My colleague and coworker Leigh Alexander yesterday published a semi-defense of Visceral Games’ (nee EA Redwood Shores) upcoming “adaptation” of Dante’s Inferno (entitled Dante’s Inferno). By “semi-defense” I mean she didn’t explicitly and enthusiastically endorse the game, but generally supported its right to exist under EARS’ chosen title and its self-professed association with a work that, to a large extent, set the direction for the modern Italian language.

It’s definitely a reasonable point of view. Certainly no developer has any responsibility to be particularly literary or high-minded. Anyone who listens to Idle Thumbs knows my personal distaste for the game is hyperbolic and probably comically exaggerated at times. But, actually, it’s a genuine frustration, because to me it is emblematic a larger issue. Here, slightly tweaked, is the comment I made in response to Leigh’s post:

“I just don’t see why this is based on Dante’s Inferno. If, as some have claimed, the core market doesn’t care about the game’s adherence to its ’source material’ — and surely it doesn’t — what usefulness is it to claim association in the first place?

“This could have been simply a game influenced by Dante’s imagery, as so many creative works have been over the centuries, rather than actually claiming to be any kind of even remotely meaningful adaptation of the poem. To me, it’s an amazing vindication of the claims of video games’ inability to thoughtfully construct ANY kind of meaningful thought: here’s how video games adapt one of Western culture’s defining literary works, and it consists of brutally ripping apart demons for eight hours, surely complete with idiotic throwaway one-liners.

“I know it’s not the duty of any individual game designer to ‘justify’ games to anyone who doesn’t play them, and it shouldn’t be, and obviously as a gamer I know full well that games are capable of more than this. But the reality is that most games DON’T have anything to say; most games DON’T communicate any meaningful thought; and most games DON’T deal with their subject matter in anything other than the basest, most ridiculous way. You could say the same for most fiction of any medium, but it’s certainly even more true for games.

“That’s clearly not a dealbreaker for me, since I still play a lot of video games, including the ones covered in the category I described above, and it doesn’t bother me all that much; if it did, I wouldn’t play, write about, and talk about so many games.

“But by claiming to have anything to do with Dante’s Inferno, this game loudly echoes that trend in a particularly frustrating way. It could have simply been called ‘Righteous Duty’ or whatever bullshit name [edit: Clint Hocking suggests 'Demon Hunter,' 'To Hell and Back,' 'Love be Damned,' 'Infernal'] with the same plot and mechanics — they could have even given Dante a shoutout in their ridiculous PR pitches — and I don’t think I would have batted an eye. But as the game industry’s big-budget, highly-publicized representation of a work that everybody knows by cultural osmosis, even if they’ve never read a word of it, it’s a big huge fucking depressing failure.”

God of War, which many have pointed out as a counterpoint to the general opinion I espouse, takes that latter approach. But while I’m not personally a God of War fan, it doesn’t offend me as a gamer; it’s just not my kind of game, mechanically speaking.

God of War is directly influenced by Greek mythology, but it doesn’t claim any kind of definitive association with a particular work in its title. Rather, it uses the cultural source material as a rough touchstone. Dante’s Inferno, ironically, appears to depart even more from its source material than God of War does, but makes an implicit claim that it is more related.

As Clint Hocking points out in a comment following mine, this also has the side effect of delegitimizing any hypothetical future video game interpretations of The Divine Comedy. (There have been “adaptations” in the past, but none with anywhere near the visibility and marketing might of an Electronic Arts production.) It basically guarantees the video game take on Dante’s epic to be juvenile nonsense. It may be a fun video game; I make no claims about that one way or the other, but it certainly isn’t what its title says it is.

I also don’t mean to imply I have any desire for a better Divine Comedy game; it’s never something I’ve particularly longed for, and I don’t mean to call for it now. I’m not saying EA should be making a game closer to the source material; I’m saying they should never have claimed the association to begin with.

If none of my arguments have been at all convincing, just load up this incredible video and skip to about 4:50. Maybe the whole interview is a piss take. But is that really relevant, when it appears to be 100% accurate anyway?

Ubisoft Montreal’s Far Cry 2 is not an inviting game. Like the war-torn (and presumably fictional) African state it depicts, Far Cry 2 is brutal, sparse, and offers little guidance.

Right from the start, your vulnerabilities are made clear: weapons you find on the ground rust and jam; you periodically suffer the effects of malaria; damaged vehicles require basic engine maintenance; and serious injuries demand improvised surgery, often with pliers.

On top of that, combat encounters (often approached with those rusted, jamming-prone guns) are fairly straightforward FPS affairs, and with the amount of mission-to-mission driving required in the game’s enormous open world, their frequency can grate.

Many gamers have gone online to post initial frustrations with the game — an understandable reaction from the perspective of somebody unaccustomed to its structure and design ethic, particularly in the context of an FPS.

But in the week since its release, there has been an interesting phenomenon unfolding. I have seen more and more posts by people announcing that Far Cry 2 finally “clicks” with them, that they have internalized the game’s structure and systems, and have been rewarded with unique, memorable moments.

For me, those have been Far Cry 2’s stock in trade. Game designers often speak about the dominance of the personal player story over the designer’s authored narrative. Indeed, that potential is powerful, and clearly more relevant to games than any other entertainment medium. But practically speaking, to me, relatively few games truly exploit that potential.

Far Cry 2 has been an exception. (more…)

Yesterday was the last day of 2008’s Game Developers Conference, which for the first time in several years I was able to attend without any preexisting press commitments. I didn’t go to any press conferences, announcement-oriented sessions, or spend much time in the press room (where I have overheard such classic video game journalist statements as, “That talk sucked; it was, like, targeted at developers or something”)–I just went to lectures and presentations, learned a lot, and met a bunch of interesting people, which is what’s best about GDC.

One of the more interesting lectures I attended was by Patrick Redding, narrative designer on Ubisoft Montreal’s upcoming Far Cry 2, whose creative director is Clint Hocking (Splinter Cell, Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory). Hocking also gave a fascinating earlier talk on how to qualify (and, by extension, better define) the rather vague term “immersion.”

Redding gave a great deal of insight into the remarkably ambitious dynamic African setting of Far Cry 2. Interestingly, at least as I see it, while Far Cry 2 and Crysis are both essentially followups to Far Cry, they have gone in drastically different directions–Crysis took Far Cry’s player choice in gameplay style and amplified it through the nanosuit, while Far Cry 2 takes Far Cry’s focus on open-ended environments and blows it up into a systems-driven, semi-autonomous ecology. Hence Redding’s rather unusual title, “narrative designer.” As distinct from a writer, Redding conceives not the dialogue itself but rather the underlying systems that allow Far Cry 2 players to (supposedly) participate in a dynamically-driven narrative, one that is largely shaped by gameplay choices.

In the narrative of the plot, Far Cry 2 takes after Conrad’s novel Heart of Darkness or Coppola’s film adaptation Apocalypse Now–”a journey into the depths of Africa and into the mind of a madman,” as Redding put it. Meanwhile, the narrative of the gameplay is more based on the Dashiell Hammett novel Red Harvest or Kurasawa’s classic film Yojimbo (arguably inspired by Red Harvest), in which the protagonist (here, the player) pits brutally pits warlord-led factions against one another. (more…)