Cuphead, Cruelty, and Selling Unfairness to You.

Teacher, mother, secret lover.

When charming indie megahit Cuphead came out, I watched a ton of it on Twitch. How could I not? It's so pretty!

I wasn't planning to play it. I like to play one super-tough game a year, to show I can still game hard like the cool kidz. But I'd already played Bloodborne last year, and my aging heart won't take much more than that.

Then my wife got me a Black Friday sale XBox One so that we could play Gears of War 4 together, so I figured I might as well try Cuphead for real.

Because of what I do for a living, of course, all of the following analysis is being done to find ideas I can steal to make more money.

Yeah, Cuphead Is Really Good

It was a huge amount of fun. I played a lot by myself. A lot co-op with my teenage daughter. A reasonable amount with my 11-year old daughter. Turns out my kids can be serious hardcore "Die 50 times and keep at it!" gamers when the bad guys are saucy mermaid ladies.

What really struck me was how little watching the game on Twitch prepared me for actually playing it. This was because Cuphead constantly uses randomness (RNG, for short) better than just about any game I've ever played.

Ever notice how sometimes a character comes along and every fan artist must come up with their own take on it instantly? I think that's cool. (Link not entirely safe for work.)

The Deadly RNG

Just about every attempt against a boss in Cuphead plays out differently from every other try. It's not only the standard Dark Souls thing where each boss has a move set and it picks an attack at random and you have to react to it. (Though it has that, of course.)

The fights are also random in every other way they can be:

Timing of the Attack - A bull is about to lunge forward to attack. It rears back. Then the amount of time until it actually launches the attack varies. Sometimes it's instant. Sometimes it's a good long pause. And sometimes the wait is so long is throws off my timing entirely and I blunder right into the attack.

Timing of Attackers - Little fireballs run across the screen. Sometimes one jumps up at you. Sometimes the pause between leapers is so long that you think the game is broke and you get complacent and BAM. And then three go all at once. (which can be evaded, but it's a rare enough occurrence that the player won't have a canned response for it.)

Random Attack Sets - In a lavish display of developer effort, some bosses have entirely different skill sets every time you launch the fight.

Multiple Simultaneous Attack Sets - The mermaid has two sets of three attacks, one set from the air and one from the water. It picks one from each set and uses them simultaneously, for nine different attacks to react to.

Random Terrain - Two fights have you battle while leaping along moving, randomly arranged platforms. To avoid an attack, you need to very quickly evaluate the routes available to you and select the best one.

This boss made my daughter cry. I hugged her. Then I beat it quickly and she was mad at me. At least we're having family time.

The End Result

This is why watching the game doesn't convey the experience of playing it. You can't get through Cuphead with patterns. Well, some fights you can. But most of the time, you have to learn how the system works, practice with it, and perform within it, adapting fluidly to surprises as you go.

Sometimes the RNG hands you a really nasty situation, but the vast majority of the time the situation you get is fair and survivable. You just have to take in the situation, come up with a plan very fast, and execute it.

The brilliance of the design is in making a system with RNG that keeps the game unpredictable and tough but still fair. I think this sort of probability manipulation is underrated as a skill in game design.

Obvious Disclaimer For People Who Are Already Yelling At Me In the Comments Anyway

Obviously, a lot of gamers don't like high challenge games. A lot of gamers don't like missions they can fail. Nothing wrong with this.

Cuphead isn't aiming for the casual market. Most of the time, I don't either. I'm looking for ways to better sell to this market.

If you're trying to write a game that will appeal to every single person everywhere, you're probably already doomed.

Unfairness Is a Selling Point

In a game like this, the occasional unfair, unescapable death is a selling point. There are some gamers for whom such a situation doesn't induce a Ragequit. It inspires a determination to excel.

If I don't kill you occasionally, how will your accomplishments have meaning?

Playing the RNG In an RPG

Darkest Dungeon is another game with great use of randomness. When you take your party into a dungeon, you can get a run of savage bad luck. If things get bad, you can pull the ripcord at almost any moment, abandon your run, and save your group (with a penalty). The skill comes in constantly evaluating your situation and deciding when it's time to give up. If you can't do that, you will have a hard time.

I've always tried to have a lot of this in my indie RPGs. I write long games, and I want to make sure it's always interesting and unpredictable and there's a chance that things can go south quickly if you're not careful.

I give enemies large move sets and make sure that they can approach a fight differently each time. I use a critical hit system to make sure you can never get too complacent. Sometimes, enemies run for help, and it's random how long they'll hang around before they do.

(If you want to see this system in action, our new game, Avernum 3: Ruined World, is out at the end of January.)

Heck, the whole genre of Roguelikes depends on randomness of your adventure. You gamble your time and hope you get a situation you can survive.

Of course, video game accomplishments don't have meaning. My job is to create the illusion that they do.

What Is the Gain From this Randomness

Humans like to gamble, and we have loved gambling for all of our recorded history. Gambling doesn't have to be for money, and it doesn't need lootboxes.

The joy of gambling comes from the unpredictability, the increasingly rare life pleasure of being unsure what is about to happen. RNG in your game means bad luck might cause you to fail. Some people mistakenly think that this is a flaw, when it is in fact a great strength.

The ideal for my games is that, for battles of an appropriate level, there is always a tiny chance to fail. Similarly, for Cuphead, unless you're a completely superior player, there is a chance that an unexpected chain of events will outwit and defeat you.

When you lack a human opponent to provide unpredictability, randomness must serve this role and provide the surprises. This provides suspense and unpredictability. For a large portion of gamers, being surprised is a highly valued product that can be sold at a premium.

It's a leapy boi! Look at him go!

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If you're intrigued by giant indie RPGs with epic stories and tough, unpredictable fights, you can wishlist Avernum 3 on Steam. It's out January 31. News about our work and random musings can be found on our Twitter.

Persona 5, Cartoon Cats, Depthless Evil, and Dating Your Teacher.

Strap in. This might get a tiny bit weird.

I write long RPGs for a living. Yet, I am the most jaded RPG gamer in the world. I tend to hate playing them. Yet, I force myself to play a long RPGs, because if you become totally divorced from playing the sort of game you write, you are lost.

That is why I recently spent 92 (92!!!) hours completing Persona V, Altus's cool, quirky, cult-hit JRPG. I didn't play it. I sunk into it, like a warm bath. For 1-2 hours a night, for months, I led my band of oddball Japanese high school students through their routine of going to school, dating, capturing demons, crushing evil, and being the best darn flower salesmen and part-time curry cooks they could possibly be.

It's really weird. When I look back on the obscene amount of time I spent on this game, I remember so many flaws. Storylines that were dull and uninspired. Repetitive dungeons and combats. A flawed translation. A lot of padding. A lot of content that was genuinely disturbing.

Yet, let's be clear, this game took over my brain. It’s the best example I've seen in this medium of a work that is much stronger than the sum of its parts. If you love this genre, it’s really worth playing, at least through the end of the first chapter.

So please allow me to go on about it for a while, as I process the experience and try to figure out why it works. Because it kind of shouldn't.

I freely admit that I can be very juvenile in my video game selection standards.

So What Is This Thing About?

Persona 5 is part of the (deep breath, bear with me here) Shin Megami Tensei media franchise, a sprawling web of books, anime, video games, etc. that have been very popular in Japan for 30 years or so. The last video game in this world to gain traction on my continent was the cool and utterly bananas 2011 puzzle dating game Catherine, which I still believe does not actually exist as it was merely a fever dream I alone experienced.

I want to try to explain what Persona 5 is about in a way that will probably agitate Megami Tensei fans to no end but will actually have a chance of getting civilians to comprehend it.

So you play a teenager in high school. You spend your days deciding what to do. You can study, or work at odd jobs, or go on dates, or hang with friends, or go see movies with your intelligent talking cat.

But you are also a, I don't know, a soul wizard. You are able to travel with your friends to the "Metaverse," which is where everyone's souls hang out. There, you can summon demons called Persona and fight the souls of bad people. If you can beat up their souls enough, you can change them and make them be less evil (or just kill them).

However, these enemies are also able to summon their own Persona demons. But then you can capture and use them yourself, in a process that plays out like Pokemon on shrooms.

So it's a JRPG, combined with an anime dating sim, with heavy Pokmemon elements. I am now stepping out of the way of those of you stampeding toward the exit.

What really sucked me in to this game was the first chapter, where you do battle with that most sinister of foes, your school's volleyball coach.

Just don't forget who, in the end, your real enemy is.

The First Storyline

The Witcher 3: The Wild Hunt was, by video game standards, fantastically written. This means that most of the writing was simply fine, but it has one storyline (the infamous "Bloody Baron") that was genuinely good. In game writing, one good story can go a long way.

In Persona 5, when you learn how to summon demons and punch the souls of your enemies, your first foe is the evil volleyball coach Kamoshida. As a famed Olympic athlete, when he retired from competition, your school eagerly snapped him up as a teacher. And then proceeded to look the other way as he repeatedly assaulted his students, the boys physically and the girls sexually. He's famous, so nobody does anything about it.

You discover that he drove one of his students to attempt suicide. You confront him. He then swears to use his position to get you expelled. Thus begins a race, with him trying to destroy you in the real life while you try to wear down his spirit and change his personality in the Metaverse. If you lose the race, the game ends. Badly.

Let's be clear. Persona 5 is a really dark game. Horrible things happen. Some of the enemies are truly evil. Not evil in an abstract Sauron/burning eye/save the world whatever way, but in a skin-crawly "Yes, this actually happens. All the time." way.

Kamoshida is one of the most loathsome characters I've ever seen in a video game. He is so horrifying because he is so believable. It happens in the real world to the point of being mundane. A game like Tyranny can play with evil all it wants, but it's in a world full of magic and elves and cat people, so who cares?

In Persona 5, the bad guy is, and let's not mince words here, a serial rapist. In a seemingly light dating sim RPG. This is what led me to write this blog post. Video games only rarely tackle this sort of extremely difficult material. So when they do try it's worth figuring out if it worked. If so, how?

Persona 5's graphic and interface design is relentlessly cool.

Video Games Have No Limits, But They Have Limits

Here is the quandary: Video games are art, and therefore no element of the human experience, no matter how horrible, is off limits. Yet, video games are mostly adolescent power fantasies, so some topics seem too serious for them to address. Much of human experience, therefore, must be walled off in weenie little indie art pieces that nobody plays.

Now look at Persona 5. It is full of horrifying abuse. And wacky JRPG battles and hijinx. With a rapist gym teacher. And a cartoon cat.

Persona 5 is a financial and critical hit. I have read criticism that there are flaws in the ways it addresses the issues it does, but I have not seen anyone, male or female, seriously say that the game is disrespectful or should not exist. If they did, I would not agree with them.

This is a game full of horrors. It shouldn't work. People should recoil from it. But people don't recoil, and it does work. This is a good spot for some meaty game criticism. How do they pull off this magic trick?

To show how it can work, I'll point out one tiny, vital part of the game: how these traumatized kids get their magical powers.

How Can a Game Have Such Horrible Things and Silly Things Next To Each Other and Not Be a Mess

You might be thinking, "How can an RPG contain material like that and still be bearable and not super-gross and offensive?" Part of it is that, when dealing with sexual assault (and it comes up a lot), Persona 5 never jokes. It treats the topic seriously.

More importantly, they use a bit of a narrative trick, which I want to highlight because I think it works extremely well.

OK, so you play a band of teenagers who gain the ability to summon demons to attack the souls of evil people. Fine. How does this happen?

It's not like Harry Potter. A fat guy with a beard doesn't show up and say "You're a wizard!" and you go off to boarding school.

Here's how it works. You have to be betrayed. Someone has to be truly cruel to you, completely take advantage of your trust and weakness (and you've been weak and trusting in a way only a child can be). And then you have to realize it. You have to enter the Soul World to fully comprehend the magnitude of what has been done to you, and you have to completely lose yourself to rage. When this happens, a mask will appear on your face, the visible form of your still belonging to and believing in society. And you have to rip it off. It's AGONIZING. There is blood. And when it's finally off, you're free.

Here is what it looks like. (The one at 9:17 is pretty good.)

It's intense and bizarre and glorious and totally silly and utterly sincere, in a way that the Japanese do really, really well. It’s full of crazy animations and cartoon cats, but it's SERIOUS. I think it's the secret to what makes the game work.

He never saw it coming.

I Love Tonal Inconsistency

Now I know I am doing a super-crappy job of selling this game. I mean, I promised you a totally bananas adventure where you travel through surreal magic lands summoning demons, and then you return to the real world to be a seventeen year old tending bar before going on a date with your high school teacher.

This is a game with a really inconsistent tone. It can switch from weird and silly to dark and heavy in a moment.

I love that. I think tonal inconsistency is one of the necessary traits of a really good story.

It's not just that, if you never allow your tone to vary, your work is monotonous and grueling. It's that, if you want your work to in any way mirror life (and Persona 5, above everything else, wants to be a life simulator), well, life itself has an inconsistent tone.

Persona 5 is about damaged people trying to recover and build happy lives for themselves. It's about having been exploited and having your trust betrayed, and healing and rising above it and building a life. So when the characters recover from the latest outrage by going out for fried octopus balls, it's not a flaw but the whole point.

Window Into a Foreign Land

Persona 5 is a work of Japanese cultural and societal criticism, focusing on the ways in which old people exploit young people (and young women and girls especially). It can get really rough.

So if this doesn't sound like a place where you want to spend 90 hours of leisure time, I'd certainly understand.

I valued it greatly, though, as a window into another culture. This game is thoroughly and unapologetically Japanese, with Japanese characters commenting on Japanese society, in a very, very cynical way.

Politics in the U.S. in the last year has been a bit, shall we say, unsettling. As a big politics and civics nerd, I really liked stepping out of it for a time to be reminded that other societies have arguments and their own problems. They are the main characters in their own stories.

I love works of art that give a view into foreign mindsets and problems, like how The Witcher comes from a very Eastern European point of view.

Of course, selecting any character as "Best Girl" is offensive and problematic on so many levels, and I apologize for any inference that I ever engage with a sincere work of Interactive Art in such a childish way. Video games, as a true art form, deserve better, and so does humanity.

"Enough of This Serious Nonsense. Get to the Important Part."

What?

"Who is Best Girl?"

Makoto. #shotsfired

As for good optional storylines/people to date, a lot of the side storylines are kind of bland. It's kind of a problem, alas. I found the most interesting characters to be Kawakami (teacher) and Tae Takemi (doctor). There's a lot of room for disagreement here. Feel free to point out other good bits of writing in the comments. (Also, be sure to never miss a chance to be mean to Mishima.)

Oh, and as one more aside, I have never liked music in video games. This is the first game I’ve ever played where I really, really liked the music. I still love the main battle theme after hearing bits of it 10000 times.

The Fun of Transgression

One of the coolest things about video games is that they give you the freedom to misbehave. This is one of the unique things about vidya as a storytelling medium. It's one thing to read about someone misbehaving, and another thing entirely to control someone being bad. Even if we know it's not real, when you choose for your avatar to do something crazy or bad, for a moment, it FEELS real.

You play a highly rebellious high school student, and Persona 5 lets you be transgressive in a way a western game could never allow. You can be responsible and do homework and get a job, sure. Or you can get a job as a bartender, or hang out with your alcoholic reporter friend, or, yes, date one of your teachers. (In a storyline that ends up being weirdly sad and touching and is one of the better bits of writing.)

This is just a first bid in picking apart Persona 5.

Be warned. While Persona 5 will allow you to two-time (or 9-time) your girlfriend, there may be consequences.

There's Plenty of Flaws

It's a 90+ hour game, how can it not? It's about 10 hours too long. There's a lot of bland writing and weird translations (in English). The writers had kind of a weird obsession with modeling. The combination of utter weirdness and total sincerity really requires some getting used to. The depictions of gay people are pretty offensive. The character of Akechi (Boy Detective!!!) seems to have been parachuted in from a different, worse game.

But if you care about the art form and the genre, this game is INTERESTING. It swings for the fences. Its reach exceeds its grasp. I haven't even begun to sort out all of the fascinating choices and ideas in this crazy, overstuffed game.

If nothing else, the next time I hear someone gassing on about how, "Video games can't do this," or "Video games can't cover that topic," I can now just say, "Persona 5, fam," and walk off to a more interesting conversation. Persona 5 got me thinking about all the things we can still explore in this young, weird medium, and I'm grateful for that.

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Our very non-JRPG games are always available here, and I am on Twitter.

Whining About Grand Theft Auto V, Part 2: Gunplay and Power Fantasy.

Grand Theft Auto V DLC just announced.

This is the second part of my big, scattershot critique of Grand Theft Auto V. (Part 1 is here.) Things it did well. Things done not so well. Ways it could have, with minimal effort, made the flat parts much more interesting.

My problem with Grand Theft Auto V is not what it tries to do. It's that it doesn't do a good job of doing what it tries to do. Grand Theft Auto V tries to sell this badass thug life fantasy, but it undercuts itself at every turn.

The main reason I'm howling into the void like this is because I want Grand Theft Auto VI (or the next game to sell the same thing, Saints Row-style) to be better.

This is who I want to play.

A Brief Note About Stories About Scumbags

Writing a story centered around criminals and killers is hard. Making these characters likable is really hard. Fortunately, there are plenty of examples of success. The Sopranos. The Godfather. Quentin Tarantino movies (especially Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction). Wolf of Wall Street does a great job of it, and it's in theaters now.

How do you make a scumbag likable? It's all about fantasy. They don't have to be witty, but it helps. They don't have to have lots of fun, but it helps. What you need is a feeling of power and of getting to live outside of society's suffocating rules.

The most important thing: You have to believe that, for all of the danger and the fear, these characters LOVE the life they live. They wouldn't have it any other way.

But what if your criminal characters are constantly miserable and dour and gray and joyless and you would rather spend a lifetime as a Walmart greeter than five seconds in their shoes?

This brings us back to Grand Theft Auto V.

My favorite was the unhappy one.

Three Characters. Kind Of.

It was huge news when it was announced that Grand Theft Auto V would have three main characters. As if this is an exciting development in storytelling, which it isn't. The Seven Samurai came out decades ago, and it had SEVEN characters! (Not to mention Ocean's Eleven.)

It really only has one playable character: An unhappy, crabby criminal who wants to score big robberies to get rich. There's the young version, the old tired version, and the midlife crazy version, but they're basically the same character. (With the crazy version coming closest to being a fully realized, believable person.)

The sameness of the three characters is a sad missed opportunity. Here's my suggestion: Why do all three have to be on the same side? Why couldn't one of them be a corrupt cop trying to bring the other two down (like Vic Mackey in The Shield). When you play him, there are corrupt-cop minigames like shaking down drug dealers. Then, when you switch characters, the game would actually change in a meaningful way.

Or, want to keep the three criminals working together? You could make the whole thing twice as interesting in a second by making the young black striving criminal a woman. (Want to know what I'm picturing? Kindly Google Pam Grier. Or watch Jackie Brown. Yeah, I know. Tell me that wouldn't be awesome.)

Of course, then you run into the problem that some young male gamers are afraid of playing female characters, which is weird. Still, awesomeness is its own reward.

Do You Want To Be These People?

I can't remember any gaming story as dour and joyless as Grand Theft Auto V. It's these three miserable, clueless people, griping at each other and failing at everything they do for hour after hour. These people just aren't fun to watch.

This game needs a lot more Pulp Fiction. As it is, it's like watching some 60s French film about the Meaning of Sadness.

A Brief Side Note About Video Game Stories

By the way, a quick tip for the uninitiated. When people say a video game has "a good story," what they mean is that it has "a story." When they say it has "interesting characters," what they mean is that it has "characters."

These things get graded on a curve.

My Perfect Example Of the Problem

The game constantly rubs your nose into how powerless your power fantasy avatars are. Favorite example: The minigame in which you can fondle strippers during a lap dance, but only if the bouncer doesn't see you. If the bouncer sees you, you get thrown out.

Let us set aside for a moment that a game where you are groping women who doesn’t want to be groped is just super-ultra-gross.

But seriously? You're playing these awesome psycho badasses, yet they don't have more juice than a strip club bouncer?

You think Tony Soprano ever gets thrown out of a strip club? I'd like to see some dude try. They'd be pulling chunks of him out of the Hudson River for years.

OK. I put the box on the other box. When do I get to shoot all of these people?

About the Heists

One of the big features of GTAV was the heist system: You would choose a target for a huge robbery, and then you would laboriously go through all the steps of planning it out. Sounds cool.

But why were the steps of planning the heist so tedious? Drive across town to buy a mask. Drive back across town to steal a truck. Wander around a jewelry shop and take pictures. At one point, I swear to god, you pretend to be a dockworker and use a crane to move boxes around.

I totally see what they were going for here. They want to show how these big crimes come together and give the player the feeling of putting something big together. It just doesn't play well.

A Final Thing. The Gunplay.

Grand Theft Auto gameplay has two dominant components: The driving and the shooting. The driving, as I discussed in the previous post, is awesome. Sadly, the shooting is kind of a mess.

I'm far from the first person to observe this ... here's how the combat works. You press the left trigger, and you will be auto-aimed at the center of the torso of the nearest enemy. Press the right trigger to kill him. That's it. Left trigger - right trigger - left trigger - right trigger, until you win. It's not that fun.

GTA apologists are already storming to the comments to angrily point out that you can turn on free aiming in the settings. Well, yeah, you can. But so what? 95% of players never dig into the Settings. The default version of the game IS the game.

But even if lots of players knew about and used this option, isn't this weird? I mean, why is such a fundamental part of how the game plays left to a check box buried in Settings? I mean, isn't that kind of peculiar? Why is that?

I think the real reason for the simplistic combat becomes very clear whenever you're in a fight where autotargeting doesn't work. In other words, in one of the many fights where it's nighttime and you have a sniper rifle and you NEED TO SHOOT THAT ONE GUY RIGHT NOW OMIGOD NOWNOWNOW!!!!!

And I'm desperately looking through the scope into the darkness, trying to figure out which gray patch on a gray patch I need to shoot to not instafail the mission. Honestly, so many of my mission failures happened because I was squinting at the screen trying to find my target.

This is the problem: Because of the art style and the huge variety of targets, settings, and times of day, you will often be in fights where you just can't see your enemies clearly. It works, though, because the magic left trigger always finds them for you. Left trigger - right trigger - left trigger - right trigger.

I don't know how to solve the problem (which existed in GTA4 too), but having an aiming-free shooter isn't a great solution.

You see how badass and non-depressed these people look? I'll come back when I can play them.

In Closing

For all its supposed edginess, Grand Theft Auto V is the most conservatively-designed, risk-averse computer game I've ever played. Is the content edgy? Maybe? I suppose? Kind of? In 2013, selling a game to teen boys where you fondle strippers and torture swarthy foreigners is not a big risk.

Of course, there's no way they will care about my criticism. Nor should they. It's not my risk, not my hundreds of millions of dollars sunk into the game. And because this game is massively successful, the next Grand Theft Auto will be the same thing. Same lavish setting, same nihilism. Honestly, the best thing Rockstar could do for the next game in the series is a three-word design document: "Same thing again."

However, this leaves an opening for a canny competitor. The Saints Row games have thrived by keeping the sense of fun and silliness the Grand Theft Auto games abandoned years ago.

My main problem with Grant Theft Auto V is that it was just a huge downer. It was sad and dour and all too frequently tedious. It never did what the Grand Theft Auto games were always so good at: making me smile.

Katawa Shoujo, Sex Stuff in Games, and Choosing What You Are Allowed To See

What I expected: Weirdo smut. What I got: A little box full of therapy.

This is one of those blog posts it's really hard to hit the Publish button. Basically, what I’m going to do is publicly throw my support behind a sexually explicit dating sim that takes place in a school for the disabled. (Yes. You read that right.) It's kind of hard to do without coming off as a perv or a weirdo.

But I'm old and cranky enough to think that good, sincere work should get its due. If nothing else, the amazingly off the wall circumstances of its creation make it worth a look. So here we go.

I've been spending the last few weeks playing through my backlog of dozens and dozens of indie games, enough to help me realize I have played enough 2-D platformers for my next ten lifetimes. And, while I was poking around online, a very odd title came on my radar.

Pictured: The Feels.

Katawa Shoujo

I love looking at new trends and apps and memes online. I've been on the Interwebs since 1988. (Yes, they existed then, and yes, I am comically old.) The weird electronic culture that sprung to life in front of me provides ceaseless fascination.

And that's why I started to hear about an odd little indie game called Katawa Shoujo. (Literal translation: "Cripple Girls." Katawa is generally considered a slur in Japanese.) It came out in early 2012. While it got some press, it didn't get as much as its quality and the fascinating story of its creation deserved. You can download it for free for Windows or Mac here.

Yes, I know I'm late to this party, and that Katawa Shoujo is a huge underground hit, but mainstream coverage of the game has been really lacking (with some exceptions), for reasons I want to dig into. So bear with me.

This game is the indiest thing that ever indied. It was made by a group of a few dozen volunteers recruited from the hugely popular anonymous image board 4chan (a source of so much reprehensible behavior and remarkable creativity). It took over five years to write. It is a dating sim set in a high school for the disabled. There is already no way this thing should exist, let alone have any chance of being good.

Katawa Shoujo is a Visual Novel, basically a romantic choose your own adventure, a genre of game I know almost nothing about. And, apparently, young people were playing it in droves and losing their minds with, as they say, The Feels.

(Some people actually argue whether Visual Novels are games or not. I could not care less about this argument. If calling Katawa Shoujo a game makes you angry, shout your rage at your love pillow.)

The amount of fan art for this game is mind-boggling. Not quite at My Little Pony levels, but ...

In An Infinite Universe, Anything Is Possible

This game is kind of marvelous.

The gameplay is pretty simple. You play a boy with life-threatening arrhythmia, who enrolls at a school for the disabled and meets five female students there. As the story unfolds (via text over graphics), you are occasionally given choices. If you choose correctly, you might end up dating one of them. Then, depending on later decisions, this relationship can end very well or very badly.

It takes about eight hours to play, with around 10-20 choices based on the path you follow. And it sounds, from any casual description, like a playground for pervs and fetishests.

It's not. It's a quiet, deliberately paced story about young love, growing up, and discovering sexuality, one of the best I've seen since Judy Blume. And yeah, there's sex, of the endlessly awkward young person variety. If it was a movie, it'd be an easy NC-17. (By the way, it is made explicit everyone having sex is over 18. The developers wisely decided to avoid that minefield.)

Yet it's not porn. It's basically a story about figuring out the things about yourself and those you love that can't be changed, accepting them, and how really difficult that is. It's heady stuff, and yes, I sound like a crazy person. But I've learned to accept that.

(By the way, no matter what you do, it takes several hours of play before anyone will even kiss you. If you are looking for smut, you may wish to keep shopping.)

I played through two of the five paths and am slowly going through a third. I'm approaching it like ... I feel like a magician who is picking over someone else's trick to figure out how they did it.

While the art and writing can be uneven, this game is beautifully made and keenly observed. (And it has a storyline around a character named Rin which, if it came in the form of a book or movie instead of an obscure indie game, would receive massive acclaim.)

Happiness not guaranteed.

"But Will I Like It?"

Beats me. Maybe? It's certainly not for everyone, but that's how art works. If you picked a book at random in a bookstore or wandered into a random theater in the local multiplex, you probably wouldn't like what you got.

It has a fanatical following among the young and socially awkward (God, I would have loved it when I was 16), but I have no idea how much Regular People (tm) would like it. I'm sure some would. I asked my wife to play it, just to make sure I'm not insane, and she really liked it, so that gives me hope.

It's hard to tell how big this game's audience is, because a casual inspection of the forums on the game's official site reveals that most people who like it keep it a secret. In a Reddit AMA, one of the game's writers said that nobody who worked on it can use it on a resume.

For people like me who want gaming options for grownups that don't involve shooting fifty people in the face, this is really, REALLY depressing. We've created a system where games that deal with relationships in a daring way like books and movies just can't exist.

An actual YouTube video, that actually exists.

Murder Is Good and Sex Is Bad.

Look. Sexuality is one of the fundamental facts of human existence, and thus is has a place in art. If video games are ever to be taken seriously in art, sex has a place in them. And yet.

It's the old conundrum in our society. Make a game like Grand Theft Auto V where you murder policemen by the hundreds and engage in excruciatingly detailed torture? Walmart welcomes you with open arms and you make billions. Make a game which depicts adults being intimate in a consensual, loving way? Welcome to business oblivion!

Sure, there's plenty of sex in video games. Grand Theft Auto V had a minigame where you grope strippers, and, if you do this efficiently enough, they will prostitute themselves to you. The Witcher invites you to sleep with as many women as possible to earn "romance cards." So basically, you can have sex in video games, as long as it is adolescent, fake, and gross.

Meanwhile, Bioware, which has at least tried to put real, emotional relationships in its games, earns a public freakout whenever they try to depict actual sex. At this point, even the extravagantly mild scenes of Dragon Age and Mass Effect are gone, replaced by Mass Effect 3's clothed hugging.

I don't want porn. I just want it possible for love to be depicted with as much care and attention as murder. The Grand Theft Auto thing can exist, fine, I just don't want it to be the only thing. Is this not reasonable?

Katawa Shoujo is an underground sensation, but I've spent the last few weeks polling my nerd-savvy friends, many of them fans of Manga and visual novels, trying to find a single one who had heard of it. No luck, because we've built a system where mainstream awareness of a title like this is impossible.

Happy endings not guaranteed. (But where is that wind coming from?)

If It's Not For Children, It Can't Be For You

I am not exaggerating. If you tried to make a game like Katawa Shoujo for money, the odds are so against you. Placement on XBox or Playstation? Forget it. This game would be perfect for the iPhone, but Apple categorically refuses to accept any program with non-murder-related adult content. (A movie? Of course. A video game? Absolutely not.)

Do I like this? No, I do not. But we decided, as a culture, that these three corporations can have near-total veto power over this whole chunk of our culture. Now we get to enjoy the consequences of this decision.

This depresses me. After weeks of slogging through insanely gruesome AAA games, it was such a relief to play a title that was, basically, about decent people trying to be nice to each other.

A Final Bit Of Crass Consumerism

One last little thing, since I know a lot of young, aspiring indie developers read this. I think one of the biggest, most unexploited markets now is for short, sincere storytelling games. Think Gone Home. Stanley Parable. This is a great, growing genre for good writers.

In the money arena, you still kind of have to avoid sex, which is stupid, but you can't fight City Hall. There's still so much room to explore. Consider this.

Katawa Shoujo was made by volunteers, covers some really edgy ground, got near-zero publicity, and still has a large and passionate following.

If you're looking for a way to make money writing indie games, your nose might be itching now. The thing you're smelling? Money, waiting to be earned.

--

Edit: The "Romance Cards" were from The Witcher, not The Witcher 2.

And, as always, we're still on Facebook and Twitter.

More Arguing About Women In Video Games. But This Time the Women Can Beat You Up.

Frankly, I want my avatar to look more like this ...

The argument about how women should be portrayed in video games rages inexplicably on. Speaking as someone who writes these things for money, not systematically alienating half the human population and almost half of actual gamers is just good business.

Happily, progress is being made. There have been quite a few games out this year, indie and AAA, that prominently feature interesting women as main characters and supporting cast. (e.g. Gone Home. Last of Us. Tomb Raider. Bioshock: Infinite, sorta.)

We're getting there. Fossilized designs like Grand Theft Auto V are increasingly out of place. But angry young men on forums make it seem like there's an actual controversy, so on we go.

It's all kind of a waste, because, as far as I'm concerned, the interview that should settle the argument decisively came out in September, and it didn't get nearly as much attention as it should have.

It's an interview with two female soldiers, one who served in Afghanistan and one who served in Iraq, about how women are portrayed in gunshooters.

It's full of great quotes, but here's a nice one, talking about Call of Duty (which only finally put in playable female soldiers in the newest title) ...

It's because you have men who are designing these games in the first place. Put me, or any of the women who have served in charge of a shooter that includes women as the main protagonists. You can bet that you'll get a character who is far more concerned about her kill streak than she is her makeup or how she looks. And you can believe she wouldn't be running around in a bikini either. Save that for Dead or Alive where the women don't do any real combat, and flounce around with their tits bouncing like they are in a rodeo.

I think that this should be the beginning of the end of the conversation. Here's why.

... than this.

Soldiers and Video Games, The Basics

Bear in mind here that video games are insanely popular among soldiers overseas, as they provide a reliable distraction during the inevitable seemingly infinite hours of boredom and inactivity.

I have received so many e-mails from soldiers who wanted to get my games up and running before they leave on a long deployment. Of course, I find it impossible to reject requests like that.

The Last Stand of Principle

Of course, in our society, pretty much any moral principle can instantly be abandoned if the money is right. In the video game industry, it's gotten to the point where anyone’s appeal to basic ethics is generally treated with open mockery. (How many huge games in the last year or two shipped in a basically non-functional state?)

There is one principle, however, that is almost never questioned by the sane: The people who chose to sacrifice years of their lives (and perhaps their entire life) to defend their countries deserve respect.

The people willing to die for us should be honored for that. Must it be said that this is still true when they are women?

From the upcoming game, Warface. This is a PR image. Everything about it was carefully planned. What does it want to say, and what does it want to teach? (Answer below.)

So Here Is The Absolute Minimum That Is Required

One. If it's a game about soldiers, female avatars should be available whenever possible. With a AAA budget, there is NO excuse to not have this in the multiplayer. You can afford it.

Two. Women soldiers should look like soldiers. When someone goes overseas and gives up years of her life in public service, she should not see that her culture regards woman warriors as a bunch of mindless sex dolls.

I mean, right?

And let's be clear. I know game devs. I've been around them for decades. They are mostly doughy, deskbound guys who never came within a thousand miles of serving in the military. That these guys are insulting the women doing the tough job so few of them signed up for is truly galling.

Answer: Thank you for your service.

And It Matters

Culture matters. I mean there's not a question, right? The images we surround ourselves with affect us. Why are such massive fortunes spent on advertising? You think they don't affect people? Corporations like wasting money?

(And don't kid yourself. There is a wealth of research that says that ads do affect you, even when you don't realize it.)

We absorb the media around us, and it shapes us. Nobody plays these games more than kids, and kids learn.

So ask yourself the question. What do you want young people to learn? Not what it is easiest or most profitable to teach them. Ask what we want. What is best for the country. What is just. What is right.

I'm no white knight. The women in the interview don't need my help or my pity. They do, however, deserve respect. Depicting soldiers as soldiers, man or woman, seems like a tiny, reasonable way to start.

---

As always, we're still on Facebook and Twitter.

The Fun of Being Bad. The Fun of Fun.

SOLD!

I've been writing a lot lately about video games that are really well designed and written. Games like Spec Ops: The Line and The Last of Us. First-rate, intelligent titles that are only held back by the fact that, let's face it, they are gigantic bummers.

Let us never forget that video games are games. They are supposed to be fun. They are capable of, in rare, magical moments, providing genuine joy.

I wanted my last article in this little series to be about Saints Row IV, the most efficient joy-production machine I have experienced in many a year.

But I need to make the topic a little broader than that. I want to talk about the most delightful, unique, transgressive pleasure that our young art form can provide: The fun of being bad.

This was controversial once. Simpler time.

The Justifiable Fun of Being Bad

In 1976, a company called Exidy released a video game called Death Race. In it, you control a car and run over little people. You try to crush as many as you can inside of a time limit. When you hit them, they made an adorable little squeak. I played the heck out of it. Yes, I am comically old.

See, the genre of Having Fun Doing Horrible Things is almost as old as video games themselves. There have always been and always will be games that let you have fun being bad. Robbing shops. Running over pedestrians. Generally being a reprobate.

There is absolutely nothing wrong with this. Video games are imaginary. They are places where we enact our fantasies. Sometimes, our fantasies are bad. That is why they are just fantasies.

In real life, I am snappish but basically mild and entirely non-violent person. I have played four Grand Theft Auto games front to back, and I always ended each session with a crazed kill-rampage. No apology is forthcoming.

This Is a Hard Trick To Pull Off

Making a game that makes doing evil things funny and fun is really difficult. Players don't seem to realize how tricky this is. Most people are feeling, empathic creatures. If you get the tone just a little bit off, if you make the suffering just a tiny bit real, if you let the player think for one moment about what the thing they are doing on the screen actually means, the spell is broken.

This is why, no matter how big the world of Grand Theft Auto V or Saints Row IV is, no matter how much you wander, you will never see a child running free. This is why these games, for all of the horrible crimes you can commit, will never depict a rape.

It's a delicate bit of alchemy. One of my favorite Grand Theft Auto missions ever involves repeatedly shooting a guy in a full body cast with a rocket launcher. It was just the right level of ludicrous to be hilarious.

If you can't possibly see how this could be funny, please, I beg you, never watch a Road Runner cartoon. The things that poor coyote goes through will break your heart. All he ever wanted to do was eat.

And then I turned off the Playstation and didn't turn it on again for a week.

So Don't Miss the Point

I have been a huge Grand Theft Auto fan for a long time, so the way the designers have completely lost the thread of what they're trying to do pains me greatly. The most discussed scene in the game involves the long, slow, graphic torture of a prisoner with jumper cables, pliers, a wrench, and gasoline. Here's a video of it! Enjoy! (Skip to 6:50 to really get the good stuff.)

Did you watch it? Of course you didn't. Why on earth would you?

And yet, why wouldn't you? Didn't you hear? Grand Theft Auto V has a 97 on Metacritic. That is basically perfection. It made a billion dollars in like a day. It is, critically and financially, the absolute pinnacle of the art form. Don't you like video games? Why would you not want to see the pinnacle of the art form?

But Anyway

Of course, this scene (and so much of the rest of the game) has been criticized for just general horribleness, to which people who don't get it respond, "But Grand Theft Auto is about having fun being bad."

This misses the point. If you want people to get that jolt of transgressive joy, you have to be more careful about what you make them do, not less. I don't know who, beyond adolescent boys, could ever have actual fun playing that scene. Game-design-wise, it's simply an unforced error.

Video games are maturing as an art form. The stuff you can't get away with in movies and TV? Soon, they won't be permissible in video games either. Civilization inflicts its requirements.

On the other hand...

Yeah, things get a little weird.

It's All In the Little Things

"Like all good stories, the second act begins with a call to action and the building of a robot." - Narrator, Saints Row IV.

Saints Row IV is a rare pleasure. It's a game that knows exactly what it is. It's not about internal consistency or artistic statements. It's about packing as much simple, senseless joy, lowbrow and high, into a game as they it possibly can.

(Disclaimer: It is the only Saints Row game I have ever played.)

It is a game that features:

The protagonist riding a nuclear missile, Dr. Strangelove style, ripping out components to disable it while your friends eulogize you on the radio and the theme song from Armageddon plays. It's pure, ridiculous genius.

A gun that shoots black holes. I can image how balancing Saints Row IV went. The designers sat down at a table, gave it some quiet reflection, and went, "Wait a second. Never mind. Our game has a BLACK HOLE GUN."

Also, the dubstep gun.

In a scene almost impossibly sweet for a game like this, you and one of your friends drive to a mission together while singing Opposites Attract. I've played a lot of games like this, but this is the only time I ever drove more slowly to hear all of the dialogue.

Zipping through the Matrix on Tron light cycles while the evil alien overlord Zinyak recites the Tomorrow and Tomorrow monologue from Macbeth. ("I don't listen to Scottish hip-hop.")

And if none of this makes Saints Row IV sound like a game you'd want to play, that's cool. Tastes legitimately differ. But can't you see how it's the sort of game a LOT of people would want to play? (Excellent pacing, satisfying super-powers, crisp writing, and an overwhelming sense of just-plain-fun help a lot.)

It's a big art form. There's room for drama and humor, tragedy and mystery. But if you want to go silly, and if you want to make a game in which players can pretend to be horrible crazy criminals and still be able to look at themselves in the mirror, this is how it is done.

And, as a special bonus for old people like me who have developed actual human empathy, almost all of the game takes place in the Matrix, so I don't have to feel guilty about running people over in the street.

But You're Not Really Doing It, So Why Does It Matter?

Another point I see made a lot, which I find overly simple and not really thought out.

Yes, on one level, your conscious brain knows it's just an illusion. You "know" it's fake. In one part of your brain. Only one.

You're still controlling it. You're still seeing it. It still makes you feel. I mean, fiction can have incredibly powerful effects on people, and we all know it's not real. Controlling it yourself only increases this effect.

This is why so many people, myself included, could not possible bring themselves to shoot the giraffes in The Last of Us, as desperately tempting as it was. This is why fiction works at all. Yes, part of our brain knows it's not real. That part is the minority.

It's Too Easy? I Don't Even Know What That Means.

The main criticism I've seen leveled against Saints Row IV is that it gets too easy. This is half right. As you develop your incredible arsenal of magic Matrix powers, you become a god pretty quick. However, I really don't like criticizing a game for this.

Difficulty is only one of many things a designer has to set, and there is no right answer. Some games, like Super Meat Boy and Demon's Souls, are selling extreme challenge. Others, like most casual games, are selling a friendlier, more casual experience. There is no right answer! I hate it when reviewers pretend there is one.

Saints Row IV is a crazy, silly game that feeds power fantasies and lets you throw enemy hordes around with awesome brain power. Making it a difficult game would just be wrong for the tone. (And, if you want it to be tough, play it on the hardest difficulty level. There. Was that so hard?)

You want to fail a lot? Fine. Go play Grand Theft Auto V and die ten times trying to land the plane. We'll see who has more fun.

Oh, and one other thing. Trust me. Gamers are far more likely to forgive a game for being too easy than too hard. Most people have only a limited appetite for being told how dumb they are.

The Pleasure of Video Games is the Pleasure of Doing

And sometimes, the things you want to do are bad. Again, nobody is going to apologize for this, nor should they need to. Yes, it feels real, but no, it's not real.

It's one of the hardest things to do right. Some people are better at it than others. Now, if you will excuse me, the new Saints Row IV DLC is out. It's called "Enter The Dominatrix". That is the sum total of all I know about it. Sold. Crass fun is still fun.

OH GOD MY FACE MY HORRIBLE HORRIBLE FACE

There was one more thing I wanted to say about Mass Effect (to accompany my earlier articles on the title). After heavy play of the second and third games in the series, I want to propose a rule to all game designers from now until forever ...

It is OK to make the player's character look ugly and twisted, as long as it is in a cute, cartoonish way. It is not OK to make the main character actively horrifying and painful to look at.

I think this is a reasonable rule of thumb. If you're going to expect someone to spend 40 hours in your fantasy world, you don't want them going "GAHHHH!!!" every time they look at the screen.

Why do I bring it up?

Well, in Mass Effect, the main spectrum for your character's moral choices is between Paragon (nice, lawful good, goody-two-shoes) and Renegade (harsh, Bad Cop, Patton-type). Note that this is not Good vs. Evil! You're always good. It's just whether you are nice-good or cranky-good.

But there is a key difference between the two paths. If you are a Paragon, you stick with the nice, normal face you made in character creation. However, if you choose the Renegade dialogue options, your face will look like this ...

AHHHH! GHHAHHHH! WTF!?!?!?

That's right. When playing Mass Effect, you better be as polite to as many people as you can, if you don't want to look like a hideous mutant leperzombie whose face is peeling off in glowing sheets.

(Note that, in both Mass Effect 2 and 3, you can spend resources to remove the leperface effect. While BioWare likes to pretend it treats both moral choices equally, this sort of gives the game away. They are actively punishing you for being rude. If you doubt this, remember: A Paragon player can't spend resources to get the zombie look. It only works the other way 'round.)

Mass Effect is known for its in-game romances. Halfway through Mass Effect 3, for example, your hot, easy secretary comes to your quarters to use your shower and totally tries to bang you. (Warning: The previous sentence contained a spoiler!) Bioware, please please please, in future games make it so I don't feel sorry for anyone trying to sleep with my character. When she makes her move, I, as a player, don't want be saying:

"What are you DOING? Haven't you looked at me? Haven't you seen my FACE? Sure, I have a working shower! Now run! RUN! I'M A MONSTERRRRR!"

Look. These things are basically adolescent wish fulfillment. I don't need to have a really gross face in my fantasy world. I've had enough of that in my actual physical adolescent life, thanks.

Mass Effect 3 Review: The Ending, Before and After!

The ending of the Mass Effect series has been discussed a lot. A LOT. It's kind of an unprecedented situation. 

BioWare, a company known for awesome video game storytelling, creates a trilogy of games in one of the most well-realized imaginary worlds ever created in the medium. People love this world. Passionately. Then BioWare fails to stick the landing. Deafening rage and butthurt echo across the Internets, who have nothing more important to worry about. So BioWare, at what I'm sure was considerable expense, makes a free patch to expand the ending. It makes things kind of better. Life, somehow, continues.

(By the way, this whole sorry incident is excellent proof that their IS such a thing as bad publicity. BioWare's reputation for good storytelling is invaluable. They saw it threatened. They reacted appropriately. But I don't think anyone working there is happy this happened.)

What the ending screams to me is that the developers didn't have the time and budget to do the ending they wanted to do. ME3 is SO ambitious and covers SO much ground that they didn't have time to give the Reaper issue the attention it needed. But this isn't the end of the world. The Reapers were never very multi-dimensional. The Krogan and Geth and even Cerberus were far more interesting.

So, if this is the case, piling onto the ending seems a little mean. Making a video game requires doing much with limited resources. You can't afford to do everything.

But, then again, after three games of this size, we have an expectation that the writers will end it well. I want to talk about my two problems with the ending- one which the patch fixes, one it doesn't. I aim to discuss game storytelling in general and what does and doesn't work.

(Please be assured that the following has no spoilers for Mass Effect 3 whatsoever!!!! If, for some reason, you don't believe me, leave immediately!)

What Is NOT a Problem

Some criticized the ending for creating some plot inconsistencies with things learned in the DLC for Mass Effect 2. (Namely, that blowing up a mass relay destroyed the solar system before and now it doesn't.) The horrors.

DOES ANYONE REALLY ACTUALLY CARE ABOUT THIS!?!? IF SO, RAISE YOUR HAND.

(Pause.)

I didn't think so.

Also, some put a lot of time into proving Shepherd was actually under Reaper control and the last game was a dream or something. (The famed Indoctrination Theory.) Of course this wasn't true. This was a AAA mega-million dollar game series that had always approached everything in a reasonably sane manner. They weren't going to end it with goofy Sixth Sense trickery.

And many thought that you didn't find out enough about what happened to your friends and to all the races you helped. I can buy this as a complaint, but it's a judgment call. I honestly felt I'd learned enough about what was going on and where things were heading to have closure. Bloody, unrelentingly gruesome closure.

So what are the problems?

Problem 1 - The Incredible Grimness

The unpatched ending of Mass Effect 3, unless you do a ton of side-quest farming and multiplayer, is awe-inspiringly grim. Everyone dies. Shepherd dies. The mass relays are destroyed. The Normandy is a wreck. The Earth is a cinder, surrounded by fleets of aliens stranded far from home. (Including the notoriously peaceful and easy-going krogan.) Space travel is over for, well, a very long time, if not forever.

Dude. And I thought the ending to The Sopranos was a poke in the eye.

But here's the thing. This aspect of the ending is legit. People don't generally like unhappy endings, but this is a subjective judgment. Unhappy endings are legal. They are allowed. It's not where I would go as the default ending for a series of this magnitude, and it is a HUGE change in tone from what came before it. But it is not technically wrong.

And, just between you, me, and these four walls? I admire their balls for going so dark. I wish more developers did it. Unless you believe things can go really wrong, there is no real sense of achievement or relief when they go right. One of the reasons Law & Order was such a compelling show is that the bad guys frequently won.

But the patch changed this. It's less bleak. Gives more hopeful details of the future. I can live with it either way.

But what really bugs me is the main element of the ending.

Problem 2 - The Star Child. Or Whatever.

My biggest disappointment in the ending of Mass Effect is this: It was a cheap deus ex machina. I didn't get to make the WIN for the team.

Look. The galaxy was invaded by the horde of horrible bug creatures. I wanted to FIGHT them. I wanted to figure out their weaknesses. I wanted to use the cunning and resources of the peoples of the galaxy to figure out how to kill them, and DO THAT. I wanted the ending of the story to be a celebration of courage and general badassery.

What did I get? You take some weird spaceship and stick it into some other spaceship. And then baby SpaceJesus (tm) appears from somewhere and uses StarMagic (tm) in the way you tell him, and this makes everything different forever.

Now, let's set aside the ookyness of having the fate of the whole galaxy be decided on a whim by one bloodthirsty gun guy who happened to be at the right place at the right time. I think the ending was perfunctory, non-sensical, and a true wasted opportunity.

At the end, you push a button to choose the fate of the galaxy. It did not provide a fraction of the joy I would have felt at actually finding a way for humanity to take down those stupid Reaper ships ourselves. The ending, as written, was the space opera equivalent of giving the last place soccer team a trophy for Trying Very Hard.

Whew. I Should Take a Pill.

I generally love BioWare games and write nice things about them, so much so that I have been accused of sucking up to them to try to get a job. (I have a job, thanks. And, believe me, if BioWare wanted me, they'd have said something to me by now. They know I exist.)

It's a great series, full of fond memories. My wife and I spent an enormous amount of time in their world, and I don't regret it. I still recommend it, especially ME1 and ME2. And then ME3 with the patched ending.

So. Any news about Dragon Age 3 yet?