3600 Words on Gaming

Its been four months since I’ve written anything of substance, mainly due to lack of finding any one topic that I’d be motivated enough to write about and that people would be motivated enough to read (even if its simply because they are bored at work). After finishing (beating is not the correct word) Prince of Persia, I believe I have found that topic: Video games (using PoP as a gateway). This will likely contain massive spoilers, so continue on at your own risk….

If you play Prince of Persia to within 1 percent of its completion it makes you feel a sense of loss and anger. I cannot tell you what it makes you feel to play the game until there is no more content left, because I did not do that. This sense of loss is not sadness or grief. It’s not anything even emotional. It’s just there. The anger on the other hand. That is very real. And directed at the jackass of a main character, the character you control. Not for anything he does or does not do in the story of the game per se, but rather for the insult he hurls directly at you, the player. Oh, and before I really get started, I’d rather not hear about how it is ridiculous to get angry at a video game. While I know this is true in theory, I don’t see how it is any different than people getting emotional over TV shows and movies. The same jackasses who cry at the end of The Bachelor, American Idol, The O.C. or Field of Dreams (okay, wait, that last one might’ve been me….might’ve been) want to tell me that it makes me a loser to express emotion over a form of entertainment? That’s fine, so long as they understand they are right there with me. Okay, initial rant over.

I first became intrigued by Prince of Persia after being blown away by a couple of the trailers that were released over the summer (trailer 1 and trailer 2). Keep in mind that while I liked the previous games, I never was intrigued enough by any of them to invest the requisite amount of time to see them through to completion. Therefore, as I have mentioned before, I have no strong ties to the series, which ended up working out well for me for two reasons. First, because despite this being like the 8th release of a game with the title of Prince of Persia, it bears little resemblance to any of its forefathers. Second, it absolved me of any loyalty that I might have felt towards any of the previous games, thereby allowing me to view the game objectively, rather than as a bastardization of the previous trilogies that bear the same name.

So, I watched the trailers and kept an eye out for advance reviews of the game as its release date drew near. All of the main publications and internet gaming sites gave the game relatively high numerical scores. I hate the concept of numerical scores by the way. One person reviews a game, spends half of his/her article giving me back story of the game, and then slaps an arbitrary number between one and ten or one and a hundred on the page and moves on. If the game is too easy or too hard, tell me why. If the controls suck, is it because they are unresponsive (which would be impossible to get over) or just poorly laid out (which your brain and fingers can adjust to over time)? Points get taken off from the score if the game lacks originality. Points also get taken off from the score if it does something too different from genre traditions. All I want to know is what the reviewer thought worked well and why. What didn’t work well and why. And on the rare occasion that the game is an instant classic or utterly unplayable, I’d like to know that too. You can take your 6.7’s, 89’s, B-minuses, and 5 stars! and shove them up your ass. I’ll form my own opinion of the overall game, thanks.

There are a few publications that do it the right way, and when it came to Prince of Persia all of them had one continuous theme: The game was easy because of how forgiving it was. Oh, and you can’t die. Ever. When I first read that, it almost sealed the deal that I wouldn’t buy the game. Can’t Die?! Easy! I’ve been playing games since I was six years old. I don’t need no stinkin’ easy games! But then I remembered something, I suck at video games now compared to when I was at my gaming peak (between the ages of 12 and 16). It used to be that I’d want to play only the hardest of games. Give me expert mode! Then I’d sit in front of my TV and play for hours. I’d get a tremendous sense of accomplishment when I beat a difficult boss. Or I’d get frustrated and pound the SNES controller into the ground when I missed a jump during a ridiculous platforming sequence. I’d scream that the system was cheating and contemplate throwing it out of the window (I have a friend who once punched his Playstation so hard he broke it). And I’d always sit back down and play again and again until I beat the game. I didn’t play for an “ending”, I played simply to beat it. That’s why to this day I still have a love/hate relationship with Mega Man 2, my Moby Dick of video games. But these days, there is not a whole lot of time for things like that. The stack of games that were applauded for their difficulty, are now sitting collecting dust in my room. Same with games that take 40 hours to complete. All of these JRPGs and open-world monstrosities that reviewers love, I just don’t have time for. These days, give me a game that is fun to play with a decent narrative and I’ll be happy. Metal Gear Solid 4 was like this. 15-20 hours of ridiculously fun game play, with a compelling (I was already invested in the story due to the first three games) but convoluted story and over the top voice acting. So Prince of Persia was a good game but easy? Maybe it was right for me after all.

The story of Prince of Persia is clichéd, but that’s okay because the narrative is quite good. There are two gods at work in the world. God of Light (good!) and God of Dark (bad!) They provide balance throughout the land, until one day God of Dark shockingly wants more than his fair share and war is waged. God of Light traps God of Dark in a tree (like that movie Fern Gully) and commissions a people to guard the tree and the kingdom it resides in. God of Light leaves the land never to be seen again (lazy bastard). Not surprisingly, thousands of years pass, kingdom falls into disrepair and only a king and his daughter are left to guard the tree, but the king is losing his mind and God of Dark is about to escape. His impact is already felt in the surrounding world as “corruption” has spread throughout the kingdom. The only way to make the tree strong again and ensure God of Dark remains trapped, is to cure the land of its corruption. Emotionally invested yet? I am. Let’s do this!

You start the game as the titular “Prince of Persia”, though it is not clear that the character is a prince, or that you are even in Persia. The Prince is a rather sardonic kind of guy that ends up playing the role of comedic side kick for most of the game. Yes, the title character is not the main character. Oh sure, the creators try and give him depth and have him grow as a character over time, but they aren’t quite successful. He starts out the game as a guy who happens to stumble into this whole mess after losing his gold strapped donkey (after doing some tomb robbing). He is set up to be a guy that wants nothing more than money and loose women, so when the princess literally falls on him at the beginning of the game, his motivation for following her is something like, “hey, hot chick who might be rich—count me in”. Though the Prince pretty much stays like this throughout the game, I much prefer the character to that of some whiny, emo-type character who spends the whole game questioning himself. Nope, the Prince knows what he wants and spends the whole game trying to get it.

The Princess, who goes by the name of Elika, on the other hand has lived in that land her whole life and is solely dedicated to healing the land of corrupted. Oh, and she has somehow been imbued with magical powers. She is witty and can trade insults with the Prince pretty well, and looks like Natalie Portman, so that helps too. So far we are deep into the land of clichés, but that’s about to change. Elika is basically a physical manifestation of all of those game mechanics we’ve become so reliant on over the years, and all of her actions are tied to a single button. Instead of pushing the jump button twice to double-jump, you jump and then push the button that calls for Elika, and she throws you higher or farther for the second “jump”. When in a fight, you can use the Prince’s sword or gauntlet to push back an enemy and then use Elika to chain in some magic attacks. You can even toss an enemy into the air and then throw Elika up after him to attack. It’s all done stylishly well, and since she is your constant companion, running and jumping by your side, you come to rely on her a lot. Oh and then there is the part about the whole no death thing.

In Prince of Persia, if you are jumping, and swinging and wall-running from area to area and you miss time a jump and fall, Elika will grab you and the game will transport you back to the last piece of solid ground you were on. This caused people to be outraged that a game could exist where you never die. They claim it makes it cheap and takes away the challenge. However, there is almost no game on the market today where death exists. At least not in the sense of old-school gaming death. Remember the days of searching everywhere for extra lives, because if you died more than 3 times the game would end? Maybe you’d get a continue, but for the most part, even if you were on the last enemy, you had to restart the game entirely if you ran out of lives. Now, the only thing that comes with death is load times and a magical reappearance at a save point/respawn point. It is an accepted play mechanic that no one even thinks twice about. Prince of Persia simply gives a reason for the reappearance and removes frustrating load times. Can anyone really have a problem with that? I don’t. Certainly not in this day in age where load times can last for mind-numbing durations.

So you run, jump, double-jump, wall-run and fight through the game’s levels, curing the land by killing some colossus type bosses and collecting light seeds to strengthen Elika after the land is healed. About half way through you find out that Elika was dead once and her father was so distraught that he took power away from the tree holding the God of Dark and somehow transferred it to his dead daughter’s body. At this point any seasoned gamer (or movie-goer) knows that this is not going to end well for Elika unless there is some kind of sappy twist at the finale. She knows she is going to die when she completes the task of healing all the lands, but resolutely does it anyway, believing that her life is what caused the corruption to spread. The Prince? Well, he seems to remain oblivious and continues to make sarcastic remarks, though he does try and say that he wants to stay in this land with Elika when they finish healing. She says, not so cryptically, that he can have the land when this is done. By this point the Prince has developed from a guy who decided to help out because of a hot girl, to a guy who continues to help out because of a hot girl, and he wants to get revenge on the God of Dark for getting in his way of having sex with said hot girl. Character development? Check.

As a player, this is all fine and well. The Prince is good for comic relief and has nothing more than a seemingly passing interest in “saving the world”. Elika, however, does. And the game does a good job of allowing a player to care about that interest, or not care at all, through optional conversations. No more long winded cut scenes if you just want to play the game for the game. You can talk to Elika at any point in time using just the press of one of the shoulder buttons on the controller. Then the Prince will ask a question and Elika will answer, or the two will engage in conversation. You keep pressing the button to continue the conversation until the Prince says one of his canned lines, upon which you know the conversation is over. Anyways, the point is that you, the player, choose whether or not to care about Elika’s journey. And I figured since I am playing the game for my entertainment, I should care. So I pushed the L2 button and talked whenever the game displayed the optional conversation icon. A lot of these conversations were about choice and how Elika basically felt that she had no choice but to heal these lands, it’s the duty of her people and all that good stuff. The Prince responds by saying that you always have a choice. She could, after all, just run away with him. I liked the idea of optional conversations as they were a way for the player to feel even more actively involved in the game if they so chose.

15 hours later, after healing all the lands, collecting hundreds of light seeds and becoming genuinely invested in Elika’s quest to purge the land, and enjoying the stunning transformation each land undergoes when it is healed, it was time to take on the final boss. I knew Elika would die when I beat the boss, but that was okay. Though she was a character I grew attached to (well in the whole video game sense of things), it was a necessary conclusion to the game and even the character was good with it. The narrative throughout the game made it as such. So the Prince slays the last boss, Elika gives her life (light seed energy) to heal the tree and seal the God of Dark back into the tree. The Prince gives his requisite scream of despair and then carries her body down a long temple corridor that heads outside. The Credits roll. Should be game over. Only it’s not.

The Prince lays Elika’s body on top of her mother’s tomb (a tomb he so hilariously called “a tomb with a view”, earlier in the game) and looks out over all of the land that they healed. There are four trees with a blue light above them, representing the four main areas of the game. The trees are all standing on islands raised off of the ground. The islands are surrounded by pillars and rock masses making it evident that you had to climb up one of the pillars and jump across. After 15 hours of gaming, performing this kind of action was second nature so I send the Prince running over to a pillar and have him climb up. I take aim at the island, jump, and then press the button to double-jump…and the Prince falls to the ground. What the hell? Then I remember, Elika is dead. The game creators, those evil bastards, placed the most obvious route to the island in perfect range of the double jump knowing that the player would try it. The sense of loss when you push that button and get no response is quite indescribable. It doesn’t make you feel sad. Its just you suddenly realize how much you relied on that one character throughout the whole game. Yes, you, not the Prince, relied on her. And then she wasn’t there. It is a great mechanic in that it causes the player to feel a sense of loss, rather than experiencing that loss through the eyes of a character. It’d be interesting to see if other games could work something like this in.

The sense of loss also stems from the fact that the game causes you to identify with Elika, to actively engage in her story. Never once do you really feel a connection with The Prince. This is not the story of Solid Snake or Marcus Fenix, or any of those characters that you both identify with (as much as you can identify with a 90 year old chain-smoking spy who fights women dressed as animals, or a roided up marine fighting aliens) and control. This is the story of Elika, and you were along for the ride, invested in helping her, using the Prince as a surrogate of sorts in that cause.

Until, all of a sudden you weren’t. When you control the Prince and make him jump onto that island with the tree, you start to hear whisperings of the God of Dark to cut down the tree. And I was thinking, wait, the game wants me to make this Prince guy undo what I had just done. All of a sudden the Prince wasn’t a surrogate for my actions but rather a guy on the screen that I could control. Except for I could only control him to do one thing: Cut down those trees and effectively waste the 15 or so hours I spent on the game. It was akin to having a list of things to do, spending two weeks finishing the list, and then after you cross off the last item, a new item appears and says to undo everything. Well screw that. You think I am going to control this avatar and watch him undo all of MY work? You think I am going to screw up the story of the only character that was interesting and engaging? I am supposed to cede the story’s ending to a secondary character? Nope. Fuck you, Prince. Except, what other choice did I have?

The whole game the Prince had been talking about how there was always a choice. Yet, I found it odd that at the very end of the game, the player was given no choice. The Prince’s only actions that had any consequence was cutting down trees. Well, I suppose the game could have turned into a running simulator where I ran around the temple for all eternity. But seeing as how my actions in controlling the Prince were limited, I decided that my actions toward the game were not. I would simply shut off the machine. After all, the credits had already rolled to completion. The proper ending had been reached. So that’s what I did.

I have since seen what happens if you do cut down the trees, and I suppose it does end up giving the developers a way to set up the inevitable sequel, so that is nice and all I guess. However, I looked at some game message boards and read some interviews with the creators and it seems as though one of the goals of the game was to snap you out of the immersion of the game world and make you make your own choice. They wanted you to use your reaction the first time you went to double jump and failed. Will you succumb to the whispers of the Dark God, feeling a sense of loss and believing you have no choice, just like Elika’s father? Or, will you respect the story of the main character and end the game with the land healed, a goal fulfilled, but with the loss of your loyal companion?

I have to say that if the game didn’t present this choice, if it ended right after the credits, or if it showed a simple cut scene of the Prince chopping down those trees, it would not have really resonated with me. The choice is where the power of the game lies. Apparently a game like Bioshock offers this choice as well, though I have not played it to confirm one way or another. Now I am fascinated by this idea of avatar disconnect, and wonder if it is in many other games. Games always seem to give the player control of a character they can root for, and place that character in a story that ensures the player and character’s motivations are, for the most part, one and the same. But what happens when the player and the character are intentionally designed to be at cross-purposes? It’s such a jarring reality because it goes against every story-telling norm that we know. And there is no other story-telling medium that can convey that.