The approach of the 4th of July seems like an ideal time to delve into an obscure part of American history. The founding fathers were rabid video game players. Fittingly, they didn’t generally have the same tastes.

Benjamin Franklin: Ben had lived most of his life with nothing but casual contempt for video games. Instead, in the age of dueling, he preferred the most dangerous game, sleeping with married women. One day, a charming lady on Facebook asked for help raising a barn in farmville. From there, he became branched out to the Bioware oeuvre, exploring every romance option available. Franklin died impoverished, the first victim of the microtransaction payment model. Gamer Tag: EarlyRiser69

George Washington: First in War, First in Peace, first in line for the new Total War games. An indifferent-at-best player, he was mainly hobbled by an ability to manage troop morale. Gamer Tag: HisExcellency

John Adams: Noted forum troll John Adams was under the mistaken impression that he enjoyed cooperative games. He was actually VAC banned from Left 4 Dead after screaming “All the perplexities, confusion and distress on this team arise, not from defects in us, but from [player's name]‘s INABILITY TO CR0WN THE f***ing WITCH!” Adams went on to have a successful League of Legends career. Gamer tag: FirePaladin1030

Thomas Jefferson: When asked, this laconic founder said only “The Sims. Words with Friends.” Gamer Tag: LoverNotPatriot

John Jay: Most historians will claim that Europa Universalis was his game of choice while Jay unwound from a long day of founding the Federalist party. In fact, this is exactly backwards. Modern evidence indicates that Federalist number 2 was intended as an After Action Report of a particularly heinous outing. Gamer tag: PUBLIUSdipLOmat

James Madison: The British Admiral Cockburn was so incensed at the constant tea-bagging done by James Madison after every Halo kill that he burned the White House specifically to destroy Madison’s XBOX. Dolly handed the console over in exchange for allowing her to save other valuables. Gamer tag: PUBLIUSrighter

Alexander Hamilton: Apologists for this founder claim that he simply held himself to a higher standard of sportsmanship than the average online FPS gamer. Others claim that he was simply a lousy shot. Either way, Hamilton was always a welcome sight on an opponent’s roster, or good for free kills in a free for all. Eventually, he moved over to StarCraft 2, where he climbed to the 1V1 Diamond League (Protoss). The famous duel with Burr was sparked when Burr claimed that he had “totally typed GG, my connection must have dropped before you saw it”, and Hamilton “called bullshit”. Gamer tag: PUBLIUSking

Something lurks under Kirkwall. Unnamed, unknown, but powerful; it infects the minds of all who dwell near it. Hawke, a refugee of blight-destroyed Lothering and eventual champion of Kirkwall, are among the very few to glimpse what is really going on. This may look like a political struggle between cruelty and terror. It is not. Whatever is corrupting Kirkwall is using the life and death struggle between mages and Templar as a means to it’s own end. The story of this entity is what Casandra pulls out of Varric. She trades him lie for lie, and comes out the victor.

From the standpoint of game play mechanics, this is a fascinating choice. There are two stories being told. One that Varric is telling, and one that Cassandra is hearing. There is the story that the player is unraveling, and the story the designers are hinting at. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a game developer hide the real story of a game within the narrative fiction of a game before.

In the theology of Dragon Age, humanity attempted to storm the gates of heaven; literally turning it into hell. From this hell, the darkspawn were born. It is the darkspawn which search for and unleash the Old Gods, causing the Blights. It is the Old Gods which constantly call out, begging for release. The Old Gods who taint and corrupt anything which happens too near.

In Dragon Age, demons are a real, tangible presence. They infect the sentient beings who inhabit Thedas, turning them into abominations. In Dragon Age Origins, Abominations were rare. Each was a tragic story happening to a named character who the Gray Warden may well have known. Certainly the Gray Warden knew the story behind the creation of each Abomination (save the ones that were encountered in the Fade). Contrast this with Kirkwall. Abominations were plentiful. They occur not simply in the mage’s tower, but in warehouses, fields, streams, gullies, the chantry… I’m honestly not sure there’s a place I didn’t stumble into several of them. This tells us that either the designers were lazy, or:

There’s something wrong with Kirkwall. It was purpose built as the center of the slave trade for a massive empire. Untold millions of sentient beings were herded through it’s streets to begin their new lives as chattel. Below Kirkwall is a Dwarven Thaig. Before the Champion’s expedition, that Thaig had sat untouched for centuries, and unused for millenia. The contents of that Thaig would be an archeological marvel, a chance to learn much about Dwarven history, perhaps the very history of the Fall itself. Would be, that is, were it not for the small fact that those who go down there tend to go mad.

There is so much insanity in this game that it would be easy to overlook the true craziness that happens Down Below. In the normal distribution of human personalities, we would tend to expect a murderer for every couple of saints. Given that this is a game about extraordinary people, perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised that the people are more monstrous than average. It’s worth drawing attention to the fact that twice we see dwarven expeditions into the primeval Thaig, and twice we see brother turn on brother over a trifling trinket or a pocket of gold. These are the incidents in which we see cut-scenes of Varric being questioned by Casandra. The game calls far less attention to your slaughter of a dragon than it does to the disposition of Varric’s brother.

The artifacts pulled from the Primeval Thaig are tainted. That much is clear. The sword wielded by Knight-Commander Meredith is made from such an artifact. Her strictness with the mages became outright paranoia and hostility. She herself becomes something akin to an abomination. It is possible that her paranoia is justified, at least insofar as it encompasses the mages of Kirkwall. I believe that the only mages who do not end up being possessed by demons are Hawke and Merrill. Every other mage in Kirkwall gives in to their desire for power– if only the power to keep themselves safe– and becomes an abomination.

Kirkwall is not a safe place for the souls of mages. It will seduce them and destroy them. Nor, does it seem, is this a safe place for the psyche of non-mages. It isn’t merely Knight-Commander Meridith who goes mad. The Arishok of the Qun also rampages through the city. After a half-decade of mostly-peaceful settlement and waiting, the Arishok eventually grows despondent over the corruption and filth of Kirkwall. So despondent, in fact, that he decides only blood and fire can purge the city. The similarities between these actions and the Right of Annulment cannot be overlooked.

Among your companions is an abomination. The mage known as Anders holds within himself a spirit possessing the qualities of justice. This spirit was bonded to this mage, and together the pair sought to find a better way for mages to integrate with Thedan society. Throughout their time in Kirkwall, the pair became darker. They brooded on the evils done to mages until finally they felt compelled to act. In a stunning act of terror, Anders and Justice used Qunari technology to destroy not merely the Kirkwall chantry, but also commit the purposeful murder of the one person who could have possibly reconciled the mage and Templar. With enough time in Kirkwall, even Justice became perverted, and turned into vengeance.

There is something lurking under Kirkwall. It might be an Old God clawing to the surface, or– terrifyingly– something even more cunning. Through it’s influence, Thedas has been set ablaze. Mage and Chantry are in a state of war against one another. The Seekers are trying to discover the whereabouts of the one person who has emerged from this opening salvo with soul unscathed.

For all the cut corners the designers took with the production of this game, for all the paring down the mechanics suffered, the story itself was rich and well told. So well told, in fact, that many players might not have noticed the slight of hand. Varric seems to have missed it himself. Whatever flaws we can point to within the game, Bioware did something bold and new with regards to storytelling within games. That is worthy of a song.

“There’s a recipe to a good hero, Hawke, it’s like alchemy. Take one part down to earth, one part selfless nobility, two parts crazy fool, and season liberally with wild falsehoods. Let that percolate through a good audience for a while, and when you’re done, you’ve got your hero”. Varric

“But here is an artist. He desires to paint you the dreamiest, shadiest, quietest, most enchanting bit of romantic landscape in all the valley of the Saco. What is the chief element he employs? There stand his trees, each with a hollow trunk, as if a hermit and a crucifix were within; and here sleeps his meadow, and there sleep his cattle; and up from yonder cottage goes a sleepy smoke.” Ishmael

The threat was realized, the riots had begun. Only a specific holy relic could stop them. Good news! I knew where that relic was, and was on my way to collect it. Bad news? I had sort of promised it to a friend of mine, for her to use hundreds of miles away. To which do I give greater weight: the lives of hundreds of citizens to whom I owe little to nothing, or the life of a friend to whom I made a promise?

Dragon Age 2 is about friendships and loyalty. Family, duty, and interpersonal connections. At the end of the game there is a choice to be made. You don’t know what that choice means, but that’s almost besides the point. What matters is why we chose to do what we chose to do. I chose friendship. In return, my friend chose me.

As important as your friends are, Dragon Age 2 is a story about you, and your exploits. It is not a story told by you. In fact I’ll say that it’s unique among games in that– within the fiction of the game– it is a story that is being told. And it is being told by an unreliable narrator. Video games may not have found their Citizen Kane, but they certainly do seem to have found their Moby Dick.

I hated Moby Dick. Dragon Age 2 would be a far superior work of literature if it’s only virtue were the omission of anything resembling Moby Dick’s Chapter 32. Dianu.

The story of Dragon Age 2 is told by a friend of yours. A Dwarven man named Varric. He’s a self confessed liar, with a nose for adventure and profit. Other friends include a blood mage named Merrill, the captain of the City Guards, a former slave, an apostate and (former?) Gray Warden, and a pirate.

In a large departure from the fantasy RPG norm, the player is not able to outfit and dress up companions. Fantasy RPGs, much in like fantasy football, statistics min/maxing is very much what people play for. And yet, it doesn’t really fit the theme of this game very well. Your companions are just that- companions. Friends. You are not their commander, you are not on a mystic quest to save the world. It is very rare that I go into my friend’s homes and decide what they will wear– games shouldn’t be different. Thus a simple mechanical change reinforces the theme of the game.

The end of the game involves a friend doing a Very Bad Thing. That friend will do that Very Bad Thing pretty much regardless of what you do. Your choice is how you respond. For all it’s myriad faults, Dragon Age 2 does a good job at representing this key aspect of human existence: we cannot know the outcomes of our decisions. They may be good, bad, or irrelevant. What’s important is the attitude with which we confront those choices, and the reasons behind our decisions. The game presents a much narrower scope of action than I would like. But as a meditation on human existence, it works quite well.

We see this in non fantasy stories all the time, in fact. It’s no coincidence that so very many cop movies have a rookie cop and a days-from-retirement veteran. One person to explain the rules, and the other to be explained to. Also: culture clash is comedy gold.

Which brings me to video games. Characters in Role Playing Games (RPGs) are, just as the name implies, playing a role. We inhabit a character who has a position within and defined by the world. The problem is that our characters have names, histories, families– if they’re real people they have everything real people ought to have. Unfortunately we players have just begun the game. We don’t know the 15-50 years of back story that our character has developed.We don’t know the history they would have learned as a child the prejudice they would have imbibed with the milk of their infanthood. We are, in short, a stranger in a society we ought to know.

There are a few solutions to this problem. The most cliche is to simple give the character amnesia. It’s the perfect excuse for not knowing who their best friend is– and also gives the player an immediate goal that coincides with the character’s motivation. Another interesting way to do this is the same “fish out of water” technique I mentioned in the cop example. Commander Sheppard can’t know every alien race because the galaxy is vast and humanity is new. The Vault Dweller is fresh from a vault. All ties are cut in an alien environment.

And then there’s Hawke. Hawke is the main character from Dragon Age 2. Your Avatar in that world. The iconic image, is of course female*, though you can also play a male version of Hawke. Hawke is a different sort of person than any other I’ve inhabited. She has a mother. A brother. She has history we don’t know about. At all.

We do meet her as she’s running from everything she’s ever known, and on the way to a land that loves her not. This would almost be the classic piscis ex aqua situation, except…

In the second part of the first act, Hawke is given a choice about who to work for in the coming year. That year exists solely as a cut-scene. She develops new relationships and strengthens older ones, all without player input and without player knowledge of what is happening. Mechanically, we are led to assume that our Hawke is continuing in the direction we have pointed her, but it does lead to an odd disconnect between what the character knows, and what the player is able to learn.

One more interesting thing that Dragon Age 2 does that is worth mentioning:
In most any body of literature, we know what the hypothesis is, and thus when the story is over. A scientific paper will state this up front, along the lines of “we thought X was true, did some testing, and we were right!** the proof follows”. A work of fiction is a bit different, but generally within the first chapter we know what the goal is: “win the Trojan war”, “found Rome”, “Marry Romeo/Juliet”, “rescue the princess from the 8th castle”.*** This is utterly unlike real life. In real life, we simply do not know when our story is over. Mythologically, people who do learn this information go mad– but the fact that it’s mere mythology sort of proves the point.

In Dragon Age, the conflict takes a long time to develop. I’m 3hrs into the story, and I don’t know what Hawke needs to do yet. I’ve got a couple quests I can do, so I do them. I’m basically killing time within the story until it develops more. In this sort of aimless day to day existence, I am playing Hawke very much like an actual refugee might behave. I don’t know what to do with Hawke, and she doesn’t know what to do with herself. But both of us know that she can’t just lay down and do nothing. This is a perfect marriage of character and player motivations.

Dragon Age 2 so far as managed to do something I’ve never seen a game do before, and do it in a way that I find intriguing. I’m not actually sure if this was the intended direction for the game, but I hope it was. Bioware has done something unique. I can’t wait to get back to Kirkwall.

*Suck it, Bioware Marketing.
** I can haz tenure now?
*** Yes, I did just compare Mario to the Iliad? why?

What interests me is this: there are at least 10 million, and perhaps as many as 27 million, people in the world for whom panel 2 is nearly-literally true*. In this entire conversation, we seem to have ignored or forgotten the slaves. No one is speaking of them, or for them. In 2011, slavery is as real as a punch in the gut. This is not a problem confined to the 3rd world.

What shocks me is the fact that I didn’t think about the slavery implications of the comic. Slavery is a fairly major hot-button of mine, both in and out of games. I don’t ever talk about “p0wning” people, and I’ve never been one to turn away from a “free the slaves” quest. Slavery is something I’ve spent a lot of time reading and thinking about in my life. Yet when it came up in this context, I allowed myself to forget about it.

That ends right now. If you’re reading this, and you both have money and give a damn about your fellow human beings, donate some money to an anti-American-slavery organization. Or perhaps to an organization that helps fight against slavery world-wide.

*I say “nearly”, because there is no such thing as a “dickwolf”.

War. War never changes. Those are the first spoken words in all of the canonical Fallout games. Which is a bit odd seeming. The war is over. The nuclear apocalypse came and went, taking humanity down to the basic survival level– in many cases below it. Even in the story presented by the narrator, the war for the Hoover dam ended about 4 years previously.

The government was– all governments were– smashed to atomic rubble. In the absence of government, Hobbes tells us that we are left with “A war of all against all”. There are those who take this as a good thing, and those who take this as a warning. The inevitable, bloody war between those philosophies is the focus of the Fallout games.

As alluded to in the introduction cutscene above, your character is a courier. You’re not sure what you were carrying, nor it’s importance, nor why you were shot for possessing it. The main quest of the game is trying to track down the person who stole it from you, though your motivations for this are entirely dependent upon what sort of character you wish to play.

One of the interesting things the game does mechanically is to give players a reputation ranking with various factions. Do nice things for a town, and that town will like you. If the New California Republic (NCR) sees you as an ally, they will give you a radio with which you can call for help. When the NCR representative told my character “you are not alone out here”, I was moved; the Mojave Wilderness is a lonely place. Alternately, if you go on a killing spree, your reputation will greatly diminish and factions will be ordered to shoot on sight.

One way or another, a player will choose a faction. The game pushes players towards the democratic New California Republic. If you don’t like the NCR, but want to go the “good” rout, the humanistic Followers of the Apocalypse offer another alternative. Players who want to be rewarded for slaughter, yet align with a government can play nice with Caesar’s Legion– an organization which sees physical dominance as the just reward of the strong over the weak. And anyone who wishes to devolve into simple thuggery makes a de facto declaration that they are a raider.

It’s an interesting way of meshing game mechanics with an overarching philosophy. As a player, I only spend a small fraction of my time thinking about this in mechanical terms. As I gaze into the wilderness, seeing people with problems that need solving, I ask myself what kind of world I want to build. This has lead me to siding with the New California Republic. They’re doing their best to create an orderly society– but one grounded in some principles of justice and self determination. They can be a bit heavy handed and tone deaf, but where the NCR has control, people are free to live lives, trade, and be fear from slavery.

Naturally, because I side with the NCR, I’ve been trying to clean up their mess with the escaped convicts known as the “Powder Gangers”. My policy is simple: shoot on sight.

After seeing Powder Gangers storm into several towns, killing the innocent, I decided to get more proactive. My friend Boone and I wandered into their base and started shooting. Some of them tried to flee, but we chased them down and coldly murdered them where they hid. We were methodical, we were quick, we were merciless. Every last one of them died at our hands.

As I started looting their hovels, the game informed me that I had lost Karma. As the blood-fury left me and I finally looked around at the bodies of those I’d slaughtered, the full gravity of what I had done hit me.

How was I any different than them? For all my vaunted morality, for every notion of fair play, for all that I wanted to build up a society… I walked into these people’s homes and destroyed their society. I offered not peace, but the gun.

Is that all I am? Am I just a bulldozer hoping that someone will come along behind me to build a better future after I knock down the rotted old infrastructure? Must I become a monster in order to protect people from evil?

I’ve got dozens of hours left to go in this game; I don’t have answers. I do know that I won’t consider this game over until I get an answer to those questions that I like. War never changes, but I cannot believe that the memes that push us towards armed conflict are the strongest ones.

In this game, there is a type of magic which requires the use of human blood for energy. In the society as presented in the game Blood magic is evil, and when (in the past) it it had been left unchecked, slavery and tyranny were it’s inevitable outcomes. So, Blood Magic= Evil. Indeed, many of your companions like you more if you kill those who practice it.

Also, well, this game is dark. The first time I was forced to murder a demonically-possessed child, I (the player, me) was haunted. Was there anything I could have said or done differently so as to prevent that outcome? I congratulated the game makers on producing an actual emotional response in me. The second time, though, the game asked me to kill a possessed child I was livid. There has to be another way. There was.

Blood magic, of course.** The game asked me to make a moral choice: was I willing to sacrifice the child’s mother (who bears part-blame for the child’s possession), use forbidden magic, to save the life of this child? Or was I to let the child die? For me, the choice was simple. There was no way in hell I was going to murder another child. None. The pure visceral reaction I had surprised me, but again– the game had succeeded.

And I succeeded also. The child was saved. Sadly, mom did die. And yes, that blood will forever stain my virtual hands…

*Note to Cristian Game makers: I would totally buy a game called Church fathers: Origen. The selling your library, and visiting the sick chapters could be an awesome examination of early church life. I admit that the self castration mini-game wold make this an M rated game, however.

**I wouldn’t have set that up in the beginning without the payoff, would I?

Books are fantastic at creating rich worlds, and showing how people live and think while within them. Books by their nature take place within the mind of the reader. They are, in this sense, an almost pure form of imagination, unconstrained by a need to produce actual artifacts. Books, then, are great at showing the microcosm how an individual mind works, and also very good at simply stating the rules by which a society operates. And yet, the fact that they take place within a reader’s mind has it’s own inherent drawbacks– A poorly described commonplace item, can lead readers to have a wildly different idea of what’s going on than the author intended. This isn’t always the author’s fault– try this exercise:

Take the sentence “Tom sat atop the elephant”, and rework it for someone who has never seen or heard of an elephant. Make it interesting, concise, and fit the tone of the story. 10 different people will come away having drawn 10 different pictures.

The other end of this is film. Film cannot exist without showing the viewer “things”, “artifacts”, “pictures”, “etc”**. Its language is that of camera work and forced angles. Narrative “voice” is controlled not simply by the words used by actors, but also by how the camera responds to various actions. The biggest strength of film (other than it’s communal nature) is that it can take the great writer’s axiom literally: “show don’t say”.

What film doesn’t do very well is show us the interiority of a person’s experience. All actions must exist as shown, with none of the self-justifications and denial that real people experience regularly. Evil is nearly always presented as “other”, and morality is very often shallow.

Games are a very new art form, and are still seeking a universal expressive language***. For now, this certainly counts as a major weaknesses. The strengths of gaming lay in it’s ability to place a player in the middle of an experience, forcing them to make decisions. Granted: players are making decisions at a remove from how actual persons might do them. Still, players aren’t reading someone’s thoughts about balancing a budget, and they’re not seeing someone balance a budget, if they’re playing SimCity or Dawn of Discovery, they’re having to make the choice between guns and butter. Most of us don’t want to slaughter civilians in real life… but it can be interesting to explore the life of someone who has to make the choice of kill or be killed.

All of this is prelude to tomorrow’s post about the movie version of Nine. Stay tuned…

*I feel that I should say something here about audio entertainment. But Alas! I just don’t know it well enough to make intelligent comments. For our purposes, we can think of books and audio as being much the same, though I know there’s a lot of room to call BS on that..

**Yes, yes, I did that on purpose

***Speaking of not having a universal expressive language! English sucks: by all the rules of grammar, that should have been “an universal”, but it sounds funky.

“Even if you never met him, you know this guy. He’s the guy at the country club with the beautiful date, holding a martini and a cigarette that stands against the wall and makes snide comments about everyone who passes by.”

— Karl Rove, describing Barack Obama

When I first read about this comment, my immediate reaction was that I couldn’t think of a single country club that would admit a black man named Barack Hussein Obama. Then I thought Rove was doing his usual shtick, i.e., take his greatest weakness and ascribe it to his opponent. In other words, I felt that he was describing George W. Bush at the club, not Obama. Makes much more sense that way, given Bush’s history with alcohol — and his smart mouth. It was much the same technique Rove used to destroy John Kerry’s Vietnam war record in 2004, all but accusing the nominee of being a liar and a coward. All this while Bush was hiding his “war record” in plain sight.

But a commenter at Talking Points Memo unpacked Rove’s comments differently than me and I think he nails it:

The key to the statement is that (in the image) he is with “a beautiful date.” Not Michelle Obama or, in the abstract, his wife, i.e. a wife like Michelle Obama. When you think of a “beautiful date” specifically at a country club, do you picture an African-American woman? Would Rove’s target audience?

Or do you picture him there, a black man, smoking a cigarette indoors at a country club, with a white woman on his arm?

When I thought of this, I got a chill. When you think of Obama’s vulnerability, I think the primaries showed that race remains a real and very serious obstacle, particularly with white Americans over 50. When you think of where we are with racism in this country, I think its a pretty safe bet that the final freak-out factor to overcome may be black men dating white women, in particular, one’s daughter.

If I were a completely amoral Republican operative, I’d try to find some white women that Obama dated before Michelle and get them into the public’s stream of consciousness anyway I could. Its a tactic so vile I don’t even like speculating about it, but if you want to be ready for the worst, I think Rove just tipped his hand at where they plan to go.

In all fairness, I have to ask if there is (or isn’t) the analogous scenario that an “amoral Democratic operative” could spring on McCain? Remember, in order for it to work, it has to resonate at the emotional level and be absolutely radioactive in the extreme. It has to address a fundamental fear that the electorate has about McCain.

Naturally Sony wants to stop this. They can’t stand the idea that they’re selling hardware at the expense of losing control of that hardware. Somehow, the idea of “giving the customer what they want” doesn’t seem to enter into the picture.

Perhaps that’s why I own a Nintendo DS…