What kind of article would I start with, now that I’m jumping back through the Looking Glass for the first time since February? Why, the kind that requires chapters on a blog entry, of course!
I: All There In The Manual
If the eyes reading this belong to a person who grew up in the 90s, think back to when your parents would buy you a new game: say you got As on your report card, or it was Christmas morning, or your birthday. Surely you remember eagerly tearing into the shrinkwrap, taking the components out piece-by-piece. Most of the time, the manual itself was well worth reading through, chock-full of tidbits, art and storyline readouts.
So lately, I’ve caught myself staring dumbfounded at some of the “manuals” included with some otherwise amazing games of this era. Mortal Kombat 2011, Mass Effect 2, Darksiders 2…the only manual that these games have is a little foldout that tells you the controls and the warranty. No background story, no luscious art. And that’s a shame, because the actual games are beautiful and clearly the product of entire teams working their arses off day in and day out.
I’ll give you another interesting example: Dead Space 3. When you open up the case, a skinny booklet tells you that the manual is available online. (Well, at least they wrote one in some capacity.) So what’s this booklet for? It’s basically a thing that tells you how to use your PS3, as well as two pages of legalese that tells you exactly how they’ll slash your throat and drink your blood from a boot if you should ever think of suing them for any reason. Huh, they chose to print out a physical copy of that but not the actual manual? Interesting little window into where EA’s priorities really lie. Oh, but buyers of Halo 4 might have been surprised to find that there was no manual at all, not even a patronizing little slip that says “here’s how to turn on your system.”
Functionally, I’ll readily agree that in some respects, manuals have outlived their usefulness for games that force the player through a prologue tutorial anyway. But at this point, it’s less about materialism or cold functionality, and more about showing a bit of pride in your product. Why is it that the people who manufactured Halo 4, one of the video game franchises that’s guaranteed to sell more than each of the Abrahamic faiths combined even if it was like a pinball spinoff or something, presents it in this most bare-bones way imaginable?
Hey, remember Illusion Of Gaia on the SNES? That game came with a guide that doubled as a manual. You could tell they took pride in crafting that game, just by looking at how it was presented to you as soon as you took it home. More recently, the manual of Bioshock reads like whoever wrote it actually enjoyed themselves while doing so.
And don’t think I’m just hung up on manuals; I’m using them as symptomatic of a larger phenomenon of modern gaming. But I think there’s something deeper going on here, and I’d like to probe it a bit further.
Say the word ‘ritual’ to the layperson and they might think of that scene in King Kong where the dancing natives summon the ape. But it’s a term that sociologists agree crosses all cultures, not just the ones that we as a society like to think of as “de-civilized”. A ritual is simply an action or procedure to which we attach symbolic or cultural significance, and it can be collective or deeply personal.
I say this because I’ve come to think of the ‘physicality’ of video gaming as a ritual in itself. You go to the game store and you get the game. You tear asunder the shrink wrap, and your experience with the game would begin right then, before you even turned on the console. You would flip open the manual, and right there, the developers would immerse you in their world. “Get a load of this; you’re gonna love this,” they would implicitly say, launching into a two-page backstory that increased your anticipation for the game lying just inches away. You would flip the pages, and be confronted by gorgeous images of the monsters you’d be fighting in a few short minutes. If the game was the fruit of the developers’ labour, then the manual was their way of shaking your hand, putting an arm around your shoulder and ushering you into their world. Remember that fuzzy feeling you’d get?
Now, there actually is a quantifiable reason for this, at least in the pre-3D generations. With the graphical abilities they were working with at the time, putting that pretty hand-drawn artwork in the manual was the best way for the designers to really get their vision across, and likewise with telling a detailed story. Heck, the booklet for the original Donkey Kong Country has a full-blown short story – like, actual prose fit for a short story compilation – nudged in between the renders and the hint tidbits. And that’s actually a trend that that series has continued to this day: the 2010 Wii title Donkey Kong Country Returns sees the player in with a luscious manual, right down to Cranky Kong’s snarky comments.
Can I ask something here? Because every time someone mentions the ‘digital era’ in which we live, I think about this. Something colossal has happened over the past ten years to the way we consume entertainment media, so how has that affected elements of ritual in gaming? Has it minimized it…or merely altered it?
Of course, things like Steam have made it easier to get games we never thought we’d play. (Statistically, you’ve played and loved Audiosurf. Don’t deny it.) Logging on and downloading a game is easy. Am I just nostalgic, pining for the past? I think that Steam’s success proves that the physical ritual is not necessary for the full enjoyment of a game. But then, games are not necessary for a society to function, but they do enhance it. Done right, digital distribution has allowed many homebrew game designers and musicians to spread their wings in ways that wouldn’t have been possible otherwise, but I think that the move for digital really should be homebrewed rather than ruled over by folks like Apple and other such corporations.
We need more artists like Machinae Supremacy, who uploaded their first live recording to the Pirate Bay so that everyone gets to watch it (Compare this with European metal label Nuclear Blast, who maintain an absurd system of delaying and denying ease of access to their products for people who have committed the horrible crime of not living in Europe); we need less of unfathomably rich corporations merely using a digital paradigm as an excuse to strip ownership rights from the consumer – which, yes, is a thing that happens. When you buy from iTunes, you don’t own those files, you now have paid for permission to access those files. With a music CD, conversely, you own the physical media, just not the copyright to the aural art. When Xbox executive Phil Spencer was saying “the idea of ownership is morphing”, he wasn’t even being coy or making a deliberate entry into the Creepiest Corporate Executive Blurb Of The Year awards. He was saying flat-out that their intention was to strip ownership rights from you. The question I want to ask is, why can’t the laws be amended in such a way that we own the digital content we buy? If I’m spending money on something, I like the assurance that I actually own what I pay for, and that I’m not merely spending money on a finite facsimile. When you get right down to it, there’s really no reason for digital content to be a “you have only bought permission to play/listen/watch the thing” deal.
To that end, I really think Steam is ahead of the curve on digital distribution, because they actually focus on ease of access above all else: you can buy a game and it’s tied to your Steam account, so you can download the game to your computer and play offline if you so choose, and play on a different computer when you get a new system.
Digital distribution has worked out pretty well for me also: the first Architects book seems to sell more copies on Kindle (yeah, yeah, part of a big corporation, I know) than physical. That said, I put together my products with the mindset that the physical presentation matters, because, well…it does, to me. There will always be an element of the visceral when it comes to entertainment media, even if the thing itself exists only in cyberspace.
So don’t think I’m getting down on digital; I’m getting down on its misuse.
But as for a digital distribution paradigm, there is a “but” coming. A big one. Let’s head back to the physicality of gaming.
I’ve previously looked at how beautiful the God Of War series is, aesthetically. But I also think the mainline trilogy offers us an interesting progression, in terms of the physicality of the gaming ritual.
The manual for God Of War is seriously old-school: tons of beautiful illustrations, full-colour pages, side-comments from characters in the universe, in-depth descriptions. It’s one of those that you can just sit back and absorb just on its own merits.
God Of War II? Well, alright. It’s a more standardized manual, seemingly less enthusiastic about its source material than the first manual. The pages are black and white, and immediately I felt like the visceral impact of the full-colour pages was gone.
God Of War 3’s manual is just that “how I turn on system, how I make facepunch?” silliness.
Of course, you can still get your feelies, depending on the game. But they’ve been relegated to the super-special limited-collector’s-premium editions, and those come with a considerable price tag. That’s where you get the real cool stuff: the art books, the statues, the character journals, et cetera. But what it tells me is that game developers have endeavored to relegate feelies – and not even talking about big things like character statues, but just the notion of having something to read and feel – to the status of something limited and special, but all they’ve really done is remove the middle ground: now there’s no real middling point between the expensive limited editions that you’d need to be a serious fan to get, and the regular editions that are basically “here’s the disc, and screw you for making us manufacture even that.”
But let’s talk about these limited editions. I consider myself a multimedia collector (music, games, movies), so these are of particular interest to me. They typically are valued at much higher than a bare-bones game: while a game can easily plummet from sixty to twenty dollars on the open market in half a year (that’s what I get for buying Lollipop Chainsaw at full price on release week…blast the voice-acting charms of Tara Strong!), these limited editions typically only go up in value the longer they exist. And they come in various forms. There are actually two different versions of the Dead Space 2 limited edition: the one I have is physically almost indistinguishable from the regular version, except it has the entire Dead Space Extraction game on the disc (Previously released for Wii), so it’s essentially two games for the price of one; the boxset version, meanwhile, has a model of Isaac’s trademark Plasma Cutter weapon, because why not?
But here’s a strange phenomenon I noticed. The boxsets of Batman: Arkham City and God Of War 3 and Ascension come with statues: Batman, Kratos and Pandora’s Box, one of the main Macguffins in the God Of War series. It couldn’t have been cheap to manufacture these statues in whatever limitation they came in. So I have to wonder why these sorts of sets have things like vouchers to download the soundtracks, as opposed to just spending two cents per set and putting the CDs inside? Hear me out and I’ll tell you why this is completely and utterly illogical.
If you can afford to produce a statue, you can afford to produce a CD. If you can dodge a wrench, you can dodge a ball. Why spend so much money on producing something that doesn’t actually do anything except sit there, while cheaping out on producing a copy of content that actually does something (IE play music), in addition to being much less expensive to produce?
The way I see it is this: if someone is going to get the super-limited collector’s edition, as opposed to the bare-bones edition or just hopping onto the open seas to the torrent islands and pirating your game, then it should be patently obvious that they value ‘feelies’. Right?
A good chunk of the God Of War 3 Ultimate Edition exclusive content is based on digital vouchers, even though they scraped together enough money to include that big ol’ Pandora’s Box replica (which, admittedly, is a cool setpiece in one’s game room). It was released in 2010, and by 2013, all the digital vouchers had expired. So collectors who bought it on Ebay were screwed over, because the asinine decision was made to turn parts of this limited set into perishables. That’s right – two music albums and a documentary, all of which would have fit on discs and put in the box to last a lifetime, turned into perishables for no reason. Really? They’re not frozen carrots, guys. There’s no reason to give this stuff a best-before date. Thank goodness for the Pirate Bay.
(Interestingly, the image of the GoW3 boxset I showed up there is of a European pressing, which does include the CDs. Just another case of people being screwed over by region, I suppose.)
For customer convenience, CDs are still king; until tablets replace laptops and towers entirely, CDs being able to interface so easily with computers means that they do everything that digital copies do, except you actually own the product, with all the security and peace-of-mind that entails. And physical copies don’t tend to eat themselves after a certain date (unless you treat them really poorly). The ‘digital nation’ is still young and developing, but even now, why are these “expiry dates” even necessary if you absolutely have to deny people the security of a physical copy? Why sabotage your own product like this? It goes back to what I was saying earlier: the digital paradigm we’re stepping into is a great thing, but hey, major companies – you’re doing it wrong.
To best illustrate my point, let’s go back to manuals for a second. Beyond: Two Souls comes with one of those “digital manuals”. What’s the quintessential function of a manual when you strip away the bells and whistles I talked about? To use it as a reference guide. But with “digital manuals”, at least on the PS3, you cannot access the manual while playing the game. You can’t use the reference guide as an on-the-go reference unless you’re planning on quitting out to the menu every time you forget how to do something, so what’s the point? How is that progress? Tell you what – put a reference guide inside of the game itself like a number of modern fighting games do, and Bob’s your uncle.
It’s ironic that despite being one of the meanest games in existence, the limited edition of Dark Souls gets it right: an art book, a soundtrack CD (so you can listen to the game’s great classical score without developing a Pavlovian fear-and-panic reaction from only hearing it in game when you’re about to die) and a making-of DVD, right there in the box. No jumping through hoops to get a digital copy, no nonsense. Was that so hard?
They say the digital world is supposed to make entertainment consumption easier, but “they” keep screwing it up. If you absolutely must be illogical and put digital vouchers in a set designed to solicit people who value feelies and physical versions, why have them expire? I’m reminded of how iTunes is locked by region, but CDs aren’t. When you’re a Canadian who regularly gorges himself on European metal bands, that becomes important.
Oh, hey, still here? Remember how I said that there was a “but” coming?
II: Digital Corporatocracy
Yes, game companies are moving further and further into a digital distribution paradigm. BUT, they’ve repeatedly demonstrated that they have no clue how to do so effectively. The backlash against the Xbox One was so tremendous that Microsoft could only save face by backpedaling and removing the DRM measures that they were basing their console around, which intended to strip away ownership rights and constantly patrol the user based on a digital paradigm.
At this crucial crossroads in the gaming industry, it’s becoming clear that the big thing pissing off gamers is not that certain companies are trying to move to a digital paradigm – it’s that the customer is continually being told that he or she is wrong. Soon after the massive backlash against the Xbox One, the Assassin’s Creed creator spoke out and said that nobody really cares if games have a physical format any more. As much as I respect his body of work, let’s not be disingenuous, sir: we’ve just seen how the majority of consumers react to the notion of having their ownership rights stripped away.
And here we see the founder of Id Software saying much the same: Oh, and there’s another one. Can I ask a question here? Why are you trying to tell the consumer what they want? Especially considering, as I mentioned, we’ve just seen how people will react to being told that the “end of ownership” is the only way forward. It needs to be made very clear that there is a difference between digital content that takes advantage of the freedom the medium gives, and digital content done with the intent to, pardon my French, be a corporate douchepizzle.
And make no mistake, there will always be physical costs involved, be it through controllers (interesting phenomenon these past few generations, where first-party controllers suddenly cost as much as a brand new game at full price, despite being unfathomably cheaper to produce on the whole…hmm), or graphics cards and updated drivers every so often if you’re a PC gamer, et al…and supposing that the Assassin’s Creeator (sorry) gets his wish and gaming goes entirely digital, I wonder what the prices will be like? I wonder if people would still pay $60 on release day for digital content? Steam recognizes the “impermanence” and “un-thing-ness” of digital content and their prices are quite agreeable on the whole, but so far, triple-A development studios have always had a revenue stream coming in from the full-price physical product. I know for a fact that these things do not take a spectacularly large sum to produce compared to what they’re being sold for (Edit: I’m referring to the physical product, not the contents of the optical media), so there’s quite a bit of revenue in that sixty-dollar paradigm.
So what happens when and if the physical product goes away? Either the game industry has to get ready for another backlash when users en masse find themselves not wanting to pay sixty dollars for digital content that they don’t really own and that may or may not eat itself in the future, or the prices are fixed to fit. And if the prices are fixed to fit, how might that affect triple-A titles with their multimillion dollar budgets down the line? I appreciate and respect the indie scene as much as any of you, but I would love for games like Mass Effect 2 to continue being made with stellar production standards, rather than having to sacrifice content and cut corners. I’ve heard ruminations that the focus on triple-A titles is gradually homogenizing the industry, and they make good points, but I think there are tons of AAA titles out there worth your time.
It’s worth thinking about, at any rate.
After the internet threw wide the gates of Tartarus when Microsoft announced the One, to such a massive extent that they were actually forced to listen to our voices instead of just our wallets, it became clear to me that the problem with the digital world isn’t the softball game we’re playing – it’s these major corporations hogging the ball.
DLC is another thing that I think a lot of companies are…close to nailing down, but not quite. The problem is that DLC almost feels like a zero sum game in some respects: if you don’t make it essential or meaningful (Multiplayer skins, etc.), then you come to the “why would people pay money for this” question, but if you put essential plot stuff in DLC, then the consumer is essentially being sold an incomplete product at launch. To use an example, take the Arrival DLC in Mass Effect 2: I won’t spoil it for you because it’s a great twist in the story that really drives home the “you can’t save everyone” message of the series, but if you didn’t get it, then you’re going to be lost at the start of Mass Effect 3. I think the perfect DLC is one that provides an interesting, involved expansion to the game, without forcing the player to buy it in order to understand the plot. To that end, I invoke Mass Effect again: the Citadel DLC in ME3 doesn’t have much to do with the main plot, but it is a detailed and rewarding experience nonetheless.
That said, DLC has the potential to be something great, and I’m glad the option is there. To keep using Mass Effect, the concept of DLC allowed Bioware a massive mulligan when the backlash to their ending of the trilogy turned out to be as massive as when Spider-Man fans read One More Day, which for those of you not into comics, can politely be described as “nuclear”. Twenty years ago, the ending would have stayed bad forever. That’s one of the ways DLC can be more ‘fluid’ than the expansion packs of yore. Granted, the ending still isn’t GOOD – the Citadel DLC provides a send-off to the cast and the Leviathan DLC explains the Reapers’ origins, but there are still a host of issues – but point stands.
Now let’s think about multiplayer games. Oh, the advent of being able to play online is great, isn’t it? When you slough through the racists and brats, it’s actually pretty remarkable that we’re able to daisy-chain people from around the world in multiplayer games at once. Heck, where once Nintendo Power and their guides were my best hope for game tips, now I can go onto Youtube and watch someone over in England or California or whevever play the game for me and show me how to do the puzzles – but it’s the multiplayer connective element that really makes me feel we’ve come a long way. I know we’re all used to it by now, but just consider it with me for a second: you can literally sit down and be connected with people worldwide at the touch of a button. We’re living in a sci-fi movie, guys.
Let’s think about Mario Party, though. If the broken friendships and broken whiskey bottles from the last time you gathered the boys to play Mario Party haven’t weighed too heavily on your conscience, let’s say you crack it out again, now a decade and a half after the first game’s release. Just cram that cartridge in, and you’re right back into the frustration and the angry yelling.
So…question. Do you really think that Left 4 Dead’s servers are still going to be up in ten years? How about Gears Of War, or whatever Call Of Duty or Battlefield they’re on to now? These things are not a one-time investment on the part of the publisher. Much like a good restaurant, servers are a constant money sink if you want to keep them running long-term. Make no mistake, these games’ servers will shut down in the measurable future to make room for new games the companies are pushing, and in the case that the multiplayer is contingent on the server to work, they’ve effectively made a large component of these games reach an expiration date.
It’s even worse if they decide to go further in the Sim City direction and try to make more games “always on”. Milk has a sell-by date, not video games. By using an “always-on” mode that’s connected to servers that are ultimately finite, you’re essentially giving games a future-use suicide pill.
So I guess that’s a reason I’m leery about a digital future for gaming, so long as companies like Microsoft get their way (and make no mistake, just because they went back on their DRM policies to save face in the wake of cataclysmic backlash doesn’t mean they don’t still want it): there’s no longer a sense that a game is a complete, self-contained, self-inherent package that will last as long as you take good care of it, so much as a sense that you’re starting an installment plan and gradually unlocking more of the game with more of your money, and that you don’t really own it, and that certain components like multiplayer which are dependent on digital to work now have an expiration date in the uncertain future.
And it really doesn’t have to be that way. It shouldn’t have to be that way.
III: The Point
Digital distribution and corporate control/inconvenience don’t need to go hand in hand, and it’s rather baffling to me that they do so much of the time.
But, you know, all that is kind of the opposite reason as to why I am a physical collector of sorts. It touches on the reasons why I’m so happy with my electronic entertainment library (Or EEL!…I don’t really call it that. Please don’t hit me.): there’s a sense that each and every piece of electronic art in there, be it music, film or game is a self-contained thing, with its own inherence, and the security and convenience of knowing that it’s there for all intents and purposes. To me, it almost feels like every CD, game and movie I own is a small piece of history, and a fraction of our culture. And I think that’s well worth celebrating. I’m not intending to try and say that my way is right and absolute – when it comes to entertainment consumption, we all should go with what suits our tastes best. But in justifying my own choices, I’d just like to veer away from the conception of myself as someone who sticks with tradition for its own sake.
And in fact, it was an incident at a game store a bit back that really made me consider just how much I actually do value the “inherence” of a product. I bought a used copy of Assassin’s Creed II, and while I know you buy imperfect when you buy used, this was just…my word. When I went home and got it out of the bag (mind, it was a different copy than the display-case I took to the counter), the case was all sticky and nasty for some reason, the manual was missing, and most importantly the disc had several scratches on it. The first thing that went through my mind (other than a sigh at how bafflingly terribly some people treat the very things that they spend their own hard-earned money on) was that I had to exchange it for a copy that wasn’t cruddy. Because heck, man, it’s Assassin’s Creed, and it deserved better than that, right? Though, I did get it exchanged successfully, and I think that incident says a lot about the psychology behind purchases, in my case.
All that said, digital future is approaching for gaming, and that’s just a stone cold fact. The question is whether it will be ruled by companies like Steam, or companies like EA and Microsoft.
But the power is in your hands. I mean that, by the way. Because when you sift through the fanboys and the trolls and the people who intend to use this amazing thing purely to take the piss, the fact remains that you have a voice in a way that’s unique to our generation. I saw Microsoft going back on its DRM policies for the Xbox One due to fan backlash, and I saw the voices of the layperson making an impact on real corporate policy. Sure, a lot of those voices were appended to funny cat pictures and stick-figure rage-faces, but does that really diminish their evident impact at the end of the day?
Because I think people are tired of companies telling them what they want instead of asking. In the ideal consumer marketplace, several options will be on the table, and the consumer will be free to check out whichever format – be it physical, digital, or everything in between – best suits their style of consumption. Apparently, people don’t like being told that they have to consume their media in a specific way. In the eyes of the Id founder and the Assassin’s Creed creator, my voice becomes a non-entity because I prefer physical products. That is not how to treat a customer and a potential source of revenue. And don’t tell me about the costs of mass-producing physical copies, because mass-production is no longer necessary. As far as physical versions go, I think the era of printing-on-demand is going to come into its own. Above all, the customer demands choice in their media consumption. But where do I think the power to do that lies?
With the artists themselves. With the musicians just scraping by from their songs on Bandcamp. With the actual game developers, not the publishers or corporations – be it a triple-A blockbuster or a source-funded indie game. With places like Createspace (yeah, another plug…), for whom printing-on-demand (one copy sold is one copy produced-to-order, in other words) is a reality without sacrificing quality of production standards. It’s these things that are going to light the way forward and make the digital world the choice-centric market that it deserves to be. Not Microsoft trying to use digitality as a flimsy smokescreen to try and eat your ownership rights, not the RIAA dealing with piracy in a way that just drives people to piracy, and not Apple just…being Apple.
And to think I started this article with the intent to look at elements of ritual in gaming past and present. But in the middle of digressing so hard, I think I’ve found it: maybe the ‘gaming ritual’ has, thanks to the internet, merely morphed. The idea of ownership hasn’t; greed-motivated executives just want to think it has. But as for the ritual of gaming?
Okay – so maybe manuals aren’t what they used to be. Lord knows that’s just an objective fact in most cases. But maybe we are all of us a part of the new paradigm, Youtubing and blogging and making ourselves a part of the culture. Maybe our voices matter in a way that never would have been possible without a journalism degree back on that night I tore open the box of Super Metroid and had my first experience with one of the series that would change my life.
Because, like I mentioned, a ritual is just an action to which we attach personal or social significance. Maybe it doesn’t really matter what the manuals look like, or what format the game comes in, so long as it’s us, the gamers, being able to say what we want and say it from the heart. Maybe that’s the new ritual of gaming.
Aside from playing the hell out of some great games, anyway.
I hope I’ve at least entertained with this article, or maybe given someone out there something to think about. I’m not trying to step on the toes of anyone who’s diving headlong into this digital future without looking back; for the purposes of this article, I’m just a gamer thinking about tangible meaning in a digital universe.