I know that Lana Del Rey is receiving all kinds of critical backlash at present from the music community about her authenticity as an artist, her botched SNL performance, and the like.

However, one way or the other, “Video Games” is a rather beautiful song.  It strikes a pretty, but mournful tone that is full of a melancholy, uncertain nostalgia from a twenty-something-years-old artist, and it has managed to solder itself into my consciousness pretty effectively in recent days.

I do like games that celebrate little boys.

Some might argue that most games celebrate little boys, from the juvenile and madcap mayhem of Saints Row: the Third to the countless titles that allow for cooing over big breasts in bikinis or big breasts in chainmail or big breasts in chainmail bikinis.  But I’m not talking about that man-boy crap.  I’m talking about real little boys, the cool ones.

This isn’t the first time that I have felt this way while playing a Bethesda game.  A couple of years ago I wrote a blog entry about the manner in which the Fallout series felt like some sort of “to do” list simulator (“Fallout, the “To Do” List Simulator”, PopMatters, 24 November 2010).

But in a sense, I don’t feel so alone in my feeling this time.  Having spent some amount of time in the world of Skyrim myself, I opened a copy of Game Informer this week to find this description of “experiencing” The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim:

At one point, I had 14 main quests and 32 miscellaneous quests active at once.  This huge list turned me into an antisocial outcast; I stopped approaching other characters for fear of getting more quests from them.  Even this strategy didn’t work, as messengers would hand me documents containing new quests, and some NPCs rewarded jobs well done with additional tasks. (Andrew Reiner, “The Elder Scrolls V: Skrim: An RPG Worth Shouting About”, Game Informer, January 2012, p. 80)

Reiner had logged “over 100 hours” of gameplay time having written that, and while I have only spent about 10-12 hours in the game’s world, I already relate to the overwhelming feeling that Skyrim evokes in providing an ever increasing list of things to do for its players.

My daughter was recently asked by her teacher to interview my grandfather for her seventh grade class.  The teacher was interested in getting some insight into the rapidly disappearing GI Generation, those that served during World War II.  One of the questions that my daughter asked my grandfather was what he liked most about living through the 1940s and 1950s.  His response: “I liked that the population was smaller.” 

I was really taken by this response, as I grew up at the very edge of the metropolitan Denver area in the 1980s and returning there now, I am always struck by how crazily busy my little suburb has grown.  It really isn’t “at the very edge” now—at all.  The US population has grown to its current size of over 310 million people, but it was only about half that size in the decades that my grandfather was in his 20s and 30s.  I imagine that, to him, the whole US looks a heck of a lot more crazily busy than my little suburb now looks to me.

This discussion of Batman: Arkham City contains spoilers.

Rocksteady’s Batman franchise features a very competent Batman by allowing the player systems of play that make playing well very easy.  That ease at which the player can slip into Batman’s skin makes some sense, though, since playing a caped crusader that fumbles about at his job would violate the iconic, nearly inhuman qualities of a character whose stock and trade is supreme competence.

That being said, Batman is not quite the same icon as Superman, nor is either one like their Marvel counterparts.  Emotional vulnerability and self doubt plague the very humanly drawn characters of the Marvel universe.  DC characters most often seem more like gods than men, as they deal not with personal issues but problems of global concern: crime, terror, fear.  A vulnerability in Batman that is not emotional or professional, however, is still present in Rocksteady’s version of this DC character (who most often feels less like a human being than an archetypal force of vengeance).  Batman is still human, and unlike Superman, he can bleed.