Microgenre Moment: Baggy

Ever wanted to throw down some obscure music knowledge to impress friends and strangers alike?  In Microgenre Moment I try my best pass along some basic Wikipedia overviews and links to relevant videos to get you up to speed on a specific sub-sub-genre of music.  I guarantee these posts will grant you the intellectual high ground in your next music-centered conversation.

"Baggy was a British dance-oriented music genre popular in the late 1980s and early 1990s. The scene was heavily influenced by Madchester, although it was not geographically confined to Manchester. Many Madchester bands could also be described as Baggy, and vice versa. Baggy was characterised by psychedelia- and acid house-influenced guitar music, often with a funky drummer beat, similar to the work of the Happy Mondays, Northside and The Stone Roses. The scene was named after the loose-fitting clothing worn by the bands and fans."

"Bands in the indie-dance era of pop music can be divided into two camps; the acts who could be described as baggy (usually the Madchester acts and a few others such as Flowered Up from London) — and those who can be described as indie-dance (i.e. Jesus Jones, who were more techno inspired). Some baggy bands disappeared after the scene was no longer popular, and others evolved into indie rock or Britpop bands who remained popular throughout the 1990s. The Charlatans are a good examples of an ex-baggy band who retained their popularity, although little trace of the baggy sound and look remained. The baggy style became eclipsed by the grunge and Britpop genres, with many of the lesser bands forgotten."

Review: Rayman Origins (Wii)

Let's get the critical evaluation out of the way: Rayman Origins is a fun, smartly-designed 2-D platformer that strikes a balance between the charm and detail of Kirby's Epic Yarn with the trial and error, twitch challenge of Super Meat Boy.  Sounds pretty good, right?  For the most part, it is.  Game reviewers have heaped near-universal praise upon the title using phrases like "wonderfully crafted," "gorgeous," and "controls perfectly."  I agree with all of these, and yet, Rayman Origins still comes off a bit empty.  The only reason I can think of for this disparity was the difficulty I had empathizing with the ragtag group of bohemian shit disturbers that serve as the game's protagonists.  This disconnect effectively eliminated my attachment to the characters' motivations and relegated the game to a product of craft rather than a work of art.

I do fear that this opinion could brand me as some kind of humorless square, but characters who have been created solely for mischief usually rub me the wrong way.  I have always been pretty straight-laced, staying organized and avoiding trouble whenever possible.  In elementary school, I observed conflicts and elicit conversations from a safe distance, honing my "excellent listener" skills overhearing discussions of cigarettes and R-rated movies.  I hated Michelangelo from Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles because he was the idiot who always dragged the others into avoidable hostile situations.  So, when Rayman Origins opened with the full cast of layabouts harmonizing beatnik music via chewing and snoring noises that essentially annoyed the neighbors into retaliation, I felt less like exacting revenge and more thankful that somebody said something.

At least in Mario games Nintendo fabricates a premise of "rescue" for your quest.  You might not desperately need to save the princess, but you assume Mario probably does, so you oblige.  The "white knight" stereotype isn't what makes the character interesting or believable – on its own the characterization is quite shallow.  It does set a stage for you to quickly get behind the protagonist's motivation though.  This works for morally ambiguous protagonists too, just using different criteria to match the context.  In contrast Rayman and his friends are a bunch of hedonists, apathetic to current affairs except when their collective buzz is at stake.  It's like playing a game where a small party of stoners embark on a quest to find the nearest convenience store and eat day-old taquitos.  Actually, nevermind, I'd totally give that game a shot too.

The fluidity of Rayman Origins' level design and platforming controls largely make up for the shortcomings in plot establishment, but only to the extant that great mechanics can reach on their own. The moment-to-moment satisfaction in Rayman Origins is quite high.  Levels are designed for smooth runs if played precisely.  If the sensation of speed was faster you might think you were playing the Sonic the Hedgehog sequel that never was.  Better yet, you never feel like the characters are out of your control.  If you screw up, there's always something you could have done better.  After all your hard work, finally you reach the end of the level and the camera zooms in to show Rayman thrusting his limbless torso around, mouth agape.  This guy again.  In the scene that follows, one of Rayman's big-nosed pals straddles an incredibly phallic test tube as it fills up with all of the Lums (yellow, glowing collectables) you found in the level.  When other reviewers talk about this game being "unmistakably French," this is what they're actually referring to.

So what am I left with in Rayman Origins but an excellent product of gameplay craft, shouldering an otherwise driveless game.  It's a shame because so many pieces are in place for Rayman Origins to be a certifiable work of art, but it falls short on a holistic level.  The mechanics that are present are rich, but they're not deep.  The game doesn't invite immersion – I got burned out after few levels each time I came back to it.  It's great that Ubisoft recently published a strikingly similar game for mobile devices, since Rayman Origins' structure is better tuned to short gameplay bursts over long-form, sit-down experiences.  If a game/painting/song doesn't ultimately provoke questions or reflection or welcome a more intimate play of engagement, then it's just serving a specifically crafted entertainment experience.  Sometimes that's exactly what I want, but I had higher hopes for Rayman Origins.

We can talk "art v craft" inconclusively for longer than it takes to play Rayman Origins, so let's just consider the established critical baselines as laid out by Enlightenment philosopher Immanuel Kant.  To state it plainly, Kant divided art objects into "fine art," "agreeable art," and "craft."  A great deal of intricacy goes into these categorical assignments, but the easiest way to distinguish them from one another is by the purpose of the object in question.  Craft objects serve direct practical purposes: cups are vessels for water.  Agreeable art serves to entertain: a well-written joke incites laughter.  Fine art seeks to act as, well, art: a video installation provokes a play with ideas.  Many individuals hold fast against Kant's distinctions between art, craft, and entertainment, but institutions of the art world (museums, galleries, and art schools) still hang on to them as guideposts for taste.

Games, and obviously video games, weren't a part of this discussion in the 18th century, but Rayman Origins was clearly built for entertainment.  That said, entertainment itself could be interpreted as a practical purpose too, thus placing the game into the "craft" category as well.  You could argue that even if I absolutely adored Rayman and his buds, the game would still be "agreeable," not "fine," art.  Who knows whether that would actually be true though?  If art was just a matter of pushing sliders more to the left or right, then the answers to these questions would be obvious.  But I digress.  My point isn't to trudge around in semantic minutiae, but simply to concretize why my time with Rayman Origins left me lukewarm when most signs within and around the game seemed to be pointing in a more prestigious direction.

I want games that match the mechanical challenge they're so clearly capable of with intellectual challenge, or at least stimulation. I'd love to see developers use the gameplay systems from Rayman Origins as building blocks.  The side-scrolling action/platformer can be considered perfected at this point.  That's a milestone achievement, and deserving of serious praise, along with the economical UBIart framework used to create Rayman Origins' visual assets.  But what of it?  I've spent years playing games where I move a character to the right, so here's hoping that the next Rayman game will return the favor and actually move me.

Gold Skulltulla on Medium Difficulty

Hey there.  I wrote a review of Xenoblade Chronicles for Wii, and the folks over at gaming blog Medium Difficulty were kind enough to publish it.  Here it is!  In the review I examine the role that extensive game length has in terms of interactive storytelling.  Hope you like it, and thanks for reading.

Review: Digital: A Love Story (Mac)

It's often taken for granted that people who play a lot of video games know a lot about technology.  I'll attest that there is generally aptitude in these circles beyond that of the non-gamer crowd, but it's not something that comes entirely natural.  Maybe I'm just being defensive because I was always late to the party on so many aspects of new and emerging technological trends in the past 3 decades.  I didn't send an email or use AIM until I started college in 2002.  Same goes for having a cell phone for more than emergency calls.  I would have needed to be unrealistically aware of the personal computer scene at a very early age to feel nostalgic about the interface of the Amie Workbench, an Amiga analogue, and Bulletin Board System (BBS) communications represented in the game, Digital: A Love Story.  Since I wasn't, few of the game's techie in-jokes and references stick.  However, since Digital places you in a sort of 1988 simulation mode, the unfamiliarity lent itself to a more personally authentic experience.

You begin Digital as a someone who's using, for all intents and purposes, the Internet for the first time, but through the very limited lens of the Amie Workbench.  Visually, the game is the computer screen: everything fits the blue/white/orange color scheme, the monitor has heavy scanlines, and the cursor is a big, fat, red arrow.  You receive a message from a friend of your dad that tells you what to do to get on BBSes and chatting with folks.  Where instructions in a game can often remove you from the experience, here everything is presented in proper context and actually reads like messages real people would send.  Because the connection between using a computer to play and the game virtualizing a specific operating system is so direct, very little suspension of disbelief is needed to jump into the narrative.

As the title suggests, Digital is a love story, but it's also a mystery.  You're introduced to the "love interest" character, *Emilia, early on, and when she disappears, it's up to you to figure out what happened.  The narrative convention, which is also the primary game mechanic, is the exchange of BBS posts and private messages.  Everyone you interact with has a unique voice and motivation, creating conversations that reach far beyond typical NPC fare.  You never actually type any messages, instead simply hitting reply and reading contacts' responses.  This string of communication works best when you're in "conversation" with one or two other people and the back and forth is readily apparent.  At other times you'll just callously reply or send PMs to everyone on your list, making sure you're doing everything necessary to trigger the text that will allow you to progress further in the story.  The introduction to *Emilia follows the better of those two paths, and though it's clear that I was just messaging a fictional character as part of an interactive short story, I did develop an attachment to that character; enough of an attachment to drive the mystery plot forward with a degree of urgency.

The writing in Digital is very consistent, believable, and emotionally affecting.   Digital's designer and author, Christine Love, bills herself as a writer first, and it shows.  That's meant as a compliment to her writing skills, not a knock on her game design abilities.  Truly well written games are few and far between, but even fewer are as dependent on quality writing as Digital.  Characters' messages vary in articulation and sophistication, as you'd expect from a bunch of random people on the Internet.  I'm reminded of Gus Van Sant's teenager-starring Paranoid Park for how real its characters felt despite, or perhaps because of, the amateur statuses of its actors.  Love is likewise able to find a tone that is reflective of the production process, and somehow more authentic in doing so. 

Digital plops you into the world of BBSes, stranger-in-a-strange-land style.  Yes, there's a missing person mystery to solve, but navigating the uncharted online world is a mysterious voyage in its own right.  Imagine a game that has a clear story objective, but in order to proceed you need to drive a tractor, and before you can drive the it you have to figure out how it works.  Do you need keys to start it?  Where are the keys?  Which lever is for reverse?  Oh wait, does this run on gas?!  BBSes are just as foreign to me as tractors, and I appreciated how Digital didn't assume any prior knowledge.  If there's a tendency nowadays to forget just how open the Internet is, typing in phone numbers in hopes of connecting to a heretofore unseen places is a healthy reminder.  No one even dials numbers to place phone calls anymore, further distancing us from the real technological processes happening in the background.  If you did hand-dial phone numbers, you might mess up and call a random bystander by mistake.  In Digital, instead of hanging up and correcting the error, every number has an unknown on the other end; there's a sense of discovery.

The feeling of openness makes for an ideal learning space, which goes as much for the in-game world as the one outside of it.  Digital teaches you about BBSes and early Internet history through message texts, but in allowing you to actually dial the numbers and direct message other users, you learn by doing.  The mystery/love story paces you through the learning process, heightening the meaning behind your actions.  Later on, the Internet "history lesson" takes some sensationalist turns, but it makes for a great moment of culmination when you finally gain access to the fabled University BBS where they don't just have direct messages, they have email!  A story that's willing to go a little over the top is helpful to make up for the potential dryness of a game centered around an archaic computer interface. The online communications depicted in Digital remain the foundation that our modern Internet is built upon, reminding us of the vast expanses available to users at increasing speeds and densities.  It's up to us to make the stories real.

Digital: A Love Story is available to download for free here.