Rockstar's Westworld.

 

I am currently having more fun playing Red Dead Redemption than any other open world game in recent memory, and certainly more fun than I've had with a Rockstar game in several years. The last Rockstar game that felt similar was Grand Thief Auto: San Andreas, largely because of its heavy emphasis on role-playing elements. Grand Theft Auto IV was marketed as if it were a role-playing experience, but it didn't have San Andreas's benefit of a clear genre reference to build its various game systems off of and give them coherence. The clarity with which Redemption identifies itself as a Western, and the surprising extent to which it allows that to inform its world design, puts it head-and-shoulders above every other Rockstar game. Though it suffers from some vestigial design conventions inherited from GTA (mostly having to do with GTA's open world strategy of being a theme park rather than a holistic world simulation) it offers the player more choices, more expressive ways of behaving, than many open world games.

What's striking about Redemption is how unlike GTA it is, in spite of following a lot of the same conventions. It's pretty ironic, considering the associations of Westerns with guns and violence, that Redemption is one of the least violence-centered open world games I've played... even less, I feel, than RPGs like Fallout 3 or platformers like inFAMOUS. The fact of the matter is in the world of Red Dead Redemption there is a whole hell of a lot to do that doesn't involve killing people. I spent the first several hours of my game simply hanging out on a ranch, learning to tame horses, herd cattle, hunt, trade, forage, play cards with the locals, and in general just enjoy the beautiful countryside. I've heard the first few hours of the game criticized as "slow", but I wonder if this is just because no one asks you to kill people until a good while in. The only violence I engaged in (not counting hunting) in my first few hours was night watchman duty for a small ranch, where I was delighted to discover that killing was only one tool in my toolbox of available actions. All it took to scare off some cattle rustlers was pointing my gun at them. More belligerent trouble-makers could easily be disarmed with a well-placed shot, and if they still didn't feel like running they could be wrestled to the ground and knocked unconscious. And this was before I was given the lasso, which is originally for breaking in wild horses but works just fine on people too. Folks can be intimidated, knocked out, humiliated, scared, tied up, carried, untied--all without being murdered. Any combination of these things usually gets the job done, and the job is usually trying to maintain some semblance of order in an already fairly civilized (by video game standards) world. Probably the biggest irony of Red Dead Redemption is that its vision of a frontier civilization feels more peaceful and less violent than most video game worlds. The countryside isn't overwhelmingly hostile like it is in virtually all other open world games. Animals largely mind their own business, and most of the people you meet are friendly. You will occasionally encounter a hungry pack of wolves or some bandits, but these are always the exception, not the rule. You'll hear gunshots often in the distance, but you can simply mind your own business and go along your merry way. Life's too short, after all. And the open sky too beautiful.

The world of Red Dead Redemption is more indifferent than hostile. It isn't trying to kill you by default, and this may be why your range of responses to it involve a lot more than killing. When violence erupts, you know there's a range of ways to respond, depending on what sort of person you want to be and how you want others to regard you. The social simulation aspect of Redemption fits nicely in with the rest of the world. Murdering someone in the street is considered a crime, even if it was part of the duel, as is hogtying or assaulting random citizens. I once shot dead a man threatening a prostitute with a knife, and I was promptly run out of town by the authorities. Murder in defense of the weak or even in self-defense is frowned upon... unless you happen to wear a badge, in which case you basically have a license to kill anyone considered an "outlaw". Bounties always pay better if they are alive, but most gangs refuse to come quietly, so killing tends to become a natural consequence of law enforcement in practice. Of course, you can try to shoot everyone in the leg, hogtie everyone, etc.--and you may even get a few of them--but when you're pinned down in a canyon by seven snipers who have no qualms about killing you where you stand, pacifism becomes the quick road to suicide.

As a simulation Red Dead Redemption isn't as nuanced or as consistent as it could be, which hinders role-playing at times. I blame this primarily on the game's adherence to the "Rockstar formula" for how it attempts to integrate story and world design. Rockstar games have always been more like theme parks than proper world simulations. Story missions and challenges are like rides in a theme park, and the open world mostly serves as a fun space to explore while traveling from one "ride" to another. The rules that govern the open world are built on the story's theme, but they cannot be very complex or have very serious consequences because that would inhibit the players ability to experience all the "rides". There has always therefore been a disconnect between story and world in Rockstar games, and Red Dead Redemption is no exception. As an experience I feel the game would be a lot stronger if your behavior in the game world actually effected the story. For example, it would be nice if the sheriff of Armadillo wouldn't talk to you if you were an outlaw. Likewise it would be nice if all your actions in general had more lasting consequences. The fact that the game responds to you killing everyone in a town by having the town become a ghost town is great, but the fact that everyone respawns six days later is silly... just like the fact that a killing spree gets you in jail, but only for a week or so. Rockstar still doesn't want to prevent players from basically doing whatever they feel like at any given moment... like any paying customer at Disneyland.

The dissonance created by Red Dead Redemption's theme park structure, along with its occasional bugginess and thematic verisimilitude, makes it feel at times like a computerized version of Westworld, that old sci-fi movie from the 70s about a Western theme park populated by robotic cowboys. When the spell of Redemption breaks down, when the simulation suddenly feels shallow or the narrative inconsistent with my personal player behavior, it feels suddenly like I'm a customer in a Western-themed amusement park, not a carefully role-played persona in a richly simulated world. However when the spell holds, when the stars align and none of the various elements contradict each other, it's the wild west simulation I've waited my whole life to play.

One Paragraph Review - Chrono Cross

Chrono Cross (PSX, 2000, 40-60 hrs) - A lush, beautiful, and deep Japanese RPG that suffers from a fatal case of bad storytelling. A sequel to Chrono Trigger, which was much better, Chrono Cross pretends to be an unrelated story about alternate dimensions for the first two thirds and then turns into something resembling a bad Chrono Trigger fan-fiction before self-destructing in a fit of hysterical pretension. Not that this necessarily matters if you're in it for the gameplay, which is pretty well-done and notable in particular for its excellent magic system. Though seemingly arbitrary at first, the magic system is deeply integrated into the plot, so that by the end the game cannot even be finished unless the player understands the cosmological significance of the magic system and its symbolic relation to the story world. A long game, but the gorgeous graphics and wonderful music (Yasunori Mitsuda at his finest) make the journey pleasant enough. Those expecting something as elegant, focused, and unpretentious as Chrono Trigger however will want to vomit by the end. Directed and written by Masato Kato, who swiped most of the story material from his equally self-destructive Xenogears. With Hiromichi Tanaka (producer), Kiyoshi Yoshii (main programmer), and Yasuyuki Honne (art director).

Letting the World Be - The Inherent Politics of Stealth?

This phrase appears if you pause Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots. It appears in English under a bit of Kanji, the same Kanji that appeared on ads before the game's release. It also appears in-game on Snake's suit. I'm not sure how diegetic it's supposed to be, if the implication is supposed to be that it's been consciously chosen by Snake and Co. or if its just so supposed to be a symbolic statement by Kojima, but it clearly is important in light of the game's narrative arc... or, more accurately, the series' narrative arc. "Let the world be" is a variation on what Big Boss (the supposed "villain" of the series) tells Snake at the MGS4's end, which sums up his (and assumedly Kojima's) entire world-view, the sum-total of everything he's learned over the course of his political and military career, which spanned most of the major conflicts the 20th century and involved as its principle enterprise the creation of a country in opposition to (among other things) the United States' military hegemony over the world.

This phrase is, at the end of the day, probably the biggest problem I had with MGS4 (and I had many). I felt it was a disappointing cop-out to the provocative 20th century counter-mythology Kojima and his collaborators had developed over the course of 20 years, but which flowered primarily in the latest three installments (MGS2, MGS3, and MPO). I realize Kojima doesn't want to advocate war or revolution, but going so far as to have Big Boss--the series' fascinating ideological enigma--flat out say it's categorically bad to try to change the world was to me a betrayal of every interesting moral/political contradiction the series had previously (and boldly) reveled in.

Not change the world? Let the world be? That's always the right political choice, huh? That's what you've got to say to Gandhi, Malcolm X, and anyone else who ever felt injustice demanded change? Maybe not "by an means necessary", but surely there is change worth fighting for, and surely the means are up to each one of us to either support or denounce based on what we personally consider necessary. Surely the lesson cannot be "fighting for anything is bad". Or am I misunderstanding the phrase "let the world be"?

"Letting the world be" may be the absurd ideological resolution MGS4 attempts to force on otherwise rich material, but it interestingly mirrors the ideological resolution of another great stealth series, one that isn't nearly as absurd. Thief III (or Thief: Deadly Shadows, as it was publically known), the final if little played installment of the (mostly) brilliant Thief trilogy, actually had a similar kind of thematic arc. The Thief series was about Garrett, the greatest thief in the world, rejecting the way of his mentors, the Keepers. The Keepers used stealth to observe the world and be its chroniclers, sort of like historians. But Garrett chose to use the skills they taught him to steal rather than learn. The Keepers have a philosophy of balance, which manifests politically as a strict policy of non-involvement, which is why they practice stealth. Thief III was about Garrett realizing how corrupt the Keepers had become, about how they really were meddling in political affairs, and how he activates an ancient fail-safe designed to wipe out their age old store of knowledge. Garrett does this not out of altruism or a conscious belief in their values (which he thought he had rejected) but out of a desire to keep the Keepers from messing with the delicate political balance he profits from by stealing. (Wars are bad for business.) In doing so he ironically was the one true Keeper left, because he wanted balance, and achieved it through stealth.

The Metal Gear and Thief series both feature central villains whose original intentions to change the world for the better become hopelessly corrupted, which necessitates their destruction by a reluctant, stealthy (anti)hero. "Leaving the world as it is" (to uses Big Boss's phrasing) has an interesting resonance in both cases, especially when one realizes this concept is fundamental to the gameplay DNA of the stealth genre. In stealth games players must ask themselves at any given moment "do I interfere?". Sometimes intervention is best. Someones it is not. But it's not coincidental, I feel, that both these series are stealth-based, which means that "to let the world be or to not let the world be?" is a political question the player answers in microcosm every time they make a decision during play.

Are stealth games fundamentally about the morality of covert versus overt intervention in any given circumstance? Is it worth killing someone to steal something? What about to save the world? Am I just the ultimate non-interventionist if I play Thief or Metal Gear without touching or altering anyone? Have I agreed to "let the world be"?

Funny that I find doing "pacifism runs" of stealth games so satisfying, such an exquisite test of my obsessive-compulsive moral conscience, but still I find the ideological conclusion at the end of MGS4 so infuriating. Maybe it's because MGS4's story is stupid in about 20 other ways, or maybe it's because I feel the real world geopolitical problems Kojima mythologized demand a less bone-headedly sentimental resolution. Thief took place in a steampunk-ish medieval fantasy world, but it still managed to generate a resolution that was subtle and complex, not silly and reductionist. If Big Boss's final lesson had to be that "stealth" is the best political strategy for a war-torn world filled with suffering, that could have been an interesting notion had it been treated as the beginning of a conversation rather than the end of one, as a question rather than (absurdly) an answer.

Part of me thinks Kojima was just so intent on ending the series--in tying up all its loose ends, even its thematic ones--that he reached for easy solutions more out of desperation than any genuine ideological agenda. Big Boss's weird apoliticism at the end of MGS4 seems to have been thrown totally out the window, for example, in Peace Walker, which is about Big Boss defending a seemingly defenseless country (Costa Rica circa 1974) from covert U.S. military occupation. Of course, one might assume this just represents a step on his road to regret (he doesn't see the "error" of his ways, according to MGS4, until 2014), but on the other hand it's really hard to imagine Kojima suggesting that letting a super power walk all over a smaller country is the "right" thing to do. Indeed, all advertising for the game seems to suggest precisely the opposite.

The stealth genre may be the ideal one for posing political questions surrounding use of force to the player, precisely because it is the only game genre where violence is always a question. Is violence necessary? Do I really need to kill this person? What if I sneak past him? What if he tries to kill me? Then do I kill him, or do I run away and sneak by him later? I know there's a way to do this without killing anyone, but I also know it's the hardest possible way to do things. Every time I take the easier way out, or try to rationalize my mistakes, and the resulting bloodbath, as inevitable (and therefore justified), have I done what politicians, generals, and soldiers do when they make the decisions we pay them in order to not make ourselves?

It's a question worth asking, and one that the player (not the developer) should be answering.

One Paragraph Review - Killer 7

Killer 7 (Gamecube, 2005, 10-15 hrs) - A stellar mind-fuck exploration/shooter game, and in my opinion the best work of self-described "punk" Japanese game developer Suda51 (at least of what's been released Stateside). The set-up involves a group of professional assassins--the Killer 7--who all inhabit the body of a wheelchair-bound old man and can only "come out" when in proximity to a functioning television set. The player must make use of their various abilities to take down "Heaven's Smile", a group of invisible, shape-shifting, and apparently skinless suicide bombers who laugh as they explode. While not technically "horror" Killer 7 manages to be scary in ways few horror games are, and the way it weaves (or rather smashes) together science-fiction, occult fantasy, and political intrigue is genuinely surreal. Unfairly criticized as a mere "rail shooter" by its critics, it actually has a nicely designed combat system that recalls some of the best aspects or Resident Evil 4 and Dead Aim. Its spacial navigation system is especially innovative in how it removes virtually all redundancy from the survival horror exploration/puzzle framework, streamlining it into a smooth, slick experience. Suda's signature ultra-high-contrast cel-shaded visuals give the entire game an appropriate neo-noir look. In the name of Harmon. Credits: Goichi Suda (story, writer, director, producer), Shinji Mikami (story, executive producer).