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This is the end...



This is the end, my only friend, the end...

The Three-Headed Monkey closes; its 60 posts will remain on the Internet until the end of times (or until blogger decides to pull the switch). I will keep writing about video games, the current research project, and whatever is coming after that, but not here. So, it's not really an end, it's more like a change of venue.

I'll invite all of you, people of the Internet, to my new home: danielmuriel.com. Not very original, isn't it? Very functional nonetheless.

Just one last song:


Bye, bye! See you on the other... site.

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Video games and guilty pleasures: suffering desires


Today I am going to embed the video of my participation at the IV Conference on Sociology of the Ordinary (website in Spanish), which was held in Madrid on 4-5 May 2016. My talk was on how video games are able to articulate desires in more complex ways, given their biotechnological and prosthetic nature; I focused specifically on what I call suffering desires, that is, our attraction to activities that potentially make us suffer. I illustrated my arguments using video games such as Dark Souls, Heavy Rain, Papers, Please, and This War of Mine. The presentation is in Spanish, but I've included English subtitles.

Video games and guilty pleasures: suffering desires



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Some thoughts on... Life is Strange

Today, some thoughts on Life is Strange (Dontnod Entertainment, 2015).


Chronicle of an announced disaster
Life is Strange tells us a tale of an announced disaster. It is to a great extent a tragedy, and like in every tragedy the hiatus is the most important part, that is, what happens in the narrative journey that leads us to the inevitable ending. In that journey the game deals with ordinary, yet thorny, issues such as the transition to adulthood, the meaning of friendship, the act of returning home as an stranger, the loss of a loved one, bullying, harassment, rape, suicide. Dontnod's title succeeds in connecting players to those experiences, making them relatable almost without noticing it. It is easy to empathise with the characters in the game and it forces us to reflect on their problems (which become ours too).

We play as a young adolescent, Max Caulfield, who is in transition to different places: on the one hand, looking to the future, she walks towards adulthood and what it entails in terms of personal and professional choices; on the other hand, looking to the past (since she is returning to her home town, Arcadia Bay), she faces the memories of herself and those she left behind. She comes back to join the Blackwell Academy, a senior high school specialised in Science and Arts, from where she wants to start a career as a photographer. In that uncomfortable quotidian context, Max finds out she is able to rewind reality, to go back in time. The game, a clever decision in my opinion, does not explain where this ability comes from; it is just given to us and becomes the central narrative and mechanic device of Life is Strange. We progress using this power, but it also help us explore the narrative nuances of the game - although we need to remember that, due to its tragic nature,  the main story is already written - by allowing us to retrace our footsteps and take alternative paths. It is about exhausting the arch of possibilities. In this way, Dontnod's work makes an old power permitted by several video games in the past playable: to reload a former save point in order to explore new alternatives.


This approach is key for the player's immersion. Giving us the opportunity to undo our actions, the game leads us to be more aware of our choices: 'I should have intervened', 'I should have said that other thing', 'why did I not do it differently?' Life is Strange makes that awareness even more evident in those scarce moments in which it strips the player of the power of rewinding reality; when we realise, terrified, that our actions will have consequences we will not be able to revert.

Ultimately, what the game gives you on one hand, the power of undoing your choices and letting you explore different alternatives, it is stolen from you on the other: it is, as I already considered above, the inevitability of the disaster. Life is Strange is the experience of a hiatus in which we enjoy a deceitful freedom, because in the end it only allows us to choose between losses. For better or worse, that is the only thing that life usually has to offer.


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Some thoughts on... The Park

Today, some thoughts on The Park (Funcom, 2015).


The anguish of the parent
If we decided to create a list with what we consider our universal fears - those fears we can claim almost without a doubt that everybody experiences regardless of their cultural and historical contexts, I am certain that the fear of losing our children would be among them. Not only am I alluding to the terrible experience - always traumatic - of their passing, but to the horror of realising that one of your children has disappeared in the crowd or is not where she or he was supposed to be. The Park (Funcom, 2015), a spin-off from the MMO The Secret World (Funcom, 2012), is based on that anguish, which works as the foundation for the development of a story about loss - literal and emotional - of the loved ones, maternity, and misery - moral and material.


That's the starting point of The Park. We play the role of a mother who is looking for her son inside a closed, semi-abandoned, amusement park. One of the original mechanics of the game, almost the only one, involves calling Callum, the boy, who occasionally answers with short phrases such as 'You can't catch me', 'This way, mommy!', 'Over here!', 'Come on, this way!', and 'Catch me mommy!'. The protagonist's shout also triggers visual clues that tell the player what to look for (find a document or an event that can be activated). We mainly interact with the video game through those cries of distress, using a language of anguish, and as the game progresses the initial nervousness turns into desperation. In that sense, The Park seeks to cause a sense of permanent uneasiness among players, putting them in that state of mind throughout the game.


Funcom's work is clearly divided into two parts. The first part is set in an amusement park - more open, with more references to the universe of The Secret World - while the second one situates us in an oppressive representation of the family home, a section reminiscent of P.T. (a benchmark for these kinds of games) that shakes the conscience (hers and ours). In both parts we sense - or rather we know - that everything is headed towards a disastrous denouement. The game does not hide the outcome, since the ending is not the most important thing, but the journey, the ride that sinks into the darkest corners of the human being and will inevitably derail.


The Park is short and does not challenge the player with any worth mentioning obstacle. It is not possible to die, there are no puzzles or major impediments, and the probabilities to get lost in the game's map are close to none. It seem evident that its aim is not to propose an ordinary gameplay challenge to players; it is more about presenting an emotional challenge to them. What does it mean to grow up in a broken home? How do you survive the loss of a loved one? How do you deal with your material needs when we live in a system that is hostile to those who cannot provide for themselves? What does it mean to be a parent in a context of family, economic and social helplessness?

Throughout the game, we find numerous truculent references to the already grotesque Grimm brothers' tale, Hansel and Gretel. These allusions are not gratuitous; they are essential to understand The Park. It's the anguish of the parent who, unable to take care of his or her children, leaves them to their fate. However, that does not reduce their anxiety, on the contrary, it grows until it swallows them up. There are several things that we can isolate, forgot, or even stop loving. Our children do not seem to be one of them.


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Interviews - Pawel Miechowski on This War of Mine



Today, the exceptional Pawel Miechowski - Senior Writer at 11 Bit Studios - on This War of Mine.




























Daniel Muriel: Could you tell me something about yourself, about your academic and professional background? And why did you end up working in the videogame industry?
Pawel: Because my older brother does so [Laughter]. We’ve been working on games since ages together. I’m doing it since high school. Pretty much all my work life has been involved in gaming, except I was a bartender once, just for a year. This is it. I studied journalism at the University of WrocÅ‚aw like more than ten years ago. Since then, I've been working professionally in game development and I want to do it forever [Laughter]

DM: That’s a good thing. Why did you decide to do a game like This War of Mine?
P: The idea came straight from my brother, exactly, at one of the meetings. He told us we should do a game about war, but its real side, how people suffer during war. The idea was so inspiring that everybody got it instantly, and simply said, “Yeah, let’s do it, absolutely!” Of course, there had to be proper research to be done, we had to approach the topic with appropriate respect. However, we knew the gaming as a storytelling form grew up enough to accept talking about serious topics via proper game language, be it survival mechanics or non-linear dialogues, and start such stuff that games can offer and, at the same time, very specific to games as a form of storytelling. We also knew that we are making the game for the mature gamer, because we are the generation that grew up with gaming. We’re close to forty, but since we were kids, we had Commodores and Amigas and then PCs and then consoles and every machine you can play a game on. Games are a natural part of our culture for us, because we grew up with them and since we grew up with them, we treat it as natural form of storytelling, and as such, you can cover any topic. In this trend of maturation, This War of Mine was created. It’s not the only example, because more and more games are dealing with commenting war as politics or as the social condition of humans in general. Tolerance, acceptation, etcetera, etcetera. I guess this is one of the good examples of the fact that games grew up.

DM: What kind of impact do you think This War of Mine had on the people who played it or is having right now on the people who are playing it?
P: This is a very personal question, so it’s hard to generalise it somehow, because that would be asking you “what did you feel when you were watching Interstellar?” People have very subjective reception, but I believe This War of Mine could be an eye opener, because we got tons of feedback from the gaming community all around the world, telling that was a very emotional experience, playing the game, and as such it could work as an eye opening experience. One of our programmers, he went to Dev Gamm conference in Moscow, say three or four months ago, and surprisingly Russians were very excited about the game. Not in a way that they enjoyed playing it, but that someone dared to make such an antiwar game in the end, being a war game at the same time. For them it was eye opening indeed, because they told us they didn’t know war could be perceived that way. In Russian propaganda and mentality, whatever is driving them in their life, it is very common to present war, when you invade other countries, as something good because for them that is justice. They don’t think about, you know, everyday victims of war. I don’t know, this is tough, but for them this was eye opening. I’m really, really proud because of this fact, that you can do such thing via a game.


DM: Imagine that someone is playing This War of Mine today. What impact would you like to have on this person?
P: Well, I think each member of our team should speak for himself or herself. For me, that is the antiwar message. I’m a complete pacifist, I think war is the worst that might happen in the world, and constant trivialisation of war in pop culture was something that made us somehow resistant to suffering. You can blame not only games, but television, movies. War is sexy and effective only when you blow stuff up, explode and shoot around and everything that set your adrenaline pumped. We somehow forget we can show also the other side. I am not blaming the entire pop culture for showing that war is so exciting from one point, because when you are in the mood, you watch an action movie, or you read a criminal book, but we shouldn't be focusing only on this side, because the real war is, pardon my French, damn horrible suffering.

DM: There was someone on the internet who said “wow, what a cool game, it seems like this is this year’s Papers, Please in terms of empathy simulation”. Would you agree with this? Would you consider your game an empathy simulation?
P: Yes, in fact, Papers, Please was one of the inspirations because we had the opportunity to meet the creator, Lucas [Pope], in San Francisco and speak about his project at an early stage. We were thrilled that we also have these ideas for provoking somehow empathy in gaming. When we saw the great success of Papers, Please, we were sure that we’re in this process of maturation, and we can treat This War of Mine as such, as a serious mature game. Papers, Please was a great a game that inspired us to move on with our project, to make an empathy game.

DM: I also found this comment on the internet, this person said: “the game is tough; I wish some characters were sociopaths/psychopaths, because, you know, if you steal some food from an old couple causing them to starve to death or kill someone who is not a thug, they go into huge depression and just become worthless.” This is a very interesting and a strong reaction to the moral scenarios you propose in the game. “I wish some of my characters were sociopaths”, I think you have created a powerful to get emotional responses from gamers. What do you think when you hear or read something like this?
P: You know, it’s about perception. You don’t have any control over how people react to the stories you tell. I can imagine people being frightened by watching The Shining by Stanley Kubrick. I can imagine people being totally excited how Jack Nicholson smashes the door with his axe. The same thing we’re having in This War of Mine. I know people depressed because they saw suffering in a game. I saw people excited, because they survived. I saw people having a sort of catharsis feeling when they survived, and I saw people being embarrassed or even had feelings of remorse because of the evil deeds they have made in the virtual world. But yet, it is a virtual world. You can invest, and you should, I guess, invest your empathy in this world, but let’s not forget, this is just a virtual reality, and same situation applies to the other forms of storytelling as well. When you watch a film, you should remember, this is just a film, right? I’m fully aware of really different perceptions of the game, however, I am certain that most of the feedback is very positive, in a way that people invested their empathy in the game and acted as we wanted when we were creating the game. So, cooperate, work, and see how to survive, rather than kill, steal and run away.


DM: Once you were speaking about how players tend to think about each location as a solution that you can use or a riddle that you can solve, because players are programmed with this way of thinking after decades of playing. And then, you added, “If you do something the player isn’t programmed for, he or she doesn’t know what to do and starts to act more subconsciously. Emotions are raised there, in this subconscious”. Is This War of Mine a device to make emotions emerge from there?
P: That is a tricky question, because we wanted to create such a tool and we use this technique, however, this is a very complicated question, it is actually a philosophical question, right? Where are the emotions born? If you act consciously, you are definitely more able to control your emotions. If you don’t, then things are happening somewhere beyond your state of mind, at least the ones you can define at the moment. We used techniques that made players play very attentively, and while paying a lot of attention to the game consciously, other processes werw "pushed" to the subconscious, making it relatively easier to raise emotions. When you provoke subconscious acting, you keep the player engaged. You are more likely to evoke emotions. Games and stories all are about raising proper emotions.

DM: I know we are speaking about a video game, virtual worlds... but can this game tell you something about who you are or what would you able to do under some circumstances?
P: Yes. Because that’s how war looks like, and as such, the environment is the one that puts humans to a test. We can only imagine it, luckily, because we were never in a war. Our grandfathers and grandmothers were... because in Poland, every family suffered war. Luckily, we can only imagine, but our imagination made this picture to make it closer to people, so they can somehow put them to a moral test, because war is the ultimate test. This is a sentence we often met during different stories about war, because, you know, you may be starving, you may be wounded. There are extreme situations that war puts in front of people, and somehow people survive it. It’s all about decisions. Although the brutal reality of war doesn’t ask you about anything, and just kills you, of course. That happened quite often. But it’s a question of the decision makers, who raise war, not ours, right?

DM: In an article written by Simon Parkin at The New Yorker, he quoted you, that you wanted to create a different kind of dramatic experience, something closer to a tragedy. Why did you seek to create this kind of dramatic experience? Why a tragedy?
P: Partially because games might be mature for storytelling, and partially because we perceived games as something reserved only for, let’s say, those emotions related to enjoyment or excitement in storytelling. While, if you look at the history of the entire forms of art or storytelling or whatever you call it, you always had comedy in ancient theatre, and you had tragedy. One was for fun, the other was for catharsis, and then medieval theatre served the same purposes. When movies were born more than a century ago, they went the same way, of course a bit quicker than ancient theatre, but still, and now the games are going through it. First, they served as a comedy platform, and now they opened and will work as a tragedy as well, and you can even mix both in games, because you have a game like The Last of Us, which a lot is about action, but also about compassion and taking care of other people. So, yeah, this is it, games can and should be not only comedies. I mean, I love comedies and action movies, and such stuff, but I think this is not everything, and now, games can talk about everything and imagine what happens when virtual reality would be widely introduced. The Oculus technology, for example. We will be able to create complete digital worlds, like in Matrix, and it’s up to us what they would offer to you. Would it be a pleasure, an excitement, compassion, an entire set of things you can tell via such technology. I’m pretty certain we shouldn’t be looking to just one dimension, so to speak.


DM: Leigh Alexander on Gamasutra wrote that “where other war games are often entertaining, This War of Mine is often frankly depressing”. There were also comments like Reid McCarter on Kill Screen that said “11 bit studios greatest success with This War of Mine, it turns out, is in creating a videogame that is profoundly unpleasant to experience.” Have you designed a depressing game on purpose? Did you want to create a game that gives an unpleasant experience to the players?
P: Showing the war presented via a game required from us staying close to reality. If you want to show war without depression, death, sadness, hate and violence, you cannot do that because war is about it. So we had to stay close to reality and we did it on as many levels as possible. Of course, it’s not a full 3D recreation of the Second World War and the whole Holocaust and such. It’s a fictional war, but that’s enough to show the mechanisms of war, the basic ones, when you are, pardon me, fucked up and you need to survive and take care of your beloved ones.

DM: In this sense, there was as debate on the comments of Rock, Paper, Shotgun, about whether they would recommend the game or not. Not because they thought it was a bad game, on the contrary, they thought it was really interesting and it had an impact on them, but they weren’t sure if this kind of experience would be suitable for all people, because it’s not a video game just to have fun, and it can make you feel awful in a way. I know you’re an interested part is this, but would you recommend this game to everyone? Or depending on the type of person, would you reconsider its recommendation?
P: I don’t know. I would need to know such person. Some movies are not for delicate people, because they are brutal, so probably this game is not for everyone. If you invest a lot, you may feel too sad, I don’t know. That’s a really personal question. However, I know veterans who found this game a clearing experience, a cathartic one. I know stories from a girl who was a daughter of a war refugee and she wrote that the game helped them understand her mother, who was a war refugee and the horrors she went through during that war, Vietnamese, in this case. This is very personal. On the contrary, I cannot think of a good movie that shouldn’t be recommended to anyone; if their story is good and tells something important, that’s a story for everyone. This is the thing you may call beautiful, right? Suitable for anyone, and anyone can find it important, unless he or she is a sociopath [laughter].

DM: You said that in This War of Mine, there is no tutorial, because when war breaks out, there is no tutorial, you are just on your own. This is one of the things that actually struck me most deeply in my first gameplay. You are on your own.Why did you decide to put the player into this situation where you don’t know exactly what to do?
P: That’s simple, because that’s how war looks like. Putting away the game from reality and making some tutorial wouldn’t be close to the topic and probably would be very bad for the immersion and immersion is a very important part of playing games, right? You need to invest yourself in the game, whether it’s competition or building or mathematical issues to be solved.


DM: I found this comment on IGN. This person said that “the idea of not being able to take charge of your fate disturbs me, and I’d probably played it once… but if I’m going to feel like crap, then it’s something I’d rather avoid since I play videogames to feel empowered, not to feel even more depressed.” Do you seek to make people feel disempowered? To feel defenceless?
P: Well, I understand escapism in gaming, but escapism is not everything. If you want to run into power fantasy, to feel the powerful lord all the time, yeah, feel free to do so, but the world is not that way. This is the reason why we read books, this is the reason why we read newspapers, this is the reason why we talk to other people, to know what’s going on and what’s the truth. This is the reason I’m not sure each game should be about feeling powerful and if you want to say something important, and you are a game developer, and this is your tool, then yeah, do it. In the end, that might be depressing for a gamer, but I don’t think that’s wrong. When I played Papers, Please and my family died at the end because I screwed something up during the playthrough, I felt bad. But I somehow appreciated that the game put me in such situation because it plays on strings that were not within reach in games before. I really, really appreciate it as a gamer. It’s like watching Shawshank Redemption: it’s not about laughing and adrenaline, but you watch Shawshank Redemption over and over because it’s such a great story and gives you some feelings.

DM: Yeah, I mean that’s one of the most important things about video games, they make you feel things and put you into situations that otherwise you’d never experience and that is important in terms of empathy and any other things that you can develop or feel. Also, I find it interesting that you mentioned that you photographed yourselves to be put into the game. What is behind this idea or this decision you made?
P: That’s simple. We didn’t want to have anonymous models or shiny beautiful actors. We wanted regular people, looking like people you may meet on the street. Because we are not that beautiful: some guys have big bellies, some are skinny and some have not so beautiful faces, we wanted to scan ourselves and make models. We didn’t have enough models, so we asked our girlfriends, and our friends, and even our guard from the office, a very nice man, who plays Anton in the game. We invited him and he was really, really happy to do that with us. The models are based on real people.


DM: You did a lot of research and the stories and biographies in the game are based on what you learned during the research phase. Could you tell me something more about this research? What kind of research did you carry out and why was it important for the development of the game?
P: Well, that’s not too difficult if you think about it, because unfortunately war is a very thrilling topic, so people talk about it, make videos about it and there is a lot information about war, if you want to search. Each conflict is well researched when it comes to politics and such bullshit. They are not so well researched when it comes to people’s stories. We were looking for memoirs, interviews with people who simply survived a war. We were looking for things that got stuck in their mind as examples of how they perceived war and those are often very, very emotional stories. We are from Poland, so a lot of stories can be told by our grandmothers and grandfathers. I know a lot of stories from my grandma, she passed away a few years ago, but I still remember. It’s a living memory, happily this is only memory, so we’re the third generation of people in Poland born in a safe country and I hope it stays that way. But even in Warsaw you can find a lot of stories about war, because the city was devastated. There are even neighbourhoods in Warsaw that you can still see war, like bullet holes and stuff like that. So it’s present in the end, and it’s not that difficult. For example, the siege of Sarajevo is very, very well documented. If you go to FAMA Collection, it’s like a virtual museum, with video interviews with different people from Sarajevo and there are literally thousands of video interviews, thousands. So you may just, you know, go to that page and watch the videos and people have interesting things to say. A fireman was talking about fires during the city, but people who were working as accountants, they just had to stay home and watch through their windows what happened and they were the best witnesses of what happened, better than historical books.

DM: Just one more question. In an interview at GameSpot, you said, “whatever you find in the game is a translation into game mechanics of the facts of how civilians experience war”. How can you translate those real civilians’ war experiences into game mechanics?
P: Well, that’s of course sometimes a simplification or compromise that you need to do when designing a game. For example, obviously the day is just a few minutes in the game. It’s not twenty four hours. It's not a one to one picture, because otherwise it wouldn't be a game. Now, human mind is a very complicated thing and somehow we tried to picture different personalities and minds that react in different ways. Our AI designer, a very smart guy, he created few thousands of different states of each character in the game that can be triggered via different behavior, be it stealing, helping, starving, getting ill, etcetera, or even being drunk, and each personality may react in a different way (to give an example - selfish guy being less touched by theft). That’s just a simulation, yet he simulated a few thousands of states. But it’s mathematics, right? It’s just counting. We didn’t want to show the numbers, because people are not made of numbers, so we put the human in front of the story and behind it, there are all the rules. That’s how games work. You need to think about certain rules that are similar to what you believe as the simulation could be, and yet it needs to be engaging; so you need to make some simplifications and compromises to make it engaging.