lonely

  Kitty Horrorshow is the latest in a group of indie developers who's prime focus seems to be crafting exploration based, lonely worlds.
not lonely in the sense of the feeling you get when a long time friend removes you on Facebook over your opinion that their battle for ethics in games journalism is misguided, but lonely like coming to a fairy tale world after the fairy tale has been finished for two centuries.
  These are profoundly places where a society has moved on either of its own volition or because they were forced to. Primarily these spaces tend to act clear cut goals as most videogames do, and ever so often they have no regard for giving the player any method of interacting with the world besides looking at places.
  A description of these spaces might be "Anor Londo sans weight." and maybe that that description implies is that these spaces are any less games than the one where people rave about it's dark imagery when really you're beset by the same glowing eyed skeletons as you are in other games.

  When I started thinking about my own feelings of loneliness in digital spaces and how I'm more likely to play something like Saints Row III than any of these walk around games when I'm craving loneliness it made me consider just what "loneliness" really means to a player.
   Is loneliness being put in a situation without backup? I don't think of the Resident Evil Remake as a super lonely game. Despite the fact that you're in the spencer mansion by yourself, it still falls back on the feelings of peace you get meet another character. It has some of the same action setpieces later in the game that modern titles tend to be so fond of. Sure, the Tyrant is a boss, but he and the arena he's fought in exploding after I shoot them with a rocket launcher kind of muddles the tone the game had been going for up to that point!
   Where do we go to be alone as players then, if not decaying fantasy worlds? If not mildew and mold filled mansions (the mildew and the mold is on gross undead men) Not "as people" as "players" as people who primarily engage with digital spaces by actively playing them. If I want to be alone as a person I can go to my room or I can go out into the woods. I know this is a luxury that isn't afforded to everyone.
   Where do I go to actively be forgotten and ignored? What kind of spaces cultivate loneliness like how Skyrim's developers worked hard on trying to wow the player every ten seconds?
   Are there any? The logical conclusion to this train of thought takes me back to the same place no matter how many times we go through it. We are alone when we're somewhere surrounded by people we don't know. Strangers that invisiblize us either on our own part or a part of the system they belong to.

  Even saying what the acronym MMOG means out loud fills you with a certain kind of promise.
"Massively Multiplayer Online Game." It's multiplayer so we imagine that moment where someone beats us in Mortal Kombat III on the Sega Genesis when we're teenagers on a dusty couch in a basement or that time we got all of our graduating class together for one last round of Halo multiplied by a few thousand. That moment, repeated over and over again, with every player interaction.
  That's not true! not even close to true, even. If you've never played an MMO it's very easy to become a "fringe" player that only surfaces in raids, or even has their own small little group of friends they play with. Don't group up for that first quest with strangers. Avoid the main landmarks.
  In real life, this would be advice on how to stay on the run from police. In Azeroth or Eorzea or wherever it's an almost unspoken lifestyle that's adopted by many players.
   A peculiar thing: When I first started playing MMO(RPGS) I  remembered the names of almost every player I interacted with. Over time, this feeling of community diminished. Now I don't remember your name even if I beat you in PVP because I don't want to fight you.
  If anything, I go to Eorza trying to fully escape. In an odd turn of phrase I get this feeling when I'm there that I'm not the only one. Especially for people who live in more urban areas than I do who have very few chances of actually getting away from society and the rest of the world - the MMORPG offers a common and easy to find retreat.
Well, I can imagine that for some it certainly beats hiking.

What I've found most funny in my travels through many disparate MMO worlds is that a lot of players that tended to hold to their own also tended to be married. Most of these people were actually women trying to get away from the constant presence of their significant others, but a handful of men I know in real life also were in the same boat.
   It's no coincidence that the married players I've met also had the tendency to, if not being a solo player - belong to groups mostly if not completely comprised of people that were the same gender.
Returning to Eorza now for the hundredth time I am met by a sense of familiarity with a recent update that adds Final Fantasy VII's ever popular Gold Saucer location with an added bonus of including the proceeding titles Triple Triad card game.
   It's funny to me that ontop of all of the mechanics that Final Fantasy XIV features, it takes a pretty rudimentary card game to make me come out of my social shell and actively start seeking and interfacing with other players.
  So far, in a simple forced interaction, the developers of Final Fantasy XIV managed to do the one thing no MMORPG has so far: be around other people




-skeletons

western

Red Dead Redemption was, as critics would call it "great"
My Dad plays videogames. He kind of always has - I remember growing up in a very small town with an old NES my parents bought. When I was old enough to start playing videogames rather then just watching my older brothers play them, they had a habit of standing over my shoulder and regaling me with stories about my mom being a waitress and staying up all night with my dad to play Super Mario Brothers before her first shift.

On the same token, my Dad and I never talked much about how he came to videogames. I always just assumed he kind of had an interest. As much as my Dad was always a cowboy - he'd also always been kind of a nerd. It was through my dad I would discover Conan the Barbarian and the artist Frank Frazetta. It was my Dad's taste in pop culture that first got me interested in things like sword and sorcery and indeed the archetypal western hero than any amount of cajoling to "read this!" or "play this!" that my brothers told me.

It was more about the casual references my Dad might drop. He might draw something and tell me it was inspired by something called Conan or even just say he took inspiration from Frank Frazetta's art. It's sort of what gave met he ability to seek out things on my own apart from what was popular for a little kid - or even just at the time.

I played a lot of videogames as a little kid, which is why I enjoy them now. There's still a small part of me that remembers watching my Dad saddle up and head into the desert on his horse, or how he'd disappear a couple of times a year for a weekend or two and come back covered in dust and dirt and tell my mom stories of his weekend spent on a ranch somewhere with his friends.

Eventually our fascination with videogames caught up with my dad sometime around my older brother somehow managing to con my parents into getting us a Playstation. Even though they were hella poor and maintained that the Sega Genesis was going to be the last console they bought for us.

(about every time one of us got a console for the next decade or so until we could work, my parents constantly maintained it all the way through getting a Wii, which was Very Definitely the last console they bought for anyone but themselves.)

Around this time I remember my older brother and my dad having a conversation about games about cowboys. The game they brainstormed never would come to be but it's still written down in a dusty old notebook in one of my parents closets.

A decade later and we'd see the release of Red Dead Redemption on the Playstation Three.


It's the game that makes me think of my Dad most of all, because it's a sometimes cynical look at the decline of the American Cowboy, when my dad is one of the people I think of when that phrase turns up. He's seen more dusty frontiers than I ever will, and I like to think he spends a lot of time remembering places he's been in life when he rides through a desert plain as John Marsten.

Videogames have a powerful ability to make us remember, not just people but places as well.
With a sad note The American Cowboy is now making the full turn into being just another piece of folklore, but there's still room in Videogames to let us experience that.

The Hero Returns

Recently (just as of last week) at the behest of a personal friend I've found myself returning to the most recent addition to the Final Fantasy XII series, Lightning Returns.
The trilogy has thus far received incredibly mixed reviews. Outside of some kind of silly "love it or hate it" paradigm all of the Final Fantasy XIII titles are very easy to dislike

I think irrespective of how you feel about the series itself there's little denying that Square Enix has taken a lot of time to experiment with the way these games are designed giving the trilogy project a sword of bizarre personality.

That personality is most distilled into Lightning Returns and the odd off-kilter journey it encompasses.
Really, one thing I keep dwelling on in the setup for the story of this game is that it centers around the return of a heroic character. This is obvious from the title but the story has more to do with characters coming back then just our protagonist, Lightning.

The introduction sequence for Lightning Returns is the standard Square-Enix fare. A voiceover greets and introduces us to the world and its concepts. After a brief moment we are re-introduced to our pink-haired protagonist looking like some sort of Tetsuya-Nomura designed update of Kain Highwind for the ray-bans and smart watch generation.

Something that I feel was lacking from the game though can be summed up by the ending portion of another game: specifically by a single screenshot of Strider 2 on the PlayStation.
For lack of being able to source the screenshot of that with the dialogue allow me to provide context. The Strider series barely has any plot at all. The second Strider game structures itself as almost a remake of the original; The levels here all homage the original game like a series of vignettes to make the player feel ostalgic.

In that screenshot our defiant  hero - because defiant is the best word to use to describe a Ninja who wears a red scarf and a bright blue Gi with a sword that glows in the dark who is fighting a cosmic dictator stares down Grandmaster Meio, videogame final boss.

His sword is cutting him completely apart like he were a giant paper mache sculpture. Meio's only words in response are to ask Hiryu if he is indeed the same Strider from two thousand years ago returned to strike him down. Hiryu's response explains it all.

Strider Hiryu is the real weapon of mass destruction in the game: A weapon brough back from hundreds of years ago with one sole and defined purpose. As a player this action was in contradiction to the personality I projected onto Strider, but suddenly it made the whole game make sense.

In kind, that odd indescribable feeling is the same thing that Lightning Returns. A single moment to give everything context - a sense that a hero has returned even if her purpose remains dubious to those outside of the player and one other character.

Lightning Returns will tell you that its world is projected far into the future of the series. Maybe it's hundreds, maybe it's thousands. Tons of interactions from questlines to casual dialogue dropped by the most robotic of NPC motherfuckers drive it through your head that You Have Been Gone.

But it never feels like it. The only plot threads you follow up on connected to the earlier series have to do with main characters. There is no questline that bounces off of something that happened in earlier games in this odd trilogy.

I enjoy Lightning Returns, but the story doesn't make us feel like we're some mythical figure that has returned. It doesn't feel like we were ever really gone.