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Oct. 21st, 2010 12:38 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dot_fennelIt also uncritically uses the "you're the boy! the girl was kidnapped! save her!" trope, which isn't a capital crime but is pissing me off more and more. It got me thinking, though.
One of the best known-games, in the micro-genre of incredibly hard platform-hoppers, is I Wanna Be The Guy. I quit playing it in disgust when I discovered that, if you set it on the easiest difficulty level, your protagonist (The Kid) appears with a bow in his hair. Because girls are bad at things! Ha ha. Fuck that.
Moneyseize, on the other hand, is the ultra-hard game I've probably spent the most time with. It, too, aligns succeeding at the game with cultural privilege, just less maliciously-- you play Reginald Q. Moneyseize, who is in search of gold coins to fund building a huge manument to himself.
Money and masculinity are both, famously, goals that attract huge cults of people who can't be satisfied-- who would say, if asked, that there's such a thing as 'enough', but who strangely can never reach 'enough' themselves.
And that's interesting! If you give up halfway through Super Mario Brothers, I think you feel-- I felt, anyway-- as though Mario 'really' does meet his Princess in the end; you just didn't get to see it. Do people who quit halfway through Moneyseize feel as though it's the story of a man who indeed builds the world's tallest tower? Or is the received story about a quixotic project that's destined to fail on its own terms (even if Reginald and/or the player find it a satisfying way to spend time, and if some minuscule fraction of players get a version of the story where he succeeds)?
The grandparent of this sub-genre, N, doesn't take the privilege angle*, but it does focus on the inevitability of death. And what about Super Meat Boy?
Meat Boy leaves a trail of blood behind him when he runs, and the blood doesn't go away when you die; far from being morbid, this made the level strangely homey to me. "Hey, there's the spot where I always grab that wall! There's the ledge I step back and forth on trying to find the right angle through the meat grinder! There's the-- oops." Best of all, when you do finish a level, the game shows a simultaneous replay of all your attempts, like this. A whole flock of Meat Boys, surging forward to victory! You've crowdsourced the rescue mission, only you (the player) get to be the winning member of the crowd no matter what. Eventually.
The game is also strangely encouraging. There's a time limit for each level, but you can go as far over it as you want-- it's just that if you beat it, you get a big "RANK: A+!" (and, well, unlock an even harder version of the level). And the load screen is a big grinning Meat Boy face with a black eye and missing tooth, apparently thrilled to still be going regardless of the difficulty; meanwhile, the villain Dr. Fetus (don't get me started) always looks frustrated during his constant re-stealing of your companion.
The internet also tells me now that Bandage Girl herself is an unlockable character, though I don't know whether you get to rescue Meat Boy, or how she differs from him as a player. (There's no game-mechanical way to make her weaker than Meat Boy, and Meat Boy's superpower is already to be really really fast, so the two most stereotypical ways to distinguish her are out. Yay.)
* Well, in N your ninja is collecting gold coins, but there's no suggestion that you will ever enjoy any interpersonal power from them: "You are a ninja. Your God-like speed, dexterity, jumping power, and reflexes are all the result of an amazingly fast metabolism; sadly, so is your natural lifetime of 1.5 minutes." Pieces of gold make you happy, extending your life by 2 seconds each. If you're disappointed about this footnote ending here, ask me when I'm actually going to write that essay about video game diegesis.
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no subject
Date: 2010-10-21 05:06 pm (UTC)You played Braid, right?!
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Date: 2010-10-21 06:01 pm (UTC)Very impressive design on most of the puzzles, though. Damn.
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Date: 2010-10-21 06:15 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-10-21 05:23 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-10-21 06:02 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-10-21 06:03 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-10-22 04:40 pm (UTC)... also, wow, you have non-trivial Gamerscores for games I did not think I knew anyone who'd played. How was Rock Revolution?
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Date: 2010-10-22 05:54 pm (UTC)Rock Revolution was kind of awesomely inept! The only reason I have it was because GameCrazy was selling it for $4.99 new.
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Date: 2010-10-22 06:08 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-10-21 05:25 pm (UTC)It's driving me nuts that I'm too busy lately to keep up with all the really marvelous stuff being done in this space, and I love that you ARE keeping up with it and posting your thoughts.
I love gaming vicariously through you, keep it up!
^_^
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Date: 2010-10-21 06:03 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-10-21 06:14 pm (UTC)Diablo2 and Quake Multiplayer were my targeted communities if that gives you any indication. ;-)
The thesis itself was pretty terrible to be honest.