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May 17th, 2018 at 16:21:44 - Grand Theft Auto V (PC) |
I used GTA V in my learning community this semester to teach deviance. After a lecture covering basic theory and concepts, I had students play GTA V for half an hour and answer questions about labeling theory, think about how norms, sanctions, and deviance differ in Los Santos vs. the real world, violate in-game norms and identify sanctions, and try to get a bunch of fake achievements I made up to get labeled deviant in various ways in the game. It was a ton of fun, and effective!
I played the bare minimum to prepare for bringing the game to class (though most of them had played before) because I had to spend most of my time trying to get the thing to run smoothly on my laptop and through a classroom projector. I eventually did it well enough, hooray, but I still haven’t got it running perfectly. It’ll get choppy sometimes while driving and shooting. It could just be that this is where my computer begins to show its age. Sigh. But now that the semester's over, I can go back through games I began for the learning community. According to Steam, I've clocked 33 hours, but it's realistically in the low 20s.
GTA V is the best GTA. I played some of the older ones (San Andreas, Vice City), never all the way through a story, and mostly just for causing mayhem. I played GTA IV for about 10 hours and spent most of that time on the fake internet and watching fake in-game TV. I’m pleased to report that the fake internet and TV are even better this time around and that I have resisted watching all of that content, which I bet runs upward of 20 hours if you count radio stations too.
Why is GTA V the best GTA? For me, it’s the characters, missions, and overall narrative. GTA V does this cool thing where there are three main characters whose lives intertwine. You start with Franklin, a sarcastic, dry-humored, practical black man living with his aunt in a poor neighborhood in Los Santos. Then you meet Michael, a wealthy ex-con in witness protection with an extremely dysfunctional family. Franklin starts to work for Michael. Finally, my favorite, Trevor enters the picture. Trevor is quite literally insane. He’s part meth head and drug and weapons dealer, with a low-rent operation out of a trailer in the desert. He has a history with Michael, and all three of them wind up having to do jobs together for the FIB (GTA’s FBI). There’s some larger story going on about a shady corporation or something called Merryweather and a super weapon. Not sure about all that yet, but certainly intrigued.
Each character is fleshed out, and it makes this story more than about stealing cars and killing people. Serious themes exist underneath the GTA parody about family, trust, speeding up of social life, consumerism, drug culture, etc., etc., and I dare say that not only the game as a whole (obviously), but the characters in particular, are real pieces of art. Franklin’s relationship with his aunt, who is into spiritual femininity and magic crystals, is fraught because they simply don’t understand one another’s lives. His relationship with his dog is adorable. Michael’s family, as mentioned, is insane. His wife is trying to be calm in a fast-moving world and is cheating on him with her yoga instructor. One of the best scenes in the game so far is when Michael and his wife get into an argument, and the yoga instructor comes around and makes them do a family session together, so you, as Michael, have to do yoga, which of course, does nothing to calm anyone down. His daughter is vapid and wants to be a reality TV star. His son smokes weed and plays video games all day. They are all entitled. Michael really does see himself as a good guy, but he’s surrounded by crazy people and pressured into crime, which he does enjoy and is good at. Trevor assaults and kills people at will, is secretly from Canada (and becomes enraged if people point out his accent), hates it when people call him a motherfucker, and in one memorable scene, becomes enraged when Michael describes how Trevor is a hipster, or at least what hipsters aspire to become. Trevor is currently dating a woman whom he kidnapped and does not see a problem with it.
Gameplay wise, it’s typical GTA, but missions are far more varied. This is exemplified by the heists, in which you put together a team (some combination of the three main characters and sometimes other NPCs) to do things like rob banks, rob trains, secure witnesses, or steal other huge items. These involve preparation missions where you observe a place, or acquire a getaway car, or do other tasks before the actual heist. For example, the last one I did was to rob a bank. I first scouted the bank and tested its alarm system to see how fast the police response was. It was very fast, and so I made the decision to shoot our way out. Then, I stole a military truck full of armor and weapons from a convoy to prepare for the shootout. Then, I stole a van for Franklin to use as the getaway vehicle. The other characters (Michael, Trevor, and one hired gun) hit the bank, stole the money, changed into full combat gear, and emerged guns blazing at a stunned police force. We shot our way through them, working our way toward Franklin in the getaway vehicle. I forget how or why this happened, but at some point someone stole a bulldozer to help clear the path of cops.
Part of what’s so cool about heists is that you switch between characters to perform all their roles when they are doing things simultaneously (e.g., one character sniping from a rooftop, one causing a distraction, one stealing something). You do this during the game as well, switching between the three characters at will. They all have different jobs they can do, different contacts for missions, different properties they can purchase, different activities they can engage in, etc. And they so frequently weave together. You’ll go to do a mission as Franklin, and it’ll turn out Michael orchestrated it. Or you’ll go do something with Trevor, and the FIB agent in charge will want Franklin too.
This plenty to write at the moment, but suffice it to say that there is so much more that GTA V offers. Tons of random events, side missions, activities (darts, races, Trevor’s rampages, etc.) will keep a dedicated player busy for a really long time. This may be the last open world game you need for a long time. And I'm saying this almost 5 years after it came out. Oh, there's also GTA V Online. Will update again once I beat story mode with some good memories.
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May 11th, 2018 at 17:36:11 - Killing Floor 2 (PC) |
I bought Killing Floor 2 during Extra Life 2016 and was really impressed with how wonderfully gory it was. It's a co-op FPS with lots of zombies and other hellish creatures. According to Steam, I've played 15 hours...in a year-and-a-half. I've recently been cleaning out multiplayer games and think I'll keep this one installed, because I played some more last night, and it really is fun, if a bit repetitive. There are a lot of character classes with different weapon specialties. I have been playing mostly with the Gunslinger, who uses pistols and a shotgun. General shooty class. Every 5 experience levels, you can access to a choice between two perks for the class (you can change the perks). I think there are like 20 or 25 levels, so there are a lot of perks, times however many classes, means a hefty amount of knowledge, skill, and time to master everything.
So you choose your character, choose your difficulty (it can be a leisurely and gory romp or a ridiculously difficult infinite waves game, your choice), and go into a random match or lobby or whatever. Game starts. It's shorter, medium length, or longer (and I think there's an infinite mode now). I've only played short, which is four waves. After each wave, you go spend your money (earned for killing enemies? I'm not really sure. But I know you can "throw" money at other players and share) at the upgrade station to buy ammo, armor, and new weapons. At the end of the fourth wave (on short) there's a boss. I've seen really only one boss boss, and then other bosses that are variants of strong enemies that already exist. I wish there were more. They generally eat a ton of bullets and I usually die, but that's partly because I'm not very good at the game.
I think the way to play this game is to focus on one or two character classes first to get pretty good at them and learn the ropes. I have...failed to play this way, having dabbled with most of the classes and not having played one enough to really understand it. I should follow my own advice!
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May 8th, 2018 at 00:12:40 - Beholder (PC) |
This ended sooner than I thought! Orwell was longer and Beholder was shorter. Beholder is a game about Soviet style surveillance. You get put in the government job of landlord of an apartment block. You need to earn money and reputation. With reputation, you can buy security cameras, which you install in your tenants' homes. With money, you can buy repair kits to fix broken stuff and buy all sorts of goods. You can also spend these resources to pay/bribe/uncover info.
The government gives you orders to spy on and evict people. You've always got to listen for the phone to ring so you can run to your apartment and answer it. The other citizens are needy little Sims. They need medicine, or a tie, or want you to buy them a gun for protection from an abusive ex-husband, or want you to sell cans of old fish they stole, or want to get a girlfriend, etc., etc. Your family is the most needy, with a wife and two kids. The wife always needs money for bills and groceries. Your college age son needs money for books or a date, or to avoid being sent to the mines. Your small daughter gets sick, and good luck affording $30,000 to save her life!
Your task is to manage all the conflicting desires of all these NPCs while not getting yourself arrested, killed, exiled, and ideally keeping your family safe and healthy too. The gameplay loop got old fast. Run around from apartment to apartment collecting information on who has illegal goods, building dossiers on residents, and reporting all this info to the Ministry, or bribing residents for money. When residents are around, chat with them for info and take and complete tasks. Do your best to keep money and reputation rolling in so you can continue your spy work.
You will get bad endings. You will fail residents. You will have to compromise your morals and allegiances. At least all this happens on the hard difficulty, which was quite hard. I got caught stealing a lot, I was shot and killed by two different residents, I was arrested for being in debt, I was fired from my job, I was reprimanded for evicting a tenant without tact. My daughter died, my son got kicked out of college and went to work in the mines. I couldn't afford to protect either of them. It was terrible. I felt like a bad father.
And a bad neighbor. And I guess that's what Beholder is about. Being a bad neighbor and a bad father. And no one likes you.
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May 6th, 2018 at 23:40:20 - Orwell (PC) |
This semester I taught a learning community with the theme of serious games and gamification. I reworked my Introduction to Sociology class using games as examples to cover sociological content. The last topic we covered was governance and surveillance. I used two games to do this, Beholder (which I'll finish next) and Orwell. These worked well together, with Beholder demonstrating a more traditional type of citizen surveillance reminiscent of pre-Internet Communist states and Orwell demonstrating modern technological government surveillance. From there, I moved into surveillance capitalism and the Chinese citizen score example. It was a cool unit, but anyway, I just finished up Orwell tonight, and here are thoughts on the game.
The best thing I can say for Orwell is that it is thought-provoking. It explores questions about government surveillance, power, privacy, and so on to make you connect the fictitious narrative to events in the real world. Unfortunately, it's hindered by remaining at a rather surface level treatment of these issues, such that to delve deeper requires the player to have additional knowledge or guidance or interest to learn more. This is obviously in large part due to the fact that this is an indie game probably with a small team and budget. For example, the social media site that characters all use is never implicated for its role in sharing your data. There is no connection between government and business in the game, and we know business drives surveillance capitalism.
In the game, Orwell is the name of the surveillance system. It's neat how it works, though it would never work like this in the real world because surveillance is automated. But we've got to have player interactivity, so here we go! You play as an "investigator," someone who scours the internet for information to compile dossiers on citizens of The Nation. This investigatory work is outsourced, so you are a foreigner. In the beginning of the game, there is a bombing, and so your task is to get to the bottom of this bombing. As you gather information on suspicious people, you will wind up gaining access to their social media profiles, blogs, cell phone records, and eventually gain the ability to poke around on their hard drives.
One neat thing is that, as your boss tells you in the beginning, you are to remain objective and report facts. Occasionally there will be conflicting information or information that is clearly out of context (e.g., one character tells another jokingly that they are being tortured, and you can report this piece of data as evidence that the character engages in torture, which is clearly untrue). You have to make decisions about submitting or withholding these data chunks. Now, once you submit data chunks to the Orwell system, it's completely de-contextualized. Your handler only receives what you send them. Later on, there are intentionally conflicting data chunks and I just sort of rolled my eyes and reported on whichever character I most disliked. Because they're almost all annoying as shit, I felt difficult to remain objective. I chalk this up to sub-par writing, but if this was just a clever way to point out that objectivity in surveillance is impossible, then kudos to the devs!
Characters in the game suffer from making horror movie decisions: "No, no, stupid! Why would you do that!?" For example, later in the game, a few of the people you're spying on get onto Orwell's existence. Yet they continue to talk online, and even plan a conference call. Another character lists his bank account information in his email signature (?!), which of course allows you to look at his bank statements. One person you're spying on starts talking to someone on a dating website and immediately states their first and last name. Who does that?! This of course allows you to find more about them because you have their last name.
The game is very linear, and I don't know how much your choices about what to submit to Orwell matter. I know that many times, I would leave data chunks unreported because I'd think they weren't that important or that they were inaccurate, but the game wouldn't move forward until I submitted that data chunk. Since the writing isn't great, one could easily play this game by submitting data chunks as fast as possible without reading anything. You'll end up submitting like 99% of data chunks anyway. Whenever there is data you can submit, it is automatically highlighted. This is nice so that you don't get lost trying to find information, but also, as surveillance systems do, automates your work. Are you really watching people, or are you just being told what to submit? Also, are you being watched? How wide is the scope of Orwell? What secrets does the government hide? So many questions.
All in all, Orwell is an interesting experience. The feeling of spying on people is empowering and you feel a bit like god peering into their private business. If you like gossip, you'll like this game. But it's not too exciting, definitely rough around the edges. I enjoyed the story overall. If you're interested in this kind of thing though, just go read some Wired articles. Faster, deeper, and more engaging.
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