The couple are entwined on a small bed in a dormitory room in New York City. Young and inexperienced, they fumble at each other’s clothes, his hands all over her. The camera draws in nearer, almost uncomfortably stark and intimate in the way of all mumblecore movies about the awkward first stages of a new relationship. But this is not an independent film. This is a video game, and the woman on the bed is played by its designer, Nina Freeman. It’s a long way from Call of Duty.
For the last five years, Freeman has been working with small teams of artists and programmers, making intensely personal games about sex and relationships. She came to prominence with the acclaimed How Do You Do It, an interactive skit about a little girl exploring the idea of sex by bashing a Barbie doll and Action Man together. In Ladylike, you control a conversation between a teenage girl and her mother during a drive to the mall. No matter what you say about school, boyfriends or clothes through a series of conversation options, the mum always disapproves. You literally can’t win.
Earlier this month Freeman released her latest project, a multilayered narrative game named Cibele. Developed with small studio Star Maid Games, it’s about the designer’s brief relationship with a man she met in the multiplayer adventure game, Final Fantasy XI, where hundreds of players gather and form online clans to slay monsters and discover treasure.
When you start Cibele, you find yourself accessing a simulation of Nina’s own computer desktop from the time of the affair, complete with folders full of her real photos, poems and live journal entries; but if you click on a specific icon you enter a role-playing game called Valtameri, a fictitious take on Final Fantasy, where you meet Blake, who leads his own in-game clan of fellow players. As you fight monsters in this synthetic adventure, you hear Nina talking with Blake on the phone and see short film sequences, showing her taking selfies and emailing them to him.
It’s a short but complex and self-reflexive experience; a game-within-a-game about the ways in which multiplayer role-playing adventures like Final Fantasy XI double as social arenas where players meet, flirt and gossip. “I wanted to explore the journey that these two went on together in the digital space,” says Freeman, who refers to the Nina of the game in the third-person. “It’s about what it’s like to have these intimate interactions through an online game; what it’s like to be the girl who is sending pictures to her lover over the internet and talking to him on the phone and longing for this physical interaction that feels almost out of reach.”
Although the character of Blake is fictitious, he represents the man Nina met, but is no longer in contact with. “He does know the game exists,” she says. “He got in touch with me and he was like, ‘It’s cool that you’re making this.’” To make things even more complex, his role in the game is played by Freeman’s partner, Emmett Butler, who also worked on the project. Did she find this strange?
“Emmett has worked with me on a number of personal games in the past,” she says. “So he had a good idea of what he was getting into. Filming the intimate scene at the end was a lot easier for both of us, since we know each other so well. Our roommate at the time actually filmed it – it was nice to be able to create that portion of the game with people I feel comfortable around. The voice actor for Blake was actually not Emmett, but a young man named Justin Briner who we worked with remotely. He was really great, too.”
For Freeman, video games have never been the solitary, isolating pastime of common stereotype. As a child in the sleepy coastal town of Ipswich, Massachusetts, her favourite thing was to visit her friends Melanie and Brittany, hide out in their basement and play on a Nintendo console all day, until their parents kicked her out for the evening. Together they devoured games like Super Mario 64 and Legend of Zelda, sharing the stories as they unfolded on screen. When she discovered Final Fantasy XI at the age of 14, it was a way of meeting up with friends – but also forging new relationships. In Cibele, the player can swap between playing Valtameri and chatting with other characters via simulated instant messaging, email and chat forums. It’s a clever approximation of how we now socially multitask online, seamlessly moving from one window to the next.
Freeman says that in our era of Twitter, Instagram and Facebook, this idea of the internet as just another romantic space is prevalent and natural. “For my generation online relationships are basically a normal part of life. A lot of people have contacted me after completing Cibele, saying: ‘Oh wow, this happened to me when I was playing World of Warcraft as a teenager. I was that young girl on the internet, trying to negotiate a relationship with someone I’d never met.’”
For some, the way Freeman explores her own experiences so personally through her games is extraordinary. But she sees many parallels with poetry, which she studied at New York’s Pace University under Charles North. He introduced her to the New York School: Elizabeth Bishop, Langston Hughes, Frank O’Hara. She worked for a while at legendary East Village live poetry venue the Poetry Project.
Later, two things happened: she started hanging out with a bunch of independent game developers who introduced her to offbeat, experimental titles like Anna Anthropy’s Dys4ia, about the transgender designer’s own transition, and Gone Home, about a burgeoning romance between two teenage girls. She also came down with a chronic illness. “I was suddenly surrounded by game makers,” she remembers, “and I thought, these games are poetry. So while I was sick I had a bunch of free time and taught myself how to program.”
Has she ever been concerned about the implications of putting herself out there so honestly? “Putting myself into these stories in a vulnerable way has definitely taken practice. I’m more and more comfortable with each project. I have learned to separate my present personal life from them, because it could be uncomfortable to feel like critics are talking about me when they talk about the game. Yes, they are talking about me, in a sense, but they are really talking about the character I created based on me. That distinction is important.”
Freeman and her collaborators Emmett Butler and Diego Garcia are now part of a vibrant new era of independent game design. The explosion of broadband internet access, together with the arrival of cheap development tools likeGameMaker and Twine, has meant that almost anyone can make a game now, put it online and find a global audience. Whereas big PlayStation titles require teams of hundreds and budgets of millions, a downloadable indie title can be built by one or two people on a cheap PC.
The result has been an explosion of idiosyncratic titles – but also the emergence of indie gaming scenes and venues. Games have effectively become the new punk rock – or, as Nina sees it, the new poetry: “I saw a lot of parallels with the Beats,” she says. “I was excited because what I found so inspiring in poetry was starting to happen in games.”
With Cibele now finished, Freeman is concentrating fully on her current project,Tacoma, the latest title from Gone Home creator the Fullbright Company. Nine months ago, she moved to Portland, Oregon, where the team is based. Set on a lunar research station, this eerie adventure is an ambitious move for her. “I’ve never made a 3D game before,” she says. “Fullbright is one of the few studios that’s really exploring this idea of games as character-focused narrative spaces; it’s very much about letting the players explore stories rather than being controlled by them.”
But what of our rookie couple in Cibele? Is there a happy ever after to their hook-up? Not exactly. While Blake is confident and seductive online, he shies away from anything more than a single physical meeting: “I don’t think relationships are comfortable,” he tells Nina. It’s not hard to see this as a reflection on the alienation of online relationships but maybe it’s actually just about kids finding new ways to deal with social anxieties.
Tuesday, November 17, 2015
Thursday, November 12, 2015
Rise of the Tomb Raider review – all action but too few risks
Despite her escalating body count, Lara Croft has no problem crossing borders. In Rise of the Tomb Raider, the explorer’s second outing since a 2013 reboot which re-established her as a more vulnerable yet more violent warrior, she freely zips around the world – including an ill-advised stop-off in chaotic Syria.
The series, once an icon of the British video game industry, has also roamed; it’s now being co-built by long-time developer Crystal Dynamics and a Square Enix studio in tax-break friendly Canada (albeit with a team that includes the British writer, Rhianna Pratchett). Not only that, like the 2013 title upon which it builds, Rise of the Tomb Raider is a game that has wandered some way from the roots that linger in its title. Not a lot of tomb raiding goes on in Tomb Raider these days. Instead, Rise of the Tomb Raider is a rip-roaring Saturday matinee of a video game, which has traded original ideas for popular ones.
Croft, voiced by Camilla Luddington, spends the majority of the game in freezing Siberia, where she skulks through the snow in search of an ancient, life-extending artefact supposedly lost to time in a forgotten city. More abstractly, Croft is chasing her late father, who once sought the same treasure. As well as answers, she also seeks resolution to unresolved issues to do with loss and deferred grief. Croft does this soul-searching through monologues, recited whenever she finds shelter at a campfire (the locations at which you may upgrade equipment, refill ammo supplies or craft new implements with which to combat the Siberian winter and the nefarious secret society known as Trinity, against whose agents you scuffle in the snow). Later, she also does this through conversation with a companion, who lends an ear if not, outside of the game’s cinematic cutscenes at least, a hand in her progress.
If Croft is in search of inner peace, she shows little care or consideration for her fellow human in the moment-to-moment play. Appearances deceive: this lithe, slender protagonist packs a serious punch, able to take out swarms of well-armed men, even those protected by Teflon body armour and six-foot-tall shields. Croft is able to knock up rudimentary explosive devices from tin cans or Molotov cocktails while cringing behind cover. She hurls them at her opponents with abandon, waiting for the flames to extinguish on their charred remains before plundering the body for ammunition or resources.
The juxtaposition in these games between the likeable, quipping hero we often find in word, and the bloodthirsty, ruthless killer we find in deed has become such a cliche that pointing it out has become a cliche itself. Nevertheless, the clanging incongruity remains, undiminished by familiarity, ludicrous in its continued repetition.
Familiar too, at least to players of the previous game, are your tasks, both primary and extra-curricular. Stealth follows light puzzling, follows light exploration, follows open battle, follows the kind of Indiana Jones set pieces in which you must, for example, flee a pursuing attack chopper, or a burning building. The linear design allows Crystal Dynamics to finely control the game’s rhythms, changing the pace and feel of the story through the nature of the challenges with which you’re presented. The recipe is undeniably compelling and well measured, but ultimately feels shallow.
Soon enough you learn to enter every new area and stab the analogue stick in order to instantly highlight items of interest – ammo crates, relics, rope-slides, climbable branches, frolicking animals who can be hunted and turned into resources. In this way you can read a location in seconds – there’s no need to slow down any more, survey your surroundings and figure out what you’re supposed to do. Mostly, you run from highlighted object to object, collecting, prising, climbing or reading your way through the to-do list that’s been laid out in front of you. There is, in nouveau-Tomb Raider, little true exploration or puzzle solving to do. Even on the toughest difficulty, this is a fast-food approximation of challenge.
It certainly slips down easily enough. Levels propel you forward with pitter-patter of manageable tasks, creating a sense of momentum. But there’s none of the enriching sense of accomplishment that one used to feel when working away at one of Tomb Raiders’ grand and exquisite environmental puzzles. As in the 2013 reboot, these are relegated to optional side-missions. You must discover the entrance to the tomb, perhaps accessed through some remote cave, or down a disused Soviet mineshaft, and then work out how to reach the treasure in its farthest depth, or tallest summit. Your reward is not only an upgraded ability, but also an honest sense of triumph. These are Rise of the Tomb Raider’s strongest moments.
On the evidence of these optional tombs, which are the closest the game comes to replicating the style and satisfaction of historical Tomb Raider, it’s clear that developer Crystal Dynamics is a home to masterly designers who would, surely, be able to deliver many games’-worth of memorable and delightful puzzles. But in the ever-accelerating homogenisation of the blockbuster video games, it seems as if they’ve been held back by the need for the game to hit the expected notes of the genre. Where once Tomb Raider led the field, now it merely rides with the pack, offering nudges of modest invention and improvement, but little to truly inspire and amaze.
The exception is, perhaps, Expeditions. Gone is the 2013’s game’s multiplayer mode, replaced by this score attack recasting of the main missions. Here you find new challenge goals and the chance to complete against friends and other players online. As in Halo 5, a new collectible card system adds modifiers to play. You buy (either with in-game currency or real world money) or win packs of cards. Each offers a bonus (eg better starting weapons) or a drawback (eg no ammunition), which comes with a counter-balancing penalty or multiplier to your subsequent score.
The harder you stack the odds against you, the greater the opportunity for glory. As you can equip multiple cards per run, there are many thousands of potential “load-outs” with which to fine-tune the balance between skill and risk. It’s a welcome diversion, and one that will provide, for some, additional interest and challenge after the main game is finished.
Rise of the Tomb Raider improves upon its predecessors formula. The skill tree, with which you improve Croft’s abilities, is larger and better defined. Most areas have additional challenges, and, in some locations, you can even take on freelance missions for other friendly characters you meet among the snow-dusted firs.
The game has undeniable breadth, then, but questionable depth. Like the Assassin’s Creed series, which places its bet on sprawl rather than texture, too often Rise of the Tomb Raider devolves into a gratuitous treasure hunt, where every piece of treasure is marked with a beam of light shooting up into the sky. If only this talented team had the chance to pursue a more singular vision.
As it is, Tomb Raider’s transformation from archaeological puzzle adventure to action blockbuster is complete. The result is a crowd-pleasing game, which offers only glimpses of what could be if this team were only allowed to take some braver risks with Croft’s next expedition.
The series, once an icon of the British video game industry, has also roamed; it’s now being co-built by long-time developer Crystal Dynamics and a Square Enix studio in tax-break friendly Canada (albeit with a team that includes the British writer, Rhianna Pratchett). Not only that, like the 2013 title upon which it builds, Rise of the Tomb Raider is a game that has wandered some way from the roots that linger in its title. Not a lot of tomb raiding goes on in Tomb Raider these days. Instead, Rise of the Tomb Raider is a rip-roaring Saturday matinee of a video game, which has traded original ideas for popular ones.
Croft, voiced by Camilla Luddington, spends the majority of the game in freezing Siberia, where she skulks through the snow in search of an ancient, life-extending artefact supposedly lost to time in a forgotten city. More abstractly, Croft is chasing her late father, who once sought the same treasure. As well as answers, she also seeks resolution to unresolved issues to do with loss and deferred grief. Croft does this soul-searching through monologues, recited whenever she finds shelter at a campfire (the locations at which you may upgrade equipment, refill ammo supplies or craft new implements with which to combat the Siberian winter and the nefarious secret society known as Trinity, against whose agents you scuffle in the snow). Later, she also does this through conversation with a companion, who lends an ear if not, outside of the game’s cinematic cutscenes at least, a hand in her progress.
If Croft is in search of inner peace, she shows little care or consideration for her fellow human in the moment-to-moment play. Appearances deceive: this lithe, slender protagonist packs a serious punch, able to take out swarms of well-armed men, even those protected by Teflon body armour and six-foot-tall shields. Croft is able to knock up rudimentary explosive devices from tin cans or Molotov cocktails while cringing behind cover. She hurls them at her opponents with abandon, waiting for the flames to extinguish on their charred remains before plundering the body for ammunition or resources.
The juxtaposition in these games between the likeable, quipping hero we often find in word, and the bloodthirsty, ruthless killer we find in deed has become such a cliche that pointing it out has become a cliche itself. Nevertheless, the clanging incongruity remains, undiminished by familiarity, ludicrous in its continued repetition.
Familiar too, at least to players of the previous game, are your tasks, both primary and extra-curricular. Stealth follows light puzzling, follows light exploration, follows open battle, follows the kind of Indiana Jones set pieces in which you must, for example, flee a pursuing attack chopper, or a burning building. The linear design allows Crystal Dynamics to finely control the game’s rhythms, changing the pace and feel of the story through the nature of the challenges with which you’re presented. The recipe is undeniably compelling and well measured, but ultimately feels shallow.
Soon enough you learn to enter every new area and stab the analogue stick in order to instantly highlight items of interest – ammo crates, relics, rope-slides, climbable branches, frolicking animals who can be hunted and turned into resources. In this way you can read a location in seconds – there’s no need to slow down any more, survey your surroundings and figure out what you’re supposed to do. Mostly, you run from highlighted object to object, collecting, prising, climbing or reading your way through the to-do list that’s been laid out in front of you. There is, in nouveau-Tomb Raider, little true exploration or puzzle solving to do. Even on the toughest difficulty, this is a fast-food approximation of challenge.
It certainly slips down easily enough. Levels propel you forward with pitter-patter of manageable tasks, creating a sense of momentum. But there’s none of the enriching sense of accomplishment that one used to feel when working away at one of Tomb Raiders’ grand and exquisite environmental puzzles. As in the 2013 reboot, these are relegated to optional side-missions. You must discover the entrance to the tomb, perhaps accessed through some remote cave, or down a disused Soviet mineshaft, and then work out how to reach the treasure in its farthest depth, or tallest summit. Your reward is not only an upgraded ability, but also an honest sense of triumph. These are Rise of the Tomb Raider’s strongest moments.
On the evidence of these optional tombs, which are the closest the game comes to replicating the style and satisfaction of historical Tomb Raider, it’s clear that developer Crystal Dynamics is a home to masterly designers who would, surely, be able to deliver many games’-worth of memorable and delightful puzzles. But in the ever-accelerating homogenisation of the blockbuster video games, it seems as if they’ve been held back by the need for the game to hit the expected notes of the genre. Where once Tomb Raider led the field, now it merely rides with the pack, offering nudges of modest invention and improvement, but little to truly inspire and amaze.
The exception is, perhaps, Expeditions. Gone is the 2013’s game’s multiplayer mode, replaced by this score attack recasting of the main missions. Here you find new challenge goals and the chance to complete against friends and other players online. As in Halo 5, a new collectible card system adds modifiers to play. You buy (either with in-game currency or real world money) or win packs of cards. Each offers a bonus (eg better starting weapons) or a drawback (eg no ammunition), which comes with a counter-balancing penalty or multiplier to your subsequent score.
The harder you stack the odds against you, the greater the opportunity for glory. As you can equip multiple cards per run, there are many thousands of potential “load-outs” with which to fine-tune the balance between skill and risk. It’s a welcome diversion, and one that will provide, for some, additional interest and challenge after the main game is finished.
Rise of the Tomb Raider improves upon its predecessors formula. The skill tree, with which you improve Croft’s abilities, is larger and better defined. Most areas have additional challenges, and, in some locations, you can even take on freelance missions for other friendly characters you meet among the snow-dusted firs.
The game has undeniable breadth, then, but questionable depth. Like the Assassin’s Creed series, which places its bet on sprawl rather than texture, too often Rise of the Tomb Raider devolves into a gratuitous treasure hunt, where every piece of treasure is marked with a beam of light shooting up into the sky. If only this talented team had the chance to pursue a more singular vision.
As it is, Tomb Raider’s transformation from archaeological puzzle adventure to action blockbuster is complete. The result is a crowd-pleasing game, which offers only glimpses of what could be if this team were only allowed to take some braver risks with Croft’s next expedition.
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