It’s not easy to be me.
—Five for Fighting, “Superman (It’s Not Easy)” (EMI, 2001)

In response to some of the criticism of the events of the new Superman movie, Man of Steel, Bill Gibron recently asked in an article, “Why are so many picking on Superman for destroying a few hundred thousand people when his actions clearly save billions?” (”Man of Steel and the Wanton Detruction of Human Life”, PopMatters, 17 June 2013). There is, I think, an answer to this question that is directly linked to the kind of character that Superman is and what he represents.

As I wrote in my post about Journey, I love the contradictory nature of video games, their use of cold hard programming logic to create an emotional reaction that’s not logical at all. It’s a wonderful contradiction, and I’m always amazed when a game gets it right. As such, I love breaking games down into their mechanics. I love tinkering with their systems in order to better understand how this process works.

I couldn’t do this with Telltale’s The Walking Dead. I’ve tried playing the game again. I’ve tried breaking it down to its core components. I’ve tried to analyze it from a distance to figure out how it’s able to so effectively hook my emotions, but I can’t break it. Every time I try to replay an episode, I am drawn to the same choices that I made before. They felt so right, both morally and logically, that to make another choice was to betray myself.

I suppose this post has spoilers for Proteus.  It’s hard to know, as it’s not a traditional game when it comes to its story or systems.  In fact, popular opinion is split on whether this Proteus is a game at all.  If something has no clear faiure or win states and no in-game actions besides simple locomotion, is it a game?

The question has re-spawned a labyrinthian debate around the nature of medium: the philosophies, semantics, and hurt feelings are quite hard to untangle.  Because of this, I admire Matthew Burns’s Alexandrian response: the idea of video games as a unified medium has become intractable.  In his words, trying to reconcile experimental design with the mainstream publishing scene is akin to “a faculty member from Juilliard express[ing] a desire for ‘a dialogue’ with Sid Vicious about chord progressions.  It’s not that these two don’t see eye to eye on matters of music theory ... it’s that the punks have arrived on the scene with such a completely different set of values that they might as well be from different planets” (“Our Immiscible Future”, Magical Wasteland, 27 April 2013) It’s sad that we cannot return to “the prelapsarian niceness of thinking that everyone should hang out with everyone else ... but there is an element to defining the self that is made out of forsaking something else.”  Things change, but that’s okay.

Twine is a relatively new game development tool that makes it easy to create a simple game. I hesitate to describe it any further because many different people have managed to make it do many different things. However, when someone says Twine game, the image conjured in their mind is that of a choose-your-own-adventure-style interactive fiction experience.

Everything about Twine is contentious or rather it’s causing people to at least check their assumptions on what they knew about games or their genres. There are some in the interactive fiction community wondering if games in this style qualify as such next to games developed with parser based interfaces. You have those of the formalist persuasion saying that they are not games at all and the less thoughtful members of the gamer population saying they are utter wastes of time.

There’s a story to Risk and Settlers of Catan and Monopoly but not in the games themselves. Sure, there’s an identifiable setting that makes them more than flat pieces of cardboard—the unconquered world, the geological absurdity that is Catan island, Britain street(?)—and the point of these games is to become emotionally engaged in the constantly shifting cooperation and competition alongside other players. There’s a story of the players meeting up to play the game as well, but that isn’t the story that makes up the games. The story that tabletop games tell can be found in the means of interacting with the game world: the dice.

Each dice roll unfolds a story of a vainglorious tyrant hoisted by his own petard or the scrappy underdog clawing his way from destitution to victory. Engagement with these games’ systems means also engaging with an unfolding, undetermined narrative. There is a sort of Schrodinger’s story in these games, in which that story is determined only after one of a finite set of possibilities is reached. When a dice needs to come up as a two, the roll creates a completely different set of emotions than when it needs to come up five. Likewise, rolling a three when a two is needed feels different than rolling a six. One success feels desperate, whereas the other feels absolute. Engaging with randomness creates a relatable narrative experience. There may be no quantifiable difference between a thee and a six—they’re equally probable successes—but they provoke different reactions. Strategizing around chance is the only method of playing dice games, but it also makes the lead up to every action tense and the resulting triumph or defeat meaningful. Every turn is significant.