]

I haven’t been getting anywhere trying to write the newest Save File episode. I’ve had to keep putting it off and putting it off, and worse yet, it’s my own fault. I decided to do this one in a special way, which requires me to rethink the way I write – which is turning out to be more difficult than I expected. So, instead, I thought I’d write another Zen article – and wouldn’t you know it, this one is almost as difficult to write.

It goes back about a week. I was having no luck writing the script for the video, and I’d learned long ago that trying to force it will just make things worse, so I decided to play some Max Payne 3 instead. Max Payne 3, like its predecessors, is a remarkably well-written game for the most part, and Max spends the first half of the game in the wealthy areas of Sao Paulo, Brazil. Trendy nightclubs and high-rise penthouses. We see an almost disgusting opulence and decadence that’s only mitigated by the interesting, flawed characters and the fact that these rich people and areas are about to be riddled with bullets.

About halfway through the game, Max has to travel through the favelas, the poor part of town. Not only do we get a vastly different picture of the way things are, but Max himself becomes a victim of gang violence almost immediately. It’s a refreshing change of pace in what was already an engaging work of fiction.

With no money and no weapons, Max decides he needs to call for help. He spots what he thinks is a bar, and reasoning that they must have a phone, he heads inside, and quickly finds that it’s actually a strip club. A couple of strippers walk by, topless. And I got sexually excited to a minor degree.

But then Max spots a guy apparently having sex with one of the girls. It’s not explicit, but the way it was staged made me rethink my excitement. Max walks by some more strippers, and they’re not the perfect body female character models one ALWAYS finds in a video game strip club – one girl even appears to be in the first stage of pregnancy. And I found myself a little ashamed for my earlier excitement.

After a shootout, in which one of the strippers died, and I couldn’t honestly tell you whose bullets killed her, Max finds an American tourist who’d flown down often, and bragged about the place having “the cheapest pussy” and the slimy scumbag defended his actions by declaring “they’re legal here…I think.”

I was now VERY ashamed.

Video games rarely do this – up the sexuality, but give it a negative connotation – and I think it was absolutely genius. It wasn’t included for titillation – it was included because that’s a reality down there. It highlights the misogyny present in such a place, but more importantly, it highlighted the misogyny present in myself.

I like to think I’m not a misogynist – ask anyone who knows me, I love women. I’m not only extremely attracted to them, but I find it much easier to talk to women than men, and the closest friends I’ve ever had have been women. But one of the hardest things I’ve ever learned is that even I am capable of evil, and moreso, capable of violence against women.

For example, I once hit a woman.

Okay, “hit” is probably the wrong word, “push” is closer. She was, and still is, someone I care about, and we were having a particularly lengthy argument. We were both drunk to more or less of a degree, but that does not excuse me. She stood up, as if to put the final cap on our argument and walk off. I stood up and forcibly pushed her back into her seat.

Her shock mirrored my own, and what little I had left to say to her was weak and hardly convincing, even to me. She left, and this time I let her. We didn’t speak again for the rest of the night.

What had I done? To make matters worse, it was her place, and I knew I was too drunk to drive. As I waited to sober up, I got more and more disgusted with myself. I eventually curled myself up on her couch and cried myself to sleep.

To this day, it haunts me, and until recently, I’ve never really spoken with her about it, we both just kind of pretended it didn’t happen. People who would alleviate my guilt would tell me I didn’t hurt her, but at the end of the day, it was force. It was violence. And I have been left wondering just what else I am capable of.

My knee-jerk reaction to the bare breasts in Max Payne 3’s strip club was also misogynistic. Granted, to a smaller degree, but still, wrong is wrong. The only defense I can claim is that there are far worse people out there, but it’s a rather weak argument, no matter what the subtext. I will certainly never act like that slimy tourist scumbag – I’d sooner die.

I’m not writing this to lash myself with recriminations about my wrongdoings – that’s another article entirely. And I should mention that the girl and I have now talked about it, and reconciled – we weren’t really estranged because of it, but we haven’t been the best of friends, either. But it is important – the incident with my friend was the first time I realized that I was just as capable of hurting a woman as any other man, no matter how much I cared for them. It was a wake-up call, and one that I have tried to learn from. So I can be an even better man.

Maybe someday, I will be.

THE ZEN OF VIDEO GAMES – 8008135!!!!!!!!!!!1!

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The question of sexism in games still intrigues me. Women have been far from helpless in games for a long time now. One of Nintendo’s first icons, Samus Aran, is a woman, and she’d been the definitive example of a smart, independent, capable female in gaming until recently, when Nintendo (stupidly, I feel) handed the production of Other M to Team Ninja, a production company not exactly known for being feminists (they made Dead or Alive, a series of fighting games that introduced the term ‘jiggle physics’ into gaming vernacular).

They made Samus Aran oddly submissive and somehow less competent and independent than she’d always been. But I do not agree that she’d been lessened by her dependency on a man, Adam Malkovich. Having learned her entire backstory, I think she would’ve latched onto anyone with some permanence in her life, and Adam could’ve been Ada, and the story would’ve unfolded the exact same way.

But they did, to a minor degree, sexualize the character. And a lot of people complained that Samus had been objectified, and this highlighted a problem in the gaming industry – a LOT of its characters had been objectified from the start.

Let’s take the all-time classic example out for a spin. Lara Croft has to be THE defining example of sexualized women in video games. And yet, she became that way entirely by pure chance, when a graphic artist accidentally increased her breast dimensions by 150%, and the rest of the creative team argued to leave it that way. And the rest is history.

Ever since then the gaming industry seems almost entirely split in two. There are designers who seem to believe that female characters should have the bodies of porn stars and show them off nearly as much, see above re: Team Ninja and jiggle physics. Then there are those who are trying their best to create realistic, honest feminine portrayals without hyper-sexualization, see Alyx Vance from Half-Life 2 or Jade from Beyond Good And Evil. Or my personal favorite, Zoey from Left 4 Dead.

Is it any different or worse than Hollywood? Granted, Hollywood also relies heavily on sex appeal, but Hollywood can’t control the physical reality of the human body to the same degree that video game artists can. After all, if you want your starlet to have larger breasts, it’s much easier and cheaper to just click and drag a slider. You might be turning your intelligent, dynamic character into a plaything, but hey, think of the extra sales and try not to dwell on the loss of your soul.

And yet, even though I come down on the side of more realistic, less objectified female characters, I have found myself enticed into buying games solely because of their sex appeal. I’m slightly ashamed to admit that at one point, I even owned copies of The Guy Game and Dead or Alive Xtreme Beach Volleyball, games that exist SOLELY to objectify and seemingly even ridicule women. And we still play The Guy Game from time to time, it’s still fun at parties.

And there are some games that I may not have tried if it weren’t for their overt sexualization. Fear Effect is one of my favorite games for the Playstation, and I’m not certain I would’ve bought it if the main heroine, Hana, didn’t have a rack you could balance an assault rifle on. And I’m glad I did – the game features fun stealth and gun play, intriguing puzzles, and an interesting story based on Chinese culture and folklore. Yes, this is one of those rare games that educates as you play – and more people played it because Hana could carry a dinner plate across a room without using her hands.

The sequel is even worse – for Fear Effect 2: Retro Helix, they created another character, Rain, also with the body of a porn star, and heavily suggested a lesbian relationship between herself and Hana. I’m all for more LGBT characters in gaming, but not when their only purpose is to allow your marketing to have two girls scissoring each other. And again, the game is brilliant, fun, original, and forays again into Chinese folklore, bringing aesthetics and story elements rarely seen in America. And I suspect a lot of gamers might not have played it if not for the prospect of seeing two over-sexualized busty babes going muff diving.

Did it bring more attention to games that were good enough to deserve it? Yes. But I’m worried about the kind of damage that can do in the long run. This kind of thing can create unrealistic expectations of women in younger gamers. Is there a woman on Earth with the body of a porn star, intelligence, humor, and the ability to put a bullet in my eyeball from 500 yards out? Possibly. Am I gonna meet her? Nope.

Ask any porn star: huge boobs are going to get a lot of attention. It’s just a fact of life. Will this change over the years? Maybe. But the best thing gamers can do, if we want our games to grow up, is to not buy games trying to entice us with cheap sexuality. Characters can still be sexy with realistically defined proportions – the Mass Effect series is fairly good in that regard, as well as practically anything by Valve – because their women are tough, smart, and funny, and those are sexy qualities.

Sex is a HUGE part of our adult lives, there is nothing morally wrong with having it, and it can be handled in a mature, responsible manner. As gamers we should demand it to be the same way in our games, and designers should strive to make characters that can be sexy without almost popping out of their armor-plated bikini top.

THE ZEN OF VIDEO GAMES – Saving The Princess

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As I’ve stated before, I’ve wanted to be a hero since I was little. It’s hard to tell if that stems from or helped cause my love of video games. I mean, we can go right back to the beginning. Super Mario Bros.

Here we’ve got an overweight Italian plumber from Brooklyn in a strange world trying to save a princess from an evil monster. An unlikely hero …to be sure, but he fights anyway, to save the girl and win her heart. A classic tale, to be sure, damsels in distress have been around for centuries.

But why wasn’t there a game about an overwrought faux-Italian hairdresser from Jersey in a strange world trying to save a prince from an evil monster? Why must it be a damsel in distress? Couldn’t it be a…what would you call that…a damsen? A…dams? A damseler? Damnit.

Mario saves Princess Peach. Link saves Princess Zelda. Kuros saves a harem of women wearing standard-issue “dungeon bikinis” before rescuing his nameless princess. I can name a bunch of examples of this in current and retro games, but I can’t think of one where the roles are reversed – unless the game allows you to choose the sex of your character – which is still a pretty recent innovation.

I liked to think that if I made a game, I’d be above that. But I wouldn’t be – the stakes are always higher for me when a woman’s life is in danger. I don’t know if that’s instinctive or learned, but it’s true. I will leap faster, try harder to save a woman.

It’s not that the hero has to be male, though. In fact, more often than not, if I can choose the sex of my character, I’ll pick female. Phallic imagery aside, there’s something ultimately more badass – and attractive – about a woman who holds a gun or a sword like she knows how to use it.

Is that sexist of me? I honestly have no idea at this point. Thinking this deeply about gender issues and analyzing my reaction to them is rather dizzying. I want to save women more because I’m more likely to care about them (which isn’t sexist, I think) – which makes me a male hero trying to save a female damsel (which is sexist, I think). I give up.

The best example I can think of is the recent Modern Warfare 3 DLC. There’s a mission where you have to save as many hostages as possible – all men. I lost more than ten, but it wasn’t a big deal, because I still accomplished the mission. In Fallout 3, on the other hand, I would get very upset if I failed to save the female slave with the exploding collar. Despite the fact that she is wholly imaginary and digital and no one ACTUALLY died.

Is it just ingrained in me by virtue of being male? Is it simple genetics? Is it the last vestiges of chivalry? I don’t have the answers to these questions, but I believe it’s worth exploring.

Now, there’s obviously more important gender issues in gaming, such as women being primarily used as sex objects (I’m looking at YOU, Team Ninja). But that’s a topic for another time.

For now, I just thought I’d muse on why saving women is better, in my eyes, at least. And to all those who would argue about that: WOMEN HAVE BOOBS. YOUR ARGUMENT IS INVALID. (so much for not being sexist)