Burn your expectations

 Kill them, if you have to

Expectations are a natural part of life. From the moment we're throw into that sick pool of consciousness abroad this hellish floating space rock, we're affixed with expectations and hopes that will systematically be stomped out of us and wringed dry as life proceeds to mock and disappoint us to greater and greater degrees until it ends with tragedy. (Hmm? I'm bringing down the mood, am I?) Whilst everyone has their own way of approaching the world around us, it's an unshakable fact that expectation will play some major role in practically every part of our lives. Whether you hope for the best and flitter on the sleeve of your heart, or assume the worst so that you'll never quite be disappointed. It's part of the human condition to anticipate what hides behind the next sunrise and prepare for that eventuality. As such, it's only fair from a marketing sense to exploit those expectations.

For that's what marketing really is at the end of the day; expectation manipulation. An effective advert will worm it's way not just into your mind but also your perception, either changing your inbuilt priorities to convince your mind that you need this advertised product, or arranging your own sense of happiness to manufacture some internal gaping maw that can only possible be filled by an X-product. One of the most famous exercises in marketing, "sell me this pen", hides it's secrets not in conjuring up some false cornucopia of magical application that said-pen is apparently capable of, but by ascertaining the intended client's supposed needs and warping those to a preferred reality within which a purchase of your pen is merely a formality. "How long have you been on the market for a new pen"- is the typically accepted first question in such an exchange.

When we approach the ideas of games and expectations, we play out this same dance once more with the face of the interactive medium. Hopes and perceptions piled onto of one another and balanced in a game of 'Jenga' where the higher you stack the more you win- which I guess is only really circumstantially like Jenga now I think about it. Pile them too high, however, and the consequence can be brutal; a total crash of marketing or overabundance, or maybe you'll just start telling fibs. We've seen from Cyberpunk to No Man's Sky to Fable how a great vision can be tainted by a skewered marketing cycle, and even great final products may still be hampered by the marketing scars still just too present. I still can't bring myself to actually go out and play Cyberpunk because I remember all of that fervour and chaos we were led into. Also, I am absolutely lacking the free time what with everything else going on in my life right now.

Yet what of the titles to which we hold no expectations but which pleasantly surprise us nonetheless? Despite coming to it more than a year after the fact, I had totally ignored all content on Death Stranding and was determined to treat it as neutrally as I could, ascertaining what I would and coming away with only a solid understanding of the game. I ended up totally loving Death Stranding for all of it's weird idiosyncrasies, without trying to match it up either to other games of the age or even previous Kojima works. (Which is nice, because Death Stranding's gunplay and stealth action is total pits next to 'The Phantom Pain') I also remember approaching Hollow Knight with a similar sense of "I have no idea what to expect but I'm going to take it as it comes." And being knocked for six with how brilliant that title was. Expectation is not, therefore, a necessary ingredient in a great game.

But what about a successful one? Because how often does the great simply balloon to the top of the pile purely by the merits of it's own quality? I mean it's happened, sure, but sparingly... more and more so with the proliferation of new titles and the accessibility of development tools. Doki Doki Literature Club pretty much blew up from reputation alone, before being carried on the backs of streamers to immortal super stardom. There was also that incredible Dragon Ball Z fan animation from last year which glittered with creative ingenuity. And that's... man I know there's other examples! I'm sure there are! But when it comes down to it, the gift of the gab and mastery over the intangible world of marketing really lacks a substitute.

The very idea of an 'expectation' can be a writhing snake cutting off the lifeblood of surprise as it is, simply by the way it taints that virginal experience when embarking on a game. Jump up to the first boss of Elden Ring (Yes, I know I invoke the name of Miyazaki too much, I can't help myself!) expecting the speed and deflection mastery of Sekiro to infrom the playstyle of that newer game and- well, you're going to be disappointed; aren't you? That's no fault of the game in question, but the baggage you've brought to the experience. I skimmed over the screenshots of 'Tower of Time' and bought it very much expecting an isometric CRPG and getting a puzzle RPG game. My bad for not paying more attention, but it also ruined by attempts to genuinely give the game the chance it deserved because, at the end of the day, it just wasn't what I expected.

So how exactly can we be rid of our expectations, if we want to revert to our apparent innocence of baby youth? Well, unfortunately that is patently impossible as living human beings because that is simply the lot the human condition. But perhaps the fairest possible way to approach a new game is with a light 'cleansing' of expectation. Similar to how you are taught for yoga to dispel all thoughts and focus in the moment, an exercise which does honestly nothing for me even if I can respect the intent within it. At it's heart a product of entertainment should be judged purely for the product that it is, and all the evils and woes swirling around it are mere inconsequential set-dressing laying outside of the magic box of the world of escapism. Consider the whirring engine of your console switching on to be synonymous with the blasting pistons of a full-speed Isekai truck roaring towards your face, and the experience thereafter a world all of it's own. Divorce yourself from the world around yourself.

However, we can't really do that; now can we? To this day my Father finds it deeply confusing how it is I can be such a rabid fan of the work of H.P. Lovecraft despite the fact that the man was a deeply pseudo-scientific racist who would probably have seen someone of my complexion and immediate heritage as a degenerative abomination of phenology. Some can switch off like that, others just can't. And I won't pretend I still don't turn up my nose and sniff huffily everytime a well-known game agency commits the sin of reviewing a modern sports game with a largely favourable score, further propagating the poisoning of our industry. Objectivity is an ideal, and a goal to strive for, but just as world peace and a satisfied mind are ephemeral phantoms forever dancing out our grip, we can only strive to be the viewers that we want to be, and to give everything and one the chance deserved.

Why indie horror is so effective

Where do you go when the mainstream just doesn't kick anymore?

A lot my personal thoughts and feelings come out on this blog simply because I feel it serves best to be some form of honest when I write these, as such I don't always cover as wide a range of games as I feel that I should. This is something that I've sought to work on, simply so that I'll have more material to draw from, and that's allowed me to really get a lot closer with some of the weirder side of gaming that I was mostly ignorant to before. And let me be clear that when I say 'weird', what I really mean to say is 'non mainstream', because gaming is such a hard to pin-down form of entertainment that anything outside of the mainstream has a good chance to be wild in all manner of ways; some of which might have you confronting exactly what 'entertainment' is even supposed to be. Just look at Frog Fractions. (No seriously; look at Frog Fractions. Nothing I could say will do that thing justice.) And this retrospective of indie titles all across the land has drawn back two conclusions to me; one: that a lot of Indie games are horror titles, and two: that they usually end up being way scarier then AAA horror games.

Now don't get me wrong, I still think that horror has a place in the mainstream market; just look at Resident Evil and my rather transparent love and respect for those games and that franchise. I think the original Outlast is one of the most terrifying experiences I've ever gone through, nearly sticking me with emergency heart bypass surgery; and recently I even got around to a playthrough of 'Amnesia: The Dark Decent', which was a masterclass on atmosphere that I honestly wasn't quiet expecting. But those last two examples I offered, whilst undeniable horror classics, were not AAA games. In fact they were both Indie. AAA games tend not to go after the horror market too often, but instead prefer to make games that are horror adjacent. The only real exceptions I can think of from the modern age would be 'The Evil Within' (Which I like but a lot of people don't) and 'The Medium' which seemed to be pretty lukewarm from most reviews I picked through. (A real shame too. I had faith in Medium) 

So what is it about independent horror games that hit differently from their AAA departments? And why is it that the only active horror series from a big studio in today's day and age is Resident Evil, and there's a franchise that specialises in Action Horror, not pure horror. I don't claim to be any great psychologist with his finger on the trigger of societal opinion, but I personally think that a hint might lie in an example from the entertainment industry in the past. Only a different platform for entertainment. In fact, I have an example from my very own home country of England, and the sort of hysteria that fuelled the video horror market over here in the 1980's. What I of course refer to is the phenomenon known at the time as 'video nasties'.

Now 'Video nasties' is a term popularised by the National Viewers' and Listeners' Association (Now known as Mediawatch-UK) and was used as a flag under which to hunt down and prosecute video media that was considered to be 'immoral'. There's some extra details around here about how some of these videos couldn't be properly rated in order to keep them out of impressionable hands due to workarounds regarding early video rights ownership laws, but that was about the high and low of it. And in the manner of all things like this, once these sorts of films were given the red stamp and told to be frowned upon, that merely sparked the early video watching audience to seek these films out to discover what they were missing. As you can imagine when we're talking about the hitlist of a morality toting activism group, a lot of the movies they targeted were explicit horror movies, and so these were the sorts of films that became in demand during this time. Eventually people went around sharing poorly ripped and overplayed versions of these low-budget gorefests, the shoddiness of which almost fed into the allure, the illusion if-you-will, that these horrific affairs could be real. And of course they weren't, everyone knew that; but seeing films existing outside the accepted constraints of the mainstream helped conjure up a false verisimilitude, even when the actual quality of what you were watching would be obviously limited thanks to the scope of the budget.

Now I think the way we look at horror in the gaming market isn't exactly one-to-one with that so to speak, but you can see the resemblance. A genre of storytelling that relies on being shocking and unpredictable, constrained by a set of rules and stipulations that some can interpret as holding back the art form. In terms of 80's movies there was a certain level of visual gore that the ratings board wouldn't touch, and in terms of modern gaming it's more that there's just a whole level of obscure directions and arthouse twists that just wouldn't be appealing to enough people to warrant the investment. And when the mainstream can't cut it, that leaves a primed stage for the indie scene to step up and take the glory. Of course, that's just one connection, I think there's another.

Just as with the illusion and mystery of swapping under-the-counter banned movies, there's a certain thrilling sense of danger that comes in seeking out these sorts of games where you wouldn't normally find them, and what these sorts of titles might contain. It's a bit silly to think of Itch.Io as some wild frontier full of the unknown, but to someone who only ever gets their games off of Steam or storefronts like that, it can feed into this question of 'what am I really installing on my computer?'. This is something that can really be exploited by a certain breed of horror which is almost unique to the indie market; meta horror. Now I've mentioned Doki Doki Literature Club before in this vein, but if we're really going back to the roots then maybe a more apt game might be IMSCARED. That was a rather straightforward horror game that managed to do the impossible and send it's atmosphere outside of the 'magic box' of the game world and into the real world. How? Simple; it just created files. Simple text files. But the sort of thing you were encouraged to find on your computer in order to unravel more of the mystery. Think of how crazy of a forth-wall break that is! That transcends anything that the movie market could possibly pull off and anything that the AAA game market would have the nerve to pull off; it made the danger feel real.

And then there's the other aspect about the unregulated market: actual danger. Now I know that a lot of this is melodramatic and drummed up for effect, and no one gets excited about the prospect of downloading a virus instead of their game, but I'm talking about the sorts of legendary games for their depravity. (So when I say 'danger', I more mean 'mental danger') Whether I talk about a game that touches on topics too uncomfortable for the main stream (like actually playing as a man who murders his entire family) or even a mythical game that goes beyond any limit of taste and apparently features actual snuff. (Something which I'm absolutely not in support of, and thus I refuse to even name the rumoured software) Where there's the thrill of actually screwing oneself up by seeing something scarring, they'll be an audience for it. Just look at me; I actively seek out the most evocative games I can, even when it's gut-wrenching, just so that I'll feel anything. It's a real addiction.

The best thing about indie Horror in the light of everything I just discussed; is that it doesn't need to cross any of the lines that I laid in the sand at all. Great indie horror can go just as far as normal mainstream horror, but still come away hitting harder all because it could have gone further. I mentioned it in other blogs, but Horror is fuelled more by your imagination about what's around the corner rather than what actually is, thus Indie horror benefits most by reputation above all else. All this I say despite, bizarrely, not actually liking horror all that much. I think it's telling to see the ways in which modern horror has started taking cues from the indie market, rather in contrast to almost every other genre out there, and just goes to show you where the real scary experiences can be found. So if you ever find you becoming bored by the mundane same-old-same-old horror stories; maybe it's time you angled yourself away from the established, and further towards the whacky world of the lawless. That's indie developers, I should clarify, not bank robbers. 

Surrealism

Strawberry hills forever

I've said it before but the topic does bare repeating; one of the greatest things about the video game medium is the ability to shirk the coils of what's possible and reach into the unfathomable limits of what's imaginable. The consequence of this freedom can inflate a dream into majestic reality and allow us to share the abstract and insane with those around us. To transcend beyond what we acknowledge to be 'real' and reach a state of 'surreal.' Obviously, the same could be said about any and all forms of none physical media, but seeing as how this is gaming blog, that's were I'm going to focus my gaze for this article.

There is a significant degree of danger when it comes to exploring the surreal in the pursuit of storytelling, it can seem alienating to the audience in a way that can put them off and even be a bit too exposing for the author. However, when you reach an audience that really resonate with your message it can create a strong bond/ connection. Just look at the, now cult classic, 1993 movie 'The Thief and the Cobbler'. That was a wondrous and often abstract movie that is often erroneously labelled as an Aladdin-clone. (The movie was in development for well over a decade. Although one could argue that the success of Aladdin pushed the responsible studios to get it finished) At the time many found it to be boring or too obtuse to understand or enjoy, but in the years since a new audience of people have clung to it and given the project a new life in home media. (Just a pity that the original director never lived to see it.)

Surrealism need not go to the extremes of abstract imagery and an entire storyline paved in lunacy in order to justify it's existence, merely subvert the expectations of it's audience to a fundamental degree. That is really the type of game that I honed in on for this blog, for no other reason then the fact that the truly abstract games are often hard to talk about to any sensible degree. (That being said, there is one game I selected which certainly fits into that category; but you'll have to wait until the end for that one.)

I doubt anyone would look at 'Ruiner' and immediately label it as 'Surreal'. The game itself is a top-down skill based shoot-em-up based heavily on powerups and varnished with a neon Cyberpunk gleam. But for me, the surrealism comes with the game's peculiar stylisation that inflates much of the tropes of it's themes and genres in a bright, punky, surrealist way. For example, the game starts with the player being thrust into several gun fights with very little explanation for what you are doing apart from the occasionally block-font prompt accompanied by the droning command "Kill Boss". Soon you'll meet the character 'HER' who guides you through the narrative with her odd vocalizations and inconsistent dialogue cues.You'll notice the primary colour cues accompanying each individual area that seem to throb with the hum of neon.Ultimately, you'll be swept in an overbearing Cyberpunk onslaught of a world that scream 'kitsch' in all the weirdest (and best) ways.

It is easy to look at any game with monochromatic colours and a lack of guided narrative and call it 'Surreal', but when looking at Playdead's 'Inside' there really isn't a better way to describe the whole experience. (Aside from 'beautifully horrifying', I guess.) Borrowing the style of their other iconic title 'Limbo', 'Inside' is a story told entirely through visuals with enough vagueness to it's events that the majority of the story must be deciphered by it's confused players. With such a stark presentation to it all, themes start to stand out of 'Control' and 'Compliance' but the overall package can remain still very elusive even after you reach that final screen. I don't want to spoil anything for those that haven't given this wild ride a go, but I'll bet that the ending will leave you feeling some kind of disturbed by the time the credits roll around. (Even if I can't tell you what it ultimately symbolizes. If anything.)

It is hard talking about a game that you haven't personally played, especially in excessive detail, but a list like this is too ripe for a Death Stranding entry for me to ignore. Hideo Kojima's first game outside of the influence of Konami's money men turned out to be the perfect example of surrealist storytelling from it's almost impenetrable story to it's incredibly divisive content. I've heard people hail it as one of the worst and best games ever made, and many more conclude that they have no idea what any of it meant at all. For my part, I've followed enough about the game to know that it, in some fashion, depicts the unravelling of reality as space, time and even existence twists in upon itself. A more surreal setup I could not come up with, that's for sure.

Once again, Super Mario Bros. 2 isn't a game that screams 'surreal' in retrospect, but one must simply apply some context to see what a break from the norm that this game was. The original Super Mario Bros. was a very weird and confusing game to come to terms with anway. We may all know the story now of an Italian plumber on the warpath to save Princess Toadstool whilst stomping on sentient mushrooms and dropping dragons in lava, but at the time it was quite the pill to swallow conceptually. Of course, the game still ended up being a hit and spawning one of the longest running franchises in gaming history. Super Mario Bros. 2, however, probably marks the biggest mainline departure from the formula that the games have ever gone through. Everything changed, from the enemies you were facing, the way you attacked them, and even the worlds through which you were traversing. Things became unexpected as the player was dragged up against sentient cacti, three headed snakes and a royal toad who can only be defeated by forcing him to eat vegetables. Of course, the reason for this would be that Nintendo retooled another upcoming game (Doki Doki Panic) into a Mario game for the masses, leaving in a lot of the weirdness from that entirely separate game in the process. So it all turned out well in the end, but it was certainly unbearably weird for a time.

Speaking of Doki Doki, how about that game about the Literature club? Ostensibly a traditional anime dating Sim, Doki Doki Literature Club lures it's victims in under a false sense of security by having them sail through a VN chock full of charming stereotypes and work on writing poetry to woo their girl of choice. Simple and mundane enough, right? But things quickly spiral out of control when the player starts to become aware that this game was never supposed to be a dating Sim, but was actually retooled from something much darker. As I mentioned in my other blog, it isn't long before characters start breaking the fourth wall, with one in particular making it very clear that she knows that you are playing the game and she wants everything to play out to her benefit. Once again, I won't go into specifics regarding how twisted everything gets, but trust me when I say that calling it 'Surreal' is definitely an understatement.

Finally, as promised, comes the one game which is the culmination of everything you instinctively imagine when you hear the word 'Surreal'; LSD Dream Emulator. This game, if you can call it that, takes players through a tour of absolute visual nonsense as you traverse a twisted dreamscape wherein every surface that you touch sends you spiralling into another world. Funnily enough, this game wasn't the result of an LSD trip (allegedly) but rather the work of a Japanese 'multimedia artist' called Osamu Sato. As far as the Wikipedia page states (saved you a Google) Osamu, like many artist of his time, rejected the idea of Video games and wanted to use the Sony PlayStation as an outlet for his art. This game came about due to his dislike for playing racing games, as he found them difficult and boring. He dreamed of crashing his car through the walls of the tracks and travelling into different worlds, and so that was the premise of the game that he went to make. This, dear reader, is surreal experimentalism at it's most raw.

With the level of complexity that one can achieve with modern video gaming software tools, it's a shame that Surrealism isn't more prevalent in the industry as of yet. But looking at the various visceral responses to games like Death Stranding, I suppose it makes sense that the money men want to take much safer approaches when it comes to bringing their games to life. Perhaps once things start opening up to streaming and we shirk the 'big money financed' console cycles (not yet I fear, Google.) we'll start to see more weird and wild concepts start to rule the roost.

Breaking the Fourth Wall

This one's for the Audience

In typical viewing media there are three metaphorical walls. The three surrounding the character that exist within their world, and the fourth which exists only for the audience to peek in. A transparent glass wall that separates the world of fiction from our own. This fragile separation keeps our viewing experience rationalized as it means we witness without being noticed, the characters play their parts without ever realizing they are in a play. But what happens when things don't play out like that? What happens when the characters break that cardinal rule of cinema and look directly into the camera? Is it anarchy? Does the fabric of space time collapse around us? Well no... we usually just get an overdone joke.

A significant degree of 'Modern' story telling in film, TV and now games, have followed the trend of traditional art (one century late) and gone 'Meta'. That is to say, they often like breaching the metaphysical barrier between fiction and reality and acknowledge that they are in a performance. At first this was a little bit quaint, a scandalous break from the norm that gave the viewers a forbidden look behind the curtain. That sort of shared secret between the audience and the character could even become engrossing as they wrap you up in their world by acknowledging your own. But over exposure, as always, as sullied this charming gimmick and turned in into a sour and predictable move. Such to the point that only the quirky (lazy comedy movies) and the committed (Deadpool) still stick to the formula. Even games have given up on this cliche for the most part, however there was a time when it was all over the metaphorical shop of gaming, and I want to approach that today.

Seeing as how I already mentioned already, I might as well start with Deadpool. Not the movie version starring Ryan Reynolds, but the Video game starring Nolan North. (Good lord, both their names are alliterative. They belong in comic books!) Deadpool is a character built around one simple premise: he knows that he is in a comic book and he doesn't care. That has carried over to every piece of media to which Wade had emigrated to and it means the game is inter-cut with many instances of Wade breaking the Fourth wall. Heck, the entire story is driven around the premise of Wade struggling to make Deadpool game after getting his propositions cancelled by the studio and firing his prospective voice actor (Nolan North, obviously.) What follows is a wacky affair in which Wade chases down some vague threat whilst, every now and then, making a snide remark to the camera or even shifting his own reality to fit to some joke. He even personally makes the final fight 10 times harder in order to make it more climatic by cloning the boss. (Sounds more like the actions of a really annoying lead designer, honestly.)

Metal Gear Solid, (ding-ding-ding. I've exceeded my Metal Gear quota for the week!) featured one particularly endearing trait wherein the series would occasionally acknowledges it's own existence for little moments of "Wait, did you notice that?" Metal Gear Solid 2 has that moment when Campbell's AI starts going haywire and he directly informs Raiden that he has been playing the game too long and should turn it off immediately. Metal Gear Solid Ground Zeroes has the level in which you re-enact scenes from the original Metal Gear and get your game infected with the classic 'FOX-die' virus only to have the actual Fox Engine (The proprietary engine made for the game) save you, And then there were those off-the-cuff moments throughout the game wherein characters would teach you how to play the game by actually saying things like "Press the Action button." (That always annoyed me, truth me told.) But the classic Fourth wall break would have to go make to Metal Gear Solid 1 during the fight with the iconic Metal Gear villain; Psycho Mantis. Things start off with Mantis 'reading your mind' (scanning your memory card) and then commenting on games that you like to play. (Spooky!) They come to a head, however, mid-way through the fight once Mantis starts dodging all of your moves instinctively. Calling for back-up reveals that Mantis is once again 'reading you mind' and the only way to shake him off is to replug your controller into the second game port. (You can see why they don't try cool tricks like that nowadays)

Borderlands 2 is primarily a comedic game at heart, so it makes sense that the team would be a little bit flippant when it comes to creating a solid and believable world. That being said, Borderlands has managed to only subtly prod at the fourth Wall throughout all of it games, but never go the whole hog and shatter the thing. One of my favourite moments for this is when Scooter sends the vault hunters off to bring power to a small settlement, which can be achieved through the acting of clearing monster infested pumps. He commends you for fixing the first pump without prompt and then comments about how weird it was that he knew the task was done the second you did it. (A subtle nod to the same logic fallacy that affects all games with silent protagonists.) The best, however, comes from 'Tales from the Borderland' in a scene wherein the protagonist Rhys is shocked by the fact that he has the consciousness of the previous game's antagonist, Handsome Jack, inside of his cranium. (I guess Cyberpunk was taking notes for this scene.) Handsome Jack plays around with Rhys by threatening to overload his neurons before laughing it off by saying he can't do that. He's still tickled by his ability to  terrify Rhys and, in Telltale game's style, a little prompt pops up in the corner stating 'Handsome Jack will remember that.' By chance, Jack finds himself noticing the little prompt and points to it saying "What the hell?" before it disappears and the scene goes on unabashed.

Bioshock isn't the kind of game that one would usually equate with being 'fourth wall breaking', and that's because it isn't... In the traditional sense. Whilst Bioshock is both a sober and satirical look at a twisted society driven by extremest socialist ideals, it doesn't take much to see how the game aims at video game culture as well, especially in it's twist. Now, I know that the game has been out for over a decade now, but seeing as how the twist itself is one of the best in gaming history I will dance around it here. (Look it up if you really want to know. Or better yet, play the game.) But safe to say, 'that twist' is a direct comment on the way that games incentivize the player by forcing them to do tasks for which the player is not in control. Even when presented with a branching RPG narrative, there are still restrictions to your actions at some point, making the art of video game storytelling almost 'enslaving' in it's execution. Perhaps not shattering the fourth wall wholesale, but defiantly noticing it in a smart way.

One 'Fourth wall breaker' that is well on it's way to becoming a classic is Dan Salvato's 'Doki Doki Literature Club'. That is a game in which the player is initially rolled into a traditional anime-schoolboy set-up only to have everything turn on it's head in the weirdest possible fashion. The first hint of anything going off-script is when Natsuke pokes fun at Monika by joking how she should be the person to talk to about matters concerning fish seeing as how it's in her name. After a moment of confusion, the girl spells it out for us; "Mon-Ika". Eventually, Monika has to wave it away be explaining that the joke doesn't work in the English translation of the game, and we get our first glimpse into the way that things aren't sensible in this game world. The game itself goes into fifth gear at times but, once again, I refuse to spoil things so I'll encourage those interested to seek it out yourself, you won't be disappointed.

Lastly, there is a game that one certainly wouldn't assume would be flippant with it's fourth wall, and yet when it was, the moment was undeniably perfect. 'The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt' was  in development for a very long time and when it came out, critics and fans alike attested that it was worth the wait. The game was especially important for the Developers themselves, CD Projekt Red, as it was the conclusion of the franchise that had put their studio on the map. The team threw their hearts and souls into the game and were rewarded with adoration and fandom from practically every corner of the Internet. But things didn't end there, as the team then moved straight on to creating two DLC's for the game; 'Heart of Stone' and the new-land expansion: 'Blood and Wine'. With the latter DLC being the last time that CDPR would work on The Witcher for the forseeable future, the team ensured there would be a moment of closure for themselves and the fans. At the end of everything, once the day is saved, there is a moment wherein Geralt finally makes the choice to end his illustrious career of monster hunting and retire. Regis comments how the both of them deserve rest after their turmoil and strife, to which Geralt merely responds "That we do." Before looking straight at the camera to let the audience know that he's including us in that statement too. It's a touching scene to tell us all that he has earnt a break and is almost looking for our permission to take it, it was a moment that just felt right.

As you can see there are a great many number of ways that one can play around with breaking the Fourth Wall, and not all of them are lazy and awkward. That being said, I'm glad the trend has fallen off of late, before things started getting as dire as the 'modern art' scene and we started getting 'impressionist video games'. Perhaps there is still space for the odd subtle fourth wall wink in the future, in the same vein as The Witcher 3, but I'd still ask for it to be exercised in moderation before another foul trend starts to build.

Ruminations on video game atrophy.

Insert funny line/obscure reference here

I had another blog lined up for today. It had bells and whistles and everything. But after some unfortunate circumstances it all got wiped and now I feeling weak and useless and can't even work up the creative energy to re-enter the paragraphs that I lost. (I suppose I underestimated how much I needed the stability of this blog in my life.) However, I am sad. Really freakin' sad. So I thought I could replace my fallen content with something that fits my morose mood. (Don't expect many zany jokes and punchlines with this one.)

So what do I mean by a video game atrophy? It's a fairly vague term with many different possible meanings or connotations, but which drove me to write this blog? Well, I was thinking about the general wasting away of gaming in the industry sense. (Maybe I'll cover personal atrophy the next time I feel like hurling myself off a roof.) You see, gaming has evolved incredibly rapidly in the past few decades from a niche activity to the most profitable in the world, and that sped-up growth could be met with a hastened demise considering how things appear to be panning out from here. (FYI, the rest of this blog is going to be an off-the-cuff personal dirge of an article, so don't expect heavy research, mirth, or a happy conclusion.)

There have been a few individuals who have taken a look at the progression of gaming and remarked how it resembles the ebb and flow of other art forms, yet in fast-motion. So it is my no means an original idea when I point out how gaming trends fall out of grace in a matter of years as opposed to generations. Remember when breaking the fourth wall was the height of intelligent storytelling? (Well, maybe not in the mainstream. Everyone seemed to roll their eyes in Assassin's Creed 2 when Juno spoke to the player.) That trend seemed to be wholly axed off with the cumulative and creative; Doki Doki Literature Club. To try that again would be old hat and uncreative. How can you top the type of manipulation that Dan Salvato pulled off? Simple, you can't. People's tastes moved on and so did video game storytelling. All in the space of one game.

Of course, that isn't to say that there aren't trends that don't overstay their welcome. When Kojima delivered one of the greatest horror teasers of all time in PT, many indie Devs tried to copy the ideas and concepts that were introduced here. If I had a penny for every looping hallway horror indie project that I have come across since, I would have enough to pay off my debts and become a functioning member of society. (Thank god that's not the case and I'm resigned to this purgatory, huh?) Not that I blame anyone for borrowing an idea here and there, what Kojima and his team presented was truly inspired. In horror video games there are usually those few spaces in which the player is safe, these are areas that you get to know exceedingly well and take comfort from that familiarity. These help to pad out the time between terror sequences and prevent the player from becoming desensitized too quickly. Kojima turned this concept on it's head slightly by familiarizing the player with this hallway location and having them loop through it again and again, then he changed it up by subtly adding small detail to the map and throwing in horror ques to deeply unnerve you. He played on so many levels of horror that other games hadn't manage to reach yet that it was inevitable that someone would try to emulate his game. That being said, Polish Itch.io horror project 'Estacao Liberdade' is literally just PT on a subway. I mean, they literally stole the creepy radio script and re-worded it for their game. (Good artists borrow, great artists steal, I guess.)

So where am I going with this? Just that I think that the rapid adoption rate of video game trends could have an adverse effect on the future of gaming. Heck, I don't like being an alarmist, but I think that if things carry on the way they are it's only a matter of time before we hit a second Video game crash. Let me explain. Recently I was playing 'The Outer Worlds' (Today's blog was supposed to be on that game, but you know...) That is a game that is feature complete with every bit of desired content finished and shipped with the product. That is to say, this isn't an a work-in-progress game that is going to try and persist itself for years and bum a few pity bucks off you in order to keep up with expenses. 'The Outer Worlds' is a very "what you see is what you get", kind of game. And that strangely makes it something of an abnormally in today's gaming landscape.

I have spoken in length about the steady rise of live services in our gaming sphere, but I find it really is important not to understate just how prevalent these types of games are becoming. Every release window we seem to get at least two live service releases, attempting to compete for your money and attention through recurrency incentives. Ubisoft famously claimed that traditional games were gone and everything was about 'live services' now. They even demonstrated so with a hilarious amateurish flow chart featuring a .Jpeg of Bayek (from Assassin's Creed Origins) in the middle. (You guys need to start paying your graphic designers more. Or at all.) So that is one huge company that has committed to bowing out of making traditional video games in favour of ones that are more 'lucrative'.

The problem is that when such a trend starts to catch on, you start to run afoul of Syndrome's razor; "When everyone's a super, no one is". All these games want to be different and advertise their games as a journey for their players to go on. 'Join us and you can see this game start from humble beginnings to become the next WoW or FFXIV!' The problem is, this usually doesn't work out. When we live with a work ethic of "It's not where yo start, it's where you end up." (Thanks Todd Howard.) we start to see games that finish unpolished, unfinished, or straight up broken. (Or all 3 if we're talking Fallout 76.) From there these developers are expecting fans to latch onto these messes-of-a-game until the thing becomes worthwhile, dedicating their time and money along the way. The industry has essentially found a way to mix crowdfunding and early access in the worst way possible.

Even when things work out and the game isn't total trash, Devs still need the community to be playing and paying constantly in order to justify the game's servers being kept up. This leads to situations where players will find themselves with literally no more freetime left to split between their games as they have to do a daily in this game, before completing a dungeon here, and then the weekly boss in that game before finishing with the monthly contract. All of these 'recurrency incetives' are slapped with a timer in order to promote their exclusivity and encourage impulse buying. Essentially, this means that every live service game is competing each other for your screen time oblivious of the fact there is only so much to go around.

So, as the quality of games is slowly starting to become worse, people are starting to buy less of them and instead stick to the games that they know to be good, or are already a shoe in. Battlefield, Call of Duty, and Sports games are all going to hit their sales quotas, that's a given, but every other game has to struggle for recognition and sales. It's slowly starting to create a bubble where only a handful of games are getting the lion share of the industry profits, and bubbles are known to be susceptible to bursting. Wasn't the last video game crash caused by an influx of low quality products that cost too much to produce and nobody wanted to buy them? (I may be wrong on the particulars there, but I think I caught the gist.)

So what do we do about all of this? As consumers, we have to let these companies know that it's time to change tactics into something that it more sustainable and healthy for the industry. And that means we'll have to play hardball with the only bargaining chip that matters, their money. Of course, this is implying that people have enough social responsibility to even act in the greater good. Heck, the other day I saw a Reddit post of someone complaining about how they were getting rude messages over Xbox live because they purchased Fallout 76's subscription service and were running around in the exclusive ranger armour. "I don't agree with it either" He wrote "Blame Bethesda, not me.". If that is any hint as to the intelligence of the average consumer, then it's safe to say that gaming is doomed. (Have a happy Halloween!)