Elizabeth Smart Takes on the Deep Evils of the Purity Myth

At a recent panel at Johns Hopkins university, Elizabeth Smart asked us all to approach victims of kidnapping and human trafficking with compassion and empathy—imploring us to offer them safety and support, rather than merely gawking at the grisly particulars of their ordeals or getting lost in the callous, irrelevant question of why or when a given person did or didn’t run.

Her comments are especially worthy of our attention right now, given the horrible ordeal that just ended for those three women in Cleveland. It’s worth thinking about why people (mostly men) do these sorts of monstrous things to other people (mostly women), and why victim-blaming (of which the why-didn’t-she-run question is certainly a facet) remains so pervasive.

Smart talked very openly about her experience being kidnapped and held captive for nine months, during which time she was repeatedly raped:

I was raised in a very religious household, one that taught that sex was something special that only happened between a husband and a wife who loved each other. And that’s what I’d been raised [to believe], that’s what I’d always been determined to follow—that when I got married, then and only then would I engage in sex.

And so, for that first rape, I felt crushed: who could want me now? I felt so dirty, and so filthy. I understand—so easily, all too well—why someone wouldn’t run: because of that alone. I mean, if you can imagine the most special thing being taken away from you, and feeling like that—not that that was your only value in life, but…

Can you imagine turning around and going back into society, where you’re no longer of value? Where you’re no longer as good as everybody else?

Smart then immediately, explicitly traced her feelings of shame and worthlessness to abstinence-only education.

I remember in school one time, I had a teacher who was talking about—well, about abstinence. And she said, “Imagine you’re a stick of gum. And when you engage in sex, that’s like getting chewed. And then, if you do that lots of times, you’re going to become an old piece of gum. And who’s going to want you after that?”

That’s terrible. Nobody should ever say that. But for me, I thought, “Oh my gosh, I’m that chewed-up piece of gum. Nobody re-chews a piece of gum. You throw it away.” And that’s how [easy] it is to feel like you no longer have worth, you no longer have value.”

There are lots of problems with abstinence-only education. One problem is that it doesn’t seem to work at all. It doesn’t produce teenagers who are more abstinent, but only teenagers who are more ignorant. For another thing, then, children without sexual information are easier targets for sexual predators; how can they know what inappropriate or threatening behavior looks like when they have only the foggiest idea of what safe, healthy, appropriate behavior looks like?

But Smart’s comments also address something bigger than abstinence-only education, bigger than rape culture: the idea that a woman’s value derives from her virginity, from her purity—that whereas a man becomes incrementally more awesome (and thus more valuable) with each sexual conquest, sex renders a woman sluttier (and thus less valuable). This means that a woman’s first sexual experience markedly, massively, irretrievably reduces her value.

Let’s begin by agreeing about how fucked up that concept is.

We construe a woman’s virginity as, in Elizabeth Smart’s words, “the most special thing” she possesses. Smart stops just short of saying that virginity is a woman’s “only value in life.” If a woman isn’t a faultless sexual gatekeeper, then she’s nothing, whatever else she may have going for her. As Jessica Valenti outlined in The Purity Myth, sexual “purity” is held up as the cardinal virtue of female life, over and above actual virtues like kindness, intelligence, creativity, and integrity.

Now, this crap does make some semblance of sense, in an “evolutionary history” kind of way: before the emergence of birth control as a technology and genetics as a science, the only way that a man could guarantee himself children that were biologically his own was to exert total control over his reproductive partner’s sexuality. Even as women achieve greater measures of equality—and even as science strips old gender configurations of all utility—men and women alike continue to believe that female sexuality must be policed, restrained, reigned-in (and worse, that this inequity is somehow the natural order of things).

Peggy Reeves Sanday pinpoints this as the founding cultural myth of victim-blaming and female non-agency, expressed most succinctly in the work R.F. von Krafft Ebing and Havelock Ellis—who, following from Charles Darwin’s theories of natural selection, attempted to find a “natural” explanation for rape. “Ellis conceives of human sexual behavior as a game of combat,” Sanday explains. “Playing the role of the hunted animal the female conceals her sexual passion by adopting a demeanor of modesty in order that the male may be more ardent and forceful.”

More specifically (and also more creepily), Ellis argued that female resistance is eventually, inevitably met with “an element of real violence, of undisguised cruelty,” and that this combativeness-unto-violence “[puts] to the test man’s most important quality, force.”

So on Ellis’ account, aggressive coercion is a valid tactic for men perusing sex, and female sexual gatekeeping is a performance: really, she wants it, but it’s her responsibility to withhold it, except that she won’t be able to, because she’ll find the sheer virility of her increasingly coercive paramour to be just that damn irresistible.

This tangled knot of misogynist non-logic helps to explain why we think of sexually active women as less virtuous, and why we think this even when the sex-acts in question occurred against their will—and also, why so many men who rape do not think of themselves as rapists. The cultural script tells us that women are supposed to resist, and that men are supposed to overcome that resistance. Nothing wrong here. Just sex-as-a-zero-sum-game, forever.

Succinctly and without exaggeration, this idea is one of the deepest and most pervasive evils ever to riddle the human psyche. This is what leads us to ask what rape victims were wearing when they were raped. This is what makes it possible to regard “honor killings” with anything other than open horror.

This is also what makes it possible to use a rape as a weapon of war. Rape is self-evidently monstrous in itself, but it couldn’t tear societies apart if the members of those societies refused to shun and despite its victims—if they reserved their disdain for the perpetrators of the crime, rather than those against whom the crime was purpotrated.

I’m not claiming that I know how to untangle this knot, but I do know that we won’t get anywhere while so many of us persist in beliving—obstinately, confrontationally, and against all available evidence—that the whole problem is fictional or long since solved. We need to begin by noticing these malignant assumptions in ourselves, and fighting them whenever they emerge.

I’m not claiming that’s easy. Just that it’s necessary. We stand to make the world an infinitely more humane place, if only we can all see sexual “purity” for the pernicious, corrosive bullshit that it is and supplant it (bit by bit, thought by thought, interaction by interaction) with a better and saner cultural script.

Playing Our Parts in Monaco

Monaco is a game about pulling heists. You move through the floorplan of whatever building it is that you’re breaking into, viewed top-down in abstracted black-on-black. What your character can hear, you see, Marauder’s Map-style. What your character can see appears in sunbursts of luminous full-color—still abstract, but information-complete. You get in, you steal something, and you get out (optionally collecting coins along the way, both to unlock new heists and to earn additional ammunition).

A successful multiplayer run is like clockwork, everyone in tune with everyone else, everything timed down to the split-second. When things go wrong (and things do go wrong), the result is a lot less elegant and a little harder to define, but no less fun. My good buddy Adam and I eventually settled on “Ms. Pac-Man by way of Benny Hill,” and that’s about right: the Pachinko machine psychedelia of Pac-Man Championship Edition DX set to the honky-tonk equivalent of Yakety Sax. The game oscillates between those two utterly different tones and paces, seamlessly and without breaking stride.

The game’s characters are specialists, drawn from heist movie archetypes. The Locksmith can pick locks and crack safes with uncommon speed. The Lookout can detect guards even when they’re well out of eye- and earshot. The Pickpocket has a pet monkey who steals stray valuables on his behalf. The Gentleman, a kindly-looking fellow, and can be seen for a few seconds without being suspected. And then there’s The Mole, who can tunnel through walls, and The Redhead, who can beguile and distract.

I prefer The Hacker, who can spread viruses through computers and power outlets, disabling security measures and spreading consistently advantageous chaos. Adam usually ends up being The Cleaner, who can perform non-lethal takedowns on guards and innocent bystanders alike, accompanied by a marginally disquieting sound effect that suggests a brief, fruitless struggle, possibly involving chloroform.

Those two guys work damn well together, with The Hacker disabling the machines while The Cleaner disables the people. They can cut a clear path through rooms as long as they can stay in sync with one another.

If my hack runs out, or if one of Adam’s victims wakes up, then there could be trouble. But often the guard will woozily come to, or the security camera will blink back to life, just was we’re making our escape to the next floor, and that feels like million bucks.

But there’s more than that. The Hacker and The Cleaner inspire crisp, snappy, pulpy role-play, Adam calling out to Hack that camera, hack that camera! and me saying I’ve got it, but quick, clean that guy! and Adam responding OK, we’re good, that guy’s cleaned! in an earthy growl. I don’t even think the game itself uses the word “clean” in quite that way. Adam and I were just getting into the spirit.

Monaco makes it pretty easy to get into the spirit, is what I’m saying.

There are these snippets of story in between the levels, you see, with the game’s various thieves disagreeing on the specifics of the capers—and these sequences do more than add flavor. They echo the tenuous trust and emergent narrative chaos that comes across in every in-game heist: What are you talking about? I didn’t get us killed on the ship. You did.

Like the rest of the game, Monaco’s player relationships have two speeds, well-oiled machine and runaway train, and it’s impossible to say which mode is more compelling. It’s the combination of the two that makes the game such an engrossing creation.

Here’s Why We Should Stop Using Review Scores

Late last year, Jim Sterling made an argument in favor of review scores that I think is worth refuting. As Sterling points out, lots of people like review scores, and the first few major outlets who eliminate their scoring systems will probably see a decrease in their readership, at least temporarily. Given those facts, he argues, why rock the boat?

The thing is, MetaCritic scores are widely (if mysteriosuly) respected, and sometimes used to determine game developers’ compensation. As such, Sterling misunderstands the problem, and also underestimates his own culpability in it. His main assertion is that review scores are not inherently evil, even if they can be put to evil uses. This observation is both unassailably true and face-palmingly beside the point.

Look. Movies get scores. TV shows get scores. But no one takes those numbers half as seriously as we all seem to take game review scores, specifically because there is a widespread cultural understanding that movies and TV shows can’t be boiled down to some set of objective evaluative criteria. By approaching videogame review with such reverence, we’re reinforcing the idea that videogames should be approached primarily as technology, as software—that a new Call of Duty is more like a new release of Photoshop than a new Bond movie.

Now, there’s nothing wrong with valuing games as technology, nor is there anything wrong with wanting a review to cover a game’s more objective, more technical aspects—does it run well and render nicely?—and yes, it does make a certain kind of sense to rate those qualities numerically, or with letter grades, or whatever. But the exercise becomes silly once we’re assigning quantitative values to “story” or “fun factor,” or for that matter, to aesthetics as well as graphics.

More to the point, it’s heartless and nutty to address game developers (who make pieces of software that run on computers, yes, but who also make narratives, experiences, and other squishy things) and say, “Hey, this clock you made? It doesn’t function properly,” and feel that those developers therefore should, objectively, be paid less for their labor. Hey, you can’t argue with the numbers!

Paying someone less for their work because that work didn’t sell is the kind of coldly logical capitalism that can be hard for mere flesh-and-blood mortals to swallow, ethically and empathetically speaking—and so wanting to take the quality of their work into account, regardless of raw sales, is a commendably humane impulse, and a potential counter-wight to the often unaccountable cruelties of the market.

But believing that MetaCritic provides an objective measure of quality—wantning the numbers the do your work for you, even though no one really even knows how MetaCritic arrives at those particular numbers—takes us right back into in the realm of hardhearted pragmatism, with the additional drawback that (unlike pure, balance sheet-driven, Adam Smith-flavored exploitation) it isn’t even logically defensible or strategically sound. In short, it’s bad, and also stupid.

Sterling says “The argument that we should abolish review scores hinges on the belief that all reviewers secretly loathe them, and would jump at the chance to be free of their numerical shackles.”

Eh, not really. The argument is more that, whether you like using review scores or not, you’re doing harm my using them. By attaching a score to your review, you’re knowingly feeding the snarling, shambling, bonus-garnishing behemoth that MetaCritic has become. None of the misconduct outlined in that Kotaku piece is reviewers’ fault, of course, but it’s within their power to stop it from happening. If game reviewers would simply stop affixing scores to reviews, then they’d starve the beast, and that would be that.

Sterling’s own metaphor, over-the-top though it may be, is actually the best way to explain this problem. “If somebody stabs,” he asks, “do we punish the knife, or the psycho holding it?” Here review scores are a knife, and the developers denied their bonuses (for example) are the stabbed, and those who denied them their bonuses (again, just for example) are the madmen doing the stabbing.

But it would follow that reviewers using reviews scores are the ones handing the madmen the knives. A stabbing isn’t the knife’s fault, sure—but if you hand someone a knife, knowing full well that they intend to stab someone with it, then the stabbing is at least partially your fault, isn’t it?

So really, the argument against review scores is: put away the stupid knives, Jim. We know they’re fun to play with, but it’s just not worth anybody getting hurt.

On Loving Starseed Pilgrim

I’m awfully glad that I don’t have to write a proper review of Starseed Pilgrim.

It’s not that it’s hard to say whether the game good (it is) but it’s good at things that are difficult to describe or quantify: it encourages you to discover rules for yourself, it confounds your expectations without ever exactly misleading you, and it serenely gives back in direct proportion to how much you’re willing to put in. I don’t envy anyone who is tasked with distilling those qualities into an apples-to-apples comparison with some cinematic AAA production, or deciding where it belongs on a top ten list, or whatever.

The game lives outside, and stretches beyond, the world that reviews were invented to describe. Like Super Hexagon before it, Starseed Pilgrim is gleefully self-contained—an autonomous object first and foremost, art and/or commerce a distant, disinterested second.

Starseed Pilgrim works by breaking the rules of game design, using beauty and mystery as (or perhaps even place of) conveyance. It’s long on invitations but short on instructions. It barely ever teaches, and rarely even hints.

You’ve really got to trust your players if you’re going to try something like that, because what if a player tries it once, doesn’t learn any of the game’s secrets, and stops playing? Well, then that player hasn’t put much in, so they can’t expect to get much out. Starseed Pilgrim is at peace with that possibility. It’s Zen like that.

The toolset may always feel unruly and unhelpful to you. You may never learn that what seems like a grave threat is in fact an eventuality from which you can profit, if only you plan ahead. Maybe the worlds beyond and behind the one you first see will remain hidden from your view, even if you do come back again and again. Fine. So be it. But the game will be ready and waiting for you if you change your mind and decide that you want something more.

Starseed Pilgrim feels more like a world in a box—more like Shigeru Miyamoto’s famous “miniature garden that [players] can put inside their drawer”—than any game I can think of, Proteus or Minecraft included. It offers a literal garden, of course, but more than that, it engages you where other games would merely indulge you, demonstrating patience instead of panicking at a perceived lack of rapt player attention. It’s a bold and quiet videogame that takes bold, quiet liberties with the very form of videogames.

So much of what Starseed Pilgrim has to say is untranslatable into text, and inhospitable to Best-Game-Ever/Worst-Game-Ever tribalism. I love it for that.

The Cost of Saying That a Given Game Is Not a Game

Richard Terrell recently argued at legnth that Proteus is a “cool digital musical experience” rather than a game as such. While I have tremendous respect for Terrell’s overall project—he’s “nobly wrestling with the limits of language,” as Michael Abbot once put it—I still can’t shake the feeling that he sometimes applies his considerable efforts to the wrong questions. Because in this case, the right question is, what do we actually gain by deciding that Proteus is not a game?

Proposing a narrower definition of games means making one of three statements:

    1. When I say game in the following piece, I mean x.
    2. Whenever I say game, I mean x.
    3. Game means x.

That first one is a valid, practical, and frequently necessary gesture. The second is potentially limiting, but also potentially liberating; if you can stop sweating the vocabulary, then you can move on to new, exciting, probably unmapped territory.

The idea of defining games once and for all, however, is completely unworkable.

Please understand, I’m coming at this as a former art history major. For about four years, I had the what is art? discussion more often than I had hot meals. And while it’s important to know how various critics and practitioners have defined art (just as it’s important to know that Sid Meier defines a game as “a series of interesting choices”), it’s a costly mistake to fully embrace any one definition or definitively drink any one theorist’s Kool-Aid. There’s always a cost, and that cost is never worth the benefit, even if there is a benefit, which there usually isn’t.

Say you decide that art has to exist primarily as art. It can’t be utilitarian, so a table isn’t art, even if it’s well made, expressive, and beautiful. Art for art’s sake, this idea is sometimes called.

The problem with this definition (or one problem with it) is that it manufactures a crisis of classification, wherein African art, for example, isn’t art at all—and not only because you’re dealing with so many tables, and water jugs, and textiles. More importantly than that, when viewed in the cultural context of animist traditions, medicine societies, and ancestor worship, representative sculptures can also be construed as functional objects. They’re at least considered ceremonial, and often considered magical. So their purposes are metaphysical, yes, but also utilitarian. Meaning they don’t count as art.

Oh, but it’s O.K. that African art isn’t really art. That doesn’t diminish it. It does mean, of course, that African art is worse than European art at being art. But it doesn’t follow that European art or European culture is better. Just that it’s more advanced and artful and—

See the problem?

You could argue that something isn’t art, or isn’t a game (or isn’t music, or isn’t literature) for an infinity of reasons. But whatever you’re trying to do, and regardless of whether you succeed at doing it, you’re also explicitly excluding those works that push hardest against the boundaries of a given medium. You’re leveling things off.

There’s no getting around the fact that this is an argument with a target, and that it naturally tends to target those who are least in need of being taken down a peg: it naturally and automatically targets marginal voices. That means denying someone a place at the table, and denying their work a place on the syllabus. Saying that’s not a game means putting forth a bold and dickish hypothesis about whose work is worth discussing and whose work isn’t.

And to what end? What’s the point? Well, the point is clear, specific language. Using a word, knowing what it means, and knowing that your audience knows what it means, too. It’s not hard to see why this goal is so appealing to Terrell, who is after all writing a freakin’ glossary.

But here’s the thing: when we use words with increasing frequency and breadth, it becomes increasingly foolish to try and pin those words down to singular, canonical definitions. In past posts, Richard Terrell has gone into great detail about his working definitions of games and gameplay, but when defining the word game in his glossary, he simply quotes Jesper Juul’s Half-Real and moves on. By contrast, Juul’s own “Dictionary of Video Game Theory”—in a gesture akin to the entry about the word is in the Oxford English Dictionary—provides eight separate and sometimes conflicting definitions of game. (Nine if you count Wittgenstein’s notion “that what we call games have nothing in common.”)

Which is the right approach. We should be cataloging and exploring, but not resolving. Because resolving the word game into a single definition, even if it weren’t completely impossible and a little dangerous, would still be thoroughly pointless. If we did somehow manage to agree on some unified definition under which Proteus is not a game, we would still want to talk about how it relates to games. So we would most likely need a broader term that could encompass all of these games and non-game gameoids we wanted to discuss, wouldn’t we? So hey, maybe that bigger, looser word could be something like, I don’t know, game.

It’s insufficient and unconvincing to declare, without qualification, that specific language is good and that unspecific language is bad. Games and art are open-ended concepts, so it’s not a linguistic crisis to describe them in open-ended terms. It’s acceptable, and maybe even preferable, to describe nebulous things nebulously. We do it all the time.

To use the squishiest possible example, love is an inescapably inexact concept. When you say “I love you,” to someone, your words are a contract currently being written. You are building an understanding, but always a provisional and contextually specific one. Other people say those same words and mean completely different things, and you know that, and knowing that diminishes the meaning and importance of your own words in precisely zero ways.

A word can be maddeningly vague in isolation, yet clear and powerful in context, is my point.

It’s fine and even necessary to use broad terms in narrow ways. But when you insist that your newly narrowed definition is the definition—when your goal is to pin the word game down to a single, universally applicable meaning, for example—then, nobly wrestling with the limits of language becomes tilting at windmills. It’s noble, sure, but that doesn’t mean it’s productive.

Daniel Tosh and the Anatomy of One Particularly Tasteless Joke

Let’s begin with a big old trigger warning, as the topic at hand is a rape joke.

So, Daniel Tosh was doing standup last Friday. Depending on who you ask, he either did a bit about how “there are awful things in the world but you can still make jokes about them,” or about “rape jokes always being funny.” Depending on who you ask, a woman in the audience either “heckled” Daniel Tosh during that bit, or simply yelled out that “actually, rape jokes are never funny!”

As far as I know, it is not in dispute that Daniel Tosh then said something along these lines: “Wouldn’t it be funny if that girl got raped by like, five guys right now? Like right now? What if a bunch of guys just raped her?” Neither does it seem to be in dispute that the a fair portion of the audience laughed at that suggestion, or that the woman in question then quickly left the comedy club.

It seems to me that the important question is why is that supposed to be funny? Let’s put aside for the moment whether the joke worked—a tasteless joke that lands always seems less tasteless than a tasteless joke that doesn’t—and let’s take a look at how the humor is supposed to be operating. You’re supposed to laugh at the idea of this woman being suddenly raped by a group of men (1) because it’s supposed to be an ironic and precise punishment for a self-serious killjoy, like dropping a piano on the head of someone preaching against cartoon violence, and (2) because the image is supposed to be over-the-top; it is unlikely that five men would spontaneously rape a woman in the audience of a comedy show, and the idea is clearly intended to be absurd.

OK, now let’s talk about why the joke may or may not actually be funny. The first part (a killjoy getting her comeuppance) only works if you think that those who object to rape jokes are killjoys. If you don’t, then the element of retribution just comes of as unwarranted meanness at best, a misogynistic power-play at worst.

The second part (the absurd extremity of the image) only works if you believe that it is utterly impossible for a group of men at a Daniel Tosh show to rape a woman. So it’s worth mentioning that the “heckler” herself found the idea “pretty viscerally terrifying and threatening all the same, even if the actual scenario was unlikely to take place. The suggestion of it is violent enough and was meant to put me in my place,” she says.

The really sinister undercurrent in the suggestion that this woman might be gang-raped is that it’s not particularly implausible. The only element in the joke that strains credulity—the only thing that makes it a joke rather than an actual, immediate threat, in other words—is the suggestion that the rape might take place right then and there, in the middle of Daniel Tosh doing his set.

But after the show? What in fact is absurd or implausible about that? In point of horrific-but-undeniable fact, that kind of shit happens all the time.

So it’s important to note that Daniel Tosh’s rape joke is not problematic because it’s “offensive.” I’m sure that some people are simply offended, and that they just want Daniel Tosh to apologize or do a public service announcement or whatever, but those reactions completely miss the point. The point is that this particular joke operates on deeply fucked up assumptions about gender politics—the feminists want to take away our toys!— and a gross underestimation of the real danger that real sexual assault poses to real women on a daily basis.

I literally could not care less whether you personally think the joke is funny, but whether you do or not, the mechanics of it matter. Because this particular joke is prodding at some extremely important aspects of gender, and is doing so in just about the stupidest way imaginable. That’s why it’s problematic. And also dumb.

Respecting Us to Death: Spelunky on XBLA

If you doubt for a moment that gaming is moving forward as a medium, or that new styles and genres are rapidly gaining mainstream acceptance, consider that Minecraft has sold well over a million copies as an Xbox 360 game—and then consider the impending Xbox release of another deep, gutsy, hour-devouring indie titan: Spelunky.

The Xbox Live Arcade has served as a launch pad for countless indie luminaries, from Braid to Super Meat Boy to Limbo to Fez, but those games have a funny way of finding their way to PC, and thereby to even greater financial success and an even larger following. (Fez has yet to make that leap, but give it a year or so). Minecraft and Spelunky, on the other hand, have been self-published PC mainstays for years, freely expanding and experimenting via free updates, and only now are they finding their way onto the mostly-benevolent island dictatorship of downloadable console games. Interesting times, folks.

Like Minecraft before it, Derek Yu and Andy Hull’s rougelike/platformer opus arrives with a newly-created tutorial and a robust in-game codex. And as in the case of Minecraft, the concessions to new players pretty much stop there.

Spelunky XBLA has plenty that the original PC game does not, from two-to-four-player co-op to overhauled audiovisuals to the aforementioned teaching tools, but the core design has not been mainstreamed for its mainstream release. It still belongs to that rapidly expanding swath of games that respect you enough to kill you over and over and over. As Yu told Gamasutra, he hopes “that casual players will see how much fun a tough game can be if it’s designed well.”

In other words, rather than lower the game to a dumber denominator, Yu saw this new version as an opportunity to exceed and elevate new players’ expectations, to invite the self-identified casual set into his high-minded, uncompromising fold. Whether that’s admirable or arrogant, I’m not quite sure. Like most genuinely ambitious projects, it’s probably a little of both.

When Spelunky debuted in 2008, it was the vanguard of cross-pollinating familiar NES-era designs with the opaque world-building, procedural generation, and permanent (sometimes inevitably cheap) death of rougelikes. This combination blew the mind of at least one Independent Games Festival judge, who said that where most games ask the player to learn and repeat a discrete sequence of actions, akin to learning a single instrumental line in a piece of music, Spelunky is about learning “the overall composition, understanding the overall system and how it works, and becoming fluent in that.” The lovestruck IGF judge went on to say that Spelunky

looks like a game of execution, but it’s really a game about information and decision-making. How good are you at looking at a situation and understanding what it means? You can’t memorize, and you can’t take time to carefully analyze, you must rely on your literacy of the system.

Which is not to imply the absence of execution challenges, mind you. Bad jumps are just as deadly as bad tactics, so this is not a mere genre bait-and-switch, a stern-faced RPG in the motley of a side-scrolling action game. Rather, Spelunky is aiming at a “holistic” mode of interaction where ideas become indistinct from their execution, every moment at once visceral and cerebral.

Spelunky was by no means the first game to generate its content procedurally, but it was one of the first to crystallize, refine, and expand what that technique could mean. Four years later, it remains one of the most compelling, maddening, compulsive games ever made, thanks in no small part to its oscillating cruelty and kindness, its ability to mete out fortune and misfortune in rapid succession or even simultaneously.

There’s a right and a wrong way to do this stuff, and Spelunky XBLA must be doing it right, given that I (usually) have a smile on my face after being impaled for the nth time. Of course, I’ve never been impaled in quite the same way twice, and it’s hard to overstate the degree to which that helps matters. There have been cheap deaths, to be sure, but they’ve been in the interest of forging a world that is irresistibly and often hilariously hostile. (Attack a shopkeeper, even accidentally, and you’ll see what I mean).

This is a game that allows for few non-fatal mistakes, but also few discoveries that are anything less than exhilarating and few successes that are anything less than triumphant. So then, one more comparison to Minecraft: while there will be plenty of people who respect the design more than they actually enjoy it, those who do fall for Spelunky XBLA will fall hard. Probably into lava or spikes or something. And then they’ll gladly fall all over again.