Cheap Shot Review Of Gravity

THIS ARTICLE CONTAINS SPOILERS FROM THE FIRST SEVEN SECONDS OF GRAVITY FOR THE LOVE OF GOD RUN AND DO NOT LET YOURSELF BE SPOILED

My wife and I really, really did enjoy watching Gravity, but several days of non-stop ranting has caused my wife to ban me from talking about it anymore, so I turn to you. After all, the internet is a loving, non-judgmental safe space.

First off, I've read articles seriously saying that Gravity would ignite new interest in space travel. No. That's like saying Jaws would make everyone want a pet shark. Gravity is the last shovel of dirt on the grave of space travel. It's the science fiction equivalent of your parents telling you that, yes, in fact, they really did get divorced because of you.

This will never, ever be you.

But the part that I'm fixated on is how, at some point, they remembered that they needed to give Sandra Bullock's character an actual character, so they saddled her with a dead, young, tragically dead daughter.

(Just a thought. Wouldn't it have been so much better to give her a live daughter, and she couldn't talk to her because of the loss of communications? It would have given Sandra's adventure real stakes. Even better, it would have given her moving conversation with the Chinese ham radio guys an actual point. She could have tried to break the language barrier to tell them to record what she is saying ("Record? Tape?" "Tape!" "Yes! Tape!") so she could send a last message to her child. Again, just a thought. Though I am right.)

But then, when they needed to decide how Bullock's daughter died, and this is the point where I had to ask three people just to make sure I didn't hallucinate it, it turns out that the kid died when she fell down playing tag.

Yes, I'm not kidding. When she said that, I lost a full minute of space suspense thinking, "No, I couldn't have heard that right." I mean, sure, it is technically possible. (Not really. I mean, I've been a parent quite a while now, and it's not like the dead kids are stacked up like cordwood by the side of playgrounds from tag and monkeyshines-related fatalities.) But the point isn't possibility, it's choosing something that doesn't take people out of the moment. Kids get eaten by lions all the time, but if Bullock said that's what happened to her daughter, isn't there at least a chance you would have said, "Say what now?"

And then his spine snapped like the stem of a Waterford crystal wine glass.

So the conversation actually went something like this.

Sandra Bullock: "My daughter died playing tag. Fell down and hit her head. Just one of those things that happens."
George Clooney: "[Laconic Chuck Yaeger imitation.]"
Random Non-White Guy: "Guys, look! A wrench traveling at 20000 miles an hour!" [DIES]

Actually, I would have written something like this:

Sandra Bullock: "My daughter died playing tag. Fell down and hit her head. Just one of those things that happens."
George Clooney: "No. No, it isn't."
Random Non-White Guy: "Wrench!" [DIES]

But my dream version would be something like this:

Sandra Bullock: "My daughter died playing tag. Fell down and hit her head. Just one of those things that happens."
George Clooney: "What? She died playing tag? Who taught kids in Illinois how to play tag? You do know that, when tagging someone, a light-to-medium-firm touch of the fingers is all that is required. You don't use a bat. You don't need to give the other kid a donkey punch in the back of the freakin' head."
Random Non-White Guy: "Wait. What did she say?"
George Clooney: "She says her daughter died playing tag."
Random Non-White Guy: "Seriously!? Where was she playing tag? The Thunderdome!?" [DIES]

Or maybe just:

George Clooney: "So, Ryan, who's waiting for you back home?"
Sandra Bullock: "Um, can this wait until Space isn't trying to kill us?"
Random Non-White Guy: [DIES]

Please, please let me know if I start to overthink this.

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State Of Art In Vidya Games. Exhibit 2. The Last of Us.

It's not easy to explain why a game is really neat to people who'll probably never play it,  but I'll take a crack at it.

I wanted to write about The Last of Us. It's an instant classic, and an amazing testimonial to how excellent writing and voice acting can turn an already very solid video game into something truly moving and extraordinary.

However, I think it maps an excellent path to answering the tricky question about what makes video games a unique art form:

In a game that is purely linear and tells most of its story through cutscenes, why not just tell the story as a movie? What unique element makes video games a distinctive art form?

I'll write more about this bit next week, because I think there are some very interesting things to say. Today, because most of the people reading this won't ever play it (Playstation 3 exclusive) I wanted to describe its story and some of the interesting things about it, accompanied by YouTube videos so you can see what I'm going on about.

More of a game design geek sort of post today.

So About The Last Of Us

The Last of Us is a first person shooter with a heavy stealth element set in the zombie apocalypse. Yeah, like 500 other games. It tells the story of a bitter, violent, barely sane, middle-aged survivor named Joel and the teenaged girl who ends up in his care named Ellie.

(Standard Spoiler Warning: There will be spoilers. So what? We're trying to have Real Talk about art here, which means looking at the whole thing. So put on your grown-up pants, come along, and don't freak out.)

Quick plot summary. In the prologue, the zombie apocalypse breaks out. Joel tries to get out of town with his daughter. Some idiot soldier, just following orders, kills Joel's daughter. Joel pretty much loses him mind.

(The prologue is pretty fantastic. One thing I need to point out about it: It's not some easy-peasy spoon-fed tutorial nonsense. If you don't take the zombies seriously and run and run FAST, they will kill you. Last of Us is a game that demands you take it seriously from the get-go. Don't mess around during the apocalypse.)

Skip a couple decades forward. Joel is now sort of a thuggish criminal smuggler in a hellish future city full of mushroom zombies, completely closed off and cynical. He goes with his partner Tess to get a job.

(Tess is another sharply drawn, bitter female character, who’s competent, angry, not a love interest, and totally not there just for eye candy. It is taking the game industry a while to realize that the percentage of female gamers is edging real close to 50%, but Naughty Dog gets it.)

Joel meets Ellie. Joel learns Ellie is, for some unknown reason, immune to the zombie fungus, and Joel needs to escort Ellie to future scientists who can use her to figure out how to cure zombieism.

(Now, at this point, you can probably make a pretty accurate guess how this is all going to end. I anticipated it instantly. This is NOT a flaw in the game. Human behavior is usually extremely predictable. This makes it no less interesting. Sometimes good storytelling means having the courage to make the ending go where it needs to go.)

Joel crosses country with Ellie. At first, he can't bring himself to like Ellie. Little by little, both people learn to open themselves up to caring for another human again.

(Side note. Ellie is a fourteen year old girl. The way the game industry is right now, many were terrified that the game would sexualize her and make the whole thing insanely creepy. Instead, they simultaneously avoided any creepiness at all and made Ellie a completely believable teenager. I bet a lot of thought went into it.)

Then, in my favorite section of the game, Joel is heavily wounded, and you switch protagonists. Ellie has to hunt for food and then protect him from bandits. You play as Ellie for a huge chunk of the game, and she gets an excellent and suspenseful boss fight all to herself.

(This whole section completely caught me by surprise and blew me away. Ellie plays close enough to Joel that your skills still matter, but differently enough that you have to adapt. Obviously, a teenage girl is going to have to rely much more on stealth and trickery. Also, the first part of this section is simply Ellie stalking a deer through the snow and hunting it with a bow. It's quiet and lovely.)

But if you can't shoot it, why is it even there?

In one city, in one of many exploration sections that are free of violence ...

(Last of Us understands pacing, and that quiet sections make the fast, scary sections more effective. Smart designers know that sometimes simple, quiet exploration is a lot of fun.)

... you see a tower of giraffes, descendants of specimens that escaped from a zoo.

(Yes, a group of giraffes is called a "tower." This is a great scene. Apart from being really very pretty, the game takes the time to let you know that, if humanity dies out, it's not the end of everything. There is still a world that will carry on just fine without us.)

Finally, Joel delivers Ellie to the scientists. Surprise! They might be able to save humanity, but they will need to kill Ellie to properly analyze her. Joel goes on a rampage, saving the unconscious Ellie, and carrying her away.

(Some people still think that Grand Theft Auto is in some way shocking, instead of just dour, obvious, and tired. These people need to play the last section of Last of Us to see how a horror game can really bring the horror. No zombies required.)

Now, note. It's a linear game. Almost no choices to be made. A lot of players were really angry about being forced to control Joel as he, potentially, damns the human race to destruction. And yet, there is no way that character could do anything but what he did. He had a faceless bureaucrat kill his daughter once, and it basically destroyed him. There is no way he could ever endure it again.

Games For Grown-Ups Should Be Their Own Genre ...

... with their own section in the store.

Everything about Last of Us is for grown-ups. The real characters, acting in believably human ways. The lack of pandering and gratuitous sex eye candy. The occasional difficult sections, showing an awareness that to give a feeling of accomplishment requires a chance of failure. The game length, which is a smidge long but still doable for someone with a busy, adult schedule.

It's easy, sometimes, to look at video games and despair. It's this sort of rare AAA game, that aims for a target above the most simple and base, that gives me hope.

There's some shotgun ammo hidden inside the podium.

It's Not the Citizen Kane of Video Games

And stop looking for one. That anyone thinks we need a Citizen Kane of video games shows a lack of understanding of why Citizen Kane is as revered as it is. Citizen Kane was unusual in having a huge density of innovation in film-making techniques for one film, but there is no reason to expect that one game needs to come along and remake everything. It's just as likely that video games will advance in an incremental way, with lots of new techniques spread out over a bunch of games.

Really good movie, though.

Also, The Last of Us is not, for the most part, an innovative title. (The switch to playing Ellie is ingenious, and I hope more games play with the POV character like that.) This game mainly does stuff many games have done before. It just does it perfectly.

And There's No Choices

It's a purely linear story. It's their story, and you're experiencing it.

Why did this need to be a game? Why not a movie? I mean, this thing could be an insanely cool A&E miniseries, like Walking Dead but with actual characters and interesting events.

But, even in the most linear shooter, video games bring their own unique features to the art table. Still working that one out, but I should have a post on it ready next week.

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Never Write a Wacky Surprise Ending Again.

I am Jack's incredibly tired writing trick.

One of the sad things about the video game industry is that it has very little institutional memory. People go into it young, get burned out on infinite crunch hours for minimal pay, realize they want to raise a family/live their lives, leave, and never go back.

As a result, you don't get enough skilled crafters who put in the decades it takes to get really good at it. (Not to mention the obvious effects of having an entire art form almost exclusively written and designed by young people, still mostly men.) This is especially clear when it comes to the storytelling.

Good storytelling requires a very fine understanding of humanity. How it acts. How it develops. How people react to success and failure. And, sorry, this sort of fine awareness is only helped by living, experiencing things, and thoroughly absorbing what others have learned and experienced.

(ProTip: If you want to write game stories or anything else, you should be a voracious reader and watcher of things. Cast a broad net. If you take any sort of visual storytelling seriously and haven't seen, say, The Godfather, or Casablanca, or just about anything by Orson Welles, you're doing it wrong. Money on the street, and you're just walking by.)

The surprise ending, it turns out, is that Bruce Willis is actually an Uruk-hai.

So, in the absence of a lot of writing experience, young writers tend to grab what they know. What's cool and shiny. What did they grow up watching? The wild, unexpected twist ending. The Sixth Sense, Fight Club, Saw, every Shyamalan movie and every other film that, while they might have been good, should perhaps not be taken as a template for all storytelling forever.

(And yes, a lot of these movies are good. One of my favorite films is The Crying Game, and everyone got so overheated about its crazy twist that they often failed to notice it's a fantastic film about how complex and unpredictable love can be.)

Surprise wacky twists were good for a while. Now they're in half the games I play, and we need to take a break. They are the enemy of good storytelling.

Yeah, You Read That Right.

Good storytelling is, in the end, about humanity. About the choices they make, the results they have, and how those results affect us.

You know something? Those results are almost never surprising. That's the point. It's part of being human: The things we bring upon ourselves, good or bad, are often entirely predictable. You saw them coming a mile away (or you were deliberately not paying attention).

The patterns in the lives of others are frequently obvious, but the patterns in our own lives are often almost impossible to see. We can only recognize them when they are shown to us, so we can go: Oh. Yeah. That's me. Or that's not me, and I know why.

That is how great storytelling works. THAT IS WHY WE HAVE ART.

(Which is why it's so horribly depressing that our schools have been systematically purged of arts education in lieu of eternal test prep. A cynical person might think that we're removing anything that creates fully rounded humans and citizens of a Republic so that we can instead mass-manufacturer mindless work drones ranked and measured according to meaningless test scores. Happily, nobody has ever accused me of being cynical.)

Pictured: Art.

A Caveat

I am not trying to eliminate all surprises in drama. You can have big reveals. What I am specifically calling out are wacky twists, defined as those that require withholding key information from the viewer, out and out lying to the viewer, or using other storytelling tricks to obscure a key fact that would otherwise be instantly obvious.

Why Surprise Twist Endings Are Stupid

Here are some reasons.

1. They lie to the reader/viewer, or they withdraw key information. When you're telling a story and trying to make an emotional connection, you're doing something difficult. Don't waste your time. Focus on creating your characters. That's a tough enough job! Say the most relevant, interesting things about them. If you do your job right and make them compelling, you don’t need secrets in the first place.

2. They degrade the viewer's trust in future works of art. When I played Spec Ops: The Line, I was constantly distracted from immersion in the story by the suspicion that I was being lied to and some crazy twist was coming at the end. Of course, it was.

3. You're risking all for an uncertain payoff. The movie The Sixth Sense worked because the insane twist at the end was pretty cool. It's also a very fragile thing. If your ending isn't really that clever, or if someone spoils it, your movie better be able to stand on its own. Which is usually can't. And if your movie could stand on its own, why did you need the twist in the first place?

4. There's just a better way. There is nothing in the world, not spaceships blowing up, not a guy turning into a big green guy, nothing more interesting than human beings, the dumb ways they act, and why. Real stories, stories that LAST, are always about this. (And if you aren't trying to do this, why aren't you? Life is short.) If your wacky twist doesn't make your story be more about real people, you're just wanking. Throw it away.

And, finally, one key point specific to video games.

5. Most people don't finish video games, even short ones. If you put the crazy detail that makes your story make sense at the end of your game? Then, for most people who play your game, the story will never make sense at all! It's a big waste.

You may want to find out how the game ends before you get too comfortable ogling those.

A Real Life Example

I enjoyed Bioshock: Infinite a fair amount, but I really didn't get into it the way most people seemed to. It seemed to feel obligated to have the trademark, crazy "Bioshock twist," which resulted in a story with far less punch than it could have had.

(Spoilers ahead for Bioshock: Infinite, of course. Stay calm.)

So here's the story. You play this guy named Booker who is hired to rescue a woman named Elizabeth from this floating racist city in the sky. When you find her, she's missing the tip of one of her fingers. As you run around and shoot racists, you explore the mystery of where she came from and why you are there.

You learn, at the end, that Booker is Elizabeth's father. He sold her to pay off a gambling debt, and, when he tried to get her back, the tip of her finger was cut off.

Holy crap!

What a fantastic set-up for a story. A tormented father, guilty of a horrible crime, given a chance to redeem himself. A confused young woman who learns who her rescuer is and has to come to terms with what he did to her and the violent creature he has become. (Because it's a video game, so he's still spending a lot of time decapitating racists with his robot hand.) There's potential for a lot of cool, meaty drama and dialogue here.

Of course, none of that happens. Because Booker's relationship with his daughter (and that she is his daughter) has to stay secret until the very end of the game, for no reason.

It means that the whole, long game is spent with none of the characters ever talking about what they should be talking about. Elizabeth constantly goes on about her Disney princess "Oh, I wonder what life is like on the land?" issues, and expressing ambivalence about Booker's psychotic violence that doesn't come to anything, and constantly bugging you about the five dollars she found, instead of getting into any of the cool stuff that the story should have been about in the first place.

(If you want to see the superior drama that comes from letting a violent old guy and his young female ward talk about what they should be talking about, I plan to write about The Last of Us soon.)

And, again, a huge number of people don't finish games, unless they read the Wikipedia page. On Steam, as of this writing, only 58.2% of people who got the game achieved the Tin Soldier achievement, which means finishing the game at all. That's actually a really big percentage.

It still means over 40% of the people who bought Bioshock: Infinite on Steam never learned one thing about Booker and Elizabeth and the finger and what was going on. I honestly feel that if all the crazy bananas stuff was openly presented in the beginning, it would make people more engaged in what was going on then just another generic Mystery Box.

Like I said, fun game. I did enjoy it, and there were a lot of good things about that story. And yet, I am allowed to be bothered by wasted potential.

That's right. I said something critical about Bioshock: Infinite. Now's your chance to jump ahead to the Comments and fix me.

But Jeff, I've Played Your Games. Your Stories Suck!

That's right, kid. Get it out of your system. Nothing easier than a big, categorical cheap shot. Still the Internet, after all.

The writing in my early games was, frankly, lousy. It's a side effect of having to spend the 10000 hours it takes to gain proficiency in public.

I have tried, over the last two decades, to write games with good stories. My resources are limited, and I have to write a game at the same time as the plot and dialogue. This is not to excuse my many failures, but to explain them.

I do believe I've written some cool stories, and I think they're getting better. I have some story ideas for a new game series, which I might be able to write someday, that I think are fantastic.

But if you think my stories suck, hey, cool man. Some people like them. De gustibus non est disputandum. 

It's Just a Fad

I'm not really worried about it. Wacky twist storytelling is a cul de sac. There's really only so much you can do with it, compared with the infinite potential variety of simple stories about actual people doing actual things. As video games evolve as an art form, there will be a lot of dead ends.

And look at the bright side, if a writer is taking the time and effort to construct a twist, it at least means they care. They're trying! That is such a step up from game storytelling in the past.

The fact that this conversation could happen at all means we've come a long, long way.

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The Internet Lies To You. WHEN WILL YOU GET THAT!?!?

My heart is singing a joy song.

Take a moment to Google "iOS 7 waterproof". Do it. It's worth it.

Yes. Someone Photoshopped some fake iOS 7 ads to tell people that a software update would make their phone waterproof. And some other people, who may in fact not be as insightful as they possibly could be, believed it. So now thousands of articles saying that, no, a software update will not change the physical properties of your phone.

Anonymous evil ad maker with Photoshop, I wish I could shake your hand. Here's why.

The Internet is an immensely new, hugely important mode of human communication, but we don't yet know how to use it. People don't understand this about the Internet: It is half lies. At best.

Most people who saw the fake ad read it, smiled, and moved on. A few people, however, believed it. They took their phone in the shower. The device was destroyed. They learned a valuable lesson, in a way that won't soon be forgotten, and all it cost them was a few hundred bucks.

And you know something? Maybe they will be less like my older relatives, who never read anything in e-mail so ludicrous they didn't believe it.

I promise you this. One of these days, someone who trashed their phone will get a message saying vaccines are killers, or a guy in Nigeria wants to give them a hundred million bucks, or that they should quit the chemo for their Stage 3 breast cancer because eating enough lemons will take care of it (yes, real example). Maybe, dare to dream, when this happens they will think about their phone and maybe, just maybe hit Delete. Like they should.

It is a small price to pay for a lesson of such value.

Oops. Sorry. What I meant to say was, it's real. You can install iOS 7 on your iPhone and give it to your kids to play in the bathtub. Go try it. You know it's true, because you just read it.

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State Of Art In Vidya Games. Exhibit 1. Spec Ops: The Line

This looks like a nice person!

One of the most painful things about stepping away from blogging was the really cool games that came out in my absence that I never got the chance to pick apart.

I mean, the Are Video Games Art? argument is stupid, right? Of course they're art. Just usually crappy art. Art is helped by careful criticism. So I want to go over a bunch of games and pick them apart.

(Standard Spoiler Warning: There will be spoilers. So what? We're trying to have Real Talk about art here, which means looking at the whole thing. So put on your grown-up pants, come along, and don't freak out.)

The first game I wanted to talk about was Spec Ops: The Line, a game that looked like a totally bog-standard Call Of Duty clone, suffered for it sales-wise, and became a cult classic by being something infinitely more cool and weird.

How On Earth Did This Thing Get Green-Lit?

Spec Ops: The Line is an enjoyable, competently made Call of Duty type shooter, with most of the focus being on the single-player campaign. (Reviews of the multiplayer part would be difficult, as it would require more than one person to have ever played it.)

This is really important to remember when reading what follows ... It's a fun game. Good shooting sections, clever design, some really nice vehicle bits. It's not artsy-fartsy. It plays.

Its greatness comes from the fact (and this is where I'll start to lose people) that it's not just a game but commentary on both the state of video game storytelling and the way people play games without really thinking about what they're supposedly doing.

In any contemporary shooter, you're generally given a long hallway, a vaguely designed mission, a half-assed story, and a bunch of people to shoot. And you do. You trudge forward, center little images of human beings in your crosshairs, and blow them away. Then you get more half-assed story, shoot more simulated people, and it soon becomes hypnotic and repetitive. Soon, it's just a reflex. People. Shoot. People. Shoot.

I am in no way part of the Fox News hysteria about how this process manufactures spree killers, but isn't it just a little bit weird?

This trend is still continuing. We are still trying to find the limit to the horrors gamers will enact if that's what it takes to get to the next mission.

Spec Ops: The Line takes this process and completely turns it on its head, telling the story of a group of soldiers who start to reflexively kill people, and the nightmare that results.

Call Of Duty On Shrooms

You start out as ordinary soldiers, on an ordinary mission. Then, as the game progresses, it gets more violent, the missions more questionable and vague. At the same time, everything about the framing of the game gets more bizarre and hallucinatory (the best touch, in my opinion, being the increasingly hilarious and disturbing loading screen tips).

The most commonly cited example: At one point, there is an artillery section highly reminiscent of the Death From Above bombing mission in Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare.  It's flashy and fun. Then, immediately after, you wander the land you shelled and see the results. And it's ... not OK.

(By the way, you get several chances to choose whether or not to commit atrocities. I always chose to. You don't play a game like Spec Ops: The Line to NOT commit atrocities.)

It's become an industry joke that every new Call of Duty game has to have some bit that's allegedly surprising and shocking. You can take every 'shocking' bit in every Call of Duty game, wrap them up in a ball, and it's still playschool recess next to Spec Ops: The Line. That is because war, and we should occasionally pay at least lip service to this fact, is actually quite horrible.

The game has a real, visceral emotional punch, which is understandable, considering its source material.

The horror. The horror.

We All Stand On the Shoulders of Giants

Spec Ops: The Line is one of many, many interesting retellings of Joseph Conrad's classic novel, Heart of Darkness. I believe that if you put an infinite number of monkeys with an infinite number of typewriters in a room, they will come up with a retelling of Heart of Darkness in about 2 seconds.

(Even I tried my own Heart of Darkness homage, and it turned out quite well, though it strayed so far from its inspiration as to be unrecognizable.)

The basic Heart of Darkness template is a simple one: Agent A of Law/Order goes off into some sort of wilderness and is seduced by Chaos/Power. Agent B of Law/Order is sent after Agent A to try to control him/her/it. There is a harrowing journey through the wilderness, and Agent B (Law/Order proxy) finally confronts Agent A (Power/Chaos proxy). Awesome drama happens.

It's a terrific story model, and there's a lot of meat on it. The final showdown between these two models of civilization always has a ton of punch, which is why my one problem with Spec Ops: The Line is a big one.

And it turned out he was a robot the entire time. Storytelling!

I Hate Wacky Surprise Endings

As I played Spec Ops, I thought, again and again and again, "I know you're building up to a wacky surprise ending. PLEASE don't have a wacky surprise ending."

It had a wacky surprise ending.

These things are a curse. They lie to the player. They obscure character development. I'll write more about this in another post, but I'll get to the meat of it here. The real problem with it, in this game, is that it's such a less interesting choice.

Turns out, much of what happened was a hallucination of the main character. (YAWN! Things that didn't happen are always less interesting than things that did happen.) The rogue Colonel Konrad you've been hunting, who has been effectively taunting you this whole game? He's dead.

So I'm spending this whole game at the edge of my seat, waiting for this epic confrontation between your character and this awesome rogue soldier. Instead, the game ends with one crazy asshole in a room talking to himself.

Two engaging characters in conflict of any sort (even if they're only arguing about whether cake is better than pie), will always be more interesting than one crazy asshole talking to himself.

But Let's Not Go Overboard

It's a terrific game. It's fun, it's full of awesome little touches, and it brings something unique to the most tired of genres. It feels truly fresh, and I think it's required playing for people who take this design wonk stuff seriously.

Next game, to be written about someday: The Last of Us. You don't think I can go without talking about that one, do you?

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Department of "Oh, Never Mind Then."

Best headline about a video game in the history of video games:

Grand Theft Auto “Rape Scene” Actually Just Naked Cannibalism

OK. I'll admit it. Now I'm intrigued.

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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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