Sly Cooper, Preserver of Caste Hierarchy

Posted on October 5, 2015 by Petar Duric

The titular protagonist, posing as the Bogeyman

The Sly Cooper series is one of the most beloved games of the PS2 era, one of the so-called “Holy Trinity” of PS2 platformers. The series features a world full of anthropomorphized animals, where Sly Cooper, a roguish raccoon, and his friends have a series of globetrotting adventures pulling off heists in all sorts of exotic locales. The series is lovable, charming, and exciting, and the news that it’s getting a CGI movie release for 2016 has me overjoyed.

Oh, and it really, REALLY hates poor people.

Maybe I should start from the beginning…

Intro: The Basics

The narrative of the game revolves around Sly Cooper and his allies fending off threats to his family legacy. It positions the protagonist as a rightfully privileged hero, and the antagonists as nefarious class usurpers. At every turn, the series reinforces the idea that the Bad Guys are bad guys because they challenge social hierarchy, directly or otherwise, and that the Good Guys are good guys because they are defending Sly’s bloodline, which is presented as inherently good for arbitrary and never-questioned reasons.

Sly 1: F@$! The Haters

The whole series starts with you learning about Sly’s central motivating tragedy. He’s descended from a long line of master thieves that aggregated all of their thieving knowledge into a single book that has been passed down through the generations. This clan takes pride in only stealing from other thieves, as they consider it the ultimate test of skill to rip off another larcenist. The very night Sly’s father was going to give him the book, five mysterious strangers invaded and ransacked their home. These strangers, known as the Fiendish Five, murder Sly’s father and tear the book into several pieces, retreating to the far reaches of the earth with their respective parts. This brutal and bizarre crime lands little Sly in an orphanage with nothing but his father’s cane, where he meets Bentley (a turtle, and the brains of their gang) and Murray (a hippo, and the brawn of their outfit). They quickly become fast friends and start stealing stuff, honing their skills for the inevitable day when they would embark to recover Sly’s inheritance.

Why do Bentley and Murray agree to dedicate their lives to Sly’s inherently selfish revenge scheme? How did they end up in the orphanage and what are their backstories? Who knows? The answers to these questions are never provided. In fact, Sly is the only character in the whole series with a self-contained backstory. Bentley and Murray (and every other character you meet) seem to exist for the sole purpose of aiding, validating, and/or antagonizing Sly throughout his journey.

The first antagonist and member of the Fiendish Five, Raleigh, seems to contradict the thesis proposed above. He is the aristocratic British heir of a sizable fortune, turning to modern piracy out of boredom. Frankly, he’s a pretty straightforward jerk.

Not so with the second, Muggshott (a bulldog), or the third, Miz Ruby (an alligator). Both are bullied and ostracized as children. Muggshott pursues control of his social circumstances through bodybuilding, and Miz Ruby pursues control over her environment through her magical voodoo powers. Both turn to crime because…the story needs Bad Guys. There is never any clear motivation given for their choice to enter high-stakes crime. Instead, you are left to believe that in the process of overcoming their marginalization, they simply became evil.

Fear the victims of bullying. Feeeeeaaar theeeeeeeem.

The story of the fourth member, the Panda King, is even more absurd. He was born and raised poor in China. In order to escape poverty and indulge his love of the art of fireworks, he put together a display for some noblemen, who ridiculed him for his poverty. In response, he swears revenge on his critics and uses fireworks to pursue crime. But not only is this runaway poor person thin-skinned and uppity, he’s also a sociopath. In the first level of his portion of the game, you see him bury a village under an avalanche. No reason for this action is ever given (except for some vague line about extortion), and you only see this incident from afar. In fact, you never see any bystanders harmed by Sly’s enemies, although you are frequently told he is helping innocents. You never see their faces, and Sly keeps everything he steals. He’s not Robin Hood. Instead, you are led to believe that a process of competitive larceny, whereby Sly ruins somebody and Inspector Fox rushes in to mop up, is a virtuous, populist societal good, without ever seeing the populations being “saved.”

The Panda King calls Sly on this when they finally meet, rumbling, “You are a thief, just like me.” Sly scoffs back, “No, that’s only half right. I am a thief…from a long line of master thieves. Whereas you…you’re just a frustrated firework artist turned homicidal pyromaniac!” Not only does Sly specifically cite his bloodline and inheritance as evidence of his moral superiority over the King, he explicitly links his enemy’s failed attempts as an artist, and by extension, his failed attempt to exercise upward mobility, to his violent, evil tendencies.

The Big Bad of the game, Clockwerk (an owl), further validates Sly’s bloodline through contrast. Clockwerk shows up in virtually every image of a Cooper clan member that you see, but only as a shadowy silhouette in the background. He is an ancient nemesis of the Cooper clan, so envious of the Coopers’ thieving abilities that he mechanized his body to live until the day he destroys the Cooper line. His stated goal is to end the Cooper lineage, steal their relics, and make their name fade into obscurity, and his stated motivation is envy. That’s it. No other plans. He just hates the Cooper bloodline and inheritance so much that he founded the Fiendish Five solely to kill them all. Here, you, the viewer, are asked to accept some dizzying circular logic: the Cooper legacy is worth protecting because Clockwerk hates it and is evil. But why does he hate the Cooper legacy? Because the Cooper legacy is good and he is evil. He is so evil, in fact, that the whole second game is largely about stealing and destroying his mechanized corpse…

Sly 2: Return of the Haters

After the events of the first game, you learn that Clockwerk’s mechanized body parts are in a museum, oddly enough. Sly and his Super Friends attempt to steal the parts, because they believe that Clockwerk could be revived and threaten the Cooper line once again. Unfortunately, a new set of villains in the form of the Klaww Gang, have stolen the parts first, for nebulous and nefarious purposes. In order to protect the Cooper line from future threats from Clockwerk, Cooper and Co must steal them back.

The game wastes no time explaining how evil the new guys are. The first couple of criminals you go after follow now-familiar templates. Dimitri (a…newt, I guess?) is a failed artist who turned to forgery and racketeering after being laughed at by the art world, and Rajan (a tiger) escaped poverty in New Delhi by using drug trafficking to build up enormous wealth. In both cases, you see these formerly marginalized individuals showing off ostentatious wealth in the form of Dimitri’s nightclub and Rajan’s “ancestral palace.” In both cases, that wealth is accumulated through work, not inheritance. In both cases, the game constantly ridicules these men for being so egotistical as to show off their earned wealth, as well as demonizing them for threatening Sly’s bloodline without knowing.

Here we witness the repulsive spectacle of a poor person making money.

It is worth noting that in the process of taking down Dimitri and Rajan, the Cooper Gang are aided by a mysterious colleague of Inspector Fox named Constable Neyla (a panther). At the moment they nail Rajan, the Cooper Gang are betrayed by Neyla, who imprisons them. From this moment on, Neyla is a recurring enemy, whereas before, she served largely as a plot spur providing periodic missions. This role is taken over by Inspector Fox, who Sly refers to as the biggest reason “this is all fun.” Law enforcement serves as a game mechanic, contributing to the global adventurism of the protagonists. The moment the law enforcement become characters with personal motivations outside of Sly’s adventures, they become evil.

To illustrate the point, Sly and Murray are thrown in a prison operated by the Contessa (a black widow spider), a warden affiliated with Interpol. Bentley seeks to rescue his friends, and learns in the process that the Contessa is an expert in hypnotherapy, which she uses to rehabilitate her inmates. But (gasp) there is a nefarious catch. Her hypnotherapy erases her inmates’ criminal tendencies, allowing them to reintegrate into society, but she also uses hypnosis to force inmates to tell her where they have stashed their criminal fortunes. Upon learning this, Bentley gasps, “That dishonors thieving and law enforcement at the same time!!”

To restate that differently, the Contessa steals the fortunes of other criminals…which is exactly what the Cooper Gang does. It’s the whole point of the series. It is extremely hard to discern what nuance makes the Contessa’s way of doing it so much worse than Cooper’s. If it’s the hypnosis, the Cooper gang have drugged, beaten, blown up, and otherwise brutalized their opponents on a regular basis. If it’s that she utilizes the aid of law enforcement, the Cooper Gang used Neyla’s help to take down two prior marks. If it’s that she is evading detection, Bentley is actively trying to break his friends out of prison. And yet, the narrative supports Bentley’s gasping assertion, despite its utter hypocrisy and self-righteousness.

Perhaps it has to do with the Contessa’s background. The Contessa is a black widow, both literally and figuratively. he came into her own astounding fortune, including her ostentatious Gothic castle, by marrying a wealthy Czech nobleman and then poisoning him. The explicit reason for her evilness is her murder and deception, but the narrative precedent suggests it’s her inheritance by marriage that is more offensive, as opposed to Sly’s virtuous inheritance by birthright.

After steamrolling the Contessa, the Gang target Jean Bison, a Gold Rush-era prospector who was frozen in ice for roughly 150 years before thawing out and building a freight-and-timber empire in Canada (it’s a weird game). Jean Bison aspires to “taming the Wild North, damming every river, and chopping down every tree, with progress delivered at the sharp end of an axe.” Jean Bison’s criminal enterprises exist to “bankroll his one-man war against Nature.” The Cooper Gang steps in, not just to steal from Bison, but to, “save the environment from his twisted sense of progress.” In other words, it’s not corporate entities, or societal consumption habits that are to blame for environmental destruction. It’s the backwards, anachronistic, white working class, and that bloc is so powerful and intimidating that only a royal heir like Sly Cooper is capable of stopping them.

All Hail the unstoppable lumberjack overlord!!

The equation of marginalization to evil becomes most blatant with the boss of the Klaww, Arpeggio (a parrot). Arpeggio is a bird whose species should be able to fly, but his wings are stunted, and therefore, useless for flight; he’s effectively disabled, but the game has absolutely no sympathy. He pursues an education in engineering, taking inspiration from Leonardo Da Vinci in a quest to create prosthetic enhancements, which the game presents as a megalomaniacal pursuit that ultimately leads to his criminality. He also takes on Neyla as a protégé, who has been working with him under Interpol’s nose the whole time in an effort to reassemble Clockwerk’s body as an exoskeleton. Sly confronts them, Arpeggio rants, Neyla betrays them all and fuses with Clockwerk to become immortal, and the Gang has to stop her, or some such nonsense like that.

But if Neyla is a cop, an inherent authority figure and a powerful person in this world, isn’t the game saying that privilege and power are dangerous and corrupting? In answer, the game’s manual gives us Neyla’s backstory. She grew up poor in New Delhi and scammed her way into, and through, a prestigious British university. Interpol caught her, but was so impressed by her scam that they gave her a job (so she could “get into the criminal mind”). So the answer is that privilege and power do corrupt…if you weren’t born into them in the first place.

This monstrosity is what happens when you let poor people get an education.

After a big battle, the Cooper Gang takes down Clock-la, who now hates the Cooper lineage, despite a complete lack of narrative precedent. In the money-shot of the whole game, the Gang extract Clock-la’s “hate chip,” the source of Clockwerk’s immortality and power, and crush it underfoot, causing all the Clockwerk parts to rot. The triumphant finale of the whole game is Sly’s destruction of evil, which is almost exclusively a threat to his bloodline. Why should you want to save this bloodline? Because it’s the Good Guy’s bloodline and hating it is evil. Kumba-friggin’-ya.

Sly 3: In Defense of the Natural Hoarder of Things

It is a testament to human creativity that after all of the political mess in the first two games, the third game remixes the old garbage into something fresh. This time around, the Gang is on a mission to open the fabled Cooper Vault, a giant safe in the side of a mountain on an island in the South Pacific that stores the stolen riches accumulated by the Cooper Clan throughout history. The only obstacle is that the island in question is already inhabited by a madman, named Dr. M, who has built a well-staffed fortress in order to crack the impervious Cooper Vault. The Vault’s key is Sly’s cane, but the Cooper Gang need to go recruiting to assemble the talent necessary to infiltrate the fortress and get anywhere near the Vault. More globetrotting ensues.

The first two enemies Sly faces walk the trail blazed by Jean Bison in Sly 2, namely, that of the evil white working class.The first thug, Octavio, is an Italian opera singer who was rendered obsolete by the onset of rock ’n roll. He and all of his diehard Italian fans form a mafia that sets out on a dastardly plan to sink Venice into its own canals in a bid to get attention (seriously). In order to destabilize the Venetian foundations, Octavio pumps tar out from under the buildings and into the canals, which enrages Sly, Bentley, and Murray, as an example of environmental degradation. This absurd scenario uses vapid, misplaced environmentalism to laugh at a white working class losing cultural relevance and clout, setting up Octavio and his goons as a punch line, rather than real characters.

But if the game sneers at Octavio, it snarls at the Australian miners Sly goes up against next. Out in the Australian Outback, Sly and his friends decide that to recruit a local mystic, they must first help him drive off the miners ravaging the environment in search of precious gems. There are no corporate logos or managers anywhere, just a mass of wayward workers, and the game reserves particular viciousness for these nameless average Joes. In order to drive off the miners, the Gang incinerates them on electric fences, unleashes pickup truck-sized scorpions into their mineshafts to slaughter them, and feeds several of the miners to a local crocodile in an effort to get the croc to “develop a taste for miner.”

That miner is about to be fed to a crocodile…and he’s the bad guy.

All of this arbitrary retribution is exacted against the nameless working masses in the name of “the environment,” without ever showing the populations affected adversely by the miners. At the end of Sly’s conflict with the miners, a cut-scene shows the “rescued” Outback, an expansive open desert with little vegetation and no wildlife, for which you have slaughtered hundreds. But the game still presents this pointless violence as inherently good, for seemingly no other reason than that the protagonist “saved” something from the unwashed laborers.

But at this point, the game tires of pissing on labor, and instead pontificates on how terrible royal heirs who aren’t Sly can be. To illustrate, the narrative travels to China, where the Gang try to recruit the Panda King as a demolitions expert by agreeing to rescue his daughter from the ruthless General Tsao (a rooster). Tsao is the heir of a long royal line, and he kidnaps the Panda King’s daughter, Jing King, in order to marry her and augment his family line. Until the wedding, he imprisons Jing King and basks in his own image like a peacock. Like Rajan before him, he has the gall to show off his wealth in the form of an opulent mountain fortress/palace/monastery. But the way the game signals to you that he’s a Really Bad Dude is his insistence that his bloodline is better than Cooper’s. For some utterly unknown reason, Tsao is as obsessed with denigrating Sly as he is with preening himself.

While the game laughs at Tsao, it’s also desperately trying to convince you that bad guys can reform and become Good Guys by holding the Panda King up as an example. Sly is initially wary about the King (you know, because he helped murder Sly’s father). But the King slowly wins over various members of the team by helping them on missions. This all culminates in his mission helping Sly, before which he gives his reflection a pep talk. Here, the game sends you into a dialogue mini-game where the Panda King has to calm his fractured psyche by getting his Yin and Yang sides on the same page (it’s like the writers saw a NatGeo special on Taoism while high, and then insisted on plugging it here). Panda Yin wants to utilize Sly’s help to free their daughter, and thinks Sly is actually an ok dude. Panda Yang thinks Sly is an uppity jerk who disgraced them and that they don’t need his help. The game sides with Panda Yin, shockingly, and tasks you with convincing Panda Yang of Panda Yin’s point of view with preprogrammed options. The winning line of reasoning states that “Cooper is a teacher of humility” and that that quality is somehow spiritually useful to them for its own sake.

Just to recap, Sly is the kind of guy who cites his bloodline as evidence of his existential superiority over the Panda King, and pisses on him for being upwardly mobile. Sly is the kind of guy who routinely involves his best friends in harebrained schemes to achieve his inherently selfish ends, without ever really asking them how he could lend them a hand with their problems. Sly is the kind of guy who gets angry with cops when they put him in jail for breaking the law. If Sly taught anybody humility, it sure as hell wasn’t by example, and so Panda King’s insistence that he can learn humility from Sly reeks of kowtowing. The game says the Panda King can be a Good Guy…if only he learns his place and stays there, at the feet of Sly Cooper, thieving royalty.

All of this confused classist nonsense culminates in the heist, where the Gang not only rescue Jing King, but also seek to ruin Tsao by robbing him of his family treasures. In the process of doing this, the Gang destroy Tsao’s ancestral temple and take his most prized heirloom treasures, and the game portrays his justifiable outrage as evil and megalomaniacal. Remember, the first game had you traveling all over the globe to ruin and brutalize five people in order to recover one such prized heirloom of the Cooper family that was stolen. But doing the same thing to Tsao is all well and good, because he is a Bad Dude. In anger, he even yells at Cooper, “Hear me Cooper, my lineage surpasses yours in every way!” It is at this moment that the game, in an attempt to simultaneously erase and embrace its own blatant elitism, has its protagonist utter the single most inane line of the series, “It’s not about the family name pal…it’s what you do with it!”

Are you kidding me? That’s the best you can come up with?

What does Cooper mean by this statement, precisely? What should one do with his family name? How have Cooper and Tsao, respectively, measured up to that standard? Who knows? The game never answers any of these questions explicitly. In fact, there are only two explicit reasons we are given to hate Tsao, one of which is the kidnapping of women. But the reason that is placed front and center, that is repeated more often than anything else, is the fact that Tsao believes his lineage is superior to Cooper’s. It is this apparent megalomania that really shows that Tsao is evil. Tsao is a villain because he failed to learn his place, at Cooper’s feet, as the Panda King did.

All of the troubling politics thus far coalesce neatly into the final level of this game, when we return to Dr. M’s island. After many further hijinks, aimed at infiltrating M’s fortress, Cooper, Bentley, and Murray manage to crack open the heavily guarded door to the Cooper Vault, and Sly insists that the three enter the front door of the vault together, having gone on so many adventures. But the game treats this touching gesture of friendship with cold, hard cynicism. The very minute the three friends step into the Vault, there is another door that only Sly is agile enough to even access, and so he is rescued by circumstance from having to actually follow through on his offer to his friends. As if the narrative had to make it clearer that it didn’t think Sly’s friends are worth enough to access his heritage, Bentley voices the sentiment explicitly, “…this place was built for you [Sly]. We’ll hold down the fort here.”

While Sly is making his way through the caverns of the Cooper Vault, in which the Cooper Clan seems to have stored a non-negligible percentage of global GDP in the form of gold, jewels, and art, that second statement in the above quote proves prophetic. Bentley immediately doubles back on the sentiment he expressed by asking Murray, “Do you ever feel like you’re playing second fiddle to Sly? Like he treats us as sidekicks?” Murray doesn’t see it that way, responding, “…we’re all in it together!” And all at once, Bentley starts unraveling the games politics in one fell swoop, “Sure, we’re all here, but are we equal? Who went into the Vault? Sly. By himself.” But Bentley never gets to finish his point, because it is at that moment that the Vault, now opened, is invaded by Dr. M’s goons. Murray succinctly summarizes the situation and their options, “Think of it this way, Bentley. If it were you in that vault, and Sly and I were out here, what would he do?” Bentley responds with the only answer, “Stop these thugs and protect his friend.”

It’s as if the game only had Bentley raise these questions in order to swat them aside. The crushing thing is that Bentley had almost discerned the game’s politics from within the game itself. Bentley, the brains of the team, was approaching a fundamental truth in his world. Sly doesn’t treat Bentley and Murray as sidekicks…but the game sure does. The narrative certainly does not see Bentley and Murray, let alone any other characters, as equal to Sly. Sly went into the Vault, alone, because this is HIS story, and nobody else’s. And it’s the moment Bentley begins to realize and articulate this that the game puts him back in his place with a sentimental appeal to friendship. Besides, Bentley isn’t in the Vault to question the politics of the situation, he’s there to “hold down the fort.” This is Sly’s show after all, and Bentley’s not even on the fiddle. He’s on the drum set at the back of the stage.

You were SO CLOSE!!

And it turns out that the villainous Dr. M voices exactly the same critique Bentley just brushed up against. Dr. M follows his goons into the cave and reveals that he was the brains of Cooper’s father’s gang, much like Bentley is the brains for the modern Cooper Gang. Once you learn this information, Dr. M tries to build a bridge with Bentley, “…I know the pain you suffer working under your inferior.” The inferior in this sentence is Sly, and we know from Tsao’s example what that means about Dr. M’s character. Of course Bentley refutes this logic. It doesn’t matter that Bentley organizes the heists, does all the research, does his own R&D for the Gang, and in general vastly outstrips the rest of the Gang in terms of hours dedicated to the Gang’s success, because the Cooper Gang has one thing…”brotherhood.”

Dr. M scoffs at this, “Brotherhood? That’s just what he wants you to think. It’s a tool to keep you in line!” Dr. M is right about the nature of the tool, but he’s wrong about who’s holding it. It’s the narrative, not Sly, that insists on relegating Bentley to not-even-on-the-fiddle status. But Bentley has been blinded by his own vapid appeals to friendship. The game has decided he’s not worthy to bask in Sly’s heritage. Only His Highness the royal heir can do that. When Dr. M makes a move to enter the Vault proper, even Bentley says so, “That haul is for Coopers only!” Dr. M pragmatically replies, “Maybe it’s time for men such as you and I to change all that.” Dr. M insists that the work he put in as the brains of the old Cooper Gang make him worthy of the Cooper fortune his work contributed to…and the game, in it’s infinite wisdom, is absolutely certain that this basic act of self-respect makes him a megalomaniac. How dare he think he’s worthy of Sly’s fortune!? He’s not part of the bloodline!!

In the end, like every Big Bad before him, Dr. M tries to kill Sly because (SURPRISE!!) he hates Sly’s father, and by extension, Sly’s bloodline. After they fight, there’s a short scene where Sly and Dr. M discuss how, despite Sly’s maniacal obsession with his lineage, that he’s just an individual, and Dr. M can’t blame Sly for the fact that Sly’s father was, apparently, a dick. In the process of reminiscing, the comparisons between Dr. M/Sly’s father and Bentley/Sly come to a head, with Sly insisting that he would risk his life for his friends. The problem with that is that the game has rescued Sly from including his friends meaningfully as equal partners in the story. Saying he’d risk his life for them is just the game’s way of showing Sly is a good person without actually making him do anything to assert, by action, how much he values his friends.

And the game makes it known exactly how much Sly’s friends are worth without him after Dr. M is defeated. Sly manages, through faked amnesia (long story), to run away with Inspector Carmelita Fox, leaving his friends behind. In the aftermath of his escape, Bentley narrates the epilogue, explaining that, “Without Sly as our leader, for the first time we each had to step out on our own. A difficult thing, we’d been together ever since we met at the orphanage.” In other words, Bentley and Murray finally strike out on their own, as individuals separated from Sly’s legacy…except not at all. Murray goes into stocked-van racing, driving the Cooper van with Sly’s raccoon-faced logo on the side. The game refuses to let Murray have his own unique identity.

But what happens to Bentley is even more insulting. You see, Sly left Bentley and Murray an enormous trove of treasure he managed to evacuate from the Cooper Vault before leaving his friends behind. So what does Bentley do with their newfound wealth? Does he spend it on his own dreams? Not at all! Instead, he builds another, much higher tech Cooper Vault to bury the treasure in.

The treasure really only served to show how generous Sly was. The game never had any intention of validating Bentley’s worth by insisting he deserved a cut of Sly’s legacy. And the game makes this even clearer in the final frames of the epilogue, where you see Bentley writing his narrated words, “So while this might be the end of our adventures, it could be the start of something even bigger!” The hitch? He’s writing those words in Sly’s family book, from the first game! The game refuses to allow for any possibility that Sly’s friends might have any identity beyond upholding his royal legacy, or that they are worthy of being equal partners in that legacy. Even after Sly is gone, living his own life, his friends are not allowed to the same. The game won’t let them, because, as we’ve seen throughout this series, anybody who thinks they have an inherently meaningful identity outside of Cooper’s lineage, or who merely insists that they deserve more than they were born into, is a villain…and Sly Cooper will always be there to put them in their place.

“For a Good Time. . .” – Calling Up Sexist Impulses to Sell Video Games

Posted on September 10, 2015 by Osvaldo Oyola

This post originally appeared on The Middle Spaces.
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Long before the days of the internet and companies leveraging a fanbase willing to seek out commercials for their favorite properties and brands, TV spots and print ads were the only chance things had to catch on. By interrogating those old ads it is possible to uncover the strategies and cultural assumptions of those efforts to grab an audience. I recently came across an advertisement on the back cover of Power Pack #1 (1984) and it struck me as making an association that is simultaneously bizarre and prescient.

I remember the ad from my early teen years (I turned 13 the summer this comic came out), but I had never given much thought to what it offered and how it offered it. The ad is certainly slicker than most ads of the time. I am sure at the time it seemed like an extravagance. For 50 cents you could call a 900-number to learn about Parker Bros video games. My mom kept a strict eye on phone use in our house, and no attempts to use math to show her that regardless of how long I stayed on the phone, local calls cost a flat fee of 10.2 cents ever worked. Mami was wary of what seemed like confused and obscure systems that siphoned away money. I knew better than to risk an errant 50 cents showing up on the bill. But regardless of how strict (or not) moms might have been back in 1984, I can’t imagine that this effort by Parker Brothers video game division was very successful. I knew of no one who enthusiastically described a soon to be released game that they learned about by calling this hotline, or some strategy for Gyruss that had heretofore gone undiscovered. No kid even claimed that his “cousin” had called and learned some made-up-on the spot news about a new Star Wars game.

No. What is noteworthy about the advertisement itself, is not what it offered, but the banality of its fucked up normalizing of masculinist behavior to sell its products to kids.

The ad features the perspective of being inside a bathroom stall, with “For a Vid Time Call 1-900-720-1234.” Beneath it is a bunch of boastful video game-related graffiti. Instead of the usual puerile context of bathroom stall scrawl, we have a poem about Q-Bert, a drawing of a snake (a knowing phallic reference to the dongs common to bathroom stalls?), and some back and forth braggadocio about owning the James Bond 007 video game. Below the photo is some text ostensibly describing the service, but not really saying much—like calling a number you find in a bathroom stall, you never know what you’re gonna get.

Common bathroom graffiti. Big boobs. No head!

Think about it for a second…This ad is asking young, presumably male, readers to associate calling this number with calling a number scrawled on the door of a bathroom stall. Consider how bathroom graffiti of this type is mostly used to shame women (this in both men’s and women’s restrooms), make homophobic claims about other men, and for boasts about hypersexual pursuits. Putting a woman’s phone number in a stall is the analog version of internet slut-shaming and abusive social media commentary. “I fucked Stacy in this stall” is meant to give the current crapper a vicarious thrill, the suggestion that they too could have a quickie in a public bathroom—as a man they are entitled to it. (Though my estimation is that those who write that shit in bathrooms are the losers of the sexual world, just as studies show that online gamer abusers are the losers of their world).

So for this advertisement to entice young men (and remember, comic readers at this time were still assumed to be boys between the ages of 8 and 14) with an allusion to the dirty side of sexual politics is just weird. Weirder still is that there was no objection to this idea being used to advertise these games (that I know of), perhaps because the feature never took off, but also in part because doing that shit is considered normal “boy” behavior. The ad’s direct association of a potential wealth of video game information with the sexual discourse of the public bathroom is speaking directly to a young male market that has already absorbed American culture’s obsession with virility and competition, and women’s place in that obsession. It is selling the 80s video game equivalent to Pick-Up Artist “culture,” with its email newsletters, seminars and books with “tips and tricks” for success. As reviews of the recent Adam Sandler film Pixels and its sad nostalgia remind us, in games ranging from Double Dragon to Cruisin’ USA, in the 80s the promise of a girl could be the prize of a video game (something the film makes a literal reality). (Actually, this hasn’t really changed at all, and you should check out Anita Sarkeesian’s Tropes vs. Women: Video Games for her excellent analysis of this in “Women as Reward“). Writing a woman’s number on a bathroom wall represents a sick double-valence: the possibility of an easy lay or the opportunity to spout uninvited salacious and/or abusive comments anonymously to a stranger.

Given the association of video games with a male-dominated space hostile to women as early as 1984 then the negative reaction by a segment of male gamers to a critique of sexist tropes in video games and the impossible categories the games settings, plots and assumptions create for women in the games makes perfect sense. The reaction is an extension of that same frustrated entitlement that writes Stacy’s name and number in a public stall.

In other words, in a sort of obtuse way, this advertisement prefigures the attacks on Sarkeesian and “Gamergate” vitriol directed towards any woman that speaks up about this topic.

A strange mix of private/anonymous location (the stall or the seat in front of the game screen) and the public behavior that emerges from the discourse of those places, leads to the automatic id-driven lashing out at interlopers who “don’t understand.” Just as the comic ad promises access to special knowledge and thus video game success (leading to being a “real” or “hardcore” gamer), the cultural gate-keeping of the geek-o-sphere seeks to maintain an area of male power through leveraging media conspiracies (“it’s about ethics in journalism!”) and narratives of the “fake geek girl.” These, of course, are narratives constructed after the fact to make the abuse cohere with their self-image. Just like any other activity that becomes synecdoche for masculinity, maintaining a particular male video gaming in-group status appears predicated on treating women like shit (or condoning others doing so). This activity is reinforced as a “cultural” value virtually through game actions (women as prizes, women as props) and explicitly through abusive language and other online behavior (or even sometimes in person!). All the while, this attitude is exacerbated by an expectation that any women involved with video games must be sexually available to men. It seems about as healthy as trolling for dates in a bathroom stall.

I do want to pause for a moment, however, and make sure that I do not come off as being anti-graffiti. I love graffiti, have maintained a tumblr with graffiti on and off for a couple of years, and spent many a lunch hour at my old job wandering around lower Manhattan taking snapshots of stuff ranging from toy-ass tags to totally bombed out walls. Graffiti, even bathroom graffiti, can be wild and inventive, creative in ways that impress me more than a lot of contemporary art. Spend time going through a Google image search for “bathroom graffiti” (though that link comes with a possible trigger warning) and you’ll see it can be funny and just plain appealingly weird (like the weird and raunchy, but not necessarily sexist, “lobster cock”). There is something about its invisibility through its ubiquity and the palimpsest quality of years of going over each other that makes discovering it a thrill. Not all of it is in the tradition of “For a good time call…” or homophobic claims about the bartender. However, the particular context of the Parker Brothers ad connects their product to unwanted sexual solicitation and normalized notions of women’s sexuality and male entitlement. It was not simply jokey cartoons about poop or reminding us that Led Zeppelin Rocks!

Anyway, this is all to suggest that the ad is a signifier for the way masculinity is linked to presumably male-oriented (or at least the subject of male-focused marketing of) activities and thus makes the culture around those activities pretty insular. It’s synecdochal. The activity stands in for manhood and manhood for the activity, but you need only consider the arc of video games in our culture (from kiddy novelty or nerd-stuff to billion dollar movies and New York Times reviews) to understand the malleability of masculinity. Hard and fast ideas of what being a man means and what a man does are absurd. The very fluidity with which masculinity can be framed is a good thing though, because it also means there is a chance to imagine a masculinity that does not require an underbelly of anti-woman and homophobic ideals to exist. The pathologies of masculinity makes us suckers for capitalism. Advertisements like the Parker Brothers’ Video Hotline tap into young boys uncritical acceptance of patriarchal ideology to shill another layer of advertisement that they hope the consumer will pay for. But whether it flies or fails, ultimately we all pay for it in the ongoing reinforcement of toxic and unnecessary ideas of male entitlement.

Noir Minus Shooting People

Posted on February 27, 2015 by Shonté Daniels

Hot Tin Roof gives you a cat, a gun, and makes you figure out the rest

Hot Tin Roof: The Cat That Wore a Fedora by Glass Bottom Games is a noir themed 3D side-scroller starring Private Investigator Emma Jones and her feline partner, Franky. With Jones’ all purpose revolver, the two scour all over to solve the slew of unsolved cases that have plagued the world of Tin Roof.

The game is an innovative blend of mystery, platforming, puzzles and exploration. It finds inspiration in games like Metroid and Castlevania yet carves its own identity in with its 3D, noir roots sultry smooth jazzy shadow lighting and snarky dialogue. This is the most enjoyable part of the game, exploring Tin Roof and its civilian characters. It was fun and playful while maintaining a sort of seriousness I expect in a noir drama. Think less like Rockstar’s L.A. Noire and more “Radio Daze,” the Rugrats episode where Tommy, the masked detective, solves the mystery of “The Maltiese Woodchuck”.

The game rewards you for exploring outside of the beaten path, but going off the beaten path sometimes leads to a lot of confusion and aimless walking. Hot Tin Roof‘s world isn’t exactly easy to comprehend, and unfortunately there is no map system in the game. It’s a large enough world, with enough twists and turns, to make getting turned around incredibly easy. Similarly, the game doesn’t provide a solid way to point the player toward progress.

Hot Tin Roof does have a tip system to help you if you’re stuck, but even then those tips aren’t always useful. Further, tips can only be accessed at the police department, so heading back to get a tip is not always convenient. Hot Tin Roof relies on the player’s patience and intelligence to figure out where to go next, but unfortunately my patience wore thin quickly. The game does very little hand holding, which is great when you want to work through a puzzle on your own, but a little nudge now and then would have been appreciated.

I also faced a few issues with small bugs. Towards the end of the game, when I caved and checked a forum to figure out what to do, I discovered that there was a bug that prevented a conversation from starting that would have helped me know where to go next. There were other dialogue related bugs, where conversations were either cut off or didn’t pop up at all, but the developers have been routinely patching the game, so the minor problems I faced are already fixed.

Issues aside, there is still a lot to enjoy about this game. Jones’ revolver wasn’t perfect, but it was a fun tool to play with. Reloading the revolver felt slow at times. There is a shortcut to instantly reload, but it only reloads one specific bullet into each chamber. Sometimes a puzzle required different kinds of bullets to complete, so if I wanted, for instance, two bubble bullets and two fire bullets, I’d have to reload those manually. Since the gun is crucial for the entire game, reloading did lose its luster after the first few times.

But on the plus side, I never had to kill an enemy, and that actually felt really good. Rather than shooting baddies or pointing the gun at enemies to intimidate them, I used the gun to reach high places, burn boxes or find invisible items, among other things. Using a gun as everything but a weapon allowed the game to keep its not-so-serious noir charm. And hey, gathering new clues did feel rewarding, especially if I found them without having to hunt for too long. I may not have always known what I was doing, but neither did Jones, so we had that in common.

Hot Tin Roof does a great job of creating a world I want to solve crimes in. It requires intelligence, curiosity, and most importantly, patience, to solve all the mysteries Tin Roof face. The game is missing a few key mechanics like a map and hinting system that could have prevented the game from being infuriating at times, but even without it I found enjoyment in the city of Tin Roof. There were a few splendid moments where I felt like a real detective, running around gathering search and arrest warrants to capture the poor chump who thought they could get away Scot-free.

The Marvellous Miss Take

Posted on January 28, 2015 by Shonté Daniels

The Marvellous Miss Take is one of the best stealth games I’ve played in a long time. I should be honest and note that the game was released on Steam and GOG back in November, so I’m really late to the party. However, I don’t think Miss Take received as much praise as it deserves, and I want to spend some time to acknowledge how simple and enjoyable it really is.

The story revolves around Miss Sophia Take who is on a mission to reclaim her late great aunt’s collections of paintings that were stolen from Sophia and placed in different galleries all throughout London. With the help of Harry Carver, an ex artist and expert thief, and Daisy Hobbs, a seventeen-year-old loner who can pickpocket anyone in seconds, the group (two women, one person of color, all playable to boot!) becomes the foxiest bunch of thieves in the city.

The Marvellous Miss Take is all about stealing art in the most collected way possible. The game breathes composure. Nothing feels better than sauntering over to a painting after avoiding suspicious guards, stuffing the art into your pocket and slowly walking away as if daring the security to watch you exit through the fire escape. Even the music sways in a combination of smooth jazz and trip hop that contradicted the amount of anxiety I felt hiding behind a pedestal hoping not be seen. If you’re caught, all serenity is lost, and the game ends.

The harder it gets (more police men, more cameras, more guard dogs), the more the game requires silence, patience and thought. Unlike other stealth games, like Splinter Cell or Hitman, violence is never an option in The Marvellous Miss Take. There were multiple times where I wished I could choke the guards into unconsciousness, or shoot the cameras until they broke, or anything to speed through a level without any threats. These were useless wishes, yet it was refreshing to not have them granted. Violence is incredibly common in popular games today; having no trace of violence felt like an innovation.

The most enjoyment lies in the game’s balance. Miss Take rewards players for finishing a level quickly, but also punishes them for going hastily. Running, for example, is tricky because the sound of running can alert guards to a thief’s location and reveal their hiding spot. But running can also help evade security by forcing them in one direction while the player tip toes in another. The key is to always be a few steps ahead of your enemies. Successful heists feel like a game of chess that results in a satisfying checkmate.

As challenging as it is, the game doesn’t come without a few flaws. For instance, I had a guard get stuck in a doorway, making it impossible for me to get out without getting caught. But those issues rarely occurred, and don’t outweigh the enjoyment I had for playing a stealth game that won’t let you leave a gallery after a successful heist without Sophia’s signature, chic sun hat.

The Marlvellous Miss Take is a wonderful game that felt like a brainy puzzle game. It’s combination of chill music, nonviolent action and cool characters created a stylish environment unlike many games before it. At the end, having collected all of Sophia’s aunt’s paintings, I felt as if I really did bring righteousness back into a previously unhip world.

Lindsay Lohan’s The Price of Fame is Pretty Cheap

Posted on December 22, 2014 by Shonté Daniels

It is well understood that celebrities are seen as a species far beyond human. They are glorified and criticized constantly for what they say or don’t say, wear or eat way more than any person should. And because of that scrutiny, many celebs feel the heavy burden of the limelight’s obsession with perfection, and they simply crash and burn. Lindsay Lohan may be one of the best people to understand this.

“I don’t think I realized that the cost of fame is that it’s open season on every moment of your life.” A quote from Julia Roberts popped onto the screen as Lindsay Lohan’s The Price of Fame first loaded. Another quote by Vicki Baum compared success to the North Pole, a solitary, frozen place. Below the quotes is a cartoon Lindsay Lohan, smiling.

This game is not made to define fame as glamorous fabulousness like Kim Kardashian’s hit, Kim Kardashian’s Hollywood. This game, I suspected, would be the antithesis of Kim’s naive look into the daunting task of being a celebrity, and who else but Lindsay to prove this! I was excited to see how Lindsay, someone who has struggled with life in the public eye, would take on the troubles of being famous in a mobile game.

Unfortunately, the seriousness I expected ended at the sobering introduction quotes. The Price of Fame tries to use parody and humor to make its point, and it effects didn’t make me feel anything.

The freemium app is equivalent to Cookie Clicker, a type of idle game where players keep clicking an item to gain more points. In this case, it’s swiping the screen instead of clicking, and earning followers instead of cookies. Fans are treated by the game as currency, so the more fans earned the easier it is to upgrade items to earn more fans to upgrade items to earn more fans, and so on.

In some ways, this mechanic could be used to demonstrate how and why celebrities do ridiculous things in order to garner more attention. The game even makes fun of real pop culture events, like Janet Jackson’s Superbowl Halftime nip slip or selling baby photos. On the other hand, it’s hard to feel as if anything I do as a player in the game has any sort of weight or repercussion. Janet had to post a video apology, her record sales with down due to outrage. It was controversial and outrageous, especially considering Justin Timberlake did not nearly face as much backlash as Janet did. But If I click to have a “wardrobe malfunction” in The Price of Fame, I win over more fans. That’s it. There is no true price of fame, just swiping.

The idle game genre does not do much to make any actions feel significant. There are upgrades that earn fans without ever swiping, and perks that help gain fans even when the game is closed, so eventually the game runs itself. At that point, I no longer need to care about the game.

This is not how I imagine fame to be. If living in the spotlight leaves me emotionally and physically unscathed, why would Julia Roberts be condemning it; why would Vicki Baum comparing it to the chilly North Pole? Why would Lindsay Lohan be slowly working to bring her life back around because of it?

In fact, other than the title, the game lacks any indication that it is, in fact, Lindsay’s game. While it works so hard to poke fun at other celebrities, the game rarely mentions Lindsay herself. It is possible to have “Not Nice Girls” be a part of an entourage, but that’s the largest reference to any part of Lindsay’s career. There is no mention of mug shots, DUI’s or rehab. Lindsay herself shows up spontaneously as a fan, and quickly disappears with a swipe of the finger.

Though, maybe this is what Lohan wanted. She first appears to be a consultant on how to play the game, explaining what upgrades do and how to customize characters, and then she immediately becomes a fan. She no longer has to succumb to peer pressure of a celebrity life. She is watching you struggle, much like others watched her struggle in reality.

Except here is no struggle. The price of fame means nothing when it’s impossible to feel any sort of backlash. While it tries to teach a lesson about the pressures of being a celebrity, the game lacks enough seriousness to make anyone question any danger. Lindsay Lohan’s The Price of Fame does too much for laughs, too little for thought.

Atari Comes Back, Maybe Sort Of

Posted on December 8, 2014 by Charles Bell

Atari was once the most successful home video game companies in the world. That sounds impressive, but the fact that it was once one of the only home video game companies in the world is far more noteworthy. When a company leads the way like Atari did, it can be difficult for anyone else to gain traction as a worthwhile competitor. Unfortunately for Atari, that wasn’t the case in the video game industry.

While many of us hate to see something that holds such a sentimental value decaying because of its lack of monetary value, over the years we looked through our fingers and felt a twinge of guilt as the company was continuously overshadowed by other giants. Nintendo and other console/PC developers came onto the scene and, eventually, the name Atari was nothing more than a memory.

But Atari is more than a memory, and those who think otherwise may be surprised to hear that the company hasn’t disappeared over the years. As it turns out, they’ve just been waiting to make a comeback, albeit in a smaller fashion.

Most CEOs take on a failing company in hopes of bringing it back to its glory days, but Atari CEO Fred Chesnais isn’t one of them. In fact, he’s more than willing to leave those days in the past. Instead of setting Atari up for failure by trying to regain their share in the console market, the new executive is setting his sights on more realistic goals for the company’s future. And he’s starting by abandoning the branch that made them successful in the first place—consoles.

Earlier this year Chesnais told WIRED that he realized it’s time to “let other people be Atari.” Instead of trying to build the brand back to what it was, he’s allowing other studios who are already in touch with today’s audience to license the brand as a way of attracting more attention.

Instead of classic action or adventure games, Chesnais has chosen to steer the company down a new path in gaming. Earlier this year, they entered a partnership with FlowPlay, a social gaming studio that helped Atari create their own social casino gaming platform—Atari Casino. Set to launch next month, Atari Casino is reported to have one outlet for those looking to play with virtual money and another for those who wish to play with real money in states where the practice is allowed.

On paper, it’s a smart move for the company. Statista shows that the online gambling market has seen a steady rise in profits since 2003, a trend that they’ve predicted will continue into and beyond 2015.

However, that isn’t to say that they won’t face steep competition in their new market endeavors. Chesnais may be willing to let other gaming console companies “be Atari,” but there’s already an existing company that holds such a title for the online gaming community. Betfair, an online gaming group based out of the U.K., has already established itself as the world’s largest Internet betting exchange. It’s also currently available in U.S. states where gaming is legal. Thus, if Atari chooses to move forward in online gaming, they will soon find themselves going up against such industry giants.

Gaming isn’t the only market Atari has decided to dip its toes into. While working on targeting adults through their online gaming, the company is also in the process of making attempts to connect to a younger audience. This is, of course, an age group that the company initially attracted during their heyday with console games.

Chesnais believes that in today’s market, gaming companies are no longer competing against one another—they’re competing for the user’s time. And because two of the biggest time-pulls among the age group are social media and video-sharing sites, such as YouTube and Vine, Atari is looking to create their own, similar content through a project called Atari TV.

Established earlier this year, the first installments of the program feature a daily video blog called The Real Pele, which followed the soccer star throughout the World Cup in Brazil.

However, Atari’s ability to make a name for themselves in that market could prove to be just as difficult as their goal to enter online gaming. Each video that they’ve posted to their account only has a few thousand views, and subscriptions to the channel have remained in the low hundreds. With over 100 hours of content uploaded to their site every minute—that’s according to Expanded Ramblings— getting their share of the traffic could be harder than they anticipated.

It’s been challenging for Atari thus far to gain some headway, and it looks like it will continue to be so for some time while they press on and work in the shadows of their competitors. However, at least they won’t be in the shadow of their previous successes. It will be an uphill battle, but entering a new industry gives them an opportunity for a fresh start and, hopefully, a brighter outlook for the future.

There’s no denying that new projects from the company will likely lack the same enthralling aspect that the games of its past, but I can’t help but feel I owe them at least another look. It, if nothing else, will alleviate some of sympathy or pity I feel. They gave me Pong, so the least I can do is give them a little bit of my time. Who knows, maybe I’ll be pleasantly surprised.

Too Many Choices

Posted on September 5, 2014 by Noah Berlatsky

After this weekend’s post on whether video games can be art (and/or good art), I thought I’d check out Depression Quest. The game is somewhat infamous because designer Zoe Quinn’s ex publicly attacked her on some message board or other, and then other folks joined in because (as far as I can tell) they hate women and possibly because the idea of a video game in which you don’t shoot people frightens them? I am unafraid of video games in which you don’t shoot people, though, so I went ahead and played it.

Depression Quest has an ambitious concept, especially for a video game; it’s intended to give you a sense of what it’s like to live with depression. It’s a text adventure, which positions you as a middle-class, college-educated alterna-sort, of indeterminate gender, working a minimum-wage job and struggling to get through the day. You have a more outgoing girlfriend, a loving if not especially sympathetic mom, a more successful and friendly brother, some online friends and some actual physical friends. The game wends along, describing your anxiety, neurosis, and general inability to cope. This is a typical passage.

“A couple hours later the two of you find yourselves in a familiar position: on the couch, watching comedy shows on Netflix, a box of pizza open on the coffee table in front of you. As you look across the couch at her, you start to feel anxious. You feel bad about effectively forcing the two of you to stay in tonight, again. While you are always appreciative of your partner’s efforts to take your feelings into account and help make sure you’re socially comfortable, you sincerely worry that you’re holding her back from enjoying a more fulfilling relationship.

So…is it art?

I would say that yes, absolutely, Depression Quest is art. It’s true that its goals are more social and educational than purely aesthetic — but lots of art works towards social and educational goals (The Jungle; The Handmaid’s Tale; James Baldwin’s essays, and on and on.) The game works to create empathy and understanding, and to create and examine emotional states. Those are all recognizable aesthetic goals. It’s definitely art. The question, though, is whether it’s good art.

Here the answer is a lot less certain. Again, I’m impressed by the concept; the idea of using a game to explore mental illness is exciting, and using interactive fiction seems like an intuitively promising way to do so. Mental illness is difficult for people to sympathize with because for folks who aren’t mentally ill it’s hard to put yourself in the brain of somebody who is. Using a game to force that identification, to put you in the place of someone making those choices, seems like it has the potential to create empathy and understanding in a way that less immersive art forms, from novels to film, do not.

Again, that’s the theory. The practice doesn’t exactly hold up though. In part this is because, as it turns out, games are not as immersive as fiction — or at least this one isn’t. Quinn deliberately leaves a lot of the game details open-ended. Your minimum wage job isn’t specified; the project you’re working pursuing on your own time isn’t specified; even your girlfriend is vague around the edges — she offers sympathy, or retreats, or wants sex, but there’s never a descriptive passage which makes her come to life as a separate, individual character, the way there would be in a good novel. This lack of detail is undoubtedly deliberate, it’s meant (like your own non-specified gender) to make the story resonate as widely as possible.

For me, at least, though, it just made the scenario seem schematic and uninvolving. Why do I care what my girlfriend thinks when she isn’t a person? How can I feel how numbing my job is if I don’t even know what I’m doing for a living? The world is too indistinct for me to care about engaging with it. The character I’m supposed to be simply isn’t vivid enough for me to care about him or her, even if he or she is supposed to be me. (The moody anonymous Somber Piano Music is perhaps meant to bridge this gap. It does not.)

The problems only get worse when you have to make choices. At each turning point, Quinn gives you a number of alternatives, as in Choose-Your-Own Adventure books — but in some cases, the choices are crossed out, because, when you’re depressed, you often can’t do the thing you know you should, whether it’s loosening up and sleeping with your girlfriend or telling your mom you’re really sad and need help.

It’s a clever conceit…but again, not clever enough. The limited choices are supposed to give you a sense of what it is to be depressed — but the problem is,you still have choices, and it’s easy to figure out what your best remaining options are. Adopt the cat, see the therapist, take your meds, try to be as outgoing and honest and open as you can. Pick the right options, and things turn out more or less okay. That isn’t what it feels like to be depressed, I’m pretty sure — and it’s also misleading, insofar as (from everything I’ve heard from friends with mental illness) not all therapists are good thereapists and getting a bad one can be miserable, and meds are unpredictable and can make things worse in various ways if you’re just a little bit unlucky with your body chemistry. Despite those crossed-out choices, Depression Quest makes depression seem like something you can choose your way out of. It makes depression look easy.

The very things that seem like they might make Depression Quest especially effective — the open-endedness, the interactivity — instead make it banal and emotionally unaffecting. In contrast, art which is more specific and more controlled — like, say, Charlotte Perkins Gillman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper,” or the brutal suicide scene in Sooyeon Won’s Korean comic “Let Dai” — are a lot more engaging, and a lot more harrowing. Even the infamous depression sequence in Twilight, where Bella just mopes and mopes and mopes, seems like it works better — it feels tedious and frustrating and you just want her to get over it and she doesn’t and it goes on and you want her to get over it and it goes on — you’re trapped with her, this person you don’t really like who is behaving irrationally and won’t stop and there’s nothing you can do. You can’t make the best choice, or the second best choice, or any choice. You’re in a particular consciousness that isn’t working right, and there’s no way out. In Kafka, say, time slows down and expands, till you’re dragging on interminably, pulling an ugly insect body behind you. The specificity of the experience and the lack of options are precisely the point; as a reader, you’re nailed to this particular self and its decisions, or lack of decisions — your own interaction with the story can be seen or read as a metaphor for the experience of mental illness.

This makes it sound like books, or comics, have an innate formal advantage over games in the depiction of, or examination of, depression. I doubt that’s really the case; there are plenty of crappy depictions of mental illness in non-games, after all. I do think that Depression Quest’s aesthetic goals and its formal choices end up being at odds with one another. The game is a good idea, and it points in some interesting directions, but on its own terms, as art, I think it’s mostly a failure.
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Edit: Please note that this thread is not an invitation to talk about Quinn personally, or Gamergate, or etc. The post is about Depression Quest and video games as art; comments that are off topic will be deleted.

The Hooded Utilitarian

a pundit in every panopticon

Tag Archives: Video Games