Nier Automata and Boredom

‘The machine rotates on the same spot.’

 

Nier Automata is a hilarious, touching and heartbreaking game. It is also at times boring and typical. It is, however, in keeping with its existential themes that we consider boredom as more than something to be avoided at all costs, and, instead, a key component of video games.  

Nier Automata has quite a typical quest structure. The majority of the quests are fetch quests. Fetch quests are quite rote and tend to be the barest of covering for the actions the player is engaged in. A fetch quest gives a player a reason to do something whilst also acknowledging that the act, and not the reason, is the important part. This boring and traditional quest structure is in place, I am sure, mostly because of publishing pressures, the sort of necessary self-censorship that takes place when one works for a major publisher like Square Enix. In Nier you rarely see the items you pick up or what use they actually have. They are Mcguffins. On a few occasions, 9S comments on these quests and notes how boring they are before being chided by 2B. These moments of self-reflexivity may tend to irritate the player. Being self-aware that the quest design is boring does not stop it from being boring. Equally, by foregrounding boredom Nier makes the player aware of a certain need for boredom. With RPGs, especially, players still expect the game to last a certain number of hours and so the game requires moments of stretching, of action that is mostly meaningless and boring. But these boring moments create  familiarity with the characters and environments. Through repetition and time we build connections. In real life, I grow a certain attachment to objects, to people, purely because I have spent a lot of time with  them. It is not an aesthetic experience, but one of familiarity and comfort. Boredom creates comfort, and comfort allows new emotions to form when that comfort is removed. The zombie machines in Pascal’s sanctuary and the dead machine children has a heightened effect exactly because the camp comes to be a reprieve from combat.

The machines are the most subversive part of Nier. The player is told that they are the enemy, and will fight a number of them to the point it becomes a nit numbing and dull. However, it quickly becomes clear that something is not quite right. When the player stumbles into a machine orgy it is funny and disquieting. The machines play at being human, and the question of why they are doing so immediately reveals that all is not as it seems, that there is something below the surface.

At the beginning of the second playthrough the game foregrounds the uncomfortably human nature of the machines. The player takes control of a small and slow machine who must fill up a bucket with oil and give it to the machine’s ‘brother’. The machine is extremely slow, and once the player has picked up the bucket, caution is required to not its content. The machine will stumble over a pipe on the ground, or if one decides to jump with the bucket, which is faster than walking, the machine will fall on landing. This sequence took me an inordinate amount of time to complete. It was a slapstick joke that was pushed to the brink of frustration. In my feelings of frustration I knew that it was my own fault, that by trying to rush I was making it go slower. I then derived a feeling of pleasure from the sense that the game had preempted me, from the feeling that the game was trying to slow me down, that it was going to make me do what it wanted at its own pace.

The grand finale of Nier is frustration and boredom pushed to a limit, and then, just when it seems unbearable, there is a great moment of transcendental release.

The credits scroll for eternity, I am shooting text, my eyes begin to lose focus and I wonder if I am doing something wrong, whether I am just meant to die. Eventually I die. I decide to give it another go. I can do better. I get further but die again. Now there are messages tell me not to give up. I retry and get further, but die again. This is stupid, I think. I’ll give up if it doesn’t work this time. The screen is coated in bright bullet baubles and now something has changed. I am offered help and accept it. New ships appear and surround mine. They take the blows from bullets and perish to see me through to the end. These are other players’ save data. Their data is helping me through to the end. I have forged my way through the boredom to realise that I could not make it on my own, that I need support. This is a single player game, but I am only able to get through it thanks to other players.

I wish that I had noted down the names of the players who helped me, that I could have sent them a message of thanks.

To get the final ending of Nier Automata you must give up your save, your past, the history of what you have done. Like Christ, you destroy yourself to save others.

Hitman: A World of Fumbled Assassinations

Hitman feels at its best when you don’t have things under control, when you’ve messed up and been spotted launching a fire axe into a guy’s skull. A large group of guards are chasing you, Instinct (your Hitman-vision that unveils character locations and highlights items) shows nothing but ominous white dots and gold outlines. Then somehow you sprint from a heil of gunfire, you shimmy down a drainpipe, and find a character with a new outfit alone and exposed. You take their outfit, become a waiter or a guard, and now you have a new lease of life. The guards will moronically walk past you, nothing to see here officer just a regular waiter who looks exactly like the guy you were just chasing, and you will laugh and laugh.

It is the artificiality of the guards that makes Hitman so joyful. It is not a hyper-realistic simulator, but a puzzle game consisting of various pieces that can only act in a pre-determined manner. This manner is complex and may occasionally act unexpectedly, but it is observable and one can predict what will happen with relative certainty. The moronic guards do not act like people, but they are given dialogue that has a warmth and humour that stops them from being entirely seen as the game pieces which they are.

Visually the game world and characters are presented with a brilliant clarity, mixing visual splendour and realistic details. The bins in the Paris level even have the Mairie de Paris logo you find on bins in the actual streets of Paris, and the buildings you can see beyond the level are definitively Parisian. It creates a great sense of place, anchoring you in Paris. You are not merely exploring a mansion, but a mansion in Paris. However, there is one way that this sense of place breaks down. In every map, no matter the locale, all the non-playable characters speak English, and do so in the same few American accents. This is particularly disappointing as in Blood Money, for example, in the level set in a French opera house the characters speak French. It is an unfortunate regression and one which is possibly attributable to the tight deadlines that the episodic model requires. Ultimately, it is only an issue due to the immensely high-standards the game sets itself.

One more story. Your target is descending a staircase in an opulent Paris mansion. He is about to show himself to his adoring crowd, to greet their applause with smug satisfaction. A bald technician stands by a control mechanism linked to a chandelier. As the beaming Russian descends he briefly pauses beneath the chandelier. It falls. He is crushed. Party over, a tragic accident. The bald man who was standing by the mechanism and is now making a hasty retreat could not have had anything to do with it, oh no.

Hitman has such a depth and variety of content that I will be playing it for the foreseeable future and I anxiously await where Agent 47’s future will take him.

Asif Kapadia’s ‘Amy’: Some Brief Thoughts

Peppered throughout Asif Kapadia’s ‘Amy’ is footage of paparazzi haranguing Amy Winehouse. These moments are violent and frenetic, featuring fast cuts and multiple perspectives of the same event. They are heavily contrasted to the slow, meditative pace of the rest of the film. This serves the clear rhetorical function of heightening our disgust towards the invasive actions of these men who objectify Winehouse and do not allow her peace or privacy. The film also turns on comedians like Frankie Boyle who used Winehouse’s illness and suffering for jokes, for their own gain. It shows Mitch Winehouse’s exploitation of his daughter, his wish to make money off of her success, and his lack of concern for her wellbeing.

Never does ‘Amy’ turn this criticism inwardly, to itself. As the paparazzi and media are condemned the question is never raised as to why they are able to exist, why the public are so interested in Winehouse’s –and celebrities in general– personal life. ‘Amy’ therefore never questions us, the viewer. Why are we watching it? Can it be more than voyeurism? To do would so the film would have had to question its own reasons for existing; it would have needed to interrogate the documentary form itself, and in doing so would undermine the narrative of her life that is constructed. Winehouse becomes mythologised. There is the suggestion throughout that her talent was a kind of Faustian pact and so her death was unavoidable.

The voiceovers provided by those who knew Winehouse are overlaid on footage from when she was alive; we never see them as they speak. There is perhaps one exception as we briefly see Mos Def speaking about Winehouse, but when this was filmed is not actually noted. The film never deals with a post-death time. We hear Juliette Ashby talk over a video of a holiday with Winehouse but we never see her do so. The voiceover and the video then become concurrent and inseparable. Ashby, then, is not seen as interpreting the past after the fact but simply describing it. This is an attempt to hide the selecting and ordering process that is a part of all documentaries and so to create a naturalism to the events and the story. It is to claim objectivity.

The shots that are not repurposed footage function to detach the film itself from Winehouse and her life. Every single one, as I recall, involves an ascension of the camera away from some area connected with Winehouse. Furthermore, home footage is often paused to linger on a particular image to extend the pathos. When Winehouse’s body, at the film’s conclusion, is brought out of her home and placed into an ambulance there is a slight disjunction of time as the camera cuts between two different sources. There is a small rewind, a small repetition.

This is documentary making from above. Asif Kapadia becomes God.

Life is Strange, Episodic Video Games, and Tension

Delay is an inevitable part of episodic video games. The difficulty of this kind of delay, as opposed to that of TV shows, is that it is irregular, has not yet been standardised. It has now been more than a year since the last episode of ‘Kentucky Route Zero’. ‘Life is Strange’, thankfully, has been relatively punctual with its releases with at most a few months separating each episode, but it still has not been consistent. Even the regular week gap between episodes of ‘True Detective’ is long enough for me to begin to forget what has happened in the last episode, and so with a gap of a month or longer I have forgotten most of the particulars of the story. Every episode then begins with a period of remembering and of re-familiarisation. The difference in this process between a TV show and a game is much like the difference between taking a week off of running and taking two months off; it takes longer to get back to where you were. Delay, of course, is not only utilised inter-episode but is used in the episodes themselves. Episode 4 of ‘Life is Strange’ uses delays to create tension in a rather muddled way.

In ‘Mimesis’, Erich Auerbach contrasts the creation of tension in Homer’s’ The Odyssey’ and the Old Testament story of Abraham and Isaac. In ‘The Odyssey’ there is a lessening of tension through the frequent digressions which take over the reader’s attention. There remains an element of waiting, of suspense, but the reader is directed away from the soon to be announced reveal, the catharsis, to another story, and so this delay no longer feels like a delay, like waiting, but is rather an active moment. In contrast, there is not easing of tension in the story of Abraham and Isaac until the very end, the absolute moment of catharsis. Auerbach suggests that this difference is due to the different effects that each text is hoping to deploy; Homer aiming to comfort the reader with entertainment, while the Old Testament with its ideological aims wishes to convince the reader of its truth, and so tension is used for rhetorical ends.

In episode 4 of ‘Life is Strange’, there is confusion between a lessening of tension and increasing it, particularly in the end of the world party event. This moment follows the seemingly revelatory discoveries of the ‘dark room’ and of Rachel Amber’s body, with Nathan Prescott the suggested murderer. Max and Chloe consequently go to the party in search of Nathan, Chloe’s intention, it seems, being to murder him. The end of the world party is then heavily juxtaposed in tone to what has come immediately before and what may be still to come. The party partially offers a sort of Homeric relief of tension. The reoccurring gag of Max saving Alyssa from getting hit returns here, as one can rewind time to stop her getting knocked into the swimming pool. It is a familiar moment that serves to comfort, to offer comedic relief and an escape into a time before Rachel Amber’s body was found, a time of possibility and greater hope. The party itself, moreover, offers humorous aid from the grave tension. As with almost all video game representations of parties, this party is an absurd caricature of flailing limbs, grotesque contortions, solo shufflers and empty spaces. It is a great example of one of my personal grievances with the game; none of the A.I characters seem to be aware of each other. They are either set dressing or simply waiting there for Max to come and address them, but she can only ever talk to one person at a time, anyone else around Max’s conversational partner remain resolutely silent. Perhaps they are just shy.

Yet, throughout this scene the relief that the comedy allows is never able to settle, to last. In near enough every conversation Max is told that she looks serious –there is not enough nuance in her model to convey this and so we must be told – and so we are reminded what has come before, why she is serious. Every conversation offers the option of asking about Nathan Prescott and so the goal, the anticipated confrontation, lingers on the periphery, waiting. Yet, once we overcome the blockade and enter into the VIP area, where it is assumed that Nathan must be, it is quickly apparent that he is not there. Will he come? There are more people to talk to. You can warn Victoria about Nathan, if you wish to. Nathan isn’t there. You must leave, there’s nothing else to do. The game stalls, pauses. Mr Jefferson is announcing the winner of the everyday hero’s competition. Max and Chloe wait, Max wants to see who won. Mr Jefferson asks for a drum roll, the clichéd symbol of anticipation, but as he makes the announcement that Victoria has won he undoes any idea of there every being any tension by commenting that the result is no surprise, everyone knew Victoria was going to win. This appears as a self-reflexive comment on the nature of tension or suspense: it is only worthwhile if the result at the end is unexpected.

From here Max and Chloe return to the junkyard, to Amber’s corpse, to Nathan they believe. You follow Chloe –Max uses her phone as a flashlight, a nice touch—she goes right to the body, they both face it, something moves behind them, Max is injected with something, is dazed, Chloe exclaims something in shock, she is shot, is dead, it is Mr Jefferson, the end, black, next time, Max is in the Dark Room, trapped by Mr Jefferson, the end. It is a breathless last five minutes to the episode. In the junkyard there is no pause, no jokes; only taut tension, and the shock of an unexpected reveal. The tension does not end, however, we are left wondering what is next for Max; Chloe can’t be dead, surely? Now there is only waiting, a month or more. I feel a great sense of excitement as to what will come because I do not know, too many threads are loose, but this will only last a few days more. I will forget, will become hazy of the details, and when the next episode arrives will have to be reminded, reacquainted. This is why I write. To get something solid down, some approximation of my feelings in the immediate wake. This writing eases my own tension, satisfies that which the game has not yet satisfied, controls and lessens the unknown.

Now to forget.

Nothing to See

There was not a man in a black suit driving a white van away from a crime scene.

This man did not speed through a red light without stopping. There was no man to do so.

There was not a man in a grey track suit driving a silver Mercedes away from a crime scene.

There was not a woman dressed head to toe in black.

There was not an elderly lady dressed in florals.

Was there a crime scene? What was the crime?

I was told a young woman was attacked by an ex. Ex-boyfriend, husband, platonic friend? I don’t know. An ex.

She’s in hospital now, alive, just about. That’s what I heard anyway.

The man escaped. He was not wearing a black suit. He was not wearing anything. He was wearing something, but no one can remember what. If he was actually wearing nothing it would not have been forgotten.

I saw it all happen. Not it all, not the cause, not their relationship, whatever it may have been, before the attack.

I know what could have happened or should have happened.

The man is wearing a black suit, no tie, a white shirt with navy buttons. He has a generic short back and sides haircut, a number two I’d say. His shoes are black and dull, in need of a polish. He has no visible scars, tattoos, or piercings, which is not to say he doesn’t have any at all just that they’re not visible. The eyes are blue, almost grey, milky but not quite. Dark circles lie below both of them. The nose is distinct, strong, powerful, foreboding, worrying. The mouth turns downwards. The weight of all this causes the chin to sag.

The man calls the woman’s name. ‘Milly!’ he says in a voice that is not normally his. It all sounds quite absurd, the frilliness of ‘Milly’ and this artificially gruff voice. It’s all phony, fake, fraudulent.

She turns, her face is obscured. It is frightened. He approaches. His mouth moves. He says something I can’t hear in the absurd voice. They are half a foot away from one another. The back of the man tenses, the head lurches forward, collides with the other head, a body falls, legs flail, there are cries, the man his nose, head and legs all evacuate.

I did not see this. It did happen just like this.

A Wasted Day

Bryan woke up at 11:48am. It was Sunday and after a long week of work he deserved a lie-in. The house was silent as he walked to the shower. He showered for a long time, exactly how long I don’t know, didn’t think to check; I don’t time his showers, the room filled with steam, the mirrors fogged up. Byran got dressed; it was the first warm day of the year so he decided he could go without a coat. He didn’t really have anywhere to go but it would a shame to waste such a nice day. Even by going out he was wasting it, truth be told.

It was quiet out, windless; there was a distant sound of cars and other sounds that were not cars: the two great categories of sound in any city – transport and other. Quiet, too quiet, Bryan thought jokingly. It wasn’t too quiet; rather, all the sound was being made elsewhere, out of sight, and too far away for the direction to be pinpointed. He kept on walking and made it to the main road. Whitstable Road, I think, it was, I guess it was. The road was empty. I mean there were no cars. It wasn’t literally empty; the signs were still there and houses still lined the street. It was probably just road works or something like that. You never go straight to the worst option, like say there was a nuclear holocaust and our Bryan was the last man on earth (couldn’t imagine anyone worse), and if you do you don’t let yourself believe it completely. Anyway, there had not been a nuclear holocaust yet. At the end of the road walking towards the city centre was the usual crowd of people. There were men, women, and children; some were young, some old, some had brown hair, some had none at all; some walked on two legs, some did not; some people were there and some were absent. Just like a normal day.

“I’ll go look in the book shop then go get some lunch”, Bryan might have thought to himself.  He walked into the small bookshop with the small wonky door, ducking as he always did. A noise that resembled ‘hi’ but was not quite right left his mouth and fell limply on the floor near the elderly lady working the till. She did not notice him and carried on doing nothing. He walked to the back of the shop and scoured the same shelves that had some slightly different books as he always did. He had not developed an efficient process for searching the shelves and tended to look arbitrarily until he found a name he recognised. Today, he grabbed a copy of B.S Johnson’s ‘Christie Malry’s Own Double Entry’, a book he had read and adored, and read the first few lines before putting it back. ‘Christie Malry was a simple person’ begins Johnson’s book, not as simple as Bryan, of course, who does not even have a surname. He looked at these books for a good ten minutes. He picked up Bolano’s ‘The Savage Detectives’, put it down again, picked it up again, this was the moment of truth: for if he put it down again he could not pick it up again, one just does not do that three times. £1.99 was too good a deal to pass up for a book that might be or should be great, he’d never read any Bolano but he was sure he was good because smarter people than he had said so. He paid, said ‘cheers’ in an assertive tone that did not fit the situation at all, and left the shop, not before banging his head on the door frame.

Where he went for lunch, if he even did, is something of a mystery. I lost track of him. You see, there was this dog… I tried to find him again and failed so I went back to his house and waited there. He came back at 3:37pm and excitedly placed the Bolano on his shelf with his other unread books. That was Sunday. He spent the rest of the day looking at his laptop.

The Witcher 3: Doings Things You Don’t Want To

Sequels are more, they are a continuation, a sign that the previous instalment was not enough, is not finished. More guns, more explosions, more hours, more of everything is something like a mantra for video game sequels, and sequels in general. At what point, however, does more become a surplus, too much?

With The Witcher 2 : Assassins of Kings CD Projekt Red did not give themselves up entirely to simply adding more. The innovation of the The Witcher 2 was a branching story determined by an early game choice which caused there to be two distinct Witcher 2s. Consequently, each path was shorter than the length of the first game; there were fewer areas to explore, fewer quests. The game was simultaneously less and more. To get more you now had to play through the game twice on each side and so repetition, replaying, was coded into this need for more; you had to surmount the old to get to the new.

Now, in the Witcher 3, this repetition is the more. The huge maps are now littered with a seemingly infinite number of question marks that lead to one of four events: typically a monster’s nest or a bandit’s camp, and rarely a place of power or a person in distress (essentially the same as a bandit’s camp but there is a person in a cage to be freed). These small moments can often spark other quests if you find a letter informing you of some nearby treasure, for example, or an encounter with a rare monster. These are rarely satisfying and involve no effort or thought.

This is not an issue exclusive to the side quests. The main quests often falter with dull dialogue, and mundane go-get-this-item-and-come-back actions. Then suddenly, out of the blue, it will turn on a single moment of actually interesting dialogue, or a piece of genuinely beautiful cinematography. This is the central dilemma and intrigue of The Witcher 3: it’s astoundingly inconsistent and, therefore, the absolute inability to know which quests will be worthwhile and which will not. The game hits an early peak with the culmination of the Bloody Baron quest line and then falls into mundanity for quite a while. It cannot sustain a consistent high quality of writing and quest design and so the peaks, the genuinely worthwhile moments, come entirely by surprise.

The most prominent example of this I have discovered is a side quest with Yennefer in which she, with Geralt’s aid, is looking for a djinn. The player must dive into the water three times to look for an item. It is boring and awkward. Geralt, it is revealed, had previously made a wish that he and Yennefer would always be together. The authenticity of their relationship is then doubted by Yennefer. How can she know if it is truly love or simply the djinn’s magic? Intrigue begins to form; there are ideas to play with now. As the item is found they are transported to the djinn’s location: a boat atop a mountain. It is a striking moment so much so that my surprise led me to fall off of the mountain. The djinn is then fought, it is an ephemeral abstract head that looks great, is a new atypical monster. After it is defeated Geralt and Yennefer sit and chat, sitting over the edge of the ship. The camera, for a moment, shows only their feet dangling in the air as if this was an indie film about two teenage lovers. After they announce their love to one and other (if they do, you can choose not to) the camera slowly and lovingly pans over the skyline: we are joined with them in the appreciation of the beauty. Then the quest is over, we are dropped back into the world to find something else to do, something that will hopefully match the quality of that quest, and most likely it won’t.

This leads to periods where nothing provoking is discovered, I begin to skip through the dialogue, sprint to whatever marker is on my map, and return for my reward again skipping the dialogue. I am bored. At these times I wonder if it is really worth going on, if my time would be better served doing anything else at all, but the next quest may be the one with another new conceit, some funny dialogue, or a genuinely touching moment of humanity. The possibility carries me on, helps me to drag myself through the mire of yet another drowner’s nest.

The Witcher 3 is wildly inconsistent, is downright broken in some fundamental cases, and yet I cannot stop, do not want to stop, playing it because the peaks it hits can be dizzyingly high. The pits look particularly low in comparison but I look out of them in the knowledge and trust that it will get better.

Her Story: Some Thoughts

‘The book read from beginning to end like a good child. You’ve probably noticed already that he gets less and less worried about joining the parts together, that business of one’s words leading to another’ 

Hopscotch, Julio Cortázar

Even Drinking is a Struggle

He just wanted a drink but they wouldn’t let him, the fuckers. He’d look up and they’d look away, pretending that they weren’t looking, but he knew better.  You don’t own me. You do. They were always looking, waiting, hoping that he’d put the water bottle to his mouth, and then they’d laugh. Look at him! What an embarrassment! He wouldn’t give them the satisfaction, no he wouldn’t. So he wouldn’t drink, even though he wanted to, even though they wanted him to. He’d wait until he was back alone. They laughed anyway.

The Demands of Dark Souls

Dark Souls is a reaction to modern game design and modernity in general. It’s difficult in an era where games are designed to be finished by anyone. It requires total concentration in a world where we usually have our eyes set on multiple screens at any one time. Dark Souls hardly makes sense as a modern video-game and that’s what makes it so great.

 Much of the difficulty in Dark Souls is born out of the repetition that the game requires. An enemy will kill you numerous times but in doing so you learn the attack patterns and the strategies to eventually defeat it. From each death there is a sense of improvement, as you become better acquainted with the enemies’ move-set and starting doing more damage to their seemingly endless health bar. This stops it from feeling banal and tedious. However, each attempt at a boss fight requires the player to traverse an area over which they have already triumphed.   The urge to get back there quickly will often lead to running past enemies on the path and rushing, which can lead to more deaths. This leads to the player wanting to rush more and so being more likely to die.

 Dark Souls is not hard just from being repetitive, it’s also difficult as it is unflinchingly punishing. A single mistimed roll or a missed attack will almost always result in a large chunk of health being taken from you. Yet, this never feels unfair. Partially, because it is typically due to your own mistakes, but also because, when at full health, the vast majority of attacks are survivable. There are a few exceptions to this, but mostly making a mistake is something that can be recovered from with a swig from an estus flask. Doing so is a tough task as there is the added tension of knowing that a single error will lead to the dreaded ‘You Died’ screen. The timing of when to use the estus flask is then crucial as there is a desire to use it immediately in order to have the comfort of a fuller health bar, but this often leaves the player vulnerable to another attack. Again, this is Dark Souls trying to stop the player from rushing and to slow down.

Furthermore, Dark Souls requires constant attention. The game cannot be paused in the middle of action. There are areas that are designated (the bonfires) as being safe, these are infrequent though. Every corner poses a threat and so the player must constantly be on guard and prepared. It is not only enemies that are a danger as there are numerous environmental dangers, ranging from precarious ledges to the cacophony of pressure plates and swinging axes that inhabit Sen’s Fortress. Giving Dark Souls anything less than your full attention will invariably result in death. Glancing at a phone screen may mean an enemy can get one devastating attack living the player on the precipice of death. The pressure ratchets up, the tension rises and a simply fight has immediately transformed into a near death experience. This absolute, undivided attention that Dark Souls constantly demands is hugely opposed to half-attention that most media requires.

You have to give your all to Dark Souls to even stand a chance.