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ctrl+alt+defeatjul 2012

Seven Games. Stuff.

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contentsctrl+alt+defeatIssue 7 (Jul 2012) Addictionctrl+alt+publish

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Dilyan Damyanov, Vanya Damyanova

Dilyan Damyanov

Vanya Damyanova, Brad Galloway, Brendan Keogh, Amanda Lange, Kris Ligman, Dan Weissenberger

Dilyan Damyanov

Declan Merriman, Cliff Nord-man, John-Paul Verkamp, Calypso, e-Magine Art, Gamekiller48, GothicCarsUrban, rusvaplauke

Calypso

Alex Mitchell

artist & photographer index1, 46 gamekiller48.deviantart.com4-7 flickr.com/photos/emagineart9-15 gothiccarsurban.deviantart.com16-19 flickr.com/photos/declanmerriman20-27 flickr.com/photos/rusvaplauke29-33 emptysamurai.deviantart.com34-39 nuclearoctober.deviantart.com41 flickr.com/photos/jpverkamp42-45 flickr.com/photos/cliffnordman

contactdilyan@ctrlaltdefeat.mevanya@ctrlaltdefeat.mehttp://ctrlaltdefeat.me/@ctrlaltdefeatme

support usIf you like ctrl+alt+defeat, there are several ways to help make it. You can buy stuff from our Amazon store at bit.ly/cadstore, donate via the appropriate button on our homepage ctrlaltdefeat.me, or contribute to future issues by submitting to the editor’s email above. Thank you! You make this so worthwhile!

disclaimerEvery effort has been made to ensure that all artwork and texts used in this issue are either licenced under a Creative Commons license or permission has been obtained from the copyright holder. We’re sorry for any mistakes we might have made.Unless it is somebody else’s artwork or text, all content in this issue is licenced under a Creative Commons-Attribution-Non-commercial license.

4 BRAD GALLAWAY reports of publish-

ers around the world falling victim

to a new addiction, DLC 8 KRIS LIG-

MAN looks into her past to explain her

present-day HOARD INSTINCT in SKYRIM

16 VANYA DAMYANOVA wonders whether

videogames are so bad for you as to

warrant treatment. do we need a GAM-

ERS ANONYMOUS? 20 BRENDAN KEOGH

compares JUST CAUSE 2 to COMFORT FOOD

28 ALEX MITCHELL brings FABLE II

to life with a set of beautiful labels

of in-game drinks 34 CALYPSO takes

inspiration from FALLOUT 3 for an awe-

some cosplay session 40 AMANDA LANGE

writes about the long-lasting rela-

tionship between games and alcohol in

GAMING UNDER THE INFLUENCE 42 the

morbid DAN WEISSENBERGER counts the

bodies he leaves behind while playing

UNCHARTED 2

3

faces

Brendan Keogh is a PhD student at RMIT Univer-sity, Melbourne, and a freelance videogame critic. His writing has appeared in Edge, Ars Tech-nica, Kill Screen, Hyper, and oth-ers. You can find him infrequently on his blog Criti-cal Damage and too frequently on Twitter at@BRKeogh.

Kris Ligman is the Senior Curator for Critical Dis-tance and aCommunity Advocate for Gamasutra. Her mother is feeling much betternow.

dlc

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riginally con-ceived as a way

of extending the life of retail games so owners wouldn’t be inclined to sell copies on the used market, DLC has changed into something quite different from what it started out as. Anyone who’s been paying attention can see that the days of getting full, complete titles with loads of extras and unlocka-bles are long gone, now replaced with titles that sell their missing chunks as Day 1 DLC, or even worse, hit shelves

as ransomware that ships with content already on the disc itself, but locked behind a paywall. That alternate costume color already in the game you just bought at full price? It’s just three more bucks!With industry

pundits constantly predicting the death of consoles and the disappearance of physical media, publishers are work-ing overtime to avoid revamping outdated business models and price structures, and DLC is the brain-frying pill of the moment.The way they tell

it, costs are ever-increasing thanks to the vast new amounts of content packed onto each disc, and the price of rendering all of this content in 3D HD glory costs even more -- we’re told that the beast of what “consumers want” must be fed. (Personally, I question whether we really want all that, but it’s a different issue altogether…)However, just be-

cause a certain thing is possible doesn’t mean that it’s a good idea. Although I was originally behind the

While the term “addiction” has been associated with videogames in vari-ous ways over the years, it’s most often applied to the behavior of the people playing -- kids maxing out their parents’ credit cards for in-app purchases, or people dying in front of their computers after week-long MMO binges. These horror stories are all too familiar, each one more extreme than the last. However, there’s a new sort of ad-diction taking hold throughout the industry, only this time it’s not infecting the players. No, this time the disease has publishers in its grip. Its name is DLC.

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concept of pay-later, add-on DLC as first envisioned, it’s now become something unhealthy and rotten, negatively affecting everyone involved. DLC is now an addic-tion, and publishers can’t break out of it.If you’ve ever known

anyone with an ad-diction in real life, watching personal relationships crumble and standards go out the window is a pitiful sight as drugs or alcohol take priority over the things they previously held dear. We’re seeing that same self-destruction happening within videogames, only on a larger, corporate scale.Before consoles

went online, develop-ers and publishers did as much as they could to make their game attractive to prospective buyers. Second quests, alter-nate characters to be unlocked, new game plus modes, artwork, cheat codes… the list went on and on. Each game provided more content and quality than the last, and it was a point of pride to say that X,Y and Z was included in the latest release. Their heads were held high,

and they had good reason to be proud.These days, it’s just

the reverse. It’s not unusual to have a core game shipped with few extras or none at all, only to be quickly followed by the kind of a la carte offerings that players used to be able to expect for free. It reminds me of nothing so much as a junkie on all fours, digging through their possessions for anything that can be sold for a buck at the local pawn shop.As for relation-

ships, it’s easy to see the damage being

done there. Instead of a husband lying to a wife about his intentions to go clean, we’ve got publishers who have no fear of souring the mutually-beneficial connection that they’ve tradition-ally had with the gamers who buy their products. Certain houses formerly held so much esteem that their products could be bought immedi-ately and with no fear, but such days are past. Now, each new release, regardless of who’s behind it, must be carefully examined. Asking exactly how much game is in a game must be done, and consumers have to be more cautious than ever. Trust doesn’t exist anymore, and it’s a shame that things have gone from ‘this is the best that we can do’ to ‘how much can we get away with?’I hate to be so

cynical, but the DLC revenue stream has proven to be a fruitful one, and one easily drawn from. As such, this extra income is only mask-ing industry-wide problems that need to be looked at in an honest, introspective way.

Is DLC really neces-sary because games are so much more ex-pensive to develop, or is it that production budgets lack sensible limits and restraint?Is DLC so vital that

games need to sell five million copies in order to be worth-while without it, or is it that publishers have forgotten how to profit from mid-list games and smaller audiences?Is DLC the right

way to ‘fight’ the used market, or is the problem that the games being put out at sixty dollars simply aren’t worth that much to consumers on a budget?DLC may be a band-

aid for the industry’s various financial woes, but rather than going deeper and deeper into this addiction, perhaps publishers should take a look at the damage they’re doing to the quality of their products and how it’s eroding the trust of the consumers from whom they make their living. Admitting there’s a problem is the first step towards recovery.

Text by Brad GallawayPhotos by e-Magine Art

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ow it’s March or so. My mother

hasn’t been able to leave her bed in days. She’s past believ-ing there is nothing wrong with her but a long way from determining what she does have, which is adult rickets. In short, a severe Vitamin D deficiency -- enough to give your doctors a false-positive for early-onset osteop-erosis, because they can’t wrap their heads around the idea of a grown woman in the 21st century developing this kind of condition. Rickets is thought of as that thing which only hap-pened in turn-of-the-century malnourished children working on grubby factory floors, in the time before we magically became enlightened humani-

It’s some cold month in the start of 2006. My mother is bedridden, shout-ing out for help from her unwill-ing coward of a daughter who doesn’t want to venture into the precari-ous stacks and piles which make up her bedroom. She needs her bedtray emptied or the dishes done, or food, or something. The specifics hardly matter, because it’s the same bitter argument anyway. It’s three in the morning but we get into the same strained, hushed shouting match as always, about the severity of her illness, and if I’m an irrespon-sible unfaithful no-good brat of a daughter or not. Just that past December we had walked together from the mall parking lot on an unhappy Christmas errand and she had clutched my arm to keep from falling, in denial about her bones fracturing as they turned into glass inside her, snarling at the sugges-tion she needed assistance.

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tarians and overnight developed sensible nutrition. It’s not supposed to happen to a modern single mom working to support four children and pay for a modest suburban home to house them and her accruing piles of stuff. But if you’re playing along, you’ll know that’s exactly what happened to her.But as I said, right

now it’s March. A week or so ago I received my accept-ance letter from UCLA. September can’t come soon enough. I can’t stand to live in a bedroom across the hallway from my moaning, bedridden mother, trapped between her stubbornness and my helplessness.I bring her something

to eat, dry cereal >>>

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or toast. She looks skeletal on the slim rectangle of her bed not overtaken by junk. Her eyes are sunken into their sockets, her skin loose and dry across her face. I can’t remember anything except the emotional-ity of that moment, how I fled from that argument as soon as I could because I just couldn’t stand the look of death on my mother’s face.I retreat to the

kitchen and start cleaning, even though

it’s so late it’s early and my younger two siblings are still asleep. I go immediately to a large salad bowl on the counter full of farmer’s market apples, the three or four pounds worth my mother bought however long ago and left uneaten, just like all produce goes around here. Their skins are loose and wrinkled. Just like hers. And as I throw them in the garbage with one heavy thunk after another I think

of them as actually being my mother’s skin, withered, dying, rasping against the plastic as they sink unseen into the trash. I start crying silently, thinking this is all I can do, is throw the dead rotten things away.

Food does not go bad in Skyrim.

People do not get hungry either. They mill around, sometimes sitting and staring blankly at their plates, pantomim-

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ing a meal as they grasp a half-loaf of bread. But the bread stays intact and the people keep circling, thoughtlessly, sharing canned remarks to my disembodied pres-ence when I veer too close. My character has probably not had a meal in weeks, but he keeps taking food. It’s a compulsion. I compelled him.

I am the daughter and sister of hoard-

ers. I hate hoarding with an unbridled ferocity. That TV show that seems so popular amongst the gawking public puts me through so much discomfort and distress that just a few months ago, when a professor screened an episode of it in a graduate seminar, I had to excuse myself to the bathroom to throw up, and then simply remained in there for the better part of an hour, shak-ing and crying. Every time I see the piles in those shows, I think about those withered apples I hurled into the trash, the detritus of junk forced into overstuffed bins out back, and my mother, a skeleton amongst her towers of clutter.

I see myself, unable to fix it.So why do I hoard in

Skyrim?In our real lives,

hoarding as a be-havior has a number of factors, but a persistent motiva-tor seems to be fear. Fear of need, fear of uncertainty. What if I’ll need it later? Except that unfairly stigma-tizes hoarding as a behavior exclusive to the consumerist un-derclass and ignores the more extravagant

I only just got around to purchasing some land in Whiterun, and already I’ve begun to fill the space

up with extra junk I’ve found in my travels. What do I use it to store? Actually, I use it to store the ridiculously burdonsome dragon parts I keep picking up after battles. Each set of dragon bones has 15 weight? The hell? With that kind of weight, I’m surprised I’m not carrying around the entire skeleton. I suppose I also hoard “miscellaneous quests,” because: damn. Joel tells me that he hoards books, which I like, as a concept -- certainly sounds more fun than reading them, am I right?

examples out there, like the Collyer brothers’ Fifth Avenue apartment and Imelda Marcos’s 5,400 shoes. It might be more ac-curate to say hoarding is a response to a fear of absence. A fear of lack. The void.Hoarding is without

question my main pursuit in Skyrim. Actually I suspect it’s the main object of the game, period, if articles such as this one from Kotaku are any indication:

>>>

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Many visitors to Skyrim choose

a particular focus. Felicia Day filled a room with cabbages. Mike Krahulik appar-ently carried around a private arsenal of brooms. For a while, I was captivated by the large yellow cheese wheels, but the appeal of this was short-lived. If I wanted 10,000 cheese wheels, I could open up the cheat console and they would appear, instantly, arranged in a

perfect circle around my character. No, I needed more than a mere class of object in this game: I wanted the full diagesis of it; the stuffing. And so stuffing became what I did. Advancing the story missions just became a way to find new caches of meat and cheese to pilfer. Then back to my cot-tage I would go, piling them all to the side of my bed until there was barely a patch to sleep on. When I outgrew my starter home in Whiterun, I used the earnings from my kleptomania to buy a mansion in Solitude. When that began to lag and crash as well, I bought a third home in Riften (convenient anyway, for its proximity to the thieves guild), and a new closet full of cheese began to form. My virtual wife continues to wade obliviously through the waist-high gar-bage, as though my mental illness were not there.I posted the screen-

capture to my blog, linked to from my Twitter. As an amateur Skyrim photogra-pher without mods or filters installed, I thought it was a

decently evocative, stark little image, the silouette of a glass-eyed NPC sitting outlined in a window, surrounded on all sides by the piles of immortally preserved pastries and slabs of horker meat I had dragged home from the far corneres of the territory. She just sat there, occasionally getting up to wander to another part of the house, knocking over carefully constructed stacks of cheese and meticulously assembled rows of choice salmon cuts as though she could discern no difference between a mess and the organized chaos I’d attempted to make. The screencap was an instant hit with read-ers: “What is wrong with you?” they asked. “That’s terrible.”I grinned. It was

pretty wrong. I was being terrible. Wait until they saw the bedroom filled with daedra hearts. It looked like the floor was covered in roses, until you looked closer.

I hoard in Skyrim because otherwise

the game is empty. Its inhabitants are automatons with

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less emotional depth than a Furby. Even my wife’s breathless pronouncements of love sound vacant and from far away. In towns I hear the same voices calling out to me from dif-ferent heads. Along the picturesque rolling hills and snowy mountains there is nothing meaningful at all except a landmark or, more commonly, something that wants to kill me. I try to travel through the

province just for the pleasure of explora-tion but it’s always interrupted with the demands for a goal of some kind; a destination; a treasure dungeon. A group of bandits, a hungry wolf, a scumbag dragon that refuses to come close enough for a hit but keeps the battle music playing indefinitely. All of it pretty pointless and ultimately devoid of pleasure or reward. The only thing I like is

collecting.As much as my

mother hoarding habits perturb me, as much as they remind me of how she neglected her own health, her inner life, I always look at her and see a reflection of my potential self. If I’m not vigilant enough with my own clutter, if I linger too long on the sentimen-tality of these little objects, waiting on them to fill some hole in my life because

work or a partner, or children, or friends could not provide, maybe I’ll turn out just the same. Until I’m withered until someone comes to throw me away.I have looked into

the abyss and found it to be an exquisitely rendered landscape.

Text by Kris LigmanPhotos by GothicCarsUrban

gamers anonymous

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e are used to other people

having opinions about what is best for us. Parents, colleagues, friends -- they all think they know bet-ter because they care.Anything that we do

or consume could be bad for us if we do it or consume it without measure. As a child I had this book with legends from India. It was about a prince and his family and friends and they all wanted to become great warriors, philos-ophers or politicians. They had a teacher, a brahmin, who taught them: “Everything that you take too much of is bad for you.” This advice has stayed with me ever since.Our lives are all

about balance. We need to have just enough, but not too much, in order to be happy and healthy.

However, lives are of-ten complicated. Not all of us are growing up with that balance we need. Not all of us are taught to seek the balance in everything to be happy. So, we end up doing much more than needed of a lot of things -- eating, sleeping, watching TV, working, reading, playing games, partying. When we’re young, we don’t feel the consequences of disbalance. But scientists say we pay for it towards the end of our lives -- we get sick, we get tired, we get sad.The ill effects of cer-

tain things are easy to spot early on and we are compelled to deal with them before it is too late. Alcoholics or drug addicts are a sad story, but we know exactly what is the cause of those peo-ple’s suffering. What

Is there something wrong with being a gamer? Opin-ions vary. If you are too young to drink or to pay for your own World of Warcraft account, you are likely to hear games are not good for you. Parents and teachers often won’t see the point of spending hours in front of the PC with a game when you can do your homework or go outside and play ball.If you are a grownup with a job and bills to pay, then people are less likely to criticise your hobbies. Even so, you’ll be a member of a group that stands out.

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about TV or games? Is someone who watches TV all day long an addict? Does playing videogames ten hours a day make you an addict?Done excessively,

both those activities can prevent us from doing anything else or limit our daily lives to an extent that is neither healthy nor productive. But do we know what causes us to watch so much TV or play games for so long? Are the TV and the games the cause for our addiction just like drugs and alcohol?Videogame addiction

is not an officially recognised disorder. It is not included in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders or in the International Statistical Classifica-tion of Diseases and Related Health

Problems. Some psy-chiatrists believe that videogame addiction is similar to some types of psychological addictions related to compulsive behavior -- like compulsive gambling, klepto-mania, pyromania, compulsive nail biting and compulsive hair pulling.A study of pathologi-

cal gaming conducted in 2011 by Christo-pher Ferguson, Mark Coulson and Jane Barnett found that 3% of all gamers are likely to experience symptoms of patho-logical gaming. The re-searchers concluded however that the cause for that type of behavior was not the games themselves, but -- most likely -- underlying mental health problems.Games are entertain-

ing, rewarding and generally fun. They can

be used as an escape mechanism so that we may forget the pains of the everyday life. In videogames we are the masters and the world changes at our will. We can beat all the monsters and take all the prizes, we make the rules and we always win.Quitting drinking or

drugs solves the un-derlying cause for our addiction; but when we’re yanked out of whatever wonderful world we’ve been inhabiting in our gam-ing, the cause for our problems remains. Nobody knows about it and everybody’s happy to blame it on gaming. We’ll be alrgith now that we’re free of that habit.But we won’t be.

Fighting real monsters is not like fighting virtual ones. You cannot just pull the plug and forget they

ever existed. Children are especially at risk here, for while adults shrug off their weird behavior as “gaming addiction”, those real monsters lurk on somewhere in the dark, never to be ex-posed and defeated.Everything that you

take too much of is bad for you -- that much is true. Ask yourself why you do it before you try to stop it, otherwise you’ll never learn how to find your balance.

Text by Vanya Damy-anovaPhotos by Declan Mer-riman

comfort food

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or many, Just Cause 2 is the

perfect ‘just mess around’ sandbox game. The fictional country of Panau is massive with snow-capped mountains, stretching deserts, thick jungles, and skyscraping cities. There’s no end of toys to entertain the player from the many over-the-top vehicles to, of course, the greatest grappling hook in the history of gaming. Whatever the player wants to do in Just Cause 2, Panau is a playground where they can do it.But for me, some-

thing weird has hap-pened. My Just Cause 2 play is more driven. I am constantly, persistently marching towards that elusive 100% completion. At about 47 hours of playtime, I am at 64.58%.I have played games

from Skyrim to all the Grand Theft Autos to every other open-world game and have never -- never -- cared about perfecting the game, not even when achievements were concerned. But in Just Cause 2, something clicks, and it is all I do. I don’t waste my

Some people watch Bridget Jones’ Diary, or entire seasons of Game of Thrones. Some people read trashy genre fiction. Me, if I have a cold, if I have writer’s block, if I am just bored or simply can’t be fucked getting off the couch to engage with anything else, I play Just Cause 2. I play it for hours upon hours without break. It’s my comfort game. It’s the game I can play without thinking. It asks just enough of me to hold my attention but not so much to actually demand anything.

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time bashing cars around with a statue’s head tethered to my helicopter; I don’t have time for such frivolities.To perfect Just Cause

2 requires you to do several things. Firstly, of course, there are the missions and the story. Next, there are the military’s various resources (propaganda vans, fuel tanks, antennae, pipelines) that have to be destroyed, and the many secret items scattered around the world’s locations to be collected. Whereas most games might have, at most, a hun-

dred things to either destroy or collect, Just Cause 2 has several thousand of each of them. Destroying or collecting any one thing will have your completing percent-age appear on the screen, roughly 0.02% higher than the last thing you destroyed/collected.You are not meant

to get 100% in this game. There is just so much to do that you shouldn’t even care about it. You should just have fun mucking around. Even the game itself knows this. There is an achieve-ment for reaching

75% completion, but nothing after that, as though the game knows it is impossible, that simply trying to do it is fruitless, that no one in their right mind would even bother. Yet, it is the only game where I have truly cared about it.Perhaps it is because

of the game’s seam-less melding of ‘pro-gression’ and ‘mucking around’. In Just Cause 2, they are one and the same. To progress in the game you must cause more chaos, which simply means blowing stuff up and collecting items. >>>

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In Grand Theft Auto IV you might stop playing the ‘story’ to go off and just mess around. In Just Cause 2, you have to mess around in order to progress. The point of such design is to give the mucking around people do a sense of meaning, for the game to give positive feed-back to people who just want to spend hours surfing on top of fighter jets.For me, it became

a carrot on a stick. Instead of caring less about progressing, I obsessed over it. I became focused, driven. Each step

Scorpio takes in the world brings me closer to that 100%. Every secret item and location is on the map, just waiting to be discovered. The next thing to do is just over there and then I will nearly have 65.00% and then just one more, just one more, just one more.But it is still a ‘com-

fort’ sort of driven. The same comfort-able drive that might lead someone to watch every episode of Studio 60 back-to-back, or lie in bed all day reading fantasy novels. I can go for weeks or months on

end without playing Just Cause 2, but when I do play it, I play it a lot, and I play it obsessively.My movements form

their own kind of rhythm. No, more of a beat. A stead, consistent beat that never changes tempo. I spawn at one of the rebel bases. I check my map to find the closest yellow dot (a location that I am yet to visit) and any blue dots (secret items) I might pass over on my way there. I head to the yellow dot with grappling hook and parachute, expertly

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and unconsciously rowing over the trees and villages below, picking up the blue dots on the way. The yellow dot might be an army base, a town, a radar dish. First I hunt out all the items by combing back-and-forward across the whole location, using the wi-fi reception symbols in the corner of the HUD to let me know when I am getting close. Then I blow everything up, finally attracting the military’s wrath. When the last thing blows up -- before it has even finished blowing up -- I am

checking my map for the next yellow dot (and blue dots), plac-ing a waypoint, and grappling up to steal the military helicop-ter that is inevitably swooping down on me by now. I throw out the pilot, fly to the next destination, jump out, and repeat all over again.It’s the simple

pleasure and grace of movement that make it so easy to keep going back to Just Cause 2, but it is the numbers that make it so terribly hard to stop. Just Cause 2’s interface is one of gaming’s most subtle

enablers. Each thing I blow up, each item I collect, a whole heap of notifications pop onto my screen -- discreetly, up in the corner, but always. They’re like a whisper in the ear, or a pat on the back. “C’mon. There you go. Now just a little bit more.”Each incremental

rise, each hundredth of a per cent my completion score rises, I feel like I have achieved something, like I am that much closer to a goal that even the game refuses to acknowledge is possible. “Resource items >>>

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found: 1023/2300”; “Elites killed: 3412”; “Fuel Tankers de-stroyed: 200/1200”. The one that grabs my attention most is “Hours played”. It confuses me, seeming to sometimes appear only minutes after it last disappeared. “Surely that wasn’t an hour!” I’ll exclaim to no one in particular (this always happens when I am home alone) as I parachute into a new army base and start all over again.Just Cause 2 has a

reputation for making it incredibly easy for you to do exactly what you want to do. For me, that is to for-get the actual world and play forever. It gives me something to aim for and puts a million rewarding, ob-tainable breadcrumb goals along the way. It’s so much easier than writing those ar-

ticles due tomorrow. It’s so much easier than figuring out what the hell my PhD is actually about. It’s so much easier than leaving the house and actually interacting with people. True story: I am writing this the day it is due because I wasted six hours yesterday playing Just Cause 2 after I turned it on to check my completing percent for the third paragraph of this article. It’s just easier to keep playing. To lose track of time. To go on and on and on and on.Yet, I’m not sure I

would say I am ‘ad-dicted’ to Just Cause 2. I am addicted to coffee. If I don’t drink at least three strong cups a day, I get the worst headache and grogginess. I don’t need coffee to perk up; I need it to not fall asleep. My body is

utterly dependent on coffee to the extent that I suffer without it. That is an addiction. But this isn’t what we typically means when we all too eas-ily (and disturbingly optimistically) call a videogame addictive. What we really mean, I think, is that they are comfortable, that once we start playing it is easier to keep on playing, to give in to their rhythms and beats and cycles, than it is to ever stop. I can go weeks without playing Just Cause 2, but when I do play it, I lose hours and hours because I don’t want to stop.I don’t think Just

Cause 2 is addictive. It is just the most comfortable game of all time.

Text by Brendan KeoghPhotos by rusvaplauke

red label

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Fable booze labels by Alex Mitchell

chemistry for a better tomorrow

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eat | play | love

n the early days, during my childhood in console gaming, there was no beer. No wine and no liquor. Only their remnants: seedy bars marked with signs labled “Cafe” and bowls of “soup” that were clearly some sort of alcoholic punch. Every bottle contained something innocent. Anyone who looked dazed, confused or was slurring, had probably drank too much juice, somehow.

But the rise of personal computer gaming cre-ated a different culture. I realized this when, in the early 90s, I witnessed Leisure Suit Larry’s pro-tagonist walk into an actual bar, and order actual alcohol. From my point of view, the censorship of alcohol in games started to relax right around the time I was becoming aware of it myself. When it came to the occasional depiction of an adult beverage, video games were growing up with me.

The higher resolution consoles at first skirted the edge. In Final Fantasy VII, Tifa runs a bar, not just a “cafe”. “Looking at you is making me sober,” slurs Reno of the Turks, in a line that at the time I thought was hilarious, but wasn’t really sure why. Then later, when airship pilot Cid shouts at his highly abused wife/girlfriend in the game about getting “some goddamn tea”, I was a bit confused. Is tea always tea or one of those coded refer-ences for something else that someone ended up removing?

In the early 90s, there was this side-scrolling

game on the PC called Duke Nukem. Many gamers aren’t aware of this, being more fa-miliar with Duke from his 3D incarnations, but the first Duke Nukem platformer was entirely wholesome. It was a bit like Commander Keen, with cute aliens and primitive sound effects, except with an older protagonist. Duke, back in those days, drank Cola to keep his health up, and we children liked it that way. But games have grown up now, even the ones that remain inherently juvenile. In the modern era’s Duke Nukem Forever, Duke slugs back beer to give himself a burst of confidence. And he’s an incredible lightweight, despite his macho swagger: one beer is enough to make his vision blurry.

So in the modern era, games are no longer shy about depicting alcohol. But it seems very few strive for realism, cartoonish exaggeration being

Gaming Under The Influence

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closer to the norm. The Demo Man in Team Fortress is one example: the comedic cliche of a Scottish drunk who laughs as he spills whis-key and grenades on his foes. Nico, in Grand Theft Auto IV, stumbles around uselessly after a night at the bar, ragdolling over any available object in a comedic way. Meanwhile, becoming an alcoholic in the Fallout series is surprisingly easy. Unless you’re trying to roleplay one for some reason, it may be best to avoid swigging back all those otherwise tempting bottles of

wine you see laying about the Wasteland.While games’ depictions of the beverages

themselves often still seem less-than-adult, the depiction of the spaces these beverages are purchased is getting more ubiquitous as games tell more adult stories. There is good reason for the “we met at a tavern” cliche. From seedy noir bars to fantasy inns, to flashy nightclubs in outer space, these are places where adventure might happen.

Back to the past. Classic arcade games, such as Ms Pac Man and Galaga came in both upright cabinets, and in the form of long, flat tables. The latter are called “cocktail tables” and you’re supposed to set your drink on them. Drinking may not have been something that happened in the games. But it was some-

thing that might happen while the game was played. Ms Pac Man is as wholesome as vide-ogames come. And yet, there is drinking in it: drinking in the context of the player.

Alcohol and videogames were always intertwined in some way. The little part of my childhood where games were censored, and I didn’t notice, was a blip in gaming history. It intersected well with a short period of time when games weren’t social. These games with censored alcohol were usually the most solitary of game pursuits, the sort of game you’d play on your console at home.

Now we have hangouts: plac-es like Mana Bar and Scrollbar where gamers can gather, discuss games, play games, and maybe have a few drinks. And there are websites catalogu-ing drinks inspired by various games and game phenomenon, like the Drunken Moogle tumblr. People who might not traditionally consider them-selves “gamers” can still mix the game and bar experience at a chain like Dave & Busters.

In spite of this, many still think games are for kids.

Alcohol is social, but certainly not always positive. There are moments of de-bilitation, the blurry uncertain hazes, awkward moments, ter-

rible accidents. There are peo-ple who take things too far. And the dread of the morn-ing after. But perhaps games have been a little too over-the-top in their exploration of drinking. Of course, it’s difficult for them, in their own worlds, to show the social aspects of drink, and how, under the right circumstances, it can open people up and bring them together. For-tunately, there’s enough alcohol in the real world to make this happen, and enough games to make those social experiences worth raising a glass to.

Photo by John-Paul Verkamp

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he Morbid Gamer continues his dissection of morality in the Uncharted series. Next up:

Uncharted 2: Among Thieves

When his decision to betray the war criminal he’s working for (shockingly) goes badly, Drake must race against the clock to find a giant sapphire before some other criminal claims it for his own.

Total Body Count: 665+

Which breaks down as:659 mercenaries9 mutants+ the unknown number of mercenar-ies and mutants who are killed when Drake causes a city to collapse on them.

In what context is all this killing taking place?

This time around should have been a little cleaner,

what with Drake’s foes con-sisting entirely of the private army of an Eastern European war criminal. Whether the grey-suited thugs are enthu-siastic proponents of ethnic cleansing, or merely mer-cenaries who are especially incurious about where their paycheck comes from, they’re basically inviting bullets from the moment they appear onscreen simply by association with their boss. Sadly, though, the violence in this game becomes far more unaccep-table than its predecessor, largely because Drake himself is responsible for almost all of it. And not just in the sense that he guns down the vast majority of those killed over the course of the game.

At the plot’s outset, Drake is presented with a job op-portunity - steal a lamp owned by Marco Polo, so that Zoran (the war criminal) can track down the lost city of Shangri-la, and seize the fantastic treasures contained within. Drake’s response to the offer? He suggests that Harry (Rene Belloq to Drake’s Indy) betray Zoran and help Drake find

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Shangri-la so that they can have the treasure all to themselves. The important part here is that this betrayal Drake plans isn’t motivated by his discomfort at the prospect of working with a war criminal, but instead pure greed. He’d rather not share the treasure with anyone, thank you very much. So while the game presents Harry turning on Drake as some kind of terrible betrayal, he’s really just staying true to his original employer, and refusing to go along with Drake’s scheming.

At this point in the story Drake hasn’t actually killed anyone, so his amorality doesn’t yet have a body count. That changes when he’s sprung from prison and immediately starts after Zoran. By stealing the one artifact that would allow a for-tune hunter to locate Shangri-la, Drake narrows Zoran’s options down to one -- using a buldozer to find a china cup. Since they don’t know which temple the map room is in, Zoran’s goons start knocking them all over the city, killing an implied-to-be-large number of civilians in the process. Had Drake simply gone along with Harry’s plan, a huge amount of off-camera bloodshed could have been avoided. Likewise, later in the game Drake will find himself rescued by a village of friendly Nepalese, and he won’t bother warning them to go and hide in the mountains for a few days, since there’s an incredibly pissed-off mercenary army searching for him. Again, a shocking number of innocent bystanders are killed because Drake screwed the villain over time and again.

Despite this horrible collateral damage, it’s the mutants who get the worst of it. After spending centuries in isolation, happily living away in their secret, self-sustaining city, Drake shows up and knocks down the foundations -- killing not just those few that he personally shoots, but presum-ably all of the other mutant men, women, and children who were scattered through the huge secropolis. >>>

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Any extenuating circum-stances?

Sadly, no. Unlike last game, here there’s no real at-

tempt at creating a world-imperiling threat for Drake to foil at the last possible moment. Once again Drake spends most of the game chasing personal fortunes -- even when all logic suggests that something more serious is going on. Over the course of the game characters tell him over and over again that Zoran can’t possibly want to raid Shangri-la for its material wealth, since he already has access to apparently limitless finances (helicopters, tanks, and private armies aren’t cheap), yet Drake is seemingly so obsessed with money that he can’t even conceive of anyone being motivated by any other force.

When the big reveal finally comes -- that the secret of Shangri-la is a consumable sap that cures all ailments and makes its users fairly bullet-resistant, the game makes lip-service to what a threat to the world an immortal

war criminal might pose. It’s not re-ally a plausible danger, though. The mutants have been feasting on the sap for gen-erations, and while they’re certainly strong and tough, they’re by no means immortal - and there’s no rea-son to suspect that Zoran would be any different. Even worse, the plot had already established in the Borneo episode that in addition to healing people, the sap drives them mad, forcing them to attack and kill everyone around them

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-- the mutants have clearly adapted over time, but had Zoran and his men been allowed to find the sap without Drake’s in-terference, partaking in it would have quickly led to them all slaughtering each other -- the same end result with presumably far less collateral damage.

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So... should I feel bad about playing it?

Definitely worse than the first game: because of Drake’s involvement, dozens

-- perhaps hundreds -- of people are killed who didn’t have to be, and an ancient, historically important city, is destroyed, along

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Obviously playing as a roguish treasure hunter can be a fun, rollicking time -- but a lot of that fun gets sucked out when that same rogue causes wide-spread suffering, and seems utterly unconcerned with the human cost of his actions.

At one point in the game, Zoran questions Drake’s self-identification as the hero of the story, asking how many people Nathan has killed so far that day. The answer, at that moment, is three-hundred and seven. Maybe the villain has a point.

Photos by Cliff NordmanCosplay by unknown (but awe-some)

with all of its inhabitants. All that bloodshed isn’t really in service of any particular ac-complishment.

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