Introduction, Immersion, and Bloodlines

Hi. Welcome. Come in, grab a drink, stay awhile.

Why do we play video games? It’s a question all serious gamers should ask themselves at some point. What is it about video games that makes them special? What can we get out of them that we can’t get from any other medium? Are they really just mindless wastes of our time or do they have some real value, artistic or otherwise?

I could be really lazy and answer these questions by linking to a youtube video that explains it better than I can, so I will. But I’ll also try to provide my own explanation, partially to feed my own ego, but also in case you’re as boring as I am and enjoy reading the opinions of some random dude on the internet. Opinions about video games, no less. God, you’re boring.

So. Why do we play video games? There may be as many reasons as there are gamers, but many of those reasons can be boiled down to two schools of thought: ludology and narratology. If you’re genuinely interested in this dichotomy, I will tell you now that this is not the place to be. I am a card-carrying narratologist—in other words, I view games primarily as a blossoming narrative art form. This is not to say that I believe the ludology side of the debate has no merit; quite the contrary. I am simply more interested in using this blog to explore the storytelling possibilities of video games, so most of what you’re going to get here in terms of ludological analysis will be limited and overly generalized.

 Long story short, we can understand and evaluate video games in one of two basic ways: as an abstract medium, emphasizing “game-ish” qualities, i.e. challenges to overcome, mechanics to learn and master, competitive depth (ludology), or as a burgeoning storytelling form, with gameplay functioning in concert with narrative aspects, i.e. exploration of an environment, dialogue and setting, characterization and motivation through gameplay (narratology). Yes, obviously there are games like Dear Esther where the only thing vaguely resembling "gameplay" is the ability to move around, and there are games like Tetris, with no real story to speak of (although if I were feeling particularly obnoxious I'm pretty sure I could argue that Tetris is one big metaphor for the inevitable prevailing of personal greed in unmonitored self-sufficient communities and dangers of true free-market capitalism, but I won't). And clearly the overwhelming majority of games fall somewhere in between. The distinction between ludology and narratology is not meant to separate games and gamers into two camps, or to say that all games should be a certain way, but is meant to distinguish between two unique yet related approaches regarding video game theory.

You’re not here for a debate, though. You’re here to listen to me rant impotently about stuff. This is the internet, so the most important thing in the world is what I think. And the question of why I think videogames matter can be answered in one word: immersion. Video games have the power to immerse players into their worlds to a degree unachievable by any other medium. They have the power to make the player feel personally involved in the events happening on the screen, to confront the player with dilemmas and force them to think critically about how they would act in a similar scenario, to make the player feel like they have a personal stake in what happens to their avatar. They have the power to make the player forget he’s but a cog in a soulless corporate machine, working 9-5 at some dead-end cubicle grind and watching his liberal arts degree gather dust. And that’s if he’s lucky. #totallynotbitteratall #hatemyselfformakinghashtagjoke

Sure, there are plenty of books and movies that are moving and make you think or whatever, and from a pure consumption standpoint, they’re generally much better at it. But games have the unique advantage of combining those tried-and-true storytelling methods with gameplay, inextricably linking the player’s personality and actions with their virtual worlds. In a video game, a player can be doing nothing more than moving a dot forward, with no dialogue or apparent “story” whatsoever, and still experience things like tragedy and hopelessness. No, seriously, that’s an actual game: look up Freedom Bridge, it’s a free flash game that takes about 2 minutes to play. It features nothing more than a couple sound effects and some crude, MS paint-like drawings and it has made grown men weep.

This is Freedom Bridge.

You probably get the idea by now, but just to waste more of your time I’m going to illustrate my point with an anecdote from a game I recently played for the first time. It’s a 2004 PC action/role-playing game called Vampire: the Masquerade—Bloodlines, and you really ought to play it. And if you do, you really ought to install the unofficial patch first, as it’s admittedly bugged to hell and back in its vanilla form. I promise it’s worth it though—it’s easily one of the best RPGs I’ve ever played, warts and all. Way better than anything Bioware has done in the past 3 years or so, anyway. 

This is Bloodlines.

Alright, so here’s the setup (very minor spoilers incoming). After creating a character, you are immediately thrust into the bloody intrigues of underground vampire society in modern-day Los Angeles. A victim of circumstance and newly “born” vampire yourself, you are almost immediately sentenced to execution for purely bureaucratic reasons, and subsequently spared for purely bureaucratic reasons (don’t worry, this is all in the intro cutscene). Cue lots of political struggle, complex characters, moral ambiguity, supernatural mystery, and good-old-fashioned violence. It’s kind of like Quentin Tarantino and True Blood had a really glitchy baby that was rushed out of the womb about a month early by Dr. Activision. And no, it's not "like Twilight," get out of here with that, come on. It's, like...the anti-Twilight.

So the backdrop isn’t all that different from most modern-day vampire fiction, but there’s one major element unique to Vampire: the Masquerade (both the game and the tabletop RPG that spawned it). It’s called--shocker--the masquerade. The masquerade is the set of laws vampires must follow in order to keep their presence a secret from humans: don’t drink blood with witnesses around, don’t use things like superhuman speed in public, that sort of thing. One law in particular prevents new vampires from making any contact with people they knew in their former lives. As far as the rest of the world is concerned, you are no more. Oh, and if you violate the masquerade enough times, you are executed and the game ends, just like that.

Welcome to Bloodlines.

About halfway through the game, the player character is sent to Hollywood by his or her superior to do detective things and stuff. By this point, the character has become proficient in their vampire abilities, fully embracing their vampiric nature. What’s important here is that the increase in the character’s abilities as a vampire is mirrored by the player having learned the mechanics of the game and growing comfortable in the character’s shoes. Both player and character have spent half the game adjusting to being a vampire, and both are now quite used to it, comfortable with it, good at it.

Hollywood.

Anyway, while walking through the streets of Hollywood, you encounter a woman named Samantha, who claims to recognize you (she doesn’t know you’re a vampire though). She tells you that your friends and family had given up hope—when you disappeared completely for so long without contacting anyone, they thought you had died. If your character is persuasive enough, he or she can convince Samantha that she has the wrong person; if not, as in my case, Samantha tells you that everything’s going to be ok, and asks you to wait while she makes a phone call, letting another former friend of yours  know you’re alive and well. 

Samantha.

At this point, the player can either let Samantha make the call, which results in a masquerade violation, or physically stop her from doing so. The only way for my character to do this was to kill her. I had violated the masquerade a few times already, and I knew I would be in deep shit if I let her make that call. So I panicked, I acted on instinct.

I ran the hell away.

I ran away from Samantha, I ran away from the masquerade, mostly I just ran. In pure gameplay terms, what I did made no sense. Another violation wasn’t going to end my game, but it would put me on extremely thin ice. Killing her, on the other hand, would have had practically nothing in the way of gameplay consequences. But I couldn’t. She was nothing but a piece of code, and I couldn’t bring myself to kill her. I knew she was a friend to my character once, and that was all I needed. At the same time, I couldn’t stay around her any longer. No catching up, no coffee, nothing. That life was over. I was something else now, and Samantha would never see me again.

After ditching Samantha, I wandered the streets of Hollywood for a time, trying to decide where to go next. All around me were garish advertisements, trashy strip clubs, run-down motels, neon lights, hobos, punks, hookers, goths, dropouts, yuppies, weirdos. Everything, everywhere was a monument to the humanity that I was running from, that I would never again know. And throughout this whole sequence, I heard this:

And people say video games can’t be art.

So yeah, I really, really like Bloodlines (and yes I’m a pretentious ass, thanks for asking). But this sequence is far from being unique in its immersion, or even one of the better examples I could think of. In fact, I could name several other moments from the same game alone which, while more scripted, are even better. A journey through a condemned oceanside hotel comes to mind, or an encounter with a dying girl in a hospital, or Jeanette…well, just…Jeanette. 

There's a reason she's on the cover,
and it's not (entirely) what you think it is.

I guess my point in all this is that gaming is absolutely full of these kinds of experiences, and to me, that’s why video games matter. Also play Bloodlines. It's fun, deep, clever, terrifying, brilliantly written, dripping with atmosphere, and it's one of the few truly adult games out there. And I don't just mean what normally passes for "mature" in games, AKA blood and tits, although it certainly has plenty of both to go around (to be fair, I mean...vampires). Oh, and if you don't mind the game spoiling its own plot for you, or constant absurdist humor, play as a Malkavian. It's one of the most bizarre, insane, and hilarious video game experiences you'll ever have, right up there with Portal and Psychonauts.

Alright, so I’m not going to make any promises about updating this blog regularly, because I’m really lazy, and the last time I tried this it fell flat on its face. But assuming I can motivate myself to do so, the next few posts will deal with other immersion-related topics. Probably. I may also talk about music on here, since that’s what I do, or movies or whatever, but for the time being this is primarily a blog centered around video games, and the analysis, theory, and appreciation thereof. Because I like to sound smart or something.

It’s finally starting to feel like fall. Woooo.