Ghost/Echo

Last night we finished my first-ever tabletop gaming campaign. True to form, though, the tabletop was virtual, my GM in a different timezone. While we couldn’t share a pizza, we did share a good game, the indie Ghost/Echo (from One Seven Design, and part of the Story Games community), and I got a fine example of where story really comes from in games.

We used Skype video chat: it turns out that, at least for Shadowminister, gestures are as important a part of atmosphere creation as bad Russian accents   Skype has a dice-roller which we ended up using after the really versatile online dice-roller we started with broke. Ether Pad was where we tracked the choices and outcomes being rolled for, and that rounded out our toolkit.

In my classes we’ve struggled with the definition of “game.” Whatever a century of academics have said, nothing prepared me for considering the two cryptic pages of Ghost/Echo to be, embody, describe, enable or otherwise have anything to do with something I’d recognize as a “game.”

The website describes Ghost/Echo as

a quick-play aetherpunk adventure module for 2-6 players. It includes the raw materials you need to construct your own setting and characters as well as a complete rules system.

Here’s a link to the PDF that is the whole of the raw materials for Ghost/Echo. It didn’t mean a damn thing to me before we started playing it. What you get is two illustrations, a page of names for people and places, and a page of rules for when to roll dice. And that’s it.

Out of that, Shadowminister, a dice roller and I created a four-night, six hour adventure of high-stakes bluffing, battling and badassery that, thanks to a fortunate final roll of the dice, left me, Coil, a fallen starship builder turned high-value scavenger, into Earth’s dimension-crossing warlord.

Now, this should put to rest a long-standing debate on story in games. It won’t, of course, but it should. Where was the story of how Coil, stuck in the Ghost World with a broken transport and a dazed pilot, played the Russian Mob off a Ghost World warlord to get his crew back together, beat everyone to the Score and stop an alien invasion cold?

Not in the games-designer-as-auteur product, the rule set and mechanics. As the creator says,

//GHOST/ECHO is presented as an ‘oracle game’. It provides only a starting point and a resolution mechanic. You and your friends fill in the rest of the details as you play.

So there clearly was a story in our four-session gameplay. And clearly, it came from the intersection of my imagination with Shadowminister’s and the dice roller.

There! Academic teapot-tempest unstirred!

The game’s a great example of my favorite games definition, from Sid Meyer: “a game is a series of interesting choices.”  Episode 3 ended with me awakening back in the main Ghost World town, covered in ectoplasm and blood, surrounded by bodies apparently killed by my trademark lightning gun, and guards closing in on me.

How did I get there? I’d tried to use my ghost powers to pull a Ghost Spider out of my teammate, Vixen. So we rolled: the goal was to get the thing out of Vixen, the danger that the battle would crash our transport on The Six Arms, a deadly space of grinding planetary spheres with unpredictable, shifting gravity.  In order to up my odds through getting an extra die to roll, I asked for an extra danger. Shadowminister added, the Spider would shift to me.

It was a night of bad rolls. I got one plus and two minuses, as I recall. I took the plus on getting the Spider out of Vixen (reuniting my team was one of my/Coil’s primary, self-selected goals), and took the hit on getting possessed.

In Episode 4 it worked out fine: while I came to being chased by the warlord Chain’s guards, a lucky roll saw me successfully co-opt them to help repel a Ghost attack and set me firmly on the road to my own warlord-hood.

The “interesting choices” made possible by game mechanics provided a series of insights into character, here that “projective character” fusion of me and the scavenger Coil.  Anyone who knows me fairly well could’ve predicted that what would emerge would include deep team loyalty; bluff, blarney and bullshit as tools of first resort; and standup heavy-weapons close-quarters battle as the last.

Now, while it didn’t surprise me that my first “interesting choice” was, in response to

“You turn the corner and face a pack of Ghost Dogs, who growl menacingly at you,”

my response was “I growl back,”  (I won the roll, they slunk away with ectoplasmic tails between their legs), it did generate a good startled laugh from Shadowminister, and set a tone for the game.

So, the psychological/sociological value of those “interesting choices ” is pretty self-evident. My research question, though, is, what are the political implications? What can gaming teach us about how to construct better communities?

No, I don’t think I’m really finishing my dissertation in Spring 2011 either!

The Sith Lords: First Impressions

Immediately after finishing Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, I picked up the sequel, The Sith Lords (TSL). I say “picked up” rather than played: while I didn’t have to lose two days to downloading and patching, as I did with Fallen Earth, I lost a day to digital rights management. TSL won’t run on Vista. And by “won’t run,” I mean, won’t leave the launching screen.

I’ve got an ancient laptop I use for school, that’s too old and slow to run *anything,* but it’s got XP on it. So I loaded the game, and got about 5fps out of it – but at least I was able to get a taste for the story and gameplay. After a lot of forum hunting, and a couple fan-created patches that didn’t solve my problem, I discovered that the solution is to email the DRM manufacturer and ask for a new .exe file. To their credit, they responded overnight, and the new file solved my problem.

I was able to load a mod to give me the same player-character head I had in KOTOR, and I was good to go (and yes, the non-regulation underwear’s a mod too ).

Game Mechanics

Despite being the product of an entirely different company, TSL has substantially the same look and feel of KOTOR, all around. The UI is a murky green instead of a sharp blue and tan (there’s a huge fan patch to restore the KOTOR color scheme, which I may install).

TSL fixed one of the most annoying features of the KOTOR interface, though. In KOTOR, there’s no way to differentiate between a crate that you’ve emptied and one you haven’t. So, if you’re the generally forgetful type, the only solution is to look in every box, every time you pass it. I probably spent a good two hours of my total gameplay double-checking empty crates. TSL adds the dead-obvious (and greatly appreciated) feature of [EMPTY] on crates or bodies you’ve already checked. Woot!

Additionally, blasters actually work well in TSL, whereas in KOTOR lightsabers or blades were always more effective. I was shocked when my backup actually managed to clear a room with blasters ahead of me!  And the upgrading/crafting system, which simply never worked in KOTOR, is much more substantial and effective. In part, that’s because there are fewer opportunities for merchant NPCs: workbenches where you can break down junk and build things you want take the place. It’s an elegant solution.

On leaving the first planet, there’s a KOTOR-style shooting minigame – but unlike KOTOR’s, it seems the TSL team actually tested the PC version. It’s highly playable, even mouseless. And it’s not a stop, break, play, then resume without consequnces – the roadblock that the minigames were in KOTOR. The first one here, you’re on the ship, shooting at a platoon of attacking Sith. If you get them all, good. If not, the ones you miss manage to board, and you then have to fight them in regular gameplay. Integrated and meaningful, unlike the KOTOR minigames.

Story + Game

While TSL keeps the broccoli-and-chocolate formula of story game + gear&grind RPG of KOTOR, the balance seems to be much more heavily towards story. The formula is the same: you wake up with amnesia in a place you need to escape. But instead of the squeaky-clean Carth, your ally this time is a mysterious old woman who’s clearly running some op of her own, and may or may not have your best interests at heart.

Story and gameplay seem better integrated: early conversational choices fix the backstory carried over from KOTOR, whether Sith or Jedi triumphed in that time, or whether you don’t know what happened. The persuasion skill affects your influence over your party members, and your alignment shapes theirs to a greater or lesser degree depending on your persuasiveness and choice of conversational responses when your party members have differences of opinion.

About the best of all, the droids from KOTOR are playing a bigger role. The adorable T3, who had far to little to do in KOTOR, saves the day in the prologue to TSL (which acts as a very nicely done sandbox tutorial). It’s three or so hours in before you’re reunited, and it’s a shame “Squee and hug the droid” wasn’t an outcome choice – it was great to see the little guy

I like the ambiguity of the story so far: it’s really unclear how much you as the player character are supposed to remember from your past, and with different people telling you different things, you’ve got choices as to who to believe or disbelieve, trust or keep at arm’s length.

While I know to expect frustration and disappointment at the end (the game was rushed out to meet a corporate deadline and never finished), so far I’m finding TSL a compelling, delightful, well-designed improvement over the original.

Link Salad: Story, Violence & Seriousness

I’ve got some sort of bug thing that’s left me not terribly sick, but really stupid and tired for the past few days. There were too many interesting things in my Google Reader feed this morning to let pass, but I’m not up for a deep analysis of them. So, here’s some links and quick thoughts on topics that have come up in my classes this past week.

Violence and Ethics

We’ve been struggling in Alice Robison’s class with the perennial question of whether the depiction of violence leads to violence,  and whether the performative aspect of video games makes game violence different from movie violence.

I can’t figure out how to embed videos in WordPress without buying a pro account for a ludicrous amount of money, so here’s a link. It’s to a trailer for Dreamworlds 3, a documentary on women’s bodies in pop music videos. It’s 5:33, and well worth watching: it makes a strong and compelling case in that time, that music videos are teaching the physical and emotional abuse of women, by normalizing, no, more, glamorizing, the degradation of women.

Gamasutra today ran a very nice long piece, Kill Polygon, Kill: Violence, Psychology and Video Games. It covers all the bases, from designers of ultra-violent games, to researchers, to critics and apologists. What strikes me most, as always, is the willingness of scholars and critics to glorify the depiction of violence… against people who aren’t scholars or critics. It started, as far as I’ve seen, with film criticism in the 1970s, and I find it despicable. For example:

In Edmund, the recently announced winner of the TIGSource Adult/Educational Competition, your pixilated hero has to rape another character. In comparison to other media, the thematic constraints on games are still fantastically rigid. Earlier this year two games that featured rape as game mechanics were removed from Amazon’s marketplace.

But you could buy a DVD of Gaspar Noe’s Irreversible, which shows an unedited eight-minute rape scene in a subway and a man’s head being graphically crushed with a fire extinguisher. You could also order a copy of Denis Cooper’s novel Frisk, which ends with a detailed description of a serial killer mutilating and raping victims in the Dutch countryside.

In the Los Angeles Times Michael Silverblatt wrote, “Dennis Cooper, a disturbing and transcendent artist, enters the mind of a serial killer and comes out with a genuine revelation.” Stephen Hunter of the Washington Post called Noe’s film “a genuine work of outlaw art.

There’s an old saying that “a conservative is a liberal who’s been mugged.” By the same token, I find these critics, who abstract abuse into “art,” are grossly lacking in compassion for the victims of the violence they celebrate.

Story in Games

Larisa, blogger at The Pink Pigtail Inn, one of the consistently most interesting World of Warcraft blogs, argues today that questing in MMOs is utterly disruptive of story. Story, she says, isn’t the slowly-scrolling quest text – which even lovers of story largely dislike or ignore.

If we define immersion as the state of flow, the state of absorbed attention, then it should be obvious that the enemy of this desired state is interruption. Yet the game play design constantly interrupts one’s attention on the story. The failure of questing to absorb me into the story has nothing to do with the way “the story” is written or the fact that it’s text based.

…..

I’ve always seen questing–as I’ve seen killing mobs, playing the auction house, running instances–as tools to absorb me into a fantasy, an alternative world. It’s the game itself that holds my attention. I think that placing the burden for story cohesion and player absorption is asking too much from the questing mechanic as a function of game play design. Questing is a lousy way to tell a story.

Juddthelibrarian, writing from a tabletop gaming perspective, makes a similar point about story.

The goal of games, even narr-heavy thematic games Story Now, is not to make a story. Story happens.

The goal is a night of people making meaningful choices at the table. Story is a by-product, like exhaust coming out of a car.

It is also a by-product of gamist play and sim play. Story just happens.

Looking out for the story leads to constipation at the table. Story does not need to be preserved or looked out for. It is not a just hatched chick that needs everyone to be careful lest it is trampled. Just play the damned game, make choices that are brave. Look at your character sheet, let your character surprise you and story will just happen.

I think he’s right: in games – as in fanfic, machinima, and so many forms of “new media,” story is what we do. Setting is what the devs/producers do. Sure, they can tell stories in their setting too, and their stories can and do enrich the setting. But we’re not here to play in the dev’s stories, we’re here to make, live, tell, our own.

Seriousness

If there’s a player sin to match the dev sin of wanting us to be theme-park riders through their story, it’s seriousness.

One of the first things I saw this morning was the a capella version of “Do You Want To Date My Avatar” from last night’s w00tstock. The song’s charming, and playful, and full of a lot of truth about MMOs and virtual worlds. It appeals not just because it’s fun and catchy (and Felicia Day’s the cutest human on the planet), but because it speaks to truths we’ve learned along the way. It’s an outstanding teaching tool – and I’m definitely going to be using it in the class I”m teaching next semester – in no small part because it is not serious!

By contrast, there was a reply video making the rounds by SListas Pooky Amsterdam and Draxtor Despres, “I’m Too Busy To Date Your Avatar.” It’s well done, and not humorless in its presentation – but it’s kind of sad. It’s not the glorification of violence, but another deep flaw in our culture, aspirational drudgery.

Similarly sad is the article today in Pixels and Policy, with the perfect title, “New York Times Report on Virtual Worlds Totally Misses the Point.” How did it manage to do that? It was an article in the Style section about…. wait for it… *style* in Second Life. And the point it missed? That SL is Serious Business! That virtual worlds can be as drab, humorless and soul-crushing as the RL corporate world – or as the school buildings faithfully recreated there!

O brave new world, that has avatar dress codes in it!

Someone very wise said to me that what virtual worlds do best is provide us with experiences we can’t readily get, or get better, elsewhere. We went to them for heroic adventure, for bacchanalia, for Musimmersion and DynaFleur – and now the advocates of virtual worlds are proclaiming busyness and conventionality as a feature??

Games can fix some things that are profoundly broken in our society, not least of which are its hatred of fun, of sensuality, of creativity.

We need a lot more Felicia Day, and a lot less Serious Business.

It’s *Our* Story: Character & Narrative in Alter Ego, Blue Mars and Dragon Age Origins

I’m not sure how I found Alter Ego, but I spent a few really engrossed hours with it last night. It’s a browser based (also available in Android and iPhone apps) text game, a decision tree covering life choices from birth to death. It’s charming, warm, very immersive, and really delightful. And it provides an interesting perspective on narrative and gameplay, character creation and immersion.

Alter Ego

Alter Ego looks like an iPhone screen, with a branching tree of attractive icons representing family, love, finances, work, health, and so on. Clicking on each icon generates a situation with a choice, that may in turn branch from one to four times. A separate box keeps track of character stats: trustworthiness, happiness, confidence; cash and debt; and a few other things.

And that’s pretty much it. You make choices, choices shape your character, your character shapes the arc of your life. Then you die.

My projective identity (no character names) felt real. I felt her frustrations, her triumphs, her losses – and her death after a healthy old age brought a melancholy completeness: I/she/we didn’t have quite the life I/she/we wanted, but it was rich and full, and very much complete at the end of her days.

It was cathartic, and in a way quite profound. Despite a major rewrite of childhood, her middle age nonetheless looked very much like mine: we’d converged around our core *character* – whether measured by stats or expressed in our choices. That realization gave me an “aha” moment in a way that twenty grand of therapy couldn’t – I lived it and saw it, right there on the screen.

Experiencing it through my projective identity made it real in a way that other means of learning really couldn’: that “alter ego,” that life re-roll, became my story, as much as my own life is (interestingly, WoW Insider ran a column today on “Real Life Character Re-Customization,” addressing something very similar)

A powerful, moving psychological/narrative experience had emerged from some icons and a long list of questions.

Character and Immersion: It Ain’t Graphics

Yesterday saw a bunch of gee-whiz tweets and retweets from the official Blue Mars channels, including a short video of Blue Mars running in panorama on three widescreen monitors.

I didn’t tweet my response, because I wanted to consider it (I’ve been in a “knee-jerk negativity about virtual worlds” phase, and didn’t want to just “bah, humbug” without some thought).  My immediate response was, so what? It’s pretty scenery, and I couldn’t care less. Give me people, give me a UI with effective tools for communication and expression (through text, images and building). What matters is the human world, not pretty reflections off the waves.

I was right. Alter Ego, with no more pretty than some well-designed graphic icons, deeply engaged me for the better part of an evening. Blue Mars, despite my needing to cover the world for a class, hasn’t pulled me back in weeks.

Why?

Realism and immersion aren’t generated by graphics engines, they’re generated by people, real or fictive. This is hardly news to old-time MUDders (I’m not one, but I’ve talked to them extensively), but continues to escape software engineers and too many game designers.

Dragon Age Origins

Another example: I played this week with the Dragon Age Origins character generator.

As Tobold observed, it’s not a character generator, it’s a face generator. As such, it’s really quite good (except, why is it, in game after game, you can make an avvie with nice African features but not African *hair*?).

But, using a D&D-like system, your characters are almost entirely pre-rolled, there’s no way to create a character bio, no real choice of starting talents. And you can’t modify the avvie bodies at all: not only that, the bodies across races and factions are identical aside from height (at least among the humans and elves) – so a human rogue and an elf warrior look pretty much identical below the (choose your length) neck.

So how is it a character generator?

Simple, if you think like a software engineer: it’s all about the visuals, the surface, the code that generates graphics.

Dragon Age Origins encourages you to upload your characters to a social network (an interesting take on the “alone together” phenomenon of people not really playing MMO’s socially – so Dragon Age Origins is the natural next step beyond being able to solo to level cap in WoW: it’s a solo game where you can show off your achievements socially without having to actually play with other people).

But what do you upload? Some largely pre-set stats and a profile icon.

Why not backstory? Why not the output of a little “character generator” like Alter Ego, that indicated how the character might likely behave: are they dishonest, sexually assertive, likely to try talking their way out of a fight first but brutal in finishing it, uninterested in wealth but drawn to power? How much more interesting that would be than the width of my avvie’s nose and the extra point I put in DEX?

It’s *Our* Story

This week I’ve been reading First Person: New Media as Story, Performance and Game, an anthology covering the ludology/narratology dispute in games studies. Ultra-short version? Academic wank and turf wars. Ultra-short re-roll? “Tastes Great!/Less Filling!”  Short version? Ludology stressed games-as-rule-sets, holding in its extreme view that there’s no possible room for narrative or story in games. Narratology basically wanted to read games as just like movies, with player-actors. Yes, that’s unfair, pejorative, and grossly oversimplifying. If you want the full deal, read the book.

What struck me was that both factions were arguing over the head of the player, as it were. Both seemed to be grounded in an auteur model, just arguing over what was being authored, a rule set or a text.

But what all these examples I’ve mentioned here have in common is player authorship of emergent narrative. I wrote a life in Alter Ego, not the very skilled authors of the questions and decision tree. I created, however tentatively, three characters for Dragon Age, not Biosoft. If anything interesting happens in Blue Mars, it won’t be due to the CryEngine, but due to the people.

Here’s another interesting example: there was a consensus the other day that story is irrelevant in boss fights in WoW. I think they’re only half right. I’d say, Blizzard’s story is irrelevant in boss fights, because we’re too busy enacting the events that will figure into our narratives, our guild’s tale of the time we took on the boss. And note – the bloggers weren’t saying that Blizzard’s story is irrelevant -  not at all – but that it’s best gotten from media that do a better job of delivering authored stories: novels, manga or comics. Let each medium do what it does best.

Good designers give us good tools, an engaging setting, and let us get on with living, and then telling, our own stories. Bad designers (and a lot of academics) still think it’s their story.

It’s our story, all of it.

Dreaming in KOTOR

After a class presentation on Monday where I argued that Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic is unethical in the way it creates ethical dilemmas for our player character/projective identity, then limits the player’s responses in ways sometimes deeply frustrating, the game and I clicked at such a deep level that I’ve been dreaming in character extensively every night since.

What changed? I think I’ve achieved some measure of literacy with the adventure-game format, and the game progressed to a phase where it was getting everything right. The basic structure has your adventuring party traveling between planets. The first two have to be taken in fixed order, then you’re free to take the next four in any sequence, leading into a fixed endgame. Since the middle worlds can be taken in any order, they have to be at roughly the same level – so the first one the player encounters will be very hard, the last fairly easy.

The first world I went to completely stymied me on the boss fight, so I re-rolled. By the time I got back there (at the 10 hour rather than 17 hour mark), it was tough but straightforward. The next two worlds I went to were absolutely delightful: story and gameplay integrated smoothly, the visuals were terrific, the challenges just in that “flow” zone of pleasantly frustrating.

One of KOTOR’s interesting mechanics has been the conversation/quest interplay with the NPCs in your party. Each has a backstory (including the hilariously bloodthirsty droid, HK-47). The more you converse with them, the more, obviously, they reveal about themselves – but the conversations also unlock side quests involving their pasts. It’s an interesting solution to the problem of creating strong characters in games.

Some of the character-development quest/conversation arcs work better than others, and in general they’re pretty heavy-handed. Carth’s quest for his son, lost in a war zone as a baby and rumored to be in the Sith Academy, was standard melodramatic fare, but Bastila’s search for her father’s journal and choice whether to keep it or offer it to her hated mother, and the Mandalorian mercenary Canderous’s slow reveal of why he’s come along both felt rich and engaging.

The game’s built around a powerful plot arc involving a quest for the source of the Sith lords’ power and a means to bring them down – and I’m hugely glad I was unspoiled for the plot developments. Last night had me screaming “OMFG!” at a major plot turn, much as I’d seen something being foreshadowed all along.

I think re-rolling was the key element in the depth of my engagement with the game: the choices I made at the game-mechanics level for customizing my player character and party members paid off in much better gameplay, and playing as my constant digital-worlds alter ego, Kaseido Quandry, rather than a generic character, made the ethical choices and plot developments much more personally resonant than if I were playing with a character who wasn’t so strongly my projective identity.

I’m on our last world before the finale now. I’m a little concerned that I’m low-level: I passed up a few side quests, and a lot of the money-making side opportunities, so I’m not in uber-leet gear.

I was just too greedy for the story….

KOTOR Hour 17: Disempowerment & Reflection

I’ve completed the quests that unlock the major plot device of the game, and I’m completely frustrated in several respects.

Gameplay that Unlocks Narrative

First, I think I’ve learned why I gave up on adventure games on the Playstation 1, and haven’t played the genre in ten years. I’d like to draw a distinction between games in which the gameplay creates narrative (Civilization, Sim City, and, I think, World of Warcraft) and those in which the gameplay unlocks or reveals narrative (KOTOR, Bioshock). I like stories. I read a lot of them, and I tend to gobble rather than savor them. So, when I play a story-based game, I find the gameplay is an obstacle to the narrative: I want to know what happens, not kill mobs and pick up loot!

When I used to play adventure games, back when I was a lot more addictive/compulsive than I am now, I used walkthroughs constantly: I must have spent a fortune on phone calls to the helpline for King’s Quest and Leisure Suit Larry (well, I would have, except I made them from work at a law firm when I was being paid to wait out a recession), pushing past the game elements to get to the resolution of the narrative.

(Note: I did subsequently play, and really enjoy, the Monkey Island games. How are they different?)

In my previous KOTOR post, I wondered if my frustration was the meta-game consequence of KOTOR’s theme, that impatience leads to the Dark Side. Now I think it’s just a problem with the genre, that playing a fighting game to unlock bite-size chunks of a narrative is like chocolate and broccoli, not chocolate and peanut butter.

Constraints

Miguel Sicart, in the difficult but essential The Ethics of Computer Games, flat-out calls KOTOR an “unethical game.” One of his grounds, the reduction of ethics to a game mechanic, I don’t buy as unethical, and I think directly contradicts his own praise for Grand Theft Auto: Vice City on what I read as similar grounds. But I do agree that KOTOR is a “closed system,” one in which the player doesn’t get to enact their own ethical choices, but has to choose from a limited and sometimes arbitrary-seeming system. As Sicart says

This creates an ethical experience of both disempowerment, since the player cannot exert direct moral action on the game world, and reflection, since players have to reflect on the values they are playing by.

About KOTOR specifically, he says that it and Bioshock

intends to be open ethical games, since they aim to create a game experience in which ethics play a role in the relation to a responsive game world. They do not succeed because the developers overemphasized the closedness of the game experience, not allowing players to reflect on and experience the game as a moral agent.

That was my response to Bioshock, too, which I played for about an hour. I thought the setting was gorgeous and intriguing, and I wanted to explore the city and its history. I had no interest in shooting everything around me, though, and considered playing a shooter too high a price for the visual and narrative payoff.

Here’s an example of the closedness of KOTOR. I’d mentioned earlier that I’d picked up a quest from a woman to recover her “kidnapped” sex droid, and suspected from the get-go that he was a runaway. When I find the droid, he says that he ran away because his owner had developed an unhealthy attachment to him, and he felt that if here were gone, she might find a “real person” for a lover. He then begs me to kill him. My choices from the menu then are to kill him, to tell him that I’m going to tell his owner why, or lie and tell her he’s still out there, or to say that she’s *really* upset that he’s gone. I take the latter, and he says he’s been selfish in putting his own desire for freedom ahead of her needs, and returns to her, where she very creepily says she’s going to take him home and ensure he never gets out again.

I can’t begin to count the ways in which this is fucked up, but let’s stick with the gameplay basics. My choices are to kill a runaway slave or return him to his abusive mistress. I was trying to find an option *I* considered moral – enabling him to confront her directly about her treatment of him, and/or to help him escape. But I wasn’t given those options. My choices were to kill a sympathetic sentient being, or deliver him back to slavery. The constraints did give me grounds for reflection: which is worse, death or slavery? But I was disempowered from my ability to enact my own moral alternatives by the limitations of the gameplay. As Sicart put it

the player is bereft of her creative capacities, leaving a system that evaluates and labels her actions according to moral standards that are external to those the player has created.

Exactly.

Appeal of the Narrative and Frustration With the Gameplay

One of the major attractions of the Star Wars universe for me is the complex politics underlying the simplistic Light/Dark approach of the Jedi. Their self-righteous Manicheanism has the potential for immense corruption, a theme at the heart of much of the Star Wars narrative, movies as well as Expanded Universe. Their relations with the Republic are fascinating, and full of 20th Century and contemporary analogs: are they the Communist Party running a subservient state apparatus? Are they the moral equivalent of the World Bank, dictating policy to the state? Are they the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms? The Iranian Basij?

KOTOR presents the moral complexity of the Jedi: a master fakes her death in order to drive her apprentice to the Dark Side as a test of her strength and a cautionary tale; young Jedi leaders become convinced that their strategic ability is greater than that of the Republic, and turn to the Sith for a superweapon to fight their enemies; an inadequately trained neophyte (the player character) is sent down a path that led well-trained and respected Jedi to become Sith, out of political expediency… it’s good stuff.

So, I’m interested in the storylines that intertwine this narrative, not just the main “find the mystery whoosit and defeat the Dark Lord” plot but the stories of the supporting characters that intertwine it. But, to proceed along those storylines to the conclusion, I’ve got to do a bunch of side quests (dealing with runaway slaves, gangsters, wild animals), kill a whole bunch of stuff, and do more of those progress-blocking minigames to get there.

I’m pretty sure if I weren’t playing this game for class, at this point I’d call the broccoli/chocolate ratio unfavorable and bag it. As it is, I’m on the Wookiee homeworld, about to fight my way through forest monsters to find a star map.

Oh, excitement. Or, as my Wookiee teammate would say, “AAAAAAAGHHHHHH!”