You've Been Fabled

I can't help but love the Fable games. Fable was one of the first games that I ever truly anticipated. I read about it in the old Electronic Gaming Monthly, well before I had an Xbox of my own, back when Lioinhead Studios was still calling it Project Ego. I, like many gamers, still naive about the heady technology of last generation's consoles, fell hard for the old "drop an acorn, get an oak," line. When I finally did get my hands on a copy of Fable, the game wasn't a shadow of the wonderland that Peter Molyneux had promised. I knew it, and so did everyone else. The world of Albion was almost tiny compared to the environments of some other RPGs that had preceded it. The character work was sketchy at best, the npc's weren't nearly as responsive as I'd hoped they'd be, and the length! Well, let's just say I beat the entire game in one evening while recovering from the extraction of a few wisdom teeth.

And none of that mattered to me. Not even a bit. In fact, when I'd read about these criticisms in the game magazines I'd feel a bit defensive. I would hear myself saying to friends that Molyneux wasn't a liar or a blowhard. He was just a guy who was excited about the possibilities of gaming, of the dynamic fiction he got to help create. I played and replayed that game, shaping my heroes into bold archers, fearsome mages, and bloodthirsty warriors. I did what pretty much everyone else who loved that game did: I played the crap out of it. I knew the experience was imperfect, but Albion really did feel like a different kind of place than many of the locales I had visited in other games. It was greener, friendlier, more colorful, more frightening, even a bit more unpredictable. There was something magical that happened in the liminality between me and my Hero. Even if, in the end, nothing terribly profound had been achieved outside of the typical save-the-world schtick one often runs into with these games, I still felt my time had been well spent. I knew that with work and creativity, my Hero could be unique, and I loved that.

Fast forward six years. It is now the weekend before grad classes start up for the second semester, and, as the newly crowned king of Albion, I'm desperately trying to amass as much wealth as possible before the darkness comes sweeping in. My wife, who bought me Fable III for Christmas is sitting next to me and watching the screen with attention nearly as rapt as my own. Two thirds of the year that the blind seeress (read: purposefully vague, token fantasy-setting old woman) has given me to prepare my kingdom for the coming supernatural assault has already flown by, and my treasury is running low. I played the game as a benevolent adventurer, and nothing had changed in that respect when I became king. I genuinely wanted to save all those orphans, kick Reaver's exploitative ways to the curb, and keep my promise to the Auroran people. Yet each benevolent action as a king came at the inevitable cost of my subjects' lives. And so in some instances I had to bite the legislative bullet and do a little destructive strip mining, raise the taxes on the lower classes, etc. But still, I did what I could to preserve the unstained soul of my newly minted monarch. And now I was faced with 121 days until doomsday and a five million old piece gap to fill if I wanted to save my people.

The plan was to keep buying real estate, collecting shop fees and rent until I achieved three million gold. Then, once I was halfway to the total I needed i would liquidate my entire empire, thereby raking in another cool three mil. The plan was solid. I was already near the two million mark, and after twenty-one hours of gameplay I was nearing a state of gaming nirvana that very few games had ever brought me to before. Not even my first, blissful encounters with the original Fable held a candle to the monumental achievement I was about to accomplish for the sake of my Hero's integrity.

121 days to go. Just a few more decisions to make as king before the day of reckoning came. I knew I would be cutting it close, so I wanted to see if any of the next batch of decisions would hold the possibility for earning money. I already went on a couple fetch quests which earned me several hundred thousand gold pieces, so who knows, maybe another one would pop up.

121 days to go. Was it possible that the next jump in time would bring me all the way to the day of death? I thought, probably not. My wife agreed. "It has never jumped that far before."

The screen brought me to the end. All my work, all the glory of shaping my monarch, gone. The people of Albion were lost, and for perhaps the first time ever, I felt like I had wasted my time playing a video game. I put my controller down in disgust.

More than any omitted feature, any abbreviated story line, any two dimensional character, this warning-less advance through 121 days crushed my experience of Fable III. Of all the things you left out in your games Peter, this one is by far the worst.

And the thing is: why? There's no constraint from the world of the game that the arrival of the darkness to Albion's shores should somehow have caught the King by surprise. In fact, quite the contrary. The entire coda of Fable III is based on the concept of a countdown! How stark the separation between myself and my Hero became when I was completely blindsided by an event which my avatar was clearly aware of. It felt like betrayal, but I couldn't figure out by whom. Was it by the designers of this game, who in crafting this end failed to include what might be the single most important piece of information that someone playing the game could want? Was it by my own expectations which had been growing almost wildly as I grew to like the game more and more? Or was it by the Hero and the world of Albion itself? Had the liminality closed? Had I been duped by the digital representation of myself?

In the end, though the game might not be permanently ruined for me, I've yet to pick the controller back up. For now, I'm going to direct my frustration toward Molyneux and his team of designers who crafted this final deception. Against my better judgement, I'm sure all will be forgiven come Fable IV.

This Blog: A Tutorial

A binary is composed of two parts. It often refers to the ones and zeroes which compose digital constructs. In criticism, it also refers to opposed realities which in their opposition create hierarchies of possibility. When you are in a binary, external forces have funneled your potential into one of two places. You are either for or against, up or down, conservative or liberal, inside or out. In digital worlds, these binaries are rule sets. By limiting, they make space for action. Without the binaries encoded in the games there would be no game at all. Mario exists because a 0 is not a 1 and a 1 is not a 0. In the “real” world, the political world, binaries encode the pathways of power. By simplifying society, one group can place another at a distance, on a level subjugated to itself. If we are the 1’s, and everyone else is the 0’s, then we can appropriate their oil resources. A space is created in these binaries too, but by virtue of the 1’s expanding until the 0‘s are squeezed, thinned, and pressed on the margins. This space is only for the enjoyment of the group that control’s the terms of the binary, the 1’s.
 

This is a gamer’s blog. It is also a movie lover’s blog, a writer’s blog, a student’s blog, a culture watcher’s blog, and perhaps even critical theory dabbler’s blog. But before anything else, it is certainly a gamer’s blog.

I used to go over to friends’ houses with the express intent of watching them play video games. Consoles were anathema in my house, for whatever reason, and the brief encounters I’d had with gaming were enough to convince me that my parents’ anti-Sega/Nintendo/Sony edicts were misguided at best. My friend Matt was the first person I knew who had the new Playstation. At his house I would watch for literally hours as he played through CoolBoarders, waiting for him to graciously hand his single controller over to me for just one run. 

Another friend, Alex, had an older console at his house: the SNES. His technology was less impressive, but at least we played together, and thus, I played at all. We usually horsed around with MarioKart. It was fun, and we didn’t need any kind of trumped-up narrative to convince us that video games were some kind of important cultural artifact. Imagining some kind of metaphorical gravitas were attached to Yoshi’s twitchily responsive go-kart would have seemed like nothing more than perverse absurdity to Alex and me. We were kids and it was just a game.

The question I want to ask now is, are we still kids and are the things we’re playing still just games? What would it mean for Halo LAN parties to be more than just a bunch of friends getting together to blow off steam? On some level, I think most of us understand at a very basic level that the way we use our imaginations matter. We know, instinctively almost, that the kinds of games we like to play say a little something about ourselves. But what do those games say about us? How do those games mark out the binaries that create our own ideas of possibility?

This is a gamer’s blog, made because I like to talk about games. This Christmas I received, for the first time in my life, a PS2. I have an Xbox 360, and I had its predecessor for a short while as well, but I’ve never owned a Sony game machine. Thus, I have up until this point, missed entirely out on some of the most lauded touchstones of gaming history: the Final Fantasy games, Metal Gear Solid, Grand Theft Auto, Shadow of the Colossus, etc, etc. I now have a stack of PS2 to play through and the need to do so in the context of dialogue. I want to play these games because I love playing games. I also want to play these games because I think they matter, and though there are more who agree with that sentiment than I had ever thought before, it seems the majority of us still believe that video games are only that: just games. Just: a word used to orient us between the two poles of cultural worth, important and waste of time. A word that keeps us from looking at the games we play as carrying social importance, formational power. A word that dismisses the politics of gaming by suggesting they don’t exist at all.

This might be something like a journal--thoughts on the games as I play through them. It may have a commentary feel to it, taking in what others are saying putting that up against my own experiences. Hopefully it will be a place for open discussion, ideas that mix with a general love for the craft of gaming. I believe that people learn best in community, and that’s what I most want to discover. This is a gamer’s blog. A place to learn together, playing in the binaries.