From a certain point of view

Got through the last rethink and back to writing the last act.

Was good timing to stop and think right then. There's stuff that's going to be moved to the third act and emphasized, so is nicer to be able to have it in the draft instead of trying to put it in later. The Dorians are back. It ain't a great archaeological mystery but it is the one I have so I'm not putting it to bed until the last scene.

I'm a little disheartened by how much editing I'm looking at now.

On the other hand I am starting to feel like I'm really getting a grip on what a novel looks like and how to build one. This is my third go-around so that's about right. The first I abandoned a few chapters from the end. It just didn't feel "enough." The second I think has the minimum elements. There is little character development but there is still some internalized conflict stuff that plays out properly. The world building is also simplistic but sufficient.

Oh, yes, and there were two epic-length fanfics in there. They helped a lot with scene-level and chapter-level work and were great experiences in juggling large ensemble casts.

What I'm dealing with now is the large-scale structural forms and how to hold them in your head and work with them and maintain flow and consistency across the length of a novel.




So third person might have been a better choice. I went first person largely because there are a lot of solo scenes and it makes it easier to keep an internal narrative voice going. Of course in my current round of re-writes I'm adding characters to as many of those solo sequences as I can because it just reads better.

There's two places third person would have really helped. There's a character who is a foil and goad through the first two thirds. He's the one that pushes my protagonist to change. Why he is doing so is unclear up until his last scene. And that's weak. He would be a stronger antagonist if he didn't appear magically and do things for incomprehensible reasons. And the best way to do this would be to have the ability to go inside his head once or twice, or at least look at the world from over his shoulder.

Changing first person is more awkward and less done than changing third person. In the ultimate case, third person omniscient dips into every head it wants to, moment by moment (and is rarely used in genre fiction these days).

The other thing is, well, it is tough to objectify a character from first person. Conan can stride into battle, sweat gleaming from his mighty thews, but he can't describe himself doing it (well, not without sounding like Den (as voiced by John Candy in 1981's Heavy Metal). As I discovered earlier, it is harder to look heroic from inside, especially for a character who doesn't think of herself as being that hero and from her perspective is faking it like mad.

And, yes, this is mirror territory, where you really shouldn't be writing in deep immersion but letting the character admire their long raven locks. In the first novel I actually finished, Shirato, I played around with starting with a shallow immersion and external description when the character had yet to break away as an independent person standing slightly outside of her own society. And I could certainly play that game here, with Penny being described from behind her eyes but even she views Athena Fox from outside her skin.

Of course you can always pick up a POV if you need that external shot. On my last fanfic I even created a one-scene walk-on just to be able to observe the Jack-Daniel-Lara dynamic from the outside for a few paragraphs.

Yes, I certainly played with the idea of having Penny narrate in first person but describe the character she plays in third. But something I've realized as I'm closing in on the final chapters; Penny doesn't want to be this character. She wants to be this person. She doesn't want to be a a genre hero who has adventures, she wants to be the globe-trotting, confident, skilled academic who knows history deeply and can speak a dozen languages living and dead. For this novel, at least, it isn't appropriate for her to ever describe her own actions from outside.




There's an amusing discussion going on in a couple corners of the interwebs about how so many fantasy worlds (especially in games) are littered with the ruins of a past civilization and whether we should be calling them post-apocalyptic. (The other part of the argument is the banditry and the rule of the sword and the easy access to loot seems to imply a breakdown of society).

The view has some merit, I think, but only as in describing the settings of games as borderlands. Places that for whatever reason (past cataclysm or current war) are lawless and in flux and are in short the perfect habitat for the kind of character sometimes described as a "murder-hobo."

As for the ruins? You can certainly argue for there to have been a lost age, but I don't see it as singular. I see it more as deep history. Peoples have come and gone, and some of them had pretty crazy building programs.

The only way to lose is not to play

(To paraphrase WOPR's dismissal of the underlying principle of MAD.)



Is it possible to lose a video game?

Say you are playing one of the original Mass Effect games. Your player-avatar can get caught in a crossfire at any time and die. And the game promptly restarts from the last save point. Contrast this to completing the game -- the major story points are wrapped up, the majority of the playable content has been played, and there is a nice little cutscene informing you the galaxy is saved (for the moment).

Point is the game doesn't stop until it reaches that planned ending. Failing at any moment just means going back and doing part of it over (there are certain purist players who refuse to use save games but, even then, that is an end of the game experience, not a completion). You can of course walk away at any time, but nothing changes in the game world because of this. The Reapers don't up and swarm Earth because Commander Shepard said, "The hell with it."

Now there are canonical "bad" endings you can work for. The most illustrative example I can think of at the moment is the Dawnguard expansion for Elder Scrolls: Skyrim. You can join the Dawnguard and stop the vampire plot. Or you can make one simple choice and condemn the land to (literal) darkness. Thing is...you might be playing as a vampire yourself, in which case this is the good ending. It all depends on which lawn you are standing in.

Bioshock also had two endings. In the "good" ending, you die after saving some kids. In the "bad" ending, you take over the world in a reign of evil. Similarly ambiguous. KOTOR, also, you can defeat the Dark Lord or become the Dark Lord.

But these are all choices earned through completing the game. Where is the game where you can play badly enough that the Reapers win?



I'll throw out in passing there are also what are informally called "non-standard game overs." These are usually triggered when you do something unusually stupid. In Half-Life 2, if you drove the buggy over the side of a cliff you got a text screen complaining about destroying Resistance assets. And then you restarted.

There are also quicktime failures. Tomb Raider 2013 caused a bit of a stir with the graphic nature of the things (and the fact that the QTEs were so badly designed that even veteran players were triggering the death endings) To be fair, watching Lara ragdoll into a rock-strewn ravine was always part of the experience of that series. But again, these don't end the game; they just return you to the last save point.

The closest expression of what I'm talking about occurs in Batman: Arkham City in the Catwoman extra content. At one point you are playing Catwoman and are given a choice to take the door to the right and escape with your loot, leaving Batman under a pile of rocks. If you do this, Catwoman walks out of frame, the screen fades to black and the end titles play (over them, a desperate radio message explaining that with Bruce dead the Joker won). But it's a fake-out; the game rewinds -- reverses the animation, rewind noise and all -- and offers you a second chance to do it right.

Now, I cheerfully admit that a game can't render a whole new ending for every wrong door. But I'd like to see a, "you failed" ending that had as much attention as the actual game ending. Given, too, that many otherwise good games drop you out of the last boss fight to a simple still screen and a, "play again?" button.



Perhaps a better version of, "failed to play the game well" is the ending to Mass Effect 2. Thing is, what this game gives you is blink-and-you'll-miss it. To really get the full impact of your failures in Mass Effect 2 you have to play Mass Effect 3. Again, more in my upcoming review.

So this is how it works. After you've completed several key missions (about a third to one quarter of the play time for the game), you can chose to go on what seems likely to be a suicide mission. You'll actually get an in-game warning, though, if you haven't done what are called the Loyalty Missions. Basically, you have to seek out each of your team members and initiate a quest via dialog options. Then complete the quest (and it actually doesn't matter how you chose to complete it; as long as you don't walk away from the game you will "strengthen" that team member.)

So you can finish the main campaign in under eight hours. Or invest another eight hours in bonding with your crew and helping them settle any personal issues that might keep them from being totally focused during the final mission.

There is also a little bit of finesse during the actual Suicide Mission; who you assign to what task actually matters. Well; they will always succeed, and you will always succeed, regardless of whether you send the most fumble-fingered idiot in your squad to hack the computer and open the door. But...if you do so, within a scene or two someone else will die. You will lose, permanently, one of the characters you've spent hours with, conversations with, etc.

And at the end of the whole thing, the Collectors are stopped...but you can range from getting the entire team back alive to losing everyone...up to and including Commander Shepard, your own avatar (makes playing Mass Effect 3 a bit difficult, one would think).



Or perhaps this is just a problem for the subset of games that are generally described as first-person or third-person shooters, RPGs (Role Playing Games) and the like. The term sandbox game gets thrown around a lot and in the pure form there is no win or lose because there are no imposed goals, no over-arching story. In most modern hybrid RPGs there are numerous side quests and since these don't have the investment (on either Player or Developer side) it is quite possible to "lose" or otherwise achieve the bad outcome with no easy take-back.

And of course you can quite easily lose a campaign of any strategic, tactical game from Sim City to Civilization.

But a game where there is a story, a full story with an emotional arc and developed characters and where your expertise at all the elements of play, from making choices on a dialog wheel to how well you shoot, that offers the possibility that you will actually lose? That would be something different.

Dodged that spear

Or bash it aside with your shield, if you are following protocol according to Homer.

When I heard the rumor the next Assasins Creed game would be set in Greece I worried. Then I saw the title was Odyssey. That's all I needed; for a major AAA game to be set in the Heroic Age, especially if they went all accurate about bronze age Aegean culture. A three-hundred person team with years to work can do some pretty serious research.

But, thankfully, the game turns out to be set during the Peloponnesian War. (More-or-less. The Assassins Creed series has very nice looking history, but the actual events get a bit bollixed.) In any case, this is high Classical Greece. Four hundred years after "Homer penned" The Odyssey and eight hundred years after the setting of my novel.

Although, from the looks of the previews I've seen, the lead dives on what looks suspiciously like a sunken Minoan palace, and meets what has to be the minotaur.

So maybe it isn't just my current focus that has been making me notice more and more of the Classical age (that is, Greece and Rome) getting talked about in various corners. Maybe there's a renewed interest in those corners. Not that the classical world ever went away, but we are today far from the mindset of Schliemann and his contemporaries, who lived and breathed Greek Myth and the Glories of Rome in a way that shaped their perception of the past and their overriding goals in learning more about it.



(The game is also a full RPG with a dialog wheel and "choices that matter" in the Mass Effect et al style. And nary an assassin in it, cueing various people to sneer that they'd never buy it while it pretended to be an Assassins Creed game, but then they only buy Assassins Creed games anyhow.)

(One of the complaints is you can chose which gender to play. Which the purists don't like because it sort of flies in the face of the "reliving the genetic memory of your ancestors" thing the games were originally built around. I'm unhappy because as egalitarian as I want my games, the experience for men and women is different, particular in earlier ages. Further, the game gives you choice of playing as an Athenian or a Spartan. Well. Spartan women were expected to be fit and know how to fight but the shit would really have to have hit the tower shield for one of them to be out on the front lines. Their sacred duty was, basically, to make more Spartans.)

(The Athenian woman, on the other hand -- were rarely let out of the house (well, there's a class distinction here, plus the rules were different for non locally-born but anyhow) For all that vaunted Athenian democracy it was one of the most repressive of the Greek City states (a low bar when it comes to Classical Greece -- the Laconians are very much the exception) when it came to women's rights. The evidence is unclear how widespread female literacy was in Athens, or how much exposure they got to the vaunted philosophical, artistic, and scientific glories of the golden age. The evidence is somewhat clearer that the nobel Athenian women were, however, bored out of their gourds.)

(Point being, it is not impossible for the player avatar to be out there adventuring. But every interaction should be colored differently depending on gender as well as background. What I am afraid is with all the RPG elements and millions of lines of recorded dialog and so forth there simply won't be resources spared to make the experience differ in any substantive way. And it should matter. Not because it is historical, but because it gives a richer experience.)

The reason I got into this particular series of games in the first place was to be able to walk the environments and interact with the people of historical times. I'm getting this game, if and when it comes down and price (and so does the computer that can run it). But more and more I have to recognize that this is less a walk through history and more a deeply flawed diorama; well-positioned, nice artifacts, but the plaques and posters explaining it are complete garbage.

Different for Girls: Assassins Creed III: Liberation

I read an article recently that pointed out the problems of gendered mechanics in games. Fortunately it isn't done so much these days. In, say, Mass Effect the experience of playing Commander Shepard doesn't change a bit no matter what gender you assign her. You don't get suddenly better with melee and worse at ranged combat if you play a male Shepard, and there's certainly no rainbow heart attack or "only boys can use explosives" for the femshep.

That Aveline is the first female Assassin in the franchise doesn't change a thing about her abilities. What changes is the context. She can run and climb and fight exactly as well as any previous Assassin. But she's doing it as a mixed-race woman in 1700's New Orleans and when she does so she gets noticed.

That utterly changes the experience of play. But it changes it in a way that is oddly consistent with the core gameplay of the series. And by doing this, and the way in which it does this, the game throws a light on gender experience.

The Assassins Creed games have always been about controlling your visibility. This is through a combination of outright stealth, blending into the background, and social invisibility; the last via a mechanism called "notoriety" that reflects a general awareness of the authorities and their agents that someone looking like you has been in the area doing mischief. Guards get suspicious faster and remain suspicious longer, and are quicker to act on their suspicions as well. Get notorious enough, and they will hunt you down.

The social blending is a fun aspect of the games but is also a little weird in later games, where one of the selling points is the badass outfit your avatar gets to wear. A character in Black Flag lampshades this by mentioning, "...the distinctive costume of your Secret Order." At least in Black Flag, everybody dresses weird. Pirates, you know. It looked a lot odder in Assassins Creed III, when Connor was blending into a crowd of Proper Bostonians wearing his great hooded robes crossed with bandoliers.

When Aveline is going incognito she dresses as a slave. In this costume and this persona it makes complete sense she could fade into the background. In one animation she'll actually pick up a loose broom and start sweeping up. Ten feet away from the men she is tailing, she might as well be a piece of the furniture.

Other Assassins Creed games have had segments where you go in disguise. The interesting element Liberation adds is that Aveline basically has three personas. She dresses to one of three roles, and the role she is playing modifies the mix of her options. Dressed as the well-brought up young Lady she is, her social status allows her physical access her other persona are not freely given. But she can't run in those hampering skirts and although she can (and does) fight quite well, such unladylike behavior gets instant attention and quickly raises her notoriety.

As the slave she can run and fight but she is also looked at with suspicion when she does so in the open. Fortunately she also has the easiest option to regain her anonymity; merely tear down a few wanted posters.

The last option is to wear the fancy Assassins kit. And boy it is a gorgeous outfit, but this personae starts with one point of notoriety. Just being a woman dressed in trousers is enough to attract attention. When she does do something illegal it seems the main thing all the witnesses remember is her gender. In any case her notoriety also shoots up fast, and it is difficult to dismiss.

This is almost deconstructive. And it is wonderful and chilling. No matter what Aveline she is being at the moment, you are always aware of the eyes on you, judging you, watching you suspiciously to see if you properly fulfill your gender (and class) role. As the lady dressed to the nines you are particularly constrained, unable to act out lest people take notice; allowed great freedom of movement as long as you stay within those narrow boundaries.

One of the cuter mechanics is that the Lady can flirt with a young gallant who will then follow her around for a while with his sword and musket ready to defend her. When she's dressed as a slave, the same gallant takes not the slightest notice. But of course the invisibility of the slave comes with awareness of your near total lack of any rights or recourse. And as the Assassin, you are outside the bounds of all society. At least you can run and climb -- within reason -- because she starts out so outré her physical activities are just looked on as one more eccentricity.

Just to add an extra layer, the game is presented as a game created by the fictional Abstergo, part of the secret Templar plot to rule the world (a conceit explored in more detail in Black Flag.) There are no distracting "real world" segments in this game. Sort of. Instead the game itself is interrupted by the efforts of a "hacker" who then forces you to replay certain segments with a more truthful version of events than the one that Abstergo had originally presented.

(This conceit is carried so far that among the usual pre-game titles are ones of Abstergo and the Animus.)

Then there's a probably unintentional layer. There is a lot of overheard conversation in the streets and a lot of names and history being discussed and most of it is in French. One wonders if the experience at the Canadian developers and with their playtesters was different from that of a typical monoglot American player (like me, for instance). The past is another country, all right. In this case, a rather alien and even confusing one.

There is one thing that as of game four Ubisoft hasn't gotten right. And that's making the history accessible. What I mean is, when you pass a historic building or meet a historic character you have a brief moment to click a control that takes you to the right page in the growing "Animus Database" where there is a tiny paragraph on the thing. And then you have to back out of the database with a half-dozen keystrokes and hope you didn't leave the game paused in some awkward moment.

It really should be a one key pop in, pop out -- or better yet, an overlay; something that keeps the person or building or whatever in frame and you in the world and in the moment.

Liberation is basically a re-skin of Assassins Creed III (the one set during the American Revolution), even though it was released at the same time. It is a shorter game, like an expansion pack released as an individual game. So the work Ubisoft did on ACIII is carried over; the counter-centric fighting style, the free-running with the particularly helpful tree highways, and the lovely vegetation and weather effects.

As with the other two games in the series I've played, Liberation messes with the control options and gets a hit-or-miss with that. Not all of the controls can be remapped, either; the aiming system for the blow dart is particularly inconvenient in this regard. It also has the twin flaws of insistent tutorialization one moment, and throwing brand-new mechanics at you in the middle of a fight.

I think the latter is actually a philosophy of play at Ubisoft. I think they are making a point about the way goals change and the way situations develop. So the game will throw a tailing mission at you in the middle of a dialog, and just as you've finally settled into the groove of tailing, suddenly change it up and insist you switch to fighting or something.

I end up with a lot of restarts from last save point when they do this. And that is another annoying peculiarity of the series. Most games save a snapshot of where everything is and restore you to that. The Assassins Creed series "restores" you to where the game thinks you should have been at that moment. Which is really annoying when you managed to climb to a nice vantage point, but the game sticks you in a bush and just to add insult to injury doesn't take into account you'd restocked on all your special sleep darts just for this mission.

(Actually, it does make internal sense; you are supposed to be reliving a set of genetic memories, and to die is to "desynchronize"; to have failed to reproduce the original's experience.)

The tutorials are annoying, though. And inconsistent. Sometimes the game will pop-up a reminder about a special action each and every time that action is possible. Other times it will only mention once (at a moment when you are too busy to pay attention) something you'd really want to be using later. I actually got stuck in the first five minutes of the game because it assumed I'd patiently wait to be shown how the counter/parry control works and I'd already killed the first two bad guys. The game basically froze in the middle of the fight, with the other bad guys waving ineffectually like martial arts movies background fighters, waiting their turn for a button press that had already happened.)

But more on that in my Black Flag interview. All I really wanted to touch on here is how breaking the rules worked for this one. Whether you play a game in first or third person (the over-the-shoulder camera) you begin to identify with the avatar you are controlling. Games have experimented and philosophized for decades about whether allowing the player to customize their avatar, or whether to make them voiced or voiceless, effects the depth of the player's identification.

My opinion is it doesn't. With one big caveat; you don't need to be playing a character that is of your gender, race, or species. But it helps to know that your gender, race, or species is represented; if not in this game, or in this avatar, at least somewhere. If every single avatar option is a buff white guy with crew cut you start to feel like the games weren't written with you in mind.

I'm not a woman like Aveline. But I'm not an N7 rated Space Marine like Commander Shepard, either. And I can't shoot lightning from my hands like my latest Skyrim character. Thing is, being in Aveline's skin, and being in a world that reacts to that skin, is a sobering experience. And what I find most elegant about this game is it isn't something extraneous. In the same way Shep's reputation and the intimidating figure she strikes gives you actual play options in how to win through, Aveline's visibility and social constraints give her both obstacles and options that actually matter in play....and feel organic to the game experience.

...from major to minor

Here's a proposition; video game tunes are the Jazz Standards of the internet.

If you don't know what I mean by jazz standards, I mean the way that a collection of oft-covered songs came to make up the core of the repertoire that jazz players and entire jazz movements went on to cover, re-work, improvise on, and jump off of in new directions. They came from all over, from novelty songs and Tin Pan Alley and the studious compositions of the jazz masters but many of them also came from pop and, even more, from Broadway.

So many great jazz tunes came out of otherwise almost forgotten musicals. Class example being "My Funny Valentine," out of the Mickey Rooney vehicle Babes in Arms.

Anyhow.

There's a whole bunch of people covering game music now. And I think there are some of the same reasons going on. It works better to cover a familiar song. You have the brand attraction, for one. And you enter into a dialog, for another; your cover is compared with other covers, each learning off the other -- and both adding to the weight of familiarity the piece gathers as it moves to being a Standard.

And game music has some of the same attributes of show tunes; it is emotional, and melodic, and memorable. And more. A whole lot of the covers aren't of pieces that were made more recently and with the full resources of the symphonic pallet. No; prime fodder for covers, and source of many standards like "Guiles Theme" or "Vampire Killer," is the 8-bit days.

I think there's a reason why. With only four voices to work from, and rudimentary synthesis to boot, the original composers were forced to be melodically and rhythmically intriguing. And instead of thick orchestral textures, they had to build texture harmonically; these pieces have often surprisingly complex harmonic structures.

These all make them a natural for new orchestrations. The basic parts are so simple and clean they are easily transcribed, and the voicing of the original is so (relatively) undefined you don't have to fight against the idea of "correct" orchestration for it; instead the cover artist is free to interpret within the instruments they want to apply.

But no matter what you do with them, the drive of the original ideas...the melody and harmonic underpinnings...are still there supporting you.




And of course this is the online, social media world. These musicians are having a dialog right out in the open with fans and other musicians, at the various approximations of face to face available in the online world; in videos, comments, chats, pages, etc. (And many of them perform in public as well.)

The first of this crop I ran into were essentially soloists. Often violinists. I wonder if this is how it works today; that the violin (not the piano) is the jumping-off point for certain kinds of musical activity. Anyhow. One has to lead off with Lindsey Sterling, of course. Then there's Taylor Davis, and Taryn Harbridge (who I first encountered doing a multi-track cover of "I Am the Doctor.") And many more.

That's the next step up, in a way. Artists who multi-track (usually) the same instrument to create their compositions. Violinists do this. There's others like Peter Holland who do it a cappella.

Or guitarists -- but no guitarist owns just one guitar. So when a guitarist multi-tracks themselves doing a cover, they tend to play at electric, acoustic, and bass. Or whatever combination you like out of the various guitar-like instruments available. There are some wonderful covers, especially by those who can really play an acoustic, but I can't come up with names at the spur of the moment.

And then there's the multi-instrumentalists. These are people with the daring to try to play as many parts as they can themselves, across a number of different instrument families. Top of the list here has to go to insaneintherain -- Carlos may specialize at sax (although he is a fine keyboard player) but, man....! The jazz arrangement intelligence and the soul and the chops he brings....

I'm continuing to discover these peculiar and daring souls tucked away in the corners of YouTube. Squidphysics (who stands out for me in demonstrating you can get musical results from $100 instruments), PPF, Erutan, String Player Gamer.

And of course there are groups. The Consouls, Tetrimino....but anyhow! That's enough to advance the point.

How strange the change indeed.

It Takes a Village: Assassin's Creed III

I've been tempted by the Assassin's Creed series for a while. There are surprisingly few games with a historical theme, and almost none that allow you to walk among the people of that time; most are big-picture wargames.

On the downside, assassins. As in, a lot of the gameplay is stealth (not my taste) and the entire impetus of the plot is about, well, killing people. I will give it this, though; death is far from depersonalized in this game (well....at least for named characters!) The game confronts head-on the idea of ending a life, ending a story. It doesn't try to minimize the irreversible nature of what that is.

...or a children's toy*

I found myself liking Rise of the Tomb Raider much more than I expected. Sure, there are problems. Many of the worst problems of the previous game of this reboot series have been fixed, at least.

One thing that you can say, though; not only is it a decent game, it is, finally, a Tomb Raider game. The puzzles are back. There's more archaeology. And the Mansion is back (in DLC only, but that's why you wait two years after release and get the GOTY version on Steam sale).

I'll write a full review eventually. At the moment, I just wanted to comment on a more nuanced understanding of archaeology that almost sneaks in through the cracks. Yes, Lara Croft is a tomb robber, no questions asked. What she does to ancient monuments, even Schliemann would be shocked into making some remark. And the games still push the artifact-centric view of the popular press (in addition to the underlying "Ancient myths are just the hiding places of ancient super-science.")

It is almost like someone in the developers is taking the piss, though, when "Loot" is the verb that pops up whether Lara is standing over either a can of rags (useful for making bandages and flaming arrows), or a sarcophagus. There, and in other small places, it seems to recognize how she's a worse role model than even Indiana Jones.

But here's the place where I really feel like an archaeological voice was in the conference room. The game still has collectable items. Like the previous entry in the series, these pop up with very nice rotatable 3D model (based on actual archaeological artifacts) while Lara talks a little about the find. Here's the interesting difference. In Tomb Raider 2013 she would identify the culture and date and often give a little note on usage. Basically she'd read the museum tag. In Rise of the Tomb Raider she is more likely to describe the object, like one would in a field journal, and make some educated guesses as to its nature. Sometimes, in fact, she is truly puzzled.

The same is generally true when she is reading inscriptions -- this is due to an underlying Language mechanic, but still, it is refreshing to see her unsure of her translations.

And there is less of a clear distinction between information that will advance the plot, and information that won't fit into the current project. Again this is meta-game; it comes from the way documents are collectable, and these documents are little snippets of text nicely voice acted for the player.

The place where this distinction is really erased is in the "Bloodlines" DLC, a mansion-based exploration in which both the plot-centric mechanical resolution and the emotional resolution are developed in parallel as two of multiple twining threads. The game goes out of its way to tell you to read all the documents, as you do not know going in which of the various threads you are following through them will lead you to the desired conclusion. This, then, is a heck of a lot closer match to field research than the "find the address to the next game level written in a prominent place right after the boss battle" structure.

The "Bloodlines" DLC also does the Language mechanic one better, in that it requires you, the player, to recognize and use several hieroglyphic characters! (The best is when you have to identify a similarity between the character for a district of ancient Egypt and the depiction of said character in a child's cardboard crown).

Spoilers, by the way!



*yes, and she does make the "children's toy" comment over one of the artifacts she uncovers. Again, I'm convinced someone over at Core actually did some reading.

Someday you feed on a tree frog

Got in some good violin practice over the weekend. It took the first year to learn how to play a tune badly. The second year is all about playing a tune....not so badly. The pieces in my practice repertoire are there because they test the agility and accuracy of my fingering...some nice crosses, some slides, a little vibrato, etc.

I keep adding pieces I'd like to learn. The last couple that caught my eye, however, are brass-heavy. So I'm being very tempted to borrow a trumpet and find out how hard that is to play. As if penny whistle and bodhran weren't ambitious enough! (At least I already know recorder, and own half a consort already, so when I finally do work out the parts for the Khajiit piece I'll be ready for it.)

Well, I have a friend's costume to finish on Monday, and there's two hundred feet of LED strip rolling around the apartment that I'm wiring up for another friend. So there's enough already to keep me distracted.

That, and work. I have this terrible urge to climb a really, really long ladder....

Informative Tombs

I was dashing off a couple simple scenes for a Tomb Raider fanfic when I suddenly stalled. I wanted to put a little color in the bit (from Tomb Raider: Anniversary) about Natla telling Lara the location of lost Vilcabamba.

Trouble is, Vilcabamba isn't lost. Well, it was, but only a little. Hiram Bingham found the site in 1911, it was identified in 1960, and in the 70's the identification was widely published.

We can give the 2007 game a pass as it is a fairly faithful reproduction of the 1996 game. But, really -- calling it "Lost Vilcabamba" in 1996 is pretty shoddy research.



There's a more important omission in the game, however. And that is, lost or not, Vilcabamba is interesting. What it was and the part it plays in the final act of the Incan civilization is fascinating enough that at least two works of fiction were inspired by it. But all the game does is throw out the name.

(At least the player gets that much; they might be inspired to look it up. There is a major location in the first game of the Crystal Dynamics "trilogy" that doesn't even get a name. In fact, only indirect evidence even tells which country the site is located in!)

This is particularly sad because the art direction of all the games has made an effort to bring in some of the artistic motifs, architectural elements, living arrangements, natural surroundings, etc., appropriate to the various cultures brushed against.

The 2013 game does a little better. Particularly nice are the "artifacts," in-game collectibles that have a nicely textured model that can be turned and examined, along with a charming commentary by this game's college-student version of Lara on the artifact's history, use, cultural context, etc.

Pity these are outside of the main plot. In fact, few elements that are important to the plot or the gameplay are examined in any interesting detail. Heck; there are plenty of people who would enjoy a name given to the various wartime wrecks littering the island and the handy weaponry (mostly left behind by the Japanese Army) that Lara picks up. At least there's a bit on the (actual) Himiko, but what the game gives is almost entirely unique to the plot and has little to do with any actual historical myths.

I do realize games are rarely about context. Gameplay is king, and that only makes sense. But the Civilization games made a name in part by referring to real historical developments and making it possible to learn things about them that went beyond what was strictly necessary for game play. In a very different example, the game Skyrim is absolutely stuffed with context, with artifacts and cultural ways and histories and architectures and stories, stories, stories.

In and among the gold pieces and healing potions stuck into treasure chests or littering a bandit's hideout are plates and bales and pots and eating utensils and other cultural relics that can be picked up and examined, and also books, books that add no skill points, carry no hints, have in short no influence on game play, but books that contain multiple readable pages of text. Of stories and legends and songs, all there just to give more background, more detail....more texture to the world.

So, yeah. If I'm playing a first-person shooter set in W.W.I, I want to have equipment that is modeled after the real things. And I want the game to tell me the real names. And some of the context. To name the battle, to name the leaders, to explain why it matters, to tell me (or better yet, let me experience personally) how it unfolded in history.

I don't need this for every game. But any game that flirts with history would, I think, want to make that history breath. To have more than just a name here and there or an accurate in-game model, but to make it possible for you to learn from it. To inform, just enough so you get the value of that peculiar thing games can do; to allow you to walk within and interact.

To experience the thrill and the sorrow of walking the ruins of that last Incan stronghold, knowing what you are looking at...and why it matters.