Tomb Raider, Torture Porn, and Looking For an Audience That Exists

Someone thinks this will arouse you.

So let's talk, months late, about the recent Square Enix Tomb Raider reboot, which I played on the PS3.

First off, let me say that it's a really well-made game. Excellent production values. Flat but reasonable writing. Fun gameplay. Enjoyable combat and puzzles. Environments that are neat and worth exploring.

I have to make it really clear before I get into the mess: This is a good game, and the people who made it should pat themselves on the back.

And yet, one simple decision, one minor choice of tone and content, blows the whole expensive thing up.

Here's the thing. Yes. Tomb Raider was a hit, kind of. It sold millions of copies.

But this Tomb Raider is the newest game in an iconic franchise, with brilliant design and top-rate production values. Of course it sold a lot of copies. It just wasn't the hit it could have been, and, more importantly, it wasn't the hit Square Enix needed it to be.  This is a phenomenal shame.

I think it's obvious why it didn't perform.

Yes, this is a lake of blood and rotting human flesh. Alas, the game does not contain soap.

First, About the Bewbs

I have no problem with using sex appeal to sell games. As of this writing, I've spent the last several weeks listening to females in my acquaintance wax rhapsodic about Benedict Cumberbatch and Thor. They can let me have an athletic young archaeologist/grave robber in a tanktop.

However, here is the first rule of Sex Appeal: If you want to make something sexy to sell it, it has to be sexy.

This game is meant to be an Indiana Jones-style romp, with a sense of lightness and fun. I mean, watch Raiders of the Lost Ark again. (This is never not a good idea.) This is a movie full of gory death and violence and Nazi melting faces, but it's still FUN. Look, Spielberg is a true master, and I don't expect everyone to pull off the miracle of getting this tone right, but you have to come closer than Tomb Raider did.

The problems start with the packaging. When I picked up the box and turned it over, I saw three pictures of Lara Croft covered with mud, filth, and blood. It's gross. Not sexy. Also, ewwww.

This doesn't stop when you're playing. The game is full of gratuitous gory bodies and chopped off limbs and cannibalism and tortured corpses. Set aside that this is the most obvious, cliched way to depict the evil cultists that serve as your foe. It's excessively gross and boilerplate, but that's not even the real problem. 

Warning: Do not look at this image.

OH! GOD! OH! ACK! NO!

Tomb Raider is violent. Like Saw movie murder porn excruciating to watch violent.

Sure, Lara brutally kills hundreds of evil guys. It's a video game. We can kinda sorta live with that, though I really wish they'd come up with a more clever solution. Instead of killing ten guys and then ten guys and then ten guys in a series of boilerplate shootouts, I wish they'd had a way to have there be far less killing but for it to require more care and cunning. 

(The Ellie boss fight from The Last of Us should be played by all designers for a perfect example of how this can be done. Also the Mr. Freeze fight from Batman: Arkham City.)

But that isn't even the problem.

Tomb Raider has lots of Quick Time Events ("Press the triangle button now FAST or die! Ha! You suck!"), which is already unfun design. They are really tricky and fast, which is even more terrible. And when you fail (and you will, a lot), you will see Lara die in a really horrible way.

You will see Lara, for example, have her throat ripped out by wolves. Be hacked with machetes. Have the neck impaled on a wooden stake. Swim through a lake of blood and rotting human flesh.

When you die, we're not talking about the camera cutting away and you hear nasty sound effects and get to imagine the gruesome thing that just happened. No, when that bad guys strangles her, you will see it lovingly animated, no detail lost as the life slowly drains from her eyes.

Gamers are inured to this sort of horror. It's time for a reminder that most people aren't.

This is what fun looks like.

The Finest Game Critic Working Today

Talk show host Conan O'Brien does a series of segments for his show called Clueless Gamer. In them, Conan, a self-professed non-gamer, tries out the hot games. Watching a civilian come face to face with all the bizarre design choices we've all trained ourselves to take for granted is a humbling and educational existence.

They're also hilarious.

It's real game criticism, the sort we need, the sort that doesn't shrug our shoulders and let us get away with lazy crap. (His Grand Theft Auto V segment does an awesome job of getting at what works and doesn't work about the series. I wish so much they'd had him play the torture mission.)

The Tomb Raider segment is particularly informative.  Jump to 6:00. Watch the gruesomeness. Listen to the audience reaction. Listen to what Conan is saying. "Don't let it happen again." "This is a nightmare."

This is what the game industry is selling. This is what we're proffering to people as Art. The problem isn't that Normal Humans see us as creepy sociopaths. The problem is that it's hard to argue they're not right.

The Real Problem

Kurt Vonnegut wrote, about writing, "Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia." This is brilliant advice. Don't try to write for too many people at once. It will just dilute your work.

So who is Tomb Raider written for?

Is this game for people who want to ogle a young, attractive woman? Hey, I don't categorically oppose using attractive people to sell product. I'm as intrigued by a sexy assembly of polygons as the next guy. 

But I have a hard time getting into my "Hey, that's sexy!" headspace when the woman I'm supposed to ogle is being constantly horribly mutilated and coated with filth. I don't want to ogle her. I want to give her a sweater.

Is this game for people who want a rollicking Indiana Jones style of adventure? The sort of thing promised by the name "Tomb Raider"? Then bear in mind that most people who want to explore catacombs and look for treasure may also have a small tolerance for watching young women being strangled in long, lovingly animated segments.

Is this game for young women who desperately want to play a game with a protagonist who, in some way, reminds them of themselves? Like, say, my daughters. My seven year old was playing a little World of Warcraft the other day, and she asked me, exact quote, "Why are all the pandas boys?" My family wants games with women in them, and we spend money.

Well, I won't let my seven and eleven year old daughters get within a thousand miles of Tomb Raider. Pity. They might have become lifelong fans of a series that wouldn't give them perma-nightmares. 

Is this game for young dudebros who grew up watching Saw and other torture porn and get off on a bit of the old ultraviolence? Well, I get e-mail from these kids all the time. They will only rarely play a game where they control a female character. I think they're afraid they'll catch the gay.

So I'm really trying to think who this otherwise terrific game is being aimed at. Apparently someone who's saying, "I want to spend my leisure time watching a young, talented woman being repeatedly tortured and mutilated. But I also like puzzles!"

Hope For the Future

It's a real shame because, I must again stress, there's a terrific game in here. If you can look past the gruesome (and many people can), Tomb Raider is a ton of fun.

I've read that a sequel is in the works. I really hope so. If I can get through it without needing therapy, I'll totally buy it. My little hope? Man, I would love to play it (or parts of it) with my kids. I hope it works out.

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Another good analysis of the game is at Errant Signal. And, as always, we're still on Facebook and Twitter.

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A Few Fundamental Truths About Game Reviews, So Stop Being So Mad

Always remember: If it makes lots of money, it is perfect and immune to criticism.

To catch you up: There's a game called Grand Theft Auto V. Maybe you've heard of it. Like all games in the series, you commit horrible, violent crimes. Arguably, in V, those crimes tend to be a bit more on the gruesome, appalling scale than in earlier games.

Reviews are coming out. Greg Tito of the Escapist gave the game the shocking, war-crime level rating of 3.5 stars out of 5, saying "only buy Grand Theft Auto V if you're prepared to play as characters with no justifiable motivation for doing awful things to people."

Predictably, their forums exploded into haterage, as a huge portion of gamers are nothing but giant, ambulatory, exposed nerves mainly good for the spraying of spite. 

So Greg Tito had to back up the largely obvious, expected, self-evident points he made earlier with a long follow-up article. It's worthy reading.

Man, I loves me some good internet drama. It's like fudge. I can eat it all day. Keeps me from working. But ...

oh god why am i trying so tired so tired

A Few Sanity Comments

1. Evaluating the worth of a work of art with a number, a clump of stars, or the positioning of one's thumb is completely arbitrary and useless. We know that, right? Ignore it. You can't judge a work of art with a number. It's not like there's some Art Scale you can put art on and weigh it and say, "This weighs 7.32 Arts, so it's good."

2. The point of a critic is to criticize. Anyone in our developing art form who actually tries to stand up and make real points is worth applauding, even if we don't agree.

3. If you, as a critic, don't ever make a bunch of people angry at you, you're wasting your time. If you're never challenging anyone, why are you bothering? 

4. Also, ProTip: When a carefully reasoned comment makes someone angry, that means you're on the right track. When you are being calm and thoughtful and people still rage at you, it means you hit a nerve that probably needed hitting.

5. As the art form matures, you have to expect that really egregious crap is going to get called out more and more. Sure, you're allowed to make a game that's morally repellent. But realize, as gamers grow up, have kids, and start to lose family members, they’re learning just how funny death isn't. The voices saying, "Why are the biggest, most glorious, most expensive worlds in the game industry being used for such a horrific end?" are only going to get louder.

6. This just makes me appreciate Saints Row IV so much more. Practically all of the comical violence in it is directed against evil, invading aliens or computer simulations. Makes it go down easier for us olds. And, yes, I am plausibly pointing out Saints Row as the sane, mature option, which is how we know that the world has gone mad.

7. A lot of the comments claim everything Greg Tito says is invalid forever because he gave Dragon Age II 5 stars out of 5. One, if you're wrong once, it doesn't mean you can't be right 500 times after that. And, two, read Sanity Comment #1 again. 

8. That Grand Theft Auto V depicts what it does and yet is as popular as it is is very interesting. I think it says something about us as people. And I'm not about to get all liberal and sensitive and say that it's something inherently bad. I think the game addresses less the desire to do wrong and more a deeper, fundamental frustration. Not sure. Just a hunch. Bears more thought.

9. Finally. If we are going to assign numerical values to represent the value of a work of art in a storytelling medium (which we shouldn't, because it's dumb and useless), it is necessary to take the quality of the story into account. I mean, right?

Yeah, I'll probably play GTA V one of these days. For as long as I can stand it, anyway. It sounds like a stunning technical accomplishment, the sort of thing a game designer has to play to keep one's skills current. I just dream of a day when the most technically spectacular games can be played with my kids in the room.

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The Hardest Game. For Adults.

I have come to realize that, for adults, Minecraft is among the most difficult of all video games.

Bear with me.

Minecraft is amazing for kids. All of the children in our social circle have been completely absorbed into the Minecraft collective. They make huge towns. They discuss the relative merits of the Adventure Update. They install mods. They set up LANs and explore each others' worlds. Whatever its merits as an educational game, it's certainly made our kids learn what an IP address is.

When we took our nine-year old daughter to PAX, she insisted on waiting in line to have her picture taken with Notch, Minecraft's creator. I spoke with him and mentioned that I run Spiderweb Software. He said that he'd played Avernum. This one fact did more to elevate me in her view than any single event since her creation.

The kids are mad about the game, making spiraling towers, roller-coasters, water slides, and mad dreamscapes.

But what about the adults?
 
What Adults Frequently Say About Minecraft

Many of the guardians of these children tried Minecraft themselves. Few of them played more than an hour or two. Now note, these are nerd grown-ups, gamers, people who actually finish games. Grown-ups rarely have time to play games. These are people who make time. But I played for more than any of them, logging a mere ten hours.

But that's not what got my attention. What I found so fascinating was that, when I asked my fellow olds what they thought of it, I always got a similar response:

"I didn't know what to do."
"I didn't see the point of it."
"I didn't have a purpose."

And then they looked at me as if all this made perfect, self-evident sense. And the thing is, it did. I always nodded with genuine sympathy.

And then I realized how depressing that is.

A Thought Experiment

Suppose you asked an adult, "What do you think of Legos?" and got the response, "I don't like them. I just look at them, and don't know what to do. What is the purpose? What is their point?"

What would you think of this response? Would you find that person to be Awesome? And not, maybe, I don't know, just a wee bit depressing?

Tell me, what do you think of paper? "It's blank. That stresses me out." What about clay? "I don't know what to make, so it's pointless." Look. You can make things with this. "But creativity makes me tired."

I'm not pretending I'm not the same way. I don't think I'm any better than my peers. I'm just the same.

Look What I Did With It, Because I'm So Great

I had a blast playing Minecraft! I built a little house, so that I could be safe from monsters. I made a mine. And then you know what I created?

I built a two story house for a family of four. Bedroom for the parents. Bedroom for two children. Kitchen. Workshop. Field of crops so we could eat. A big wall to keep us safe. I even baby-safed the damn thing, to keep my non-existant Minecraft four-year old from falling down the stairs and into a lava pool.

And then I was done. I recreated the world I see around me every day, to the maximum fidelity cube-world would allow. And then I stopped playing. Success.

Isn't that extra-depressing? Even in my fantasy world, I had to have a mortgage.

Why Minecraft Is the Hardest Of Games. For Adults.

I have not made any big, unique discovery here. It's been common knowledge for a long time that a kid can have just as much fun with a toy as with the box it came in. We take this loss of creativity as we age for granted. It's only when it happens with a video game, the sort of thing adults can play, with weapons and monsters and gold, that it comes into much sharper relief. Of course adults don't color with crayons. That activity is in a box in our brains labeled "Kid Stuff," and we can ignore it safely.

But Minecraft is new, so we have to evaluate it with fresh eyes.

To play Minecraft (before the release of promised updates with boss fight and goals and other dreadful things), you have to play. Not in the linear way, walking down a hall and shoot guys in the face on the one course the designer created for you.

To play Minecraft, you have to Play. Playground-style, without fear or hesitation or second-guessing. You have to, without self-consciousness, be creative. My old, withered, linear, fight-or-flight, calculate-reward-for-effort brains just can't do that anymore, not without great strain. To play Minecraft for more than a few minutes, you have to act like a kid again, in the good way. And that is HARD.

I don't know if I can do it. One of these days, some rare, free afternoon, I really need to sit down for an hour, just an hour, and try.

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Minecraft Makes Little Girls Cry.

I've been playing Minecraft a lot lately (when I'm not porting our newest game to Windows and iPad), and I will have several things to write about this truly fascinating game. For example, my nine year old daughter is addicted to it, and I thought her first experience with it was telling.

Here is a brief summary of my daughter's initial Minecraft session:

Starts game at spawn point.

Walks a long way from spawn point.

Builds most of a house.

Tries to make the roof of the house by placing a block of sand directly above her.

The block of sand falls onto her.

She suffocates.

She respawns at the start point.

She can't figure out where her house is.

She cries.

So what have we learned? First, that Minecraft is truly an educational game, punishing lack of foresight with an almost Eve-like intensity. It has much to teach about planning and forethought, and it delivers its lessons in the most painful way possible. Nothing educational can have value without the possibility of crushing failure.

Second, this would be a great bit of ad copy:

Minecraft - It makes little girls cry.

Third, after she went to bed, I logged in and spent a minute finding her house again. This made me a hero with a ludicrously small amount of effort. That justifies the twenty bucks spent on the game right there.

More to follow, once I figure out how to make a cake.

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Red Dead: Redemption and My Failures As a Parent

Before I take a weekend-long break from writing Avadon to spend a weekend with the family in my favorite place in the world, I wanted to talk about my latest gaming obsession.

Red Dead: Redemption

Since I'm an enormous fan of Rockstar's violent, objectionable sandbox games, and the only person you will ever meet who actually played Grand Theft Auto IV all the way to the end, I'm surprised it took me so long to get around to playing this. It's Grand Theft Auto, but in the old west. So instead of stealing cars, you steal stagecoaches! Instead of killing hundreds of Mexicans in fake L.A., you kill them in real Mexico!

What was more surprising, though in retrospect it should not have been, was how instantly attached my eight year old daughter became to the game the moment she caught an unlucky glimpse of me playing it. Of course, it makes perfect sense. This is a game where you own a horse, ride your horse, take your horse out into the brush, find wild horses, capture and tame wild horses, and make one of those horses your new horse.

So she wanted to play it. A lot. But it's a Rockstar game, with all of the obscenity, gruesome violence, and graphic sexuality that entails. (Along with an unusually high frequency of rape, which I don't consider an improvement.)

So I let her play the game, but only in sandbox mode. She got stuck early on in the missions, and I haven't helped her. Thus, the things she are exposed to while questing for horses are only damaging, not totally traumatizing.

Of course, when I walked into the living room yesterday, I saw her chasing down a pack of bandits and shooting them all in the back in an admirably businesslike fashion. Also, she is trying to hunt down every animal in the game. She'll say, "Daddy! I shot a snake! And an armadillo!" And she'll bounce up and down like the happiest little girl in the world.

So I either suck at parenting or am really fantastic at it.

Two Key Differences Between Red Dead: Redemption and Grand Theft Auto

In Grand Theft Auto, when I left my car to go on some dangerous mission and returned to it later with like eighty guys chasing me and a need to get away very quickly, I never found that my car was missing because it wandered off to eat a particularly tasty clump of grass a half a mile away.

In Grand Theft Auto, when I was peacefully driving somewhere, my car was never suddenly killed by a cougar, who then ate me.

I mean, sure, sometimes gang members would shoot at me, but this was never really a problem. Gangbangers with AK-47s are a walk in the park compared to cougars. Cougars are serious business.

Oh, and Some Shameless Self-Promotion

In October, we had our 15th anniversary sale, celebrating an alarmingly long time being in the business of writing Indie role-playing games. The sale was a huge success, one of the best sales we've ever had. As a result, and as a thank you to everyone who has been nice enough to keep us in business all these years, we are resuming the most popular part of the sale: the big discount on CD bundles. For the entire month of December, all of our Game Collections on CD are 25% off.

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