Tag Archives: Mass Effect

THE ZEN OF VIDEO GAMES – Spec Ops: The Line

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[WARNING: I’m going to spoil the HELL out of this game. If you have any interest in unique video game experiences, you owe it to yourself to go rent this game, and play it all the way through before you read this. Seriously, do it. I cannot recommend this game enough, and you do NOT want this spoiled for you.]

As far back as I can remember, I’ve wanted to be a hero. Save the girl, save the city, save the world, make things right. I’m not sure if that desire propelled my love of video games, or if video games are what set off that nugget of inspiration, that’s going to be a chicken-or-the-egg argument.

And lord knows I don’t have much in my actual life to fulfill that need, my crippling fear of death keeps me from entering any service in which I could save lives, like being a fireman or policeman, or joining the armed forces, I’m also incredibly squeamish, so I could never be a doctor, and being perpetually out of shape and naturally clumsy indicates that I wouldn’t do well in those professions anyway. My current profession is about as unheroic as it gets, the best I can do to make it more heroic is to say that I occasionally rescue battered paper from vicious, killer printers.

And I don’t have a wife or girlfriend who would call me her hero, and it’s becomingly increasingly more unlikely that I’ll have any children I could be a hero to. And I’m sure one or two of my friends’ first instincts is going to be to comment on this article and say I’m their hero, but that’s kind of like shooting a corpse and claiming you murdered someone: it doesn’t really count, and I’m going to look at you like you’re crazy.

But who needs all those things when I have video games? In just about every video game you can imagine, you are a hero of some sort, or at least you can be, excepting perhaps a couple of Rockstar games and some puzzle games. Sometimes you’re saving the princess, sometimes you’re saving the galaxy, sometimes you’re circumcising a prince while the king and his advisor look on with their jaws dropped straight to the floor, but in every case you are making things right. (Okay, maybe not that last one, but they did save the kingdom in the end of that game….or get drunk in a bar, I honestly can’t remember)

And I love video games for this…there’s a great poster making the rounds saying something like “as a gamer, I don’t have a life…I choose to have many”, and the picture depicts some of the biggest heroes in gaming, like Link, Adam, the Dovahkiin from Skyrim, Commander Shepard, and it thoroughly encapsulates how I feel about being a hero in these games. These characters are, or at least, CAN BE true heroes and I cannot overstate the feeling of genuine pride overtaking my system whenever I beat these games. I can’t even play the evil paths in any games that have them, because they never hold my interest for very long. I love being the hero in video games.

At least I did until Spec Ops: The Line came along and kicked me in the balls so hard that there’s a permanent boot imprint on my scrotum.

Allow me to give a little backstory here: I was aware of Spec Ops as a franchise way back during the Playstation era, but shooters were in something of a slump at the time, and I was far more interested in JRPG’s and survival horror games, so I never gave the Spec Ops games any more than a cursory look, but from what I knew, they were only mediocre shooters, and I still don’t even know if they’re first or third-person. Needless to say, I gave them a pass.

Then, last month, there’s all this hype and marketing like Spec Ops is going to be the next big thing in modern military shooters. “Oh, great,” I thought, “another Call of Duty wannabe.” I recognized the name, but I just figured they were resurrecting an old franchise just for the sake of the fans it might still have, and AGAIN, I gave it a pass.

But suddenly, the internet was abuzz about this game. I saw articles on Reddit about how the designer deliberately tried to make a game that would have players angry at the developer. James Portnow’s Extra Credits is one of my favorite webseries on the internet (not to mention at least partial inspiration for this series of articles), and when he mentioned on the Extra Credits page that he’d been blown away by the game and was going to do at least one episode on the game (he only devotes entire episodes to a single game if it’s really, REALLY good, or really, REALLY bad, and he would wind up doing TWO episodes on Spec Ops), I knew I had to play it, but it was still $60, which was more than I was willing to part with. Then Amazon had a sale offering it, and including Bioshock 1 and 2, all for $20, and the last of my defenses crumbled like a cookie under an elephant’s ass.

I quickly installed the game, and started playing. It’s a fairly linear third-person shooter, with some outdated shooting mechanics, and some rudimentary squad tactics, but the writing was solid enough that I could understand there was some serious potential here, so I kept playing.

About an hour into the experience, I started to get a sense of unease that I couldn’t quite pin down. Something was seriously wrong in this game. I wasn’t sure if the first enemies I’d encountered were actually the bad guys or not, and the further I played, the murkier it got. I thought, “Ambiguous situation, don’t know who’re the bad guys or the good guys? Brilliant!” Perceptive readers will note I’d just made a massive assumption.

A few hours of gameplay or so later, things SEEMED to become clearer. The rogue American military unit were the bad guys, or at least, were trying to stop me from helping the people I’d come to save. And you face a steady stream of them until you run across a huge encampment of them. There’s no way you can take them on with your guns, there’s too many of them, and a number of tanks besides. Your character, Walker, despite protestations from his unit, decides to use white phosphorous. Google it if you want, it’s nasty stuff, burns people alive. I wasn’t thrilled about it, but I understood the necessity – without it, we were dead.

The player is then shown a black and white screen, an infrared top-down view of the battlefield. Heat sources, enemies, show up in white, and you guide the cursor over them and pull the trigger. Towards the end, there’s one last tank in your way surrounded by a bunch of enemies, so I pulled the trigger again. I actually smiled because I managed to get all of them with one shot.

Once the zone was clear, you trek through. It was horrific, but I had expected that. Then you check the valley near that tank, and find a soldier horribly burned, but still alive. “Why?” he asks. Walker replies, “You gave us no choice.” He says, “We were helping…..” and dies. You turn the corner.

There were 40 or 50 burned bodies. No weapons, civilian clothing. My mouth popped open. The other members of my unit start arguing. Innocent men and women had been burned alive, and had clearly died in agony. My eyes finally come to rest on a mother who had apparently desperately tried to shield her child with her body to no avail. They were now locked in their death pose forever. Like Walker, I just stared, slack-jawed and numb at what he’d done. At what I’D done.

That was the biggest punch in the gut a video game had ever given me. Until the end of the game, that is.

You find the leader of the rogue American army, and he talks to Walker about how everything would’ve turned out better if Walker had never shown up. And he delivers a line that may as well be delivered straight to you, the player:

“The truth is, that you’re here because you wanted to feel like something you’re not. A hero.”

I cannot count the amount of times I’ve tried to do the right thing and managed to fuck everything up. This was like that, only on a MUCH bigger scale. My flubs had only ever caused temporary rifts in friendships or employment that healed in a short length of time. This time, I’d doomed an entire city to death.

But I’ve never had a game take me to task for trying to do the right thing before. In essence, the game is pointing at me and laughing, calling my need to be a hero, and trying to fulfill that wish by playing soldier games with guns, entirely pathetic. And in one sense, the game is right, if I wanted to be a hero, I could volunteer, or give blood more often. Hell, I could try anything OTHER than playing a video game, pretending I’m a big tough manly man wearing a cape who eats danger and shits bullets, always doing the right thing for truth and justice and puppies.

No, in this case, I am not a hero, I am a moron that somehow came into possession of a gun. In fact, it paints my enjoyment of similar testosterone-fueled FPS’s like Call of Duty and Battlefield in the same “you’re not the righteous gunhand of God” colors. I can’t imagine playing one of those games now. It’d be like witnessing someone getting burned to death and then immediately going home to cook a steak; it would be incredibly poor taste, and would probably make me nauseous.

But on the other hand, I do not agree that the base desire to be a hero is pathetic. I think there exists real nobility in the human spirit, and for those of us who can’t express it in our real lives, video games are a great outlet. And I think they can become a powerful tool to motivate people to do real, non-imaginary acts of small heroism in their real lives.

I will continue to do the right thing, where and when I can. As long as I keep that in mind, I can be, will be a hero. And who knows, maybe someday, I’ll even actually save someone’s life. But you can bet I’ll be thinking twice about simulating being a “war hero” for a long time to come.

THE ZEN OF VIDEO GAMES – Choices

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The simplest, smallest choice can have far-reaching effects you’ll never know about. Choosing to drive a different route to get to work one morning could condemn someone else to die several days later. It’s just another part of the unpredictability of life. You just never know.

Choice has always been an important part of video games, even as far back as Super Mario Bros. If I choose to get the hidden 1-up in the early part of the world 1-1, I’ll miss out on taking the pipe, which skips about half the level. In Chrono Trigger, you can choose to have Melchior make the Prismatic Dress, the ultimate armor for the ladies, or three less-powerful Prismatic Helms, which anyone can wear. One of my favorites, Front Mission 3, has a simple choice early on – go hang out with your friend, or stay in – that changes the way the rest of the game plays out.

But rarely did video games have choices that produce far-reaching consequences – until recently, at any rate. And even then, it seems most choices are built on a pure good/pure evil system – would you save this basket of puppies from a burning house, or watch them cook and then eat them? I’m exaggerating, but sometimes it feels that way. There’s rarely any middle ground.

Games have not yet mastered the art of choices that have no clear moral or tangible benefit/disadvantage that have very clear and lasting ramifications. The Front Mission 3 example is the closest thing I can think of, off the top of my head, and that was back in 2000.

And only lately are games experimenting with extended consequences. Mass Effect is a phenomenal science-fiction third-person-shooter-RPG hybrid with an incredible universe of characters, races, and worlds to explore. And one of its most impressive features is continuity. See, you will make thousands upon thousands of choices in Mass Effect, and not only will choices affect events later in the game, they have the capacity to affect events in later games.

In Mass Effect, you play as Commander Shepard, and how he/she looks – just as how he/she behaves, is entirely up to you, the player. Towards the end of the game, you have to choose between two human squadmates. One will go with you, and the other will split off to complete another objective. Whichever squadmate goes with you will survive….the other will die. That character will not appear in Mass Effect 2 or 3, except in flashback sequences. The character who survived will have a relatively small part in Mass Effect 2, but in Mass Effect 3, they can be fully recruited into your squad again.

Characters recruited to join you in Mass Effect 1 can open up side quests or give you bonuses in Mass Effect 2, and even Mass Effect 3. Conversations held, things you said, can come back to help or haunt Commander Shepard. And these are not small games – 20 to 60 hours of gameplay each. And they were released years apart. So, on some level, something I did years ago can have a profound effect on me today.

And that is DEFINITELY true about life.

The most recent and profound example I can think of involves a girl. The best stories always do, in my opinion. And even better (for the romantics, at least), it involves our first date.

I remember all my dates, largely because there aren’t that many to remember, but this one was special. The girl was (and is) beautiful, the restaurant was fantastic, the food was delicious, and the comedy class we went to afterwards was a great time. Easily the best date I’ve ever been on. But the salient point here – and what I’ll remember most about it, besides the eight-nippled dog-boy – don’t ask – was our conversation.

After the wine arrived, but before the meal, we were quietly talking. I don’t remember how, but somehow we started talking about our flaws. And I looked at her, and in a split-second I decided, knowing this could be a very bad idea if I wanted to woo this girl, that I was going to be completely open and honest with her about my flaws. And I told her something I hadn’t told another living soul since college. To my complete astonishment, she didn’t flee screaming from the room, but responded in kind, confessing a very personal flaw of her own.

It was a remarkable experience – here we were, our first date, and we were talking about things psychiatrists would have a hard time dragging out of us. We both agreed that this total honesty trend should continue, and as I said, the rest of our date went really well.

Though the total honesty trend did continue, and there were more dates, things did not go as hoped for between the two of us in the long run, but we were and are still good friends, though separated somewhat.

Fast forward to a few days ago. I’d discovered the problem I mentioned in my last ZOVG article, and it’s still too personal to talk about, but suffice to say that fixing the problem would be costly, and I doubted I could afford it, even with the best financing. I didn’t know what to do.

On a total whim, I scoped out the girl’s Facebook page, which I hadn’t seen in some time. There was a great picture of her with her friend that made me smile. It also made me realize I hadn’t seen her or talked to her in months.

I sent her a text, asking how she was, and she responded enthusiastically, things were going pretty well. She asked how I was, and I remarked that things were not going so well for me. And naturally, as I should’ve known she would, she asked what was wrong.

Now, my gut instinct was to hide it – this problem is embarrassing, and she’s one of few individuals on this planet whose opinion of me actually matters – but I remembered our promise, which had become more of a tradition at this point. Total, brutal honesty, no matter what. So I told her everything in a few text messages.

Her reply told me that her father could help me with my problem. I was amazed, but excited. I would’ve been over the moon if I could’ve just saved a thousand dollars or two.

She then said he could get things fixed for FREE.

To say that I was stunned would be an understatement of the highest order. I can’t possibly explain the magnitude of my gratitude. I think I’m going to spend the rest of my life making this up to her and her father, that’s how extraordinary this is. But I realized within minutes that it would never have happened if I hadn’t made the choice to be completely honest on that first date, seven or eight months prior.

And I have been floored by this realization. Ever since then, I’ve been making choices more carefully, deliberating more thoroughly. After all, I can’t possibly know what effect my choices will have. If something as against my self-interest as telling a girl about a deeply personal flaw ON OUR FIRST DATE can have outrageously beneficial effects months later, how can I possibly gauge what effect ANYTHING I do will have on me, or anyone else?

In the end, though, I think it’s not going to change how I make my choices. Just as I do in Mass Effect, I try to choose what’s right – I think my decision to be completely honest with her so long ago came from the fact that it would’ve felt wrong not to tell her – and being completely honest with her a few days ago was because it DEFINITELY would’ve been wrong not to tell her after we’d promised to be honest.

I’m not a paragon of virtue, like my Commander Shepard. I’m not the best man I can be, not yet anyway. But I know it’s important to at least try to make the right choices – not just right for me, but for others as well.

Because you never know whose life you’ll be changing with that choice.

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.