The Audacity of Antichamber

So now that we have some idea of what happens after Minecraft, here’s another question: what happens after Portal? I always think of Gabe Newell at the beginning of the Portal developer commentary track, saying “we think we are just at the beginning of taking advantage of this kind of gameplay.”

What kind of gameplay did he mean, exactly? First person puzzle-solving? Non-violent? Based in weird, unnatural relationships to time and space?

Even if you assume that he meant all of those things at once, and if we throw in absurdist humor and a sense of menace as additional criteria, there are several potential successors in the running. There is of course Portal 2, which played feature film to the original’s short form art house experiment. There is Q.U.B.E., the first Indie Fund game, and Quantum Conundrum, the ambitious but unfocused follow-up from Kim Swift, project lead on the original Portal.

And now, after years of tweaking and polishing, there is Alexander Bruce’s Antichamber—the purest, most tightly designed, most fearlessly, obtusely batshit step out of Portal‘s long shadow that we’ve seen so far.

Here is what makes the obtuseness and batshittery of Antichamber so fearless: unlike Portal 2, Antichanber is not the least bit afraid of the player will get lost, or get stumped, or have some sort of existential crisis. Antichamber embraces these possible dangers. You’ll get stuck, but the game’s branching, open-ended structure means that you’ll generally be stuck in three to five places at once, which is to say not exactly stuck at all. You’ll find yourself without the necessary tools (intellectual or diegetic) for a given puzzle, but (if that room’s Hallmark card/fortune cookie of a hint proves insufficiently enlightening) the answer is invariably to continue ambling and continue experimenting.

The game’s points of interaction, much like its spartan visuals and impressionistic soundtrack, are at once strictly minimal and psychedelically open-ended. There are puzzles involving blocks, and gun-shaped tools that manipulate those blocks in fascinating, unspecified ways&mhdash;but especially for the first third of the game, most of the puzzles quite literally involve nothing more than looking at things differently. Turn back down a corridor instead of going forward and something interesting happens. Look up when a sign says Don’t Look Down and something interesting happens. Look closely through a colored window instead of simply walking around it and—well, you get the idea.

On one had, you’re doing about as little as you could reasonably be doing in this kind of game: you’re walking, and you’re looking. But on the other hand, the game is asking you to engage in all manner of non-standard (and as has often been pointed out, non-Euclidean) reasoning. Where Portal was all tutorial and linear escalation, Antichamber is one long final level, a Level 9 of the mind, rich with apparent blind alleys that gradually turn into unexpected intersections. It’s a structure that is bewildering, disorienting, and memorizing in equal measure.

It may be that, when designers truly were “just at the beginning of taking advantage of this kind of gameplay,” there was no choice but to guide players carefully and patiently away from naturalistic or conventional ways of dealing with space, with physics, with games as such. But Antichamber dares to trust that, hey, if you’re playing the game, then you must be willing to suspend your disbelief, your spacial skepticism. You’re here to make sense of things that make no apparent sense. Seriously, by now you know why you’re here, don’t you?

In its brazen forward momentum, as well as in its seemingly impossible ratio of intellectual demands to discrete player actions, Antichamber offers something genuinely new. It’s a considerable step—maybe not forward, exactly; the game will be too opaque for many players, and so it might not seep it into the general bloodstream of indie game design, at least not at first. But it’s a step so confident and so singular that it deserves the attention of the entire Portal-loving world.

And it’s also a game more sensitive to spoilers than any game with a plot, so here’s where I encourage you to play it in emphatic but frustratingly vague terms, and here’s where I scamper off to play the thing some more.

The Trees of Proteus

What happens after Minecraft? What can anyone do to expand upon, one-up, or evolve the indie mega-ultra-super hit? I mean, the game is just so big. It has endless, procedurally generated environments full of adventures that, like their setting, are never quite the same twice. It has tense survival (and in fact, I would argue that it can be one of the scariest games ever made). And it offers the ability to build just about anything and modify the game experience in just about any way, unto Rule #89.

A Minecraft player’s favorite experiences with the game all tend to revolve around one of these key elements, and so many a developer has tried to pick up where Minecraft left off. For cooperative adventure and exploration, there is Terraria, and soon there will be Starbound and Cube World. For survival, there is Miasmata and Don’t Starve. And as for expandability, well, I don’t think it’s a coincidence that we’ve seen the launch of Steam Workshop, and a greater mainstream awareness of modding in general, since the ascent of Mojang.

But the design of Minecraft has another indispensable alchemical ingredient, often ignored despite being widely beloved: there is sheer joy in simply walking around the space, a space composed of elements that quickly become comfortingly familiar, but that have an undeniable, inexplicable ability to surprise and delight us nonetheless. It is, as Quintin Smith once said, “a world so tactile, so absorbing and so believable that an exciting discovery can be as simple as a big-ass tree.” So on that topic:

I’ve spent all this time talking about Minecraft because, remarkably, another game may have finally surpassed it in the wandering around and looking at trees department. That game (as you’ve most likely guessed from the image above, not to mention the name of this post) is Ed Key and David Kanaga’s Proteus.

And look, I suppose there’s another reason why most of this post about Proteus has been about Minecraft, which is that Proteus is one of those games that is undeniably better if you go into it without knowing quite what to expect. So I won’t give away the mechanic by which the in-game seasons change, nor will I tell you where or when the squirrels tend to congregate. (There are squirrels! And frogs! And they’re delightful!)

What I will tell you is that Proteus takes the visual minimalism, unexpected beauty, and procedural rejiggering of Minecraft wandering, and introduces two all-important differences.

First, most of the sound in the game emerges piecemeal, organically, as the player ambles and experiments. Chase a frog and it exudes piquant steel drum fanfare as it hops off. Walk in the rain and, in addition to seeing droplets of water, you’ll hear little staccato droplets of music. These sounds shift and change with the time of day, and with the seasons, as well as with the player’s movements. The result is a soundtrack just as elegantly sparse as the visuals (which look about a thousand times more interesting in motion than they do in stills, by the way).

The second difference—and this is where my previous discussion of minimalism comes into play—is that Proteus aspires to be equally elegant, sparse, and minimal in the modes of interaction that it offers the player. You walk, you look, you see how the world reacts to you. That’s it.

Now, if you want to find someone arguing that Proteus therefore contains no gameplay, or that it isn’t even a game, or whatever, then you won’t have to look very hard. This argument is very much like saying that something isn’t art, which is to say that it’s little more than knee-jerk terminological orthodoxy and/or tedious territorial sword-measuring. If Proteus isn’t a game, then it is something so much like a game, and so important to the cultural discussions of which games are a part, that I would say it’s the needlessly restrictive definition of game (not the interesting and unusual gameoid object in question) that needs to be excised from the conversation.

What Proteus is, regardless, is a minimalist masterpiece, small in just about every way and all the more compelling for it.

Why So Minimal?

Minimalism is a necessary step for any medium. Even if you feel little or no emotional or aesthetic connection to Piet Mondrian’s right angles and primary colors, or to the slow structural burn of a Phillip Glass piece, there’s no denying that those artists are directly confronting some deep, unavoidable issues—How little painting can I do, and have my work still be a painting? How little composing can I do, and have my piece still be music?—in order to get to the heart of why any painting or any piece of music works or doesn’t.

More than that, underlying these experiments is the question of how we quantify painting or composing or development in the first place. What do we even mean when we ask how much painting a painting contains, or how much music a composition contains, or how much gameplay a game contains?

Piet Mondrian actually did quite a lot of painting in order to arrive at his hyper-abstractions, beginning with a naturalistic image of a tree, or maybe a letter of the alphabet, and gradually whittling that image down to what he considered the most abstract form possible. Some of this process involved creating images again and again, each one more minimal than the last, which was a whole bunch of painting in the strictest sense. But Mondrian’s process also involved mathematics and data mapping—activities and disciplines that have always been ancillary to art creation, but were often considered somehow separate from art-making as such.

At its best, then, a Minimalist painting highlights the things a painter does that are not generally recognized as painting, while simultaneously celebrating the beauty and craft basic behind visual units. It is an attempt at purity.

I mentioned games, and there is no shortage of pure minimalism in game design: Rod Humble’s The Marriage attempts to convey the dynamics of a long-term romantic relationship purely through gameplay, and is thus minimal both in terms of mechanics and, especially and pointedly, in terms of audiovisual aesthetics. Petri Purho’s 4 Minutes and 33 Seconds of Uniqueness (above) does away with audiovisuals almost completely, and also manages to eliminate player input without eschewing win conditions; one wins the game by being the only person in the world playing it for four minutes and thirty-three continuous seconds (in reference to John Cage, har har), with one’s progress represented by a white bar slowly creeping across a black screen. Win and you get a white check mark. Lose and the game simply closes.

Needless to say, a great deal of art employs small-m minimalist aims and even techniques without necessarily being big-m Minimalist. I recently got to see an exhibition of Hiroshi Sugimoto’s photographs, and I was knocked out by how he uses the most basic binary oppositions of photography—light and darkness, presence and absence, black and white, focused and unfocused, intelligible and unintelligible—to create something so rich and personal. (The images may not look like much on the Brandhorst website, or on any website for that matter, but do see these pieces in person if you get the chance).

I also recently played Tomorrow Corporation’s eerie, confounding satire-’em-up Little Inferno. From the start of the game until the trippy, disruptive ending (which I won’t spoil), the game takes place on only two screens: a catalog for ordering all manner of consumerist stuff, and a “Little Inferno Entertainment Fireplace” (above) for setting said stuff on fire.

Now, there is money to be managed, and a plot to be sussed out, and a few time-based mechanics borrowed from social games, and bonuses for burning various objects in combination, and the whole thing is not quite as nihilistic and boneheaded as it might appear. But also, at the same time, the whole thing is exactly as nihilistic and boneheaded as it appears. Here minimalism becomes active critique. The question is partially How little gameplay can we offer and still satisfy our players? But equally, the question is How little gameplay can we, or anyone, get away with?

In my next post, I’ll discuss a game that offers a less cynical but equally compelling answer to that question.

Why We Nerf

In his book Play Money, Julian Dibbell observed that the act of grinding for loot carries with it an implied meritocracy: hard work really does pay off, and riches really are the direct result of industriousness. According to Dibbell, this is why so many players so hate the idea of other players cheating by taking shortcuts.

Serious players are less interested in games being fun than they are in games being fair. Playing a Hardcore Diablo 3 character for dozens of hours and then suddenly losing that character forever may seem insane, brutal, wasteful, and bizarre—but in some sick sense, it’s the player’s own damn fault, so it’s fair.

This obsession with fairness, I suspect, is what lies at the heart of nerfing. For those unfamiliar, to nerf is to single out some element of a game that has become too powerful, and to make it less powerful. The word is supposed to bring to mind a broadsword being swaddled in everyone’s favorite Non-Expanding Recreational Foam, and thereby rendered markedly less lethal. One recent example came when, in Diablo 3, increases to characters’ attack speed were deemed too efficient a means of improving those characters’ overall effectiveness. To combat this imbalance, Blizzard nerfed attack speed buffs, much to the chagrin of those who had been using said buffs.

And the recently nerfed had good reason to be disgruntled, didn’t they? Do the Demon Hunters have to suffer just because Monks are underpowered? (There’s a joke about “class warfare” in there somewhere).

Indeed, the logic of nerfing constitutes a tendency toward reducing rather than increasing, a peculiar affection for lowest common denominators. Another Diablo 3 example: there was a brief (and it must be said, not very interesting) quest in Act 2 that allowed players to farm experience points, and thereby level up faster than at any other point in the game. You talked to a dude, killed some monsters, talked to another dude, killed some more monsters, finished the quest, left the session, and booted up a new session at the beginning of the quest you’d just ended. Over and over. Soon, Blizzard effectively nerfed this quest, making it yield fewer experience points.

As the Extra Credits crew has pointed out, the pursuit of efficiency to the detriment of engagement is a well-observed phenomenon. If players “think they can get an edge or take advantage of the system by doing something really boring, they’ll do it, for hours at a time,” which rightly irks designers. Why bother crafting an engaging experience when your audience would rather run around in tiny circles instead?

But it’s interesting that Blizzard chose to nerf the exploit rather than making some other, much more fun, much more meaningful part of the game just as profitable. Wouldn’t that be the better solution? Eliminate an exploit, and people will just go hunting for another one. Stamping out those tedious little oases is a pointless crusade, so it would make more sense to let the exploiters exploit to their hearts’ content, and focus on making the game fun for those players who care about having fun.

Except that exploits just feel wrong. In some subconscious way, they devalue the hours that others have spent leveling by less efficient means. In short, exploits feel unfair because they threaten the sanctity of the game’s playtime-as-merit pecking order. It’s not about disallowing bad behavior (which is impossible) but simply about defining certain behaviors—loudly, clearly, mechanically—as bad.

So nerfing is the fraught, messy work of maintaining fairness above all else, at once a boisterous affirmation of meritocracy and an unseemly reminder that meritocracy never emerges organically. Maintaining any meritocracy requires constant vigilance, nettlesome top-down tinkering, and hard limits on how powerful any one group is ever allowed to become.

Unfairness is the natural state of things—and we’re always looking for ways to correct it without having to acknowledge that we’re doing so.

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.

We’re All Feminists Now

In case you haven’t heard, Anita Sarkeesian of Feminist Frequency decided to Kickstart a web series about female characters in videogames. She wanted to raise $6,000 for the project. She ended up raising $158,917. In the interest of full disclosure, I suppose I should mention that one of those dollars was mine.

On the way to her success, Sarkeesian encountered what could be generously described as a grand-scale Internet shitstorm. The substance of the backlash ranged from garden variety trolling to gendered insults laced with antisemitism to numerous at-least-semi-serious threats of violence. (Google it if you really want to know the details, trigger warning, trigger warning, trigger warning).

Unsurprisingly, some of the best coverage came from Rock, Paper, Shotgun. John Walker noted an emerging theme in the backlash, namely “that men are poorly represented in gaming too.” Walker agreed that indeed, “they are.”

Men in games are often represented as huge, muscled heroes, essentially weapons of war with biceps, gruff and focused and all-powerful. It’s not an accurate representation of men at large, indeed not. Because it’s a power fantasy. It’s aspirational (as much as very many men may have no desires to be anything like that). It’s about being big, and strong, and in control. Oh boo hoo. Yes, it is daft, and cliched, and tiresome. But to compare it to the default representation of women in games—either huge-titted, scantily clad sexual fantasies, or helpless, pathetic and weak—is deeply erroneous.

Walker answered the detractors’ implied question (Why are we even talking about this?) with a simple and sensible demonstration of male privilege. You wouldn’t know it from reading comments sections, but we’re talking about observable reality here, not some far-flung intellectual burg on The Island of Purely Hypothetical Feminist Wheel-Spinning.

One RPS commenter tried to refute a fairly straightforward observation—”I hear far more blathering about how crazy modern feminism is than I hear actual crazy modern feminism”—with another, weirder, considerably more confusing one: “The problem is that I hear far more blathering about how modern feminism isn’t crazy than I hear actual non-crazy modern feminists speaking.”

If most discussions of gender seem to crash into a brick wall of nonsense, then this is precisely that brick wall.

Look. Anyone who is speaking about gender in a non-crazy way is a non-crazy feminist. Feminism is, fundamentally, the act of looking at history, media, language, or anything else, and realizing that all subjects in all disciplines are gendered—and that gender has been rigidly hierarchical throughout human history, predominantly advantaging men while predominantly disadvantaging women. Most importantly, feminism reveals that this dynamic has frequently (though often quite subtly) shifted, and that we can and must continue to shift it.

The central, irrefutable insight of feminist thought is that gender operates through taught assumptions and learned behavior, and is therefore subject to revision and improvement—even though its machinations so often seem, as Simone De Beauvoir said in The Ethics of Ambiguity, “to be immediately given by nature, by gods, by powers against whom revolt has no meaning.”

And fine, she was talking about freedom in a more general sense there, but that’s sort of my point. Our responsibility to address and redress inequality goes beyond gender. It’s bedrock. Feminism is bedrock when dealing with other human beings in the same way that the Magna Carta is bedrock when forming a just, legitimate government.

To dismiss “feminism” as a fringe mode of thought, in other words, is reductive to the point of willful meaninglessness. Unless you think that gender roles really are (or ought to be) immutable, fixed, and unchanging, and that inequality between men and women is acceptable and/or unavoidable, you are a feminist.

That doesn’t mean we all agree, of course—who the hell would want that?—but it does mean that we’re all on the same side, or should be. Feminism is not so much an ideology as an event—an event that is already taking place, and from which there is no turning back, and which demands participation from anyone interested in fully understanding any topic. It’s too late to unsex the subject. We’re all feminists now.

The $5 Flash Game That’s (Much) Deeper than Diablo 3

Here’s another possible explanation for players’ almost-across-the-board dissatisfaction with Diablo 3: even though the game boasts randomly generated content, very little changes from playthrough to playthrough. Diablo 3 is incredibly small, and not just because the campaign is short—though it is pretty short, and honestly, making us manually skip each unchanging line of ham-handed dialogue is downright perverse.

But no, no, the problem is deeper than that.

When a game asks you to play through the same mode multiple times, there is an expectation that each play session will be different. To some degree, this occurs naturally in multiplayer games, given the unpredictability of human allies or opponents. But it requires some design work in anything with narrative or level progression. Some games offer multiple paths through their worlds (à la Super Mario World), while others offer branching narratives (à la anything by Bioware or Bethesda). Randomly generated content is another means of achieving difference within a repeating framework, and it has the notable advantage of being able to do so infinitely.

My go-to example of that technique is The Binding of Isaac, a game that is in many ways more expansive than Diablo 3 despite being sold for one twelfth the price, and despite having been made, in Flash, by two guys.

Playing through Isaac‘s sequence of events takes about an hour. Each of those hours is unique because the power-ups, consumable items, stat boots, dungeon maps, enemy buffs, boss buffs, and so on are all randomized. It’s not just that it’s different each time, but also that the differences are substantive and meaningful. You have to play the (sometimes wildly unfair) hand you’re dealt. You have to learn what each item does, and whether its benefits are worth its drawbacks given your current build. You have to look at the map and notice patterns, hoping to guess where the boss room might be or which wall is bombable.

Compare that with the random generation in Diablo 3. The game’s dungeon layouts are randomized, but where Isaac‘s maps snap together discrete, functional, carefully designed rooms, Diablo 3 just sort of splatters some jagged shape onto your screen and hides whatever you’re looking for in one of that shape’s many corners. The random map elements serve one purpose and one purpose only: they ensure that you’ll have to wander around for a while before finishing your current quest.

Items in Diablo 3 get random “magical properties,” but you’ll see most of them within the first few hours of play, and then the numbers just climb higher and higher with no fundamental changes to your attack patterns, movement, or class— whereas very item in Isaac significantly changes your character’s stats and/or demands a different approach in combat.

Both games give semi-random powers to monsters, but Isaac does the same with bosses—and far more importantly, the bosses are themselves randomly selected from a fairly deep pool. Why Diablo 3 doesn’t do this, I have no idea. It makes sense that the last fight is always Diablo himself, I suppose, but why the hell does Act One always end with The Butcher, and why does The Butcher do the same stuff every single time I fight him?

You could say, because of the story, but seriously, playing Diablo 3 for its story is like reading a pulp paperback for its font. And re-reading it. And then re-reading it again. And again. Always for the font, mind you.

Besides which, Isaac does fine without much of a plot. Let’s not let that pass. The more of a game’s story is told through gameplay, rather than between gameplay, the more effective it’s generally going to be. In game narrative, less really can be more. Dark Souls, for example, may have a better plot than most games—but just as importantly, it also has less plot than most games, and that’s a huge part of why it works.

Diablo 3 is laterally small. It’s not that there aren’t enough levels, but that the levels don’t leverage the game’s randomness to create novel variations. Think of it this way: when Diablo 3 gets its first inevitable expansion pack, what will the main event of that pack probably be? Bigger, flashier, tougher end-game content, right?

The Binding of Isaac’s first expansion pack, Wrath of the Lamb, resists that temptation almost entirely. It does not tack on an extra, final chapter. Instead, it introduces alternate versions of the existing chapters, each with new enemies, items, and bosses.

In fairness, Blizzard did something similar with World of Warfract: Cataclysm. But the low-level stuff didn’t get touched until, what, six years after the game’s initial release? It seems to be an accepted fact that the first 10 hours of any Diablo 3 character’s life will be grindy, mindless drudgery, and WoW’s timetable doesn’t bode well for a change on that front.

The framework is there. Diablo 3 is beyond-compulsive to play. Now more things need to happen while I play it.

Things other than this, I mean.

We Could Use More Memorial Day(s)

Today is Memorial Day. Today we’re supposed to remember those who’ve died while fighting in the name of the United States of America, and unofficially, those who have died since doing so. For those veterans who’ve survived, we have Veterans’ Day. These two holidays have become generic, catch-all dates of much-deserved appreciation, but each has a much more specific—and a much more profound—historical significance.

Memorial Day used to be Decoration Day, which commemorated and honored the Union soldiers who died during the Civil War. On May 30, 1868, this was how President James Garfield began the very first Decoration Day address:

I am oppressed with the impropriety of uttering words on this occasion. If silence is ever golden, it must be here beside the graves of fifteen thousand men, whose lives were more significant than speech, and whose death was a poem, the music of which can never be sung. With words we make promises, plight faith, praise virtue. Promises may not be kept; plighted faith may be broken; and vaunted virtue be only the cunning mask of vice.

For Garfield, the only halfway-decent tribute to our entombed soldiers is silence. Words can lie, promises can be broken, and protestations of national destiny or personal bravery can be, and frankly quite often are, bullshit. So for a moment, we need the words to stop, and we need to take in the full significance of these Americans who sacrificed their lives for something bigger, though not necessarily better, than themselves.

We still observe a moment of silence on Memorial Day, sometimes. But it’s worth remembering why we do it. Moments of silence are not merely suspensions of words and sound and noise. They acknowledge that some things are beyond words and sound and noise, beyond our powers of expression, beyond our otherwise unlimited capacity to justify violence.

Let’s turn to Kurt Vonnegut for something else worth remembering, namely that

all the people of all the nations which had fought in the First World War were silent during the eleventh minute of the eleventh hour of Armistice Day, which was the eleventh day of the eleventh month.

It was during that minute in nineteen hundred and eighteen, that millions upon millions of human beings stopped butchering one another. I have talked to old men who were on battlefields during that minute. They have told me in one way or another that the sudden silence was the Voice of God. So we still have among us some men who can remember when God spoke clearly to mankind.

Armistice Day has become Veterans’ Day. Armistice Day was sacred. Veterans’ Day is not.

Again, silence. A moment when we allow words to fail—which might be as close as we can ever come to hearing the voice of God.

Whereas Decoration Day heavily favored the canonization of one side (the Union), Armistice Day abandons any such pretense to ancient traditions of victor and vanquished. No, the really important thing was that the killing had stopped, plain and simple. The sheer weight of the fight, for that one suspended moment, meant considerably more than whatever we’d all been fighting for.

Given that historical context, I think it is supremely unwise to flatten our nation’s myriad wars and countless fallen warriors into just two days of semi-silent observance (with breaks in the silence, of course, for bargain-hunting). We shouldn’t be consolidating our days of remembrance. Rather, we should be multiplying them, as our foreign entanglements have multiplied.

We should have one day for the First World War, and another for the Second World War. A day for the Civil War, and a day for the Revolutionary War. A day for the conflict in Vietnam, a day for the conflict in Korea, a day (or more) for the recently-ended war(s) in Iraq, and a day for the ongoing war in Afghanistan, our longest to date. A day for each of the wars we waged against barbary pirates. A day for each of our McKinley-era colonial conquests. A day for the Mexican-American War, and one of the Cherokee War, and yes, one for our wildly extralegal Reagan-era adventure in Nicaragua.

And on and on and on, filling up our calendar, demanding that we all learn a thing or two about each past confrontation—some of them as heartbreakingly necessary as others were heartbreakingly unnecessary—and forcing us to acknowledge that no federal holiday, no words, no promises or high-minded nationalist rhetoric, could ever constitute a fitting tribute to those lost.

We can’t slap a neat little bow on their sacrifice without being (at best) patronizing or (at worst) morally insane. It’s bigger than that, it’s more complicated than that, and it’s well beyond the scope of a holiday or two.

Diablo 3′s Design Doublethink

I really don’t want to be one of those guys on the Internet who spends all of his time complaining about things—we’re well-supplied with those, thank you very much—and besides, Diablo 3‘s beyond-rocky launch, moronic DRM, rickety security infrastructure, deliberately bad pacing, and overall shallowness have been well-documented by Rock, Paper, Shotgun, upon whom we can always rely for singular insight and appropriate indignation in equal measure.

But Diablo 3 really has been remarkable in its ability to piss everyone off, and that widespread, heterogeneous anger demands time and analysis. Some are annoyed that the game isn’t enough like Diablo 2 (I can re-spec whenever I want?), while others are annoyed that the game remains too much like Diablo 2 (I have to slog through the entire perversely unchallenging Normal mode before getting to the good stuff in Nightmare?). But of course, both these sets of complaints are par for the course with a new entry in a beloved series. Unremarkable.

Then there’s the problem of the campaign stubbornly following a rigid narrative structure, yet paying virtually no attention to plot, character, theme, or tone. I keep getting the impression that the game truly wants me to care about its world, and I keep waiting for a good reason to start caring, and it never comes. I went ahead and switched the game over to Spanish (which I neither read nor speak), in order to give all the faux-horror melodrama a neat little telenovela feel. I am confident that, in making this switch, I have sacrificed precisely nothing of value.

The rune abilities take a little interpreting, but that’s about it.

Again, though: unremarkable. Awful dialogue and wooden plotting are frankly the norm in games.

No, the more interesting thing—and the real reason, I suspect, for such widespread pissedoffedness—is that Diablo 3 is a hardheaded mishmash of conflicting design choices, perhaps intended to please everyone but ultimately pleasing almost no one.

The aforementioned difficulty level lockdown seems designed to slow players down—way, way down—while the combat itself has been significantly sped up. Progress rests heavily on loot, loot, loot, yet the itemization is hapahazard, perhaps even fundamentally miscalculated. The rune system promises tactical variation, yet the combat seems always to come down to click on that until it dies, and maybe use a potion somewhere in the middle there. Maybe. But probably not.

The always-on DRM was pitched as a way of keeping the experience balanced and legitimate, yet the serverside Auction House (which was ostensibly the main reason for the rights management gymnastics) creates at least as much statistical entropy as command console tomfoolery and extradiegetic character squinking would have. A friend and I recently defeated the Act 2 boss in under 15 seconds, simply because we’d bought our frankly ridiculous armaments from other players rather than in-game merchants.

Like it or not, all the best drops are in this dungeon here.

That would be fine if we could then say “oh, this difficulty setting is much too easy for us,” and turn up the monsters’ power—but as previously mentioned, we cannot do that. Likewise, the slow pacing would be irritating rather than game-breaking if only we were barred from the rowdy upward mobility of the free market, perhaps by means of level-locks—but while we are currently mired in Normal, we are absolutely not restricted to Normal gear. This disconnect rapidly takes the game’s difficulty from trivial to insulting to laughable to, again, game-breaking.

All of which bespeaks a game in desperate need of fixes and tweaks from its fans—and for better or worse, Bathesda has proven that the fans will fix the game, no matter how broken. But in a paranoiac attempt at control, Blizzard has made the game unmoddable. In order to prevent others from breaking the game, they’ve gone ahead and broken it themselves at nearly every level, and also locked away the tools for fixing it.

And I’m still not sure why, except that Blizzard obstinately, emphatically, inexplicably wanted it that way. Maybe it’s all in service of the Real Money Auction House, which we’ve yet to see in action, but meanwhile Diablo 3 has made a whole lot of people unhappy. It will be fascinating to see how many of them stay unhappy, and what comes of that.