Arkham World: The Tyranny of King Washington

The Tyranny of King Washington is an overpriced DLC in three installments for Assassin's Creed III (the American Revolution one.) It is amusing to play and the production values are high, but as alternate history it leaves much to be desired.

The Assassin's Creed series has always had an uncomfortable relationship with history. On the plus side of the ledger, there are so very few games that even attempt to give a ground-level, personal view of a historical period (the market in history is generally combat sims, which either give you a General's view, or let you ogle warplanes or tanks but never engage with actual people).

The Assassin's Creed series doesn't even go after the low-hanging fruit, having games set in Alexandria during the reign of the Ptolemy's or New Orleans during the French-Indian War. And their Age of Piracy game spent as much time on land and deep in politics as it did on the High Seas.

On the negative side; well, Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag took the piss on itself by setting part of the game in a game company who are writing twisted, dumbed-down, player-friendly versions of the real events they witnessed through the techno-magic of the Animus. Liberation (a full-length, fully independent spin-off of the AC III core game) took it a step further by revealing that the game play experience is being sculpted as propaganda by the, well, the fictional secret rulers of the game universe. Ouroboros, take a bow.

Well, alternate history is the historian's playground. Historical fiction can be hard work. Alternate history, good alternate history, is harder. You really have to understand the period before you can work changes on it.

More, alternate history is really about how history has unfolded in a unique way. A story set in 1930's New York can be a love story, a detective story, whatever. A story set in an alternate New Amsterdam is going to be about why it is different and what those differences mean.

The Tyranny of King Washington does not deliver.

The first thing the game delivers, in fact, is another disappointment. In this history, Ratonhnhaké:ton did not leave his native village, train as an Assassin and take on the name Connor. Most of the first installment takes place in the frontier and involves multiple Mohawk characters. But what do we learn and experience that is new? Damn all. Ratonhnhaké:ton goes on a stereotyped Spirit Journey and gets magical animal powers. This is about as anthropological as the latest New Age book from a Plastic Shaman.

Even for the trite and the stereotyped, the game is not in any way designed to let you interact with the Mohawk people or explore the village. Trapping, tracking and hunting skills are still there, left over from the main game, but there is no reason to employ them. The game comes so close; the landscape is a surreal ruin of supernaturally deep snow, destroyed towns, dead bodies, and prowling wolves, and there is an option to feed starving locals. Which you could have hunted for some of the game which is, oddly and remarkably, still hopping about without a care in the world, except that there is insufficient benefit from it and you can get all the food you like just by ambushing soldiers and rifling their pockets.

And of course there is no exploration of what it means for George Washington to gain super powers and go mad. You meet Franklin and Jefferson and Adams, but they have no insight, no discussion; there is none of the frank conversation you had with any of these men in the main game. There aren't even interesting choices being made; Benedict Arnold, like so many, is simply and rudely brainwashed to follow Washington. There's no calculation, no lesser evil, no nuance. Just mechanics.

In a strange way it reminds me of Mass Effect III. This was after the excellent lead writer had left the company, and this may be why with the coming of the Reapers all the interesting human stories stopped. George Washington's army, like the Reapers, have plowed through everything as an unstoppable force leaving little but ruins and a small cadre of desperate survivors who can spare no thought for anything other than where to get gunpowder.

With no history to give, and no interesting side stories, and no interesting people to watch for more than a dramatic cut-scene, all that is left is the usual meat of running around from quest arrow to quest arrow killing whatever you encounter, and sometimes being forced by the script to play with some annoying special mechanic for a while instead of continuing to do the game play the game has been training and rewarding you with until then.

Ratonhnhaké:ton goes on a spirit journey three times. Each time he meets a different spirit animal and each time gets a different super power. The bear is the least unbalancing but also the most annoying in that it allows you to do a ground-pound attack like a small bomb. And the game then throws up endless doors and fences at you to force you to use your Bear Powers on instead of just climbing over them the way you normally would.

It is very Batman: Arkham style. Tomb Raider did this, too, which each new weapon you got causing extra-special doors to spawn in your path that oh-so-conveniently required that exact device to overcome. The Batman series did it well and made it satisfying. Tomb Raider less so. In Tyranny, it is merely annoying. Fortunately, there isn't much of it.

On the other hand, the Eagle allows you to, well, fly. Which means all the climbing and jumping might as well go away, since it is easier to just fly across the city. You fly so very well it is trivial to lose pursuit, making the entire Notoriety mechanic a waste of time. You can kill a squad of soldiers in broad daylight, take the money off their bodies, fly to safety, then swoop down to drop a hefty bribe in the hands of a town crier who makes the entire populace stop paying attention to the six foot tall Native American wearing face paint and the skin of a wolf who keeps turning into a bird and flying around.

And then there's Wolf power, which you get early in the first installment. Call up ghost wolf assassins, that's bad enough. But it also lets you do another thing which wolves are well known for; turn invisible. The only thing that keeps this from breaking the game completely is your health bar depletes quickly while the Cloaking Device is enabled.

The only good thing that can be said is that after playing the main game through you probably have your fill of free-running and wall climbing and those ultra-annoying stealth tailing sessions. But these new mechanics are so incredibly overpowered they don't become a new tool; they become all you do. And they aren't as interesting. The levels are largely imported from the previous game and aren't designed around the new mechanics.

Take assaulting a fort. Used to be you'd have to either laboriously sneak in through the gate, or fight your way through from a sally port. Now you just fly over the wall. Boom, done.

The only thing that keeps you from basically being a Marvel superhero at this point is that the game only allows one Special to be mapped to a key at a time. And me, I found back in the main game that the Rope Dart is the only special weapon or device I ever need. The heck with laying bait or whistling up a horse or even firing a flintlock. Rope darts stun every enemy, even the highest-ranking mooks that otherwise can't be attacked even with a counter-chain, and they drag the enemy to you where you can deliver a coup de grace. 

It is only the annoyance of fussing around with switching Specials that keeps you from swooping over a wall, dropping down with a Drop Bear to kill half the lot, then going Ghost Doggie to snipe the remainder. The game was, basically, so dirt easy at that point I pretty much went with just one Special and stayed within the limitations. Also, the Eagle Assassination is, if anything, even cooler than the Jump Assassination.

So all said, it is an amusing addendum to the existing game. But not worth the money it costs, not even at Steam Sale prices.

Gee!

I invented a "portable practice booth" and tried it out today.

It is a box built of baltic birch ply and lined with acoustic material. Works like a charm. I had no qualms about practicing trumpet during the day, even without the mute.

And something has changed. Either the comfort (of being able to blow as hard as I wanted but without a practice mute to block it) or something in my posture or just that I've been posting at Quora lately and thinking a lot about embouchure and trumpet technique, but I blew a high G.

Clean, and repeatable. I can even run up and down the scale from the C above the staff to the F (first time I did it, though, after three passes I nearly passed out myself). And, yes, I did tap the A once but I'm only counting clean notes here.

* * *

On the other hand...

I had to take a big break on the novel. I had charged ahead into the next chapters but I could sense it wasn't working quite right.

The problem is that this is an origin story. Now she's "origined." So now I have to figure out what kind of character she'll be for the rest of the book (and possible series).

And there's a lot of elements of the character that are there because they needed to be for the origin to work. So Penny is energetic, confident, an auto-didact, physically fit, widely read. Basically, she had to either have the skills to carry off "Athena Fox" in the real world, or be able to learn them over the course of an adventure.

Other things I discovered while I was writing; things that made a scene or moment work and seemed consistent with the character I was building. So she is musical, an experienced actor, and speaks a little bit of a couple of languages.

So there's a lot of directions I thought I would go that in practice didn't work. Some times I got them all the way to a trial scene and they didn't work. For instance, on paper I liked the idea of her thinking of Athena Fox as an alter-ego, as someone she transformed into. So she'd lack confidence in her own skills when in mufti but put on the hat and she'd be all competent. Well, that didn't work. Having her outside the heroism meant she couldn't enjoy it or take pride in it.

Subtler than that is her thinking of Athena Fox as a character, as a fictional thing she portrays. The trap here is that it made her way too genre-savvy to live with in a semi-realistic book. The world of this novel, unlike the Diskworld, does not run on Narrativium. And it also called too much attention to the tropes I was touching on. It is better to continue how I started; that Penny is actually going around traveling to exotic lands and speaking multiple languages and solving archaeological mysteries...she just doesn't quite realize it.

The crossing point, the big moment of the previous chapter, is her realizing she can actually be Athena Fox. But here's the trick. She doesn't want to be a character. She wants to be the person. She doesn't want to have genre tropes happen, she wants to travel and explore and solve mysteries.

Of course I've got the Act III crux coming up. And that is where the "dark side" of the character shows up, and I confront head-on the idea of genre awareness.

But I still need to construct what she is like now.

* * *

Played through to the Minutemen Faction ending in Fallout 4. If you do it right, this is the one with the fewest betrayals. (If you try to complete with the Railroad Faction, you need to follow the Institute thread past the point of becoming an enemy of the Brotherhood of Steel. And both Institute and Brotherhood involve massacring all the other factions.)

It isn't a game without problems. I think it comes down to gamification. There are many things that have to be in there to give a long and rich playing experience, and they can clash with some of the core story.

One of the strongest for me is that most of the encounters, including the majority of all of the Faction threads, are forced to assume you are a starting player; a wanderer, a wastelander, just out of the vault. If you let the Railroad give you a default code-name it is "Wanderer." When you talk to the Brotherhood of Steel even fairly far into their thread they call you "Wastelander" and (as do all of the factions) speak of you as if you are a loner with no connections, no identity, no society you belong to.

Thing of it is, you can already be General of the Minutemen and have personal control over most of the settlements on the map. Which means the other factions should be treating with you diplomatically; as one of the most powerful political figures they've encountered. Okay, the Brotherhood gets a pass on this since they are assholes anyhow. And the Institute, too, couldn't care less for Surface titles. But the idea still stands.

(The other thing that gets me about meeting a faction late-game is the dialog simply can't take into account your history. There are some clever bits, like Preston noticing you already have power armor, but by late game you are basically a Person of Mass Destruction. Heck, they even warn you about the difficulties of the Shining Sea, when you've already explored the entire thing, been to the place they want you to find, and can shrug off a couple of rads without even bothering to wear protective gear.)

Heck, even your own settlers will sometimes wonder who you are and make snide remarks about wastelanders.

But here's a bit that I found really kind of off-putting. And that's dialog checks. Why do these work so much better in Mass Effect?

Well, it might be Mass Effect has better writing. Not the fault of the writers, but more the pacing of the game means plot points need to be bigger and move faster in Fallout 4. So Elder Maxxon can do a 180 with just one line of dialog.

I think it is largely the gamification. In Mass Effect, the special dialog options (Persuade or Intimidate) are available if you have a high enough point value. Otherwise they are grayed out (which is somewhat annoying; you are given the words you could say to resolve the situation but you are prevented from saying them). In Fallout 4, they are a die roll. The higher your skill (Charisma), the better chance of making the roll.

But because this is a roll, the game awards it with a "ding" sound. So the way it all comes together is thus; you are presented with a dialog option in color-coded letters (meaning it is going to be tough to make it work). If you made it, there's the "ta dah!" sound effect and the person you are talking to suddenly agrees with you and changes their mind. It feels...artificial.

Okay, maybe there's another reason. Mass Effect the sound design is much more satisfying even for the Interrupts, which are sort of a hyped-up, QuickTime Event version. And there's no annoying effect for regular dialog options. But also...you are playing Shepard. Shepard-Commander, who talked the Salarians into reversing the Krogan Genophage, who saved the Rachni race from extinction, who talked back to the Council, who was able to get a dozen fractious races to work together to defeat the Reapers. Shepard who brokered peace between the Quorrians and the Geth. Shep isn't just some random vault-dweller who is trying to be persuasive. It is who she IS.

Stations of the Cross

In Christian practice, this is a series of fourteen images from the Crucifixion that the worshipper visits in order, praying before each, recreating the Passion with their own journey.

The term got re-purposed in modified form as part of the critical language of Fan Fiction. There are at least a thousand fan-written stories that re-tell Harry Potter's first year at Hogwarts. Even though each is different, with a different focus, different endings, different characters, even wildly different settings, the cantus firmus of the original novel is still back there. And thus, even if the story is set in 1950 and "Harry" is a girl, a ward of Dick Tracey, and from the Moon*, she'll still be unwrapping chocolate frogs with Ron on the Hogwart's Express.

The big difference being that not all of the familiar incidents and characters show up. This is more a statistical tendency towards a relatively small number of popular items from the original canon. So it is a little more like one of those churches with multiple saints in their own individual niches and you can Chinese Menu which ones you visit.

A similar effect is in alternate history, where W.W.I. may have kept going into the early 40's and Bismark II is a nuclear-powered hovercraft....but Winston Churchill is (somehow) still PM (and Adolph gets a brief appearance in the text; even though he's a well-established portrait painter in Free Austria, you still have to visit that station.)

Video Games would seem a strange place for this effect. Even in the most linear game, however, you can as player establish a different internal life for your character. I can play Tomb Raider 2013, for instance, as a scared kid or as a roaring arc of revenge. The results are basically the same and the cutscenes are, alas, the same, but there are nuances in how the actual play unfolds.

A game like Skyrim is very, very open to different paths.



In Skyrim, there is a Main Campaign and a whole bunch of side quests. And there's also stuff to do, like explore, gather herbs, hunt, learn smithing, run a farm. You can (many do) play for hours without ever touching on any of the scripted content.

You can also pick and chose. The episodes of the Main Campaign must be completed in order, but there's no time limit. You can go away to fight the Thieve's Guild or become Arch-Mage of the College of Winterhold for a few months and come back...the dragons will still be waiting.

These form the stations. Not just the memorable incidents of the Main Campaign (the flight from Helgen, the summons of the Greybeards) but also the other accomplishments and memorable incidents from the longer side quests (meeting Torvald, adopting an orphan, making one hundred iron daggers).

Not only can multiple people play this game and have unique experiences -- sharing only these Stations of the Cross as they come across them -- but one person can play the game multiple times, again each time with a unique experience.

And that means even coming at the well-known, well-worn incidents again and again, there is still new insight and new delight. Meeting Ulfric Stormcloak for the second time is a lot different if you meet him as a young dark-elf mage, or as a sturdy Nord who already beat-down the only other known Dragonborn in dragon-to-dragon combat.



And, yeah, there went a few more hours. I've been working a late-night install (we have to start after the offices clear out) and it took a bit of work to flip my biological clock around.



* Free Plot Bunny!  I would totally read an H.P. fanfic in which Moon Maid (or Honeymoon) went to Hogwarts, and Voldemort joined Pruneface and Flattop and the other wackaloons in Tracey's Rogues Gallery.

A Bridge Too Far: MOH Airborne

Airborne is the 11th installment of the perennial Medal Of Honor series of first-person shooters, and joins a still remarkably small number of games with historical settings; this one being of course World War II.

The ravening horde shouting out unintelligible insults had taken over the FPS genre at this point; it has a rather short "campaign" mode to concentrate it's energies on multiplayer (and as with so many games, the servers crashed on opening day and there were weeks of game-crippling issues with that multiplayer mode).

For the single-player campaign, you play as a low-ranking (eventually buck Corporal) soldier in the 82d named Boyd Travers. And as his clone, as any time you get killed between checkpoints a new "you" parachutes in to take up where you left off.

An unusual and fun mechanic in the game is that you make a combat drop into each new map with a steerable parachute. Not quite sandbox, it still means you can chose what order to take objectives, or even land somewhere completely random and proceed to screw with the game a little.

In the usual FPS mode you get a choice of two long arms, a pistol, and grenades. You can at various times swap out either of the long arms with what you find lying on the ground. And here's my first problem; with the exception of the panzerfaust, all the weapons as depicted are so vastly similar there's little reason to care which you are using.

Older weapons in real life are a lot less consistent. Some are bolt action, some have detachable magazines, some are notoriously unreliable; there's a lot to learn and you really shouldn't be able to just pick one off the battlefield and start shooting. Or find the right ammunition just lying on the ground.

Case in point; at various points a Gammon Bomb (which the game calls a Gammon Grenade) is added to your armory. Which cooks off and throws just like any other grenade. Well, the Gammon had a unique fusing system in which an unwinding strip of linen cloth armed an impact fuse. It should at least look -- and really play -- different. Heck, the game doesn't (as far as I can tell) even give a range advantage with the potato masher, which is pretty much the point of that long wooden handle.

I don't know if you really want to be modeling having to, say, run the bolt with every shot, much less have to go through some multi-button routine to shove a stripper clip through the top -- but then, many FPS already have a gun mechanic where you have to hold down multiple buttons to go into sight mode and shoot. In any case, I'd like something to make the weapons more distinct than just having a different sound and a different HUD model.

This ties into the hands-off philosophy so many of these games have with history. The writers cared about the period, did their research, and had a good consultant. It all looks great. But you as player engage so little with it. At least it is appropriate for Airborne soldiers to be carrying a huge armory around with them. There's a particularly famous picture of one with anti-tank, at least three other guns, and a blanket and poncho as well. But basically this is the FPS mantra; whether it is historically accurate or appropriate to the setting the player must have their four basic weapons groups.

Of course, what I'd really want is a game where you could talk to locals, go on pass between operations, swap stories with your buddies, spend time in hospital. But that's not going to happen, not even on AAA budgets. Mostly. I mean; Skyrim allows you to explore, engage in conversation (stilted as it can often be), even set up as a shopkeeper and put the sword down for good. I'm not asking for a game where you play as Anne and spend the war in an attic, but I do wish for more engagement.

In any case, the ruins are fun and look appropriate (but then, MOH have had eleven games and about as many years to learn how to model and render good-looking debris). The AI are mildly more interesting, as they seem more aware of their surrounding and even give hints of cooperating between each other. But alas, they fall prey like any other to my favorite FPS/3PS game of "confuse the AI." Just like in Tomb Raider, I could leave cover, sprint into their lines and cause the AI soldiers to spin in place as their tracking and pathfinding routines clashed.

And then beat them up with a potato masher. Amusingly enough, you get skill points for kills with a weapon even if you are doing melee with it. I think I got my first marksmanship badge with the pistol by pistol-whipping Italian irregulars behind their own barricades. Oh, right. After completing the main campaign once I went back through the first parts of the game determined to rely on the pistol and ignore the rest of the weapons. And also run around the battlefield like a maniac, which is how I got so intimately familiar with the respawn system.

It is a cover shooter, after all, with a rather cute "lean out of cover" mechanic that, alas, doesn't help against the increasingly skilled enemy shooters. As has been found in real war, the majority of bullet strikes are hands and head (the only parts exposed when you are trying to shoot from cover). The AI is aware enough to make sniper duels nicely challenging and give you a good sense of accomplishment.

The game somewhat goes off the rails in the later maps. Eventually you are fighting in a fantastical concrete warren that looks like a James Bond set against gas-masked black-uniformed super troopers who can take three shots to the head without going down and who advance on you terminator-like carrying a dismounted heavy machine gun. Accompanied by other gents who think a panzerfaust is an indoors weapon.

This is perhaps inevitable. You the player get more skilled as the game progresses, plus it has a skills system that does...something (weapons upgrades are most noticeable). So to make the later levels more difficult something has to be added. More enemy is the usual. Tougher enemy is the other. In the real world, the elite troops are elite because they know what the heck they are doing. They use cover better, they support each other better. Well, the AI is already running at its peak in the early game. The enemy can't get more skilled. So all they can get is weirdly armored. No matter how realism-breaking and un-historical that might be.

(They also in the real world get the better gear, but this is a negative advantage in the FPS world because anything they have, you can have for the price of a few bullets).

This is the sad truth of FPS, and the tired old AAA model. Time is money. To make a player spend money on a game you need to give them playing time in return. And the cheapest playing time comes from the variety and sort-of emergent behavior of AI opponents. Even an extensive dialog tree is only really novel once, and it takes a lot of time writing and recording voice talent and animating actors to achieve. Making a sprawling set that supports multiple strategies of engagement and then filling it with AI opponents is a mature technology, well-honed by the industry and familiar to the player.

Still, it plays well enough, looks fine, and there's at least a little sense of a past place and time.

Virtual Lithics

Skyrim has mods.

This has the potential to become an interesting problem for the game industry. On the one hand, Bethesda is one of the companies that strongly supports the modding community, releasing the Creation Kit for anyone to try their hand at adding new content, changes in focus, or basic bug fixes to the worlds of Skyrim and the Fallout series. This, when it works well, gives games some of the advantage of Open Source. There are some very skilled people out there who don't happen to be working for Bethesda (or who don't have any deadlines other than self-imposed ones) and are able to do things the original creators did not or could not.

On the flip side, official DLC can look bad by comparison. I have to say that Bethesda shot themselves in the foot a bit with Skyrim, at least. The two big DLC's, Dawnguard and Dragonborn, got decent reviews and are considered more-or-less worth the price. However, Hearthfire is considered by most reviewers to be a waste of money, hence a waste of employee hours by Bethesda (unless they got a lot of sucker sales).

Dawnguard: Adventure Found Me

This is not my Skyrim review. I hope when I get to that it will be a little more organized than this. This instead is an exploration of ludonarrative in the emergence of a character arc from meta-textual elements.

Or, in short, how a young Breton with dreams of becoming a bard was pulled into a conflict she didn't even know existed, became a legendary hero and saved the world.

The First Time's the Best: The "Civ Problem"

There's a problem in most computer games. It first came to my attention while playing the Civilization series. Once you've isolated it, though, you see it occurring over and over.

It has to do with the way certain things -- from building a city to opening a treasure chest -- become by the middle of the game rote, boring, and annoying, with too many button clicks and a long animation to sit through. Paradoxically, in the early game these tasks are fresh and exciting enough you as the player find yourself wanting even more. More choices. Longer animations. More detail.

In my opinion, the choice to try to strike a balance is the wrong one. I think games need to do something different. The question is how the design team can afford it.

After the battle

I've been trying to learn "Far Horizons" from the game Skyrim and that's led me to muse on a contrast.

In both Skyrim and Tomb Raider 2013 there are lethal encounters with the locals. In Tomb Raider, when the fight ends there's a brief quotation of the character theme; muted and tinged with the melancholy of all you've lost, as with every other piece of music in this particular Tomb Raider, but nonetheless a horn flourish celebrating a moment of triumph.

The only time you hear the "Dragonborn" character theme in Skyrim (outside of bardic performances in taverns) is when you are being attacked by a dragon. What plays at the conclusion to most encounters is something more wistful, even elegiac. It is a piece of music that invites one to contemplate the fragility of life and the shared humanity of you and those you've just slain against this harsh, bleak, starkly lovely landscape of steep rocks and chilly snow.

(It is in fact one of the generic wilderness travel snippets -- the piece I opened this discussion with -- but it is scripted to always show here and I can't believe the emotional impact of that choice was not considered).

Im Tomb Raider  the bad guys are somewhat humanized before the fight; if you sneak well enough you can hear snippets of conversation. Unfortunately there is no conversation allowed during the fight; once guns are drawn there is no negotiation allowed. Following the fight, all that is left is to search the bodies for more ammunition.

In Skyrim, you also search the bodies. Such is the stock mechanics of AAA games. But in doing this you are also led through their campsites and rooms and shelters. Where you find bedrolls tucked into a niche of the rock out of the rain, personal possessions tucked away in drawers, a couple books beside a table, a meal on the fire, a chair set up for no other purpose but to relax and take in a vista of distant mountains. These material goods are so particular and homely they give a mute description of their owners, a more sharply drawn and more universal one than any dialog snippet.

You can not help but place yourself shivering in that bedroll, warming yourself over a rude meal on that campfire (as often enough, you do in the course of the game) and greeting the day sitting in that chair looking over the vast snowy land of Skyrim. It invites you (sometimes literally) to put yourself in the hide shoes of those you were forced to kill. (Of course, in this game there is also no great distance between you and them. Your background is similar, your adventures similar. You aren't some well-equipped American stand-in mowing down foreign hordes, not in this game).

Even the nature of the encounter is different. In Skyrim you largely chose to engage; you can leave the bandit camp alone, or even run away. In Tomb Raider you are largely scripted in. It is an extremely linear narrative and often the next door will not even open until you've performed the sacrifice the game demands. Once combat is joined, of course, most AAA games are alike. There is no parley, no quarter.

Except not even this is absolute; Skyrim has a third-party mod that can be installed that allows your enemy to surrender instead of fighting to the death. And, sure, this is not a creation of the original designers. But the original designers did permit the end users to change the story and make this possible. Tomb Raider will not even allow the player to look in a different direction than that which the script requires.

(The only AAA game I've played in which quarter is possible in the base game is Batman: Arkham City. In that game, psychological warfare is all-important. The Batman is, after all, shaped to be a figure of fear to the cowardly and superstitious. So if you do well enough in striking from the shadows and otherwise appearing as an unstoppable phantom, some of the bad guys will drop to their knees to cower in place instead of continuing the fight. It ain't much, but it beats having to flatten everyone).

Am I reading too much into this contrast? Perhaps. Skyrim is intelligently designed by a company that knows how to search out a specific and nuanced emotional tone.  Tomb Raider 2013 is a lumpen creation-by-committee where every decent emotional arc sputters out in ludonarrative disconnect against the brainless mechanics and an insulting restriction of any player choice.

(I have to go a little bit further here. This isn't just a contrast between open world and linear narrative. The Half-Life series is also a linear narrative, and restricts exploration just as much. But Half-Life is designed by people who knew what they were doing; it leads the eye and hides the choices rather than forces them on the player. It shows that a linear narrative and even tightly scripted events can take place without making the player feel like a passive observer of the game being played).

The Virtual Archaeologist

I've got another idea for a story.

Archaeo-gaming is a thing, you know. As a sample, here's a cute and chatty article on Skyrim by a couple of career archaeologists.

I keep coming back to the image of an archaeologist-protagonist walking into a vast and ancient underground space in search of secrets, and this doesn't mesh well with the realities of our current world.*

These settings are, however, found in games. And there is a lot of interesting stuff to talk about here, between the morality of the virtual world, material culture astride the twin horns of Intellectual Property and Cultural Appropriation, etc. As just one for-instance, discussion has already arisen about the ethics of virtual replicas of cultural artifacts and practices of still-living peoples. (Throw the big money of the AAA market in and you've got the makings of an online Dakota Access Protest).

I simply can not do justice in a morning blog post to how many interesting ideas there are in current Archeo-gaming. And it intersects into other equally fertile fields, among them retro-computing and the rich legacy of old hacker lexicon and lore. Deep Magic, indeed.

Simplistically, the archaeological subjects are both the material culture of the games themselves; the intentional content of developers and the modding community and the sandbox creations of open communities like Second Life, and the borrowed material culture being variously recreated for research or educational purposes, repurposed for entertainment, or borrowed or stolen. Then there is interaction with the environment; the material culture of a designed in-game object is as much influenced by the core mechanics and the technological limitations and the developed history of game design. In a circle of continuous dialog and influence that causes those choices to move along evolutionary pathways; emergent as much as designed.

And there are actual bits of archeogaming that would be fun to either describe or reference; the near-legendary Atari Dig of 2013 in New Mexico, or the grand failure of late 2016, the great No Man's Sky survey. (In the former, old game cartridges were unearthed from a dump, in the latter, the terrain of a procedurally generated game was explored using archaeological survey methods).

But...I need to eat and solder, and I think the only way I can really describe what I'm after is to write the damned thing.







* it isn't exactly an exception, more a question of spin. Want to go into a great crumbling underground complex full of dangers and potential treasures? Try Urban Archaeology. Our intrepid Indy could be exploring into the sarcophagi of Chernobyl. Although those aren't exactly dangers a bullwhip is good against. And the local security of the still-active power plant would probably object, too!





Oh, yeah, and another weird idea that popped up two minutes ago as someone on the radio used the formulaic phrase "Passed on": Second-chance world. A technically blank slate situation where everyone has, after their death, a second chance to make different choices. Where they are reborn young enough to have time to explore that alternate career path, find time for their music, chose the other potential life-mate, etc.

Except of course it is never that simple. Even in this new world one discovers many of the same doors are closing. Life is what happens to you while you were waiting for a chance to finally do the things you wanted to do, and maybe this is true no matter how many chances you have at it.

(There are millions of other world-building thoughts that tumble after that first one. What's the timing of the reborn and what do they have of their old-world skills? If this has been happening for a while, then there will be a built-up society already. One which will by the nature of societies have definite ideas where it wants newcomers to fit in. How do religions react to this place? I can imagine a local offshoot of Buddhism confronting the reality of being stuck on the damn wheel and wanting off. And so on and so forth!)

(One answer to the question if whether the history is as long as our own -- meaning that essentially it replicates the history of our world, except with a slight head start in later periods -- is if groups are largely separated. Which means each group decants into a survival situation, which is going to be largely fatal -- and really, really restrict the life choices. But on the flip side, then you could call the tale, "Friday's Child.")

Climb Every Mountain : Skyrim

Wine released another patch, and suddenly the copy of Skyrim I installed a while ago became playable (the joys of gaming on a Mac. Wine works pretty good for older games, though).

Skyrim is an open-world role-playing-game released in 2011. The setting is an iron-age fantasy culture in an epic, stark, chilly mountainous region. Bethesda delivers again on this one; like many of the best games, the setting is not just expansive, not just detailed, but it is flavored. There is a particular kind of harsh, hardy, pseudo-Norse theme going on here that goes well beyond just people wearing furs and horned helmets riding shaggy horses across high plains and tundra.

I found myself getting rather philosophical during it. Which hurt my gameplay a little, actually. If you've just attacked a bandit camp, you then end up walking through the small treasures of their hardscrabble existence. Rough tables and split log chairs and a little rabbit on the camp fire. A wooden flute, some hides tented up to keep the rain off. Not that the villagers have it much better, with simple dwellings and crude utensils.

When you talk to the villagers, you hear stories of their life choices and their philosophical take ending up a farmwife in a small town distant from her home city, or a merchant trying to make ends meet. And the evidence of industry -- the simple blacksmithing setups, the hunting camps, even crude mining operations -- show a similar "getting along at the life you have" attitude among the bandits. Even the giants, although easily spooked, are content to stand peacefully among their herds of mammoth.



One always puts a little of oneself into a game. Even the simplest game still leaves a space for the player to read personality and backstory where perhaps it isn't there. In the case of two runs I made at Skyrim (with two different characters to try out different career paths), what I got out of the game was as much driven by chance and glitch.

It really started with my housecarl, Lydia, who the Jarl sent to me after making me a thane (kill one little dragon, and they just won't shut up about it). Anyhow, the voice acting of this character made her sound very sad and resigned when I told her to stay in the house while I adventured. And I had to sympathize. After all, this is a warrior in a warrior culture. It wasn't exactly that she wanted excitement, it was that in her mind the only proper way to live was to die in battle.

So I brought her along despite misgivings (misgivings because artificial intelligence is not exactly there yet. The AI's tend to run in front of your bow in the thick of combat. (When they aren't standing in the middle of a doorway you are trying to pass through, giving you a blank "can I help you?" stare.)

And I got suckered into helping a goddess clean her temple of an infestation of undead magic-users. A very pushy goddess. With all those spells flying about I really had to work at it to keep Lydia from running herself killed (although to her credit, the enemy AI in Skyrim is very bow-aware and does not make it easy for you to snipe them from cover).

But we won. And a cutscene was forced on me where the goddess "thanks" me (pushy goddess, did I mention?) and then dumps me unceremoniously outside the temple. And Lydia glitched. She was alive last I saw her, but she never left the temple. In my head canon, my warrior woman, servant and friend had found the destiny she was seeking. But that damn goddess better be treating her right!



I'd become intrigued with the crafting system. This is an exceptionally deep game, with almost too many stories to explore and multiple play styles are possible. Within crafting, you can do Alchemy (which is basically herbalism; you gather ingredients from the wild as you travel, then experiment with mixing them together until you find recipes that work). You can do Enchanting, which is intriguingly different and not a little disturbing.

Magical items in the Skyrim world are driven by captured souls. With a bit of training you can do this yourself; absorb the soul of a recently slain wolf, say, then use it to power up a flaming dagger that you can then hand off to anyone (or, more usually, sell). The actual enchantments are, in the game, entirely arrived at by reverse engineering; you find another flaming artifact and rip it apart to see how it was done.

The third crafting system is Smithing, with encompasses basic leather work and jewelry as well. This is nicely if sketchily illustrated with various simple forges and smelters and grindstone and anvils and so on, complete with animations as your character takes an item through the various processes.

You can in fact mine iron ore, smelt iron (or with a slightly different process make steel), hammer it into a sword, and rework the sword to be finer. This being Iron Age tech, you also need to take a hide (which could even be a pelt from the wolf mentioned above) turn it into leather, and cut it into strips to wind about the hilt.

The weird part, though, is that this is not value-added. It is a little hard to see the numbers clearly because in the early game merchants pay 30% book value on goods and mark them up 300% to sell. But basically, a sword is worth less than the processed materials that went into it. And if you are buying the raw ores from a merchant instead of mining them yourself, you basically lose money on the deal.

So basically you need external funds. And you don't learn enchantments (to really value-add the items you are smithing) unless you have magical loot to tear apart. All in all, it is extremely difficult to just sit around learning crafting. You progress vastly faster if you adventure.



So the first character I played was an Argonian. A lizard-man from far away. Who I played as so completely outside he had no idea what anyone was talking about, had no interest in the politics, and in any case couldn't tell the faces of all these humans apart anyhow. Or remember their weirdo names. I eventually ended up playing him as a sort of linebacker/scholar; on the one side, the first weapon he picked up was a two-handed axe and there wasn't a lot he couldn't deal with just by bull-rushing it and swinging away. But on the other side, he really, really loved books (that's why I bought a house; the books were getting too heavy to keep hauling around.)

This is actually common among Skyrim players, I found. A web search for "Bigger bookshelves in Skyrim" turned up easily dozens of threads on the subject.

My second was also outsider to the local politics. I made her as small as the sliders would let me go, and wanted her to be geeky determined to become the greatest smith ever. Except the game throws you into combat in the introductory scene, and pretty much forces you to get involved with a dragon.

Even the mining is complicated by the fact that there are bandits living in the mine you want to use (and wolves on the path). However, unlike many RPGs, Skyrim does not have a stat system. Whether you are a buff lizard or a slender Breton you kick ass exactly the same. And I had learned a little something about the magic system since my Argonian and at Easy settings beginning-character magic is insanely overpowered.

(There is also no class system in Skyrim. Anyone can learn anything. Most characters, NPCs as well, know a little about magic and fighting and crafting and, well, everything else.)

The problem I ran into with Moly the tiny Breton blacksmith, though, was that I'd installed the Hearthfire DLC (additional content for the game). Which allows you to customize the houses you buy. And expands a little on the craft-able items. And, oh yes, adds a few orphans. And I thought Lydia made me feel bad! No, now there was this sweet little child following me about whenever I visited town, and...

Turned out crafting was just too darned slow. I couldn't stand little Breccia (or whatever her name was) being out in the cold even one more night, so I picked up the best sword I'd made so far and struck out towards the most dangerous haunted barrows and troll-infested mountain peaks I knew about this early in the game.

Turns out I couldn't take in the poor kid without owning a house. And I had to have it furnished, too. On the second or third trip back to pay out yet more of the loot I was risking my neck for up on the mountains, and fulfill yet more obligation, I started to feel like I was dealing with Children's Services.

But I finally managed it. Took Lydia (Lydia2 if you are counting -- different me, but same game story, same dragon, and same overly-generous local Jarl) up the side of the mountain* to visit the monks for one last adventure to tell the kids. And closed the game -- at least for this four day weekend -- sitting in contented silence by the fire in my rustic home, watching the little girl play with her new doll.



*Yes, that is literal. Borrowed a couple of horses from the Stormguard. Skyrim horses do not give a fuck. Physics is their plaything. This is pretty much a glitch they kept because all the players loved it, like the fact that one square hit from a Giant's club will send you thousands of feet into the sky. People have been killed by meteorite-mammoths. The horses will ride up anything that isn't vertical. And make a pretty good attempt at that, too.

Thing is, I could never find the damned road up to where the monks were. So the well-honored alternative among Skyrim players is to find Comet the Wonder Horse and point her towards the cliff face.

Box of Plot Bunnies

I've been reading Mass Effect fanfiction and thinking again about all the missed opportunities of the Tomb Raider (2013) game.

Had some trivial thoughts about the Harry Potter universe as well. Main one; the story is hermetic. It is about magic versus magic. Neither the magic system nor the entire Magical World as presented are ever intended to interact with anything outside of magic and the magical world. Thus to my mind cross-overs and most fixfics are non-starters; magic is an out-of-context problem to any other setting, and the muggle world (be it our world or the world of Darth Vader) is an out-of-context problem for the magic world. It makes as much sense as asking whether a Checker can put a King in check, or how many spaces a domino advances in Monopoly.

The other is that the magical world is Britain between the wars. They lost so many in the first Wizarding War against Voldemort, they simply can't deal with the threat of a second one. They don't want to believe it possible, and they can't bring themselves to commit to planning against it, they don't even want to talk about it. Thus the ineffectual and even counter-productive actions by so many of the adult characters, and the willful ignorance they impose on the young characters.

And that led to the first thought; perhaps the best way to break the pattern of what happens to Lara Croft on Yamatai is to pick a character who comes to their interactions with the world from an entirely different context. Say, Sherlock Holmes. First Bunny here; Holmes and Watson on Yamatai, with the Endurance expedition taking place in the late Victorian age. A lot more deduction, a lot less shooting (well, unless you cast the Robert Downey version).

Flipping that, though, since the story of Lara on Yamatai is about growing from a scared kid into a survivor...switch up and put Lara in Shepard's shoes. In the Mindoir origin. Given the way the events of Yamatai unfolded, I'd say it would be a bad day to be a Batarian.

(There's another Bunny lurking here; given that the archaeology of Liara T'soni is what gives the first good clues to the nature of the Reapers, some of the tools used to defeat Sovereign, and in one of the outcomes of the third game leads to the only really decent resolution, one could make an argument that an adventure archaeologist makes as much a fitting protagonist for the story as does the universe's most persuasive soldier-hero since Darth Revan.)




From a completely un-quantified survey of Fanfiction.net, about a third of the Lara Croft stories are set in the 2013 reboot continuity (almost another third are in the original continuity, post Angel of Darkness, and include Kurtis as a character), and of those the majority are post-Yamatai and of that number the majority are Lara/Sam fics. There's also a sizable contingent of Amanda fics, and just enough of a sampling to be statistically significant of Lara/Natla fics.

Of the Harry Potter fics that have attracted my eye, most have turned out to be fixfics. Either crossovers or introduction of out-of-context elements like dragonriders or unexplained new powers or just plain Harry-gets-a-clue, they almost inevitably reveal the rest of the magical world as a bunch of dopes. To my mind, it never really works (as much fun as a snarky bit of "take that!" can be).

What few Mass Effect fics I've looked show the following trends; generally through all three games or set post, inevitably femshep (aka Commander Shepard is female), and she most often romances Garrus (I agree -- I was happy enough to leave Kaiden on Virmire.)

The vast majority of SG1 fics are Jack/Sam. But there's a statistically significant trend for builder fics, in which the Stargate Program is managed differently, with different methods, gear, etc. The best of which so far is one set in the late 40's, with an Ernest Littlefield who remembers to take a radio along.




And mostly unrelated: the title music to Tomb Raider: Angel of Darkness (which opens with Lara's old mentor Werner von Croy getting killed in Paris) reprises the main theme from Tomb Raider: Revelations (in which that character was strongly featured.) So I'll definitely see if I can work a reference to that theme in the Tomb Raider: Legacy title track I'm tinkering up!

(Which will be multi-tracked with a little pennywhistle and violin from your's truly. The violin is I'm afraid going to have to track itself into string sections, though. I am years from being able to do a soulful solo on that instrument.)

Crisis (on) Infinite Tombs

If you got the joke above, you are too much of a geek to need the explanation following.

Still hopeful to have a prototype new-model Holocron up by the end of the month. I revamped the shell design again and I really, really like the "stolen" design (aka, design inspired by one of the few holocrons to actually appear in a film or animation). I cringe to think of how much time I wasted trying to get other shell designs to work properly, when I should have just gone straight to doing this one right.

But work is tiring this week. Maybe a mistake listening to fan covers of game music instead of the history podcasts I usually listen to while I'm sanding wood and sorting scrap. Means I have more CPU cycles spare to dream up more ideas I don't have the time and energy to implement.



Such as: it would be a fun challenge to try to create the title track to a Tomb Raider game that never was.

Hence the reference above to DC Comic's famously flawed attempt to sort out their canon. There are essentially four unique Tomb Raider canon. Start with Core Design. In 1996, this game company released Tomb Raider. They followed it up with five more games, with 2003 seeing release of the polarizing Angel of Darkness. But in the end the sales figures, and some behind-the-scenes creative differences, sounded the end of that sequence.

Already there are two phantom games here; Core Design saw Angel of Darkness as the first of a tightly connected trilogy. In any case, although the earlier games in particular are rather casual towards any attempt at establishing an internal canon, as the games progressed they became progressively tighter-woven.

In the meantime the two movies with Angelina Jolie came and went. Core Design and Eidos (the parent company) thought the movie tie-in would help flagging sales but alas, neither property did as well as hoped. The two movies are consistent to each other, but have sharp differences with any other Tomb Raider canon.

(It is, of course, more...complex...than that. Winston has been a constant in every game but in the movie was replaced by Hillary. Yet, the Abingdon Estate of the movie became, quite clearly, the model for the manor in the Crystal Dynamics games. And so on and so forth.)

Crystal Dynamics took over, but gave some appearance of floundering with three games of markedly different character. Legend was the first, with a cheesy title sequence and more emphasis on the action-adventure aspects. Then Anniversary, which was a remake of Tomb Raider I...Natla, the T-rex, and all. Their third offering, Underworld, surprised everyone by making both previous games canonical with each other, and tying elements of both together into a single overarching plot.

Leaving aside a parallel Game Boy title as insufficiently memorable, 2010 also saw a new console set of top-down, cooperative-play games that appear to generally agree with the Crystal Dynamics trilogy. There had also been a comic book and a few books of debatable quality.

Finally, there is the 2013 game by Crystal Dynamics. This was the first time the series saw a complete reboot, a fully conscious and intentional change to the character and her back story and the style of the games. This is a darker and more psychological turn; the confident, independently wealthy adventuress who crosses the world with twin pistols blazing is replaced by a shy young archaeologist who has to find her inner strength after a shipwreck on a rather nasty little island.

Tomb Raider (2013) was followed by Rise of the Tomb Raider and a licensed comic book kept carefully within the framework established by the company. There are also plans for at least one movie; this marks the first time the series has clearly established a canon -- a brand, really -- and made sure all available materials stay in agreement with it.



So, right. A lot of background there. My idea, such as it was, is that there was a fourth Crystal Dynamics game building on what they had done before. I'm calling it Tomb Raider: Legacy. Fresh from the events of Underworld, Lara has at last achieved closure after her encounter with the remains of her vanished mother in the Norse underworld. She has returned home to the ruins of Croft Manor.

But it turns out another figure from her past is not as dead as everyone thought. Werner von Croy, her one-time mentor, and time has not mellowed him in the least. He is as dangerously obsessed as ever, and he leads her into discovery (in the usual exotic locales, particularly the Giza Plateau, the Bolivian jungle where her father vanished, and much nearer home; Stonehenge) of some particularly dark secrets of her own family. And betrayal is sure to follow.

Just like with Anniversary and Underworld, this game would have brought elements from some of the first games -- particularly Tomb Raider: The Last Revelation -- back into canon. It also would both reproduce the "Teen Lara" section from Legend and the legendary Revelation tutorial level by having you play as Von Croy's young student.

This is yet another direction, as the game would be deeper psychologically, generally slower and rather more role-playing in style; like Angel of Darkness you'd spend a lot of your time above ground in the everyday world interacting with people.

And Troels Brun Folmann is back again for the musical chores. This is an orchestral score like Underworld but with a lighter touch; more of a chamber orchestra sound, with the ethnic instruments of Legend -- except in this case, often referencing English folk music.

Every Tomb Raider game has had a unique theme, but usually close to or otherwise audibly referencing the original haunting melody Nathan McCree composed for solo oboe. A large part of the fun of this project would be to see if I can develop a theme and treatment that seats itself within the real history of the scoring for this franchise.



So I actually turned on the Behringer this evening and spent a few minutes trying to work the kinks out of my hands. I've never been even a "good" keyboard player -- on my best day I might achieve "passable," and I'm rusty now. But it does seem to still be there.

Maybe once the holocron is finished I'll have some more time to play....

Borrowed Emotions

The following is a short (ish) essay I wrote to explain to an outsider about modern video game music and the fan community that enjoys listening to and performing it.

Borrowed Emotions

Video Games — like the movies and television — have always leaned on music to build a stronger and more nuanced emotional response. What has changed is that the music created for games can now look backwards and leverage the excitement and/or nostalgia generated by the game.

This is not to say there is nothing inherent in any piece of game music that makes it a delight to listen to or to play. To understand the spread and the impact, however, one needs to look at the context.

People are recreating the music of games old and new. Some do it as part of the creation and advertisement of games, and the support of the gaming industry as a whole. Some do it for private commercial interest; for sales and donations and job offers, and for the less tangible (but no less valuable) currency of recognition within the sprawling and pervasive social media. And some do it for their own pleasure, for the simple joys of recreating both the play and the listening experience.

The Venn Diagram above must be understood to be mostly intersection. Even the high school violinist teaching herself a theme from Skyrim by ear and posting a camera-phone recording of her attempting it is simultaneously playing for pleasure and earning social credit. From such beginnings some go on, through donations and album sales, to eventually become part of the team creating the next generation of games. But such should not be understood as the goal of all!

Fans have always been with us, writing fiction, creating costumes, building props from the stories they love. As far back as oral history stretches people have been leveraging the emotional impact of the familiar tale to grasp and hold their own audience. “Let me tell a tale of the Trojan War,” the story teller says, and his audience quiets down to listen.

But games, too, are part of the Nerd Singularity. The people who played and play them have grown up, gained disposable income, and moved into the workplace where they can guide what is created today. So there is money, now, for games to hire full orchestras to create their scores. And for trade shows to hire professionals to recreate the scores of old favorites, and for symphony orchestras to try to pull in new audiences with their own interpretations. The path goes both ways; in a nostalgic quest, a few intrepid souls are re-interpreting those same modern scores in the most authentic old-school beeps and boops possible!

So modern game music has the same variety of Music, capitalized. The technical limitations are essentially gone (although certain structural constraints remain — just as the opera requires different approaches than does the concerto). And so does the fan work in response. So in this collection you will hear a gamut; church choirs, high school bands, professional musicians, new learners. I admit to a bias towards efforts featuring the piano, and also made sure that some themes would appear again in new guises as different artists approached them. I also intentionally left out the polished performances by hired orchestras that appear at certain conventions and concert halls, in order to focus better on the people who are performing to share the love and excitement of the music and of the game behind it.

Sing, Oh Goddess, of the wrath of Megaman….

Bow in Hand

I'm right in the middle of getting the Holocron out to the potential customers (people who have expressed a firm interest, that is). So of course listening to all that game music has sidelined my thoughts. Which are pretty inchoate at the moment.

Start with synthesis. I've been listening to both recorded and live symphonic music, and synthesized versions of same. And I think I've modified a previous opinion. There's something intrinsic to the "real" orchestra that gives it that power. An intangible something, not easy even for a sound designer like me to try to point to.

At first glance synthesized orchestral instruments would seem to have it over synthesis of solo acoustic instruments in being convincing. And at this first glance, yes. A synthetically produced backing track can natter on in sub-John Williams for hours without attracting attention to its nature. But then you put the real deal in your ears, and there's an excitement and a power and a presence. Somehow, all those little bits of noise and blurring and sweat and spit  that mark a mass of real humans all working in concert comes through: and the effect is inspiring.

And, oddly, synthesized solo instruments can often fake it more convincingly. Well, some. Plucked strings like guitar fare better than wind instruments. The extremely vocal nature of the saxophone makes the real deal stand out. Oddly enough, there's something about all the brass that doesn't take to synthesis. It always feels somehow off. Paradoxically, I find the synthesized brass that is most emotionally stirring is that which most demonstrates its artificiality; the thick "brass" sound of DX and JV synthesizers as heard in disco and 80's pop. It is as if there is an uncanny valley; "almost human" sounds worse than "clearly artificial." But on the flip side, a synthesized guitar can leap out and grab you with that intangible "reality." And this isn't even, oddly enough, a result of modern synth patches being built on full-length note samples played on actual instruments, because the same prickle of hair on the back of the neck can be raised by a guitar sound originating entirely in physical modeling synthesis.

Well, on the practical side, putting the humanity into synthesized tracks is work. A lot of work. Garritan's libraries introduced some clever tricks to allow a keyboard player more of the expression natural to a wind player (at the cost, of course, of even more concentration necessary to record the track in, and more time spent in laborious hand editing when the take didn't quite go right). This may be as simple as throwing in a few guitar lift-off and fret squeak noises (which go a surprisingly long way in fostering the illusion), or it may be as laborious as recording each and every violin in a section individually (a tremendous amount of work but the results are startling).

When I was doing my own pop-orchestral synthesis projects, I struck a compromise by breaking down to each desk or chair; recording two or three times for each section of violins, then again for violas, 'cellos, basses. Besides giving a better sound than a "string" patch, I think the internal movement possible when doing this is a heck of a lot more idiomatic to that massive complicated instrument we call the symphony orchestra.

If you simply must have exposed solo lines, then there's an old bag of synthesist tricks. Add little bumps to volume and (even more subtly) pitch. Hand-add your vibrato rather than trusting the patch programming to handle it. For that matter -- I used to write string lines with hand-fingered tremolo. Which is pretty much the same reason that playing in a track on keyboard (or other MIDI instrument) is superior to dropping it in mechanically with editing tools.

None of this is new. I realized way back on my second sound design using orchestral synthesis that I favored a performance by even an amateur human over the sterility of the synthesized material. The best of both worlds being using a little of both (as was recognized very early on, to the extent that a major package for synthesized backing tracks for musical theater cautions that the more parts you replace with live players, the better the result will sound).

Most of the game music covers I have been admiring of late showcase a soloist on a real instrument, seated against backing tracks that are better able to hide their synthetic origins. Of course one has to have a musician -- better yet, a singer -- capable of doing justice to the material. Because on the far side of that Uncanny Valley is the perception of a real human who is playing wincingly out of tune, and that can be even more distracting than a clearly but unabashedly artificial player.



And thus we come to my own somewhat prickly relationship to music. I'm not a musician. I lack a lot of basic skills. More than that, I lack the "heart." There's something I can hear in everything I do which is a lack of soul. So perhaps I am best suited to exactly that sort of solo MIDI composing I seem to be disparaging above. Except even that fails if done mechanistically. You can be precise, you can use the technology, but you still have to have those sensitive artistic choices.

Sure, I lack sufficient interest to gain the other basic skills. I think I have pitch sense. I can stumble around in sheet music but can't really read. Certainly not sight-reading. And my memory is horrible. Working in musical theater as I do, I am surrounded by people who can remember every note in a long song. I get lost if a tune is any longer than the Westminster Chimes. And this would probably have come with practice. I remember starting up at bouldering walls once wondering if I'd ever be able to memorize an entire sequence. Which I do so easily now it isn't even worth remarking.

Oh, yes, and at some point so long ago I can't even remember it I must have sat down and learned my scales, because I can still go through all the majors without having to think about it (the minors come a little harder).

I'm not sure which I hate worse; the things I am conscious I lack the internal wiring to ever do well, or the things I hold the (possibly mistaken) opinion that I could learn to do if I only had the time.

I do know that the vastly larger portion of the time I have spent working with computer music has been technical labor. Organizing patch libraries, editing samples, plugging and unplugging gear; constantly trying to come up with a rig that I can just sit down at and play instead of having to fuss with every time. But the Red Queen's Race of technology can not be won in this arena either. As fast as I learned one piece of hardware or software, a better one would come to replace it. In the end all I had to show was tinkering, and a few scraps of pieces created on equipment so long-gone it is useless to think of continuing work on them.

And all in all, I would have done better -- I still might do better -- to put aside the computers and spend a little more time with my ukulele. (Which, oddly, is the only musical instrument that gets any attention these days. Dust is collecting on my new Behringer controller keyboard, and I've almost totally forgotten how to work in Reaper, but my uke sees almost daily use. A strum here and there is so very relaxing.)

I've been tempted for quite a while now to try to combine the opening tracks to classic Tomb Raider and the series Stargate SG1. And for that matter tinker up a jazz interpretation of the Black Mesa theme. But to close for the moment, here's the last full-length piece I did for my own amusement. Which was more years ago than I'm comfortable thinking about.

(And here's the fiddly little details. This actually came out of that laborious and possibly pointless process spoken of earlier; collecting and editing patches. Found a freeware "old music box" patch and as soon as I had it connected to a keyboard started playing a sort of Danny Elfman inspired ostinato with intentionally quirky chromatic development. I can't say "harmonic," because I am still grossly ignorant of that whole aspect of music theory. Anyhow, built on it with mostly Garritan patches, and added a few layers of sound effects. The closest this whole thing gets to the idea of incorporating real performance is that all the foley is mine. I walked a pair of mary janes across a wooden floor on my hands, for instance. And then did a whole bunch of manipulation on those samples, of course....)

(And that's actually another idea I've been tinkering with, ever since seeing a video on how a certain mechanical music machine was recorded. And that is to make use of available acoustic instruments -- cheap ones or improvised ones -- with the intent of capturing the human element of the performance and some of the noise and grit that gives it a grounding in reality. But then processing the audio to make it sound better. The kind of dial-tweaking to bring out the essential character that I've been doing on sound effects for years, really. And come to think, I did this once; my work for a children's production of Mulan included my processed version of a handful of dowels I rapped on the floor as a percussion element.)

Rudimentary what?

If a lathe can build a lathe, it makes total sense that there are scads of people upgrading their cheap T962 reflow ovens (used to solder surface mount components)....with new circuit boards filled with surface mount components. (Well, the first thing I printed with a borrowed M3D 3d printer was a spool holder for itself).

I'm already unhappy with some aspects of my new board. I plan to drop down to 0805 chip size, for instance, and (having carefully read the Design Rules at OSHPark) narrower traces packed closer together. I can probably shrink the board by half! But I'll wait before I change anything. I expect to learn quite a bit when I solder up the first prototypes, and more when I try to program them and put them in Holocron kits.

Already I have grand dreams, of course. Given one of various audio chips and a socket for micro-SD, I could actually make a "talking" holocron. And of course if some of the ideas on the new board pan out, I'll be one step closer to actually having the DuckLite marketable. Oh, yes. And back to Wraith Stone as well (already I'm wondering...can I do capacitive touch sensing if it is hung around my neck?)



Also burned a CD for dad. He probably knows very well that video games passed the chip-tunes barrier roughly the time they stopped using vector graphics. But I'm not putting together a "greatest hits." The original conversation was about amateur covers, so I've tried to pack in a good spectrum of skill levels and a variety of approaches, from people recording themselves on a camera phone messing around on the piano in their front room, to professional-level production numbers like the work of Lindsey Stirling.

The first video I saw from Lindsey, she did a nice cover on violin of themes from the Zelda series. The production values really raised the bar; exceptional recording and mixing and professional-level backing tracks that are almost seamless. And the video is of her traipsing in gorgeous scenery, with her violin and with equally gorgeous outfits based on characters from the game. But what really nails it is how lively she is, sawing away at her violin, leaping about, all with this fantastic grin on her face.

Oh, yes, and there was one of those Oh My God moments. You know how it is when you've just learned about something new, something you are just getting into, something you want to share your excitement of with friends? And you open the wrong door and suddenly there's this massive conference room absolutely jammed by people who are into the same thing and know it more deeply and more expertly and are more passionate about it than you will ever be.

Yeah, all of this discovery of amateur covers of music from video games has been like that. Well, I knew they were out there. I didn't realize just how many, how good they really were, and how popular they are. The moment that really informed me was a video from a concert of game music (with a professional orchestra and band) at the Symphony Hall in Boston.

So soloist steps up and starts singing. Giant cheer as the crowd recognizes the number ("Still Alive," of course, from the breakout hit Portal). But that's not the worst. They start singing along. A huge, symphony-hall sized audience, and every one was a better fan than I'll ever be. I recognize the tune. They know all the words.

(There's another moment in the same video that perhaps needs some setting up. The lyric is "Maybe Black Mesa? That was a joke, haha, fat chance." Well, the soloist stepped back and let the audience sing that part. And I can't help thinking that there was a certain bitter humor in their voices. Because "Black Mesa" is the location of the first game in the Half-Life series, games created by the same company who made Portal, and the long-awaited third and final game of that series is now considered by fans to be the gaming industry's greatest piece of vaporware. "Haha, fat chance," all right. There is no longer a "maybe" about Black Mesa.)

So anyhow. Tried to select a number of piano covers, and made a conscious effort to bring back some of the same themes (in the way a concerto might) by showing off different covers of material from the same games. And I tried to focus in on games I've played myself but not only aren't there a lot of offerings there but that would leave off some of the great stuff like Skyrim, the Final Fantasy series, and of course Zelda. And I shuffled and shuffled to get a good flow, building up tension and relieving it, contrasting styles while maintaining certain continuities to help one track follow another.

Tried, too, to include some of the contexting. To show the penetration of game music into church choirs and high school marching bands, the intense fan interest, the stature of acoustic instruments and vocalists and life performance and the cross-cultural world community (as contrast the possible stereotype of nerdy white guys tinkering up music tracks in MIDI). And show too the social networking, the recording and collaboration and jam sessions that take place through the online world.

What I really wish is a little more space than a CD. I have five hours of the stuff already on my hard disk (I auditioned twice that many before making even that selection, and that's barely a quarter of what turned up in my rather basic searches). But then, dad will probably turn off around the middle of the second track anyhow.

So now I just need to find the Ukulele music I promised...

Pathetic Fallacy

I fired up Tomb Raider 2013 recently just to play the hunt-for-your-food sequence again (and try out some DLC -- like a warm jacket, finally!) And I couldn't help noticing this time around that no matter how long you spend wandering around the woods, the rain starts the very second you shoot a deer.

But I've also been playing other games, and reading reviews, and a lot of what impressed me earlier no longer impresses me. There is the core of a nice little story there and the voice acting and motion capture support it well. But ninety percent of the game is a stock first-person shooter with stock mechanics, graphics tricks, game assets, character AI, etc. As nice as some of the shrines and other scenery are, the majority of the art assets are the same tired variations of room full of boxes and cluttered alley between cookie-cutter buildings.

The new game, Rise of the Tomb Raider, ups the graphics, adds a little more variety to the combat options and improves the crafting system, but basically is the same routine. Of which an absurd amount is still the barely-interactive scripted sequences.

Really, what happened with games? So many of them are striving for spectacle. Sure, with modern graphics cards you can do spectacle, but Hollywood can do it even better. The peculiar strength of gaming is that it is interactive. And spectacular action sequences that force the player to be an almost completely passive viewer are not playing to this strength.

I've said this before. There's one sequence in Tomb Raider 2013 where a scared (but determined) Lara has to climb to the top of a rusted, shaky, and very tall radio tower in order to send out a distress call. On the first play through, this is nail-biting, seat-of-the-pants scary. But on a second play, a terrible truth becomes obvious; the entire sequence is so tightly scripted you can not fall even if you try. In fact, the only action you as a player ever take over the entire five-plus minutes of this sequence is to hold down the "go forward" key.

And so many games do this. They put in pre-rendered cutscenes. They put in quicktime events (which stab themselves in the back, as they force the player to not get involved in the spectacle but instead focus narrowly on whatever symbol has popped up that requires that corresponding key to be hit). They don't even make it possible (in far too many cases) to skip through this junk on a second play-through. So they sacrifice playability in that way, too; they force the gamer to do things that aren't interesting (like waiting through a Quicktime Event) instead of letting them, well, play.

Interact. Be involved in the material. Be immersed, in those ways that games permit and movies do not.



I also just played one of the old Call of Duty games -- a World War II setting, in keeping with my current interest in history. And the biggest problem I have with this game is a similar one to that which I have with Tomb Raider 2013. I want it to be more about the purported subject, and less about generic mechanics.

Not that I think this would be easy to achieve. Or even necessarily sell well. Call of Duty is very much a "twitch" game. Now, it does focus on events -- such as the Normandy Landings -- which were incredibly fast-moving and chaotic. But I've taken part in military exercises and outside of the last moments of a banzai charge the pace is a little slower.

The first sequence, for instance, places you as a Soviet peasant conscripted into the defense of Stalingrad. It actually frames pretty well, with such cute bits as having you practice how to throw a grenade with a bucket of potatoes, that the Soviet army is poorly equipped. But then combat begins, and for all intents and purposes the only reason to ever conserve ammunition is because the reloading animation takes so long. Really, like practically every other first-person shooter, you are encouraged to hose the landscape.

I made a point of going through even large parts of the Normandy sequence with a rifle, and choosing to look through the sights rather than firing through the hip. And this slowed down the breakneck pace just a little, but it is still far from a realistic experience.

And, yes, there are nice models of appropriate settings, uniforms, equipment, There are little set-ups in film reel style, and short diary entries. Just enough to where I did sort of get the sense of being a British soldier at El Alamein (or whatever). But really the mechanics trump any need to pay attention to specific details; grab any weapon you see on the battlefield and pull the trigger whenever the cross-hairs turn red, run in the general direction of the big arrow and keep shooting until the next cutscene begins.

Now, I'm not asking to have to study a topo map and strain to understand static-swamped radio messages in order to figure out the next objective, any more than I'm asking to have to spend three hours scraping a one-meter grid with a trowel to find the next artifact in Tomb Raider. But I think there's room for a lot more context.

And I think the standard model of the first-person shooter was sufficiently exercised by the time Doom II came out. Playing as an Army Ranger at the cliffs of Point du Hoc should not be essentially identical to the experience of playing as a young archaeologist shipwrecked on an island filled with savage cultists and an ancient mystery. Let's not be afraid to tinker a bit. Especially, lets find a way to support game length other than spawning a truly ridiculous number of essentially-identical targets.

Dancing about Architecture: Arkham City (GOTY)

This is the second game in the "Arkham" series, released in 2011. Primarily, you play Batman in third person, swooping around the scenery, solving relatively simple puzzles, and getting in a whole bunch of fights. The Game of the Year addition collects most of the DLC in one place, unlocking several other playable characters; Catwoman becomes part of the main storyline in this addition, providing a prologue and a couple of later episodes.

And, yes, the fights are amusing. And you have a lot of "marvelous toys" to play with -- batarangs and smoke bombs and so forth (no Batmobile in this one) -- but really the high point of the game is swooping around the city, gliding silently into alleys or grappling-line upwards to perch on a gargoyle.

And what a city. The back-story to the game is that Gotham City, failing to keep their increasing crowd of colorful, powerful, and generally psychotic baddies behind the bars of any traditional prison or inane asylum, has chosen to wall off part of their equivalent of Manhattan Isle and let the crazies run loose (and hopefully, one gathers, kill each other off.)

So basically it's Escape from New York, only without Snake Plisken. Okay, ridiculous idea from any kind of legal basis, penologically, financially, or even practically. I mean, really -- if Hannibal Lector style restraints can't keep a character like the Joker down, how does a high wall and some guards with guns do it?

And what is this supposed bit of low-value real-estate? One that has police headquarters (well, the cop shop is often in some part of town no-one else wants), a decaying amusement park/district (shades of Coney Island), some waterfront, a nice old theater, the courthouse where the premier District Attorney of Gotham tried some of his famous cases, a massive natural history museum, a lovely sprawling subway entrance/mall in Crystal Palace style art nouveau...

So, really, the old part of town, the one-time center before the outside investors moved in and the big financial buildings and multinational headquarters moved in. Central Boston with the old State House. Old Philly. "The City" in London. Basically, the kind of historic district even a financially desperate metropolis would be loathe to lose.

Older buildings, brownstone and brick, tall narrow windows, heavy cornices and plenty of gargoyles. Some massive statuary, too, but not taken to the extremes of the Tim Burton films. And it is all littered, half-abandoned, some boarded up, lots rusted...and add to this barricades and other modifications made in the course of the ongoing gang wars.

Several of the major figures in Batman's rogue's gallery have set up little empires and they are waging a violent turf war. But this, too, as atmospheric as it is, begs all sorts of questions. Are any of these characters, from Two-Face down to the Penguin, going to let someone else set the rules? Let outside society set the rules? Hell with entertaining their captors with a self-imposed cage match, these are the kinds of people who would team up to break out. And maybe the game designers did mean for this to come across as lobsters trying to escape a pot by climbing over each other, but it doesn't read that way in game. It reads as if many of these major figures in Batman's history are content to play king of an artificially constricted hill.

Oh, and when you leave the rainy rooftops and perch-handy cornices you discover the street layout makes no sense at all. Blind alleys, meandering streets...even the barricades and the giant wall and the broken bit of freeway (very Oakland post Loma Prieta) aren't enough to make the street layout rational. In fact, once you've been down to street level a few times, a lot of the allure of the setting wears off; you realize that these are mostly empty facades and for all the seeming size and variety of the place there's really nothing more you are going to see.



So the basic plot works out as a whole set of fetch quests/boss battles. You end up visiting the same sites multiple times, as you go across town to get something (and fight the owner for it) then back to try to deliver it (and fight against the not-unexpected betrayal by the person you fetched it for.)

Like Snake, Batman is early on cursed with one of those medical conditions with a handy countdown timer, and is working as much as anything else to save his own life. The details, of course, make no sense biologically. Basically, the Joker took Titan Serum in the last game, and the side effects are poisoning him -- he hasn't long to live. So he injects Batman with his tainted blood, which gives Batman (despite his larger, more robust physique) exactly as long to live. And to rub it in, Joker makes anonymous donations to the blood supply of several of Gotham's hospitals, putting upwards of thirty thousand patients in the same dire straights.

These people never met Paracelsus. This is practically homeopathic (except that the weaker dose is exactly, down to the minute, as efficacious as the stronger.) Indeed, Batman gets a temporary cure from Ra's al Gul (partially answering how he can be fighting and grapple-swinging like he is if he is supposed to be a few minutes from croaking) but at the climax the Joker -- an un-athletic bantam-weight with a pre-existing medical condition -- very nearly out-survives him.

Which leads us to one of the odder moments; at the conclusion of the main story-line a sombre Batman carries the dead body of the Joker out and lays him almost reverentially on the hood of a police car. This sequence is so much "elegy for the honored dead" it's amazing they resisted the urge to stage a Pieta pose as part of it. I guess we sort of forgot Batman's one-time lover Talia, Ra's al Gul himself, a number of slain cops and medical people, and several thousand dead crooks thanks to Protocol Ten. Plus any number of living but brutalized people Batman personally delivered concussions, compound fractures, and a strong need for reconstructive surgery to during the course of the game.



Fighting is both simple and deep. A very nice touch is that it is (barely) possible to complete the game doing nothing but button-mashing. The novice is not penalized by not being able to see through to the end, instead, what rewards the expert player is better action, more balletic moves and more interesting options. Batman can fight very well if you have the skill to bring it out, and that is its own reward. The game's answer to heath is simple; you don't gain back any health during a fight, but you get it all back as soon as the field is cleared. This means you have to be relatively careful to counter blows and use stealth around well-armed opponents, because you can't just duck around a corner to recoup or drink a handy Bat-potion to heal up.

One downside to unlocking Catwoman as a playable character is that she is so much quicker. After fighting with her, Batman feels like a muscle-bound tank. And after watching Selina's slinky walk, he sort of looks like he is in need of a Bat-Laxative.

On the other hand, he does have the grapple gun, and a cape to glide on, and a lot of gadgets. In the mode of many modern games, several of the gadgets are necessary to move in certain special places; sometimes you need to make a hole with explosive gel in order to proceed, for instance. Or there is the only thing that stumped me enough to look for help online; to cross an underground river you toss a freeze grenade to make a temporary ice-floe which you can perch on.

There are both elite mooks and boss battles, with the most difficult fights being those that combine both. All of the above require special techniques to take down; you can't just hit them. The most difficult pure boss battle in this sense is Mister Freeze, who needs to be stunned before you can approach him and do damage. And he learns from each encounter; if you manage to stun him for a moment by activating one of the handy electromagnets just standing around the room (just go with it), on recovery he methodically freezes the rest of them, ensuring they can no longer be used against him.

The game is decent about informing you what you need to do. The two strongest errors here are ones I've seen before; first is an inability to name anything either properly or even consistently; you simply have to figure out that "Control Room" and "Monitor Bay" both refer to the same thing, and both of those mean the place that looked like a receptionist's desk. The second is more annoying; it is the way the game will prompt you insistently about the wrong part of the problem. Aka "I need to get to the Control Room," the Batman mutters to himself. "The other key must be in the Control Room. The clue to this mystery is in the Control Room." Yeah, I got that the "Control Room" is where I'm supposed to be, game -- my problem is figuring out which damned room you intended that to be!



Estimate for completing the main campaign is a mere twenty-five hours for the average player. Other campaign material adds another ten hours or so. Then there's the usual garbage of collectables; various "Riddler Puzzles" which you basically solve for raw points. Really, the major replay is to hone your combat and try to get higher combo scores, as well as trying out more inventive fighting methods.

And maybe fly around the city a bit, stopping on a gargoyle or two to brood in the rain. Because isn't that what you came to the game for in the first place?