Hi, I’m Hamish Black and welcome to Writing on Games.
So my buddy Game Array recently put out a video regarding NieR: Automata and how the
meaning we generate from it as players comes from our relationship with other games.
It's really great and I'll link it in the description, but it also got me thinking about
how this notion of context isn't just limited to how we interact with a game – it's a
whole bunch of factors both personal and external.
The state of the industry at the time, its proximity to other games, etc.
As such, we may have a pretty good idea of what we think a game represents at the time
of its release, but as time goes on, how does that meaning change?
Could we reach a point in time where the context of play has shifted so much that even the
games we view as masterpieces are rendered meaningless?
Let me back up a bit – I mainly started thinking about this in light of the recent
re-release of Vanquish on PC, because even in the seven years since its initial release,
the meaning I derive from that game has shifted almost entirely.
This is a game that fans were clamouring for after Bayonetta was stealth launched on Steam
in April, and less than a month later they got it and the internet was awash with gushing
retrospectives about how this is the port of the beloved classic you’ve been waiting
for.
Which seemed a little odd to me for a game that, at the time, largely came and went.
Obviously it had its cult following and reviewed pretty well for the most part, but it was
a really short game with no multiplayer mode and a terrible story to boot, and so either
people moved on quick or they didn’t make the steep investment to begin with.
And don’t get me wrong here, that infuriated me at the time because I was one of those
cult followers all those years ago, watching people pass up this wild experience that I
felt was really sticking it to the industry as a whole.
And now, I installed it the other night, beat it that same night, and came away thinking
it was still pretty damn good, if nowhere near as revolutionary.
And it really did feel revolutionary at the time.
Consider the gaming landscape of 2010 – Gears of War had seen major success a few years
before and by this point everyone wanted a piece of the cover shooter pie.
It felt like every game that came out featured some daft hunk of meat slowly staggering around
the battlefield going from conveniently placed chest-high wall to conveniently placed chest-high
wall, taking pot shots at other conveniently placed chest-high walls.
I feel like I heard calls for the abstract notion of “innovation” coming up a lot
around that time.
Then you’ve got Vanquish, jet-sliding and carving its way through the competition at
blistering speeds.
Cover was there, but you’d often feel like a chump if you stayed in it for too long because
think of all the dope stuff you could be doing out there!
It really was all about speed and forward momentum in a landscape that felt so plodding
and methodical, which made it feel important on both a mechanical and industry level.
I think in terms of personal context, however, it was important to me because it was one
of the first games I remember playing where I didn’t look at the events in the cutscenes
and think “man, I wish I could do that in-game.”
The cutscenes featured a lot of talking; something the gameplay stood in firm opposition towards.
Flying over cover into slo-mo to take out multiple enemies before blazing across the
battlefield to the one left and fly kicking them into oblivion; it felt weird having that
level of control over how events played out considering how constrictive many mainstream
games felt at the time.
That wasn’t limited to just shooters either; that was action games in general.
It always felt like the flashiness of cutscenes gave way to something that just didn’t feel
as fluid or spectacular, and it felt like Vanquish was a game that you could show people
and say “it doesn’t have to be like this!
We can do better!”
Now, though?
That context has changed significantly.
I mean, it’s seven years later; we’re no longer subject to a barrage of mediocre
cover shooters partially because success wears off, and also because there are just a whole
lot more games for us to play now.
Consoles aren’t the dominant force they arguably still were around the time of Vanquish’s
release.
We’ve moved past the time where a multiplayer component was seen as a necessity to maintain
longevity of a game.
In fact, with multiplayer-only games like Rainbow Six Siege scoring lower for a perceived
lack of content, and games like Hitman encouraging replayability of single player levels, we’ve
almost moved in the opposite direction.
Hell, even the speed of movement Vanquish prided itself on has been aped by some of
the biggest shooters in the biz.
And you know what, Vanquish is no longer the unique oddity – the curio melding shooter
and action like no other game – that it once was.
But it’s still really good!
It’s just that now I see it as more of a popcorn game than anything else – the equivalent
of sticking on a dumb action movie for an evening, right down to the gravel voiced protagonists
and the story that results in your character essentially saying, “the world is gubbed,
but at least I did OK”.
It’s all total fluff – ideas like directing your own fun become a little muted when you
consider how many options we have for that nowadays, and how linear Vanquish is.
Now we have a better grasp over what mechanics can convey thematically, the idea of having
slower sections doesn’t add necessary contrast to proceedings as much as it brings them to
a jarring halt.
The game already has a means of granting much-needed respite from the chaos around us – it’s
the slo-mo mechanic.
It momentarily gives you slightly more control than you would have normally, which in a game
so short is all you really need to give the action peaks and troughs.
There’s also the fact that there have been so many super long games coming out of late
that it’s refreshing to have a game that I’m able to stick on and beat in the same
night without having to think too much about it.
Instead of this intense experience that seemed angrily focused on dragging games from the
generic mire we found ourselves in, Vanquish now comes across (to me anyway) as a distinctly
video game-esque throwback; a distraction from and response to games seen in recent
years which serve to move the medium forward.
And that’s fine!
There’s a place for that – it’s just interesting to me how different contexts have
almost reversed the meaning of an experience that itself has remained largely unchanged.
And this is just an example of a game's meaning shifting mechanically too – what about those
games whose themes are defined by the context under which they released?
Take something like Spec Ops: The Line, for example, which celebrates its fifth birthday
this year.
That game served as a polemic against the kind of jingoistic assembly line shooters
coming out annually (remember, this was sandwiched between Modern Warfare 3 and Black Ops 2).
It forced us to examine the views of violence and American imperialism that these games
desensitised us to, precisely by presenting itself as one of those shooters.
Call of Duty arguably doesn't hold the authority it once did, however.
Again, we have so much choice in what we play that it’s hard to imagine these shooters
as a going concern.
Even AAA games (however successful they may or may not be in this endeavour) are more
eager than ever to engage with political issues.
Games like Battlefield One and Call of Duty WW2 have returned their respective series
to their roots, but always with the caveat that “we’re going to treat it with respect
this time!”
People are far more likely to notice and comment on it when a war shooter is trivialising war.
More than merely representing the horrors of conflict, Spec Ops is a video game about
a specific era of video games about conflict.
The game is all about holding the player accountable for their complicity in the proliferation
of this type of flippantly violent shooter.
If this decline in popularity of these shooters continues, then is there a point at which
it stops being meaningful outside of "hey, look at how bad military shooters used to
be at this stuff?"
Is there value in trying to maintain that level of meaning the game had when we initially
played it?
When it made us feel utterly awful for treating violence as flippantly as we did?
Ultimately, I'm not really sure but as is the case with most subjects of this nature,
it's less about finding concrete answers than it is about examining the questions we ask.
Video game preservation is something that has long fascinated me and the fact that it
seems to be coming into more prominence with organisations like the Video Game History
Foundation and the growing popularity of emulators is immensely pleasing to me.
It's just interesting that we've progressed as a medium to the point that preservation
is no longer merely a matter of technology, but importantly (and in a lot of ways excitingly)
a matter of meaning and context.
So I hope you enjoyed this slightly different piece on context in games.
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And with that, I'm Hamish Black and this has been Writing on Games.
Thank you very much for watching and I'll see you next time.