Final Post

Just a note to say that from now on I’ll be consolidating this Tumblr with my main one at http://gojonstonego.tumblr.com. The new combined Tumblr will also be called Share Your Toys, but will be at the other URL, as I have a few more followers and a lot more posts over there.

d∙i∙v∙i∙n∙e∙r : a case study

d∙i∙v∙i∙n∙e∙r  bills itself as “a game of portents and poetry”. It’s gloomily atmospheric, delicately crafted and extremely simple. You are proffered ingredients, those you pick are thrown in a cauldron, and a short series of ambiguous, prophecy-flavoured statements are generated.

d∙i∙v∙i∙n∙e∙r  could be described, then, as a micro-game, interactive poem, poem-game or perhaps an interactive digital toy. It’s concise, contained and extremely simple – not a fragment of a larger project or experiment in mechanics, but a completely realised artefact. It’s worth saying this because mainstream games culture tends to fetishise size, breadth, even bloatedness, while mainstream poetry culture prizes economy of language – the smaller and neater, the better. In its structure, therefore, as well as its content, d∙i∙v∙i∙n∙e∙r  positions itself as much as a poem as it does a game.

It also falls foul of a certain strain of thinking in mainstream (internet-based) games culture debate that says the word ‘game’ ought to be reserved for digital texts/products that (a) test the player in some way and (b) feed back the results of that test unambiguously, ie. by letting you know when you have succeeded, or when you have failed. This wobbly conservatism is in part informed by a distrust of – or antipathy toward – ambiguity. We recognise this as the same misgiving directed at poetry: “If I don’t get it, then how do I know there’s anything to get, and if there’s nothing to get, why is this worth my time?”

In this respect as well, then, d∙i∙v∙i∙n∙e∙r  is a lot like a poem. But it’s not, I would say, more a poem than it is a computer game. It uses pre-recorded music and sound effects and digital graphics. It requires input from start to finish, which in turn requires the use of a mouse or trackpad. It was made for Global Game Jam 2016 by a small team. None of these things in themselves define it as a game, but together, they add up to the impression of a game. I think, therefore, that d∙i∙v∙i∙n∙e∙r  can be properly called a poem-game hybrid.

Pop Culture vs Terrorism

Whenever we try to make sense of global violence, we tend to urge each other not to think in terms of popular mediums like film, comics or video games. These, it’s supposed, are windows to worlds where things work differently, and importing their lessons is therefore dangerous.

And yet:

The second article, for my money, is far more informative than the first, and the comment made in response is not idiotic, or even particularly at odds with the sentiments of the comment made on the Guardian article.

What it points towards is a slightly more nuanced picture of popular genres and mediums than that of fluffy escapism – a suggestion that the tropes we find throughout genre films, comics, anime, cartoons, games (and so on) can operate not just as convenient narrative devices but as a store of cultural knowledge and wisdom that we usefully draw upon.

To be absolutely clear, I’m not implying that if you want to learn the truth about ISIS, you should sit down with a stack of martial arts DVDs and Marvel comics. I’m also not denying that the demands of dramatic narrative mostly result in simplistic characterisation and reductive accounts of people’s motives, relationships and internal moral struggle.

I do think it’s the case, however, that whenever we start to think and talk about real life violence, we immediately, if not consciously, import a lot of the things we have learned through absorbing popular culture, and many of them are useful in orienting us, in putting us on the path toward understanding where otherwise we might have been completely in the dark. After all, few of us have encountered terrorists in real life and been able to so much as glimpse inside their minds. Few of us are intimately familiar with the history of the Middle East or with religious scripture. It’s easy to take for granted the fact that we feel we have at least some notion of what events are playing out and why.

I’d just like to list a few of the pages from the website TV Tropes, which collects and documents “devices and conventions that a writer can reasonably rely on as being present in the audience members' minds and expectations”. It’s interesting to consider these in the light of current events.

The trope Feed it With Fire, for instance, relates to an enemy (monstrous or otherwise) that is positively nourished by conventional attacks and weaponry. Richard Garfield’s King of Tokyo, a board game that hangs its hat on monster movie cliches, includes a game card knowingly titled “We’re only making it STRONGER!”, which translates damage taken into energy that can be channelled into future attacks. The classical mythology precedent is obviously the Hydra, but the metaphor has been repeated in fictional worlds as diverse as The Fifth Element, X-Men and Neon Genesis Evangelion.

The point that terrorist organisations are actually strengthened by poorly thought through military intervention is made again and again, of course, but then, it needs to be – learning that lesson seems to ride up against all our aggressive/defensive instincts (see also Shooting Superman). So surely it’s useful to have close at hand (or never far from our minds) examples of heroes counter-productively letting rip, or furious fiery attacks that heal elemental enemies in Japanese RPGs.

Then consider Drunk on the Dark Side, Damn, It Feels Good to Be a Gangster and Evil Feels Good. It’s fashionable for opinion columnists to declare themselves completely unable to begin to even comprehend the depraved acts of extremists. This looks to me like a form of virtue signalling more than it does basic honesty. Pulp fiction and sci-fi repeatedly attest to the genuine allure of evil – not just by presenting us with characters who thrive on pain and destruction, and not just by reiterating the story of the one-time hero seduced by the dark side, but by making essentially evil characters relatable, human, sometimes even likeable. Time and again, these characters are asked: Why? How could you? Time and again, they explain that chaos – and the ability to cause it – can be irresistibly empowering.

The commenter I quote above was surprised to learn that real life villains might act just like their comic book counterparts. But why assume the basic make-up of comic book villains doesn’t express some insight into genuine villainy, crystallised through a thousand iterations? No, it’s not by any means the final word on the inner life of terrorist masterminds; it’s just a step up from affectations of wild incomprehension.

And where does evil usually thrive? In a Crapsack World. These can be either anarchic or authoritarian in nature, but they seldom seem too far removed from the reality of present day Middle Eastern counties subjected to decades of political and social unrest. Hands-on policing or martial force are rarely depicted as anything approaching a solution – a recent Judge Dredd story arc, ‘Day of Chaos’, saw 87 per cent of the population of Mega-City One wiped out in a terrorist attack. Mega-City One is already subject to a nightmarish authoritarian regime, and Dredd himself laments that the trade-off for this – safety and security – was no trade-off at all. The population is neither free, nor safe.

If you want to understand the psychology of British and French nationals abandoning the liberal West to join terrorist movements, there are worse places to start than the well-trodden From Nobody to Nightmare trope, a principle example of which is the character of Tetsuo from 1988 sci-fi anime AKIRA. Tetsuo is the weakest member of a delinquent biker gang - introverted, bullied, beat-up and spat on by a society that regards him as a waste of space. When he is offered a chance of revenging himself on the world, boy does he take it. City-wide destruction and the mass murder of innocents follow. In the much longer manga version of the story, he deals death casually and expertly, often with a sense of showmanship, and even takes young girls as sex slaves.

And how did he get this tremendous power? It was gifted to him by the Japanese government, who hoped to use him (and other children) as a weapon before ultimately losing control of him. It’s painful how much this story would seem like an allegory for recent events if it wasn’t nearly 30 years old.

Misplaced Retribution could describe the rise in Islamophobic hatecrime while He Who Fights Monsters reflects the misgivings many of us have (sensibly) with violent reprisal. Cycle of Revenge. Create Your Own Villain. The essence of a trope is that it is re-used, and that re-use, while sometimes an indication of a lack of originality, may also be a sign that multiple authors have wanted to keep basic truths about humanity and human nature in play, to make sure they are not easily forgotten. While the temptation is to make real life and fiction into a kind of dichotomy when matters on the world stage seem sufficiently serious, fiction – in the form of mythology – is one of civilisation’s most important intelligence services. It’s capable of both enlightening and deceiving us, but on the whole I’d say there’s more Truth in Television than we conventionally admit.

Code of Princess versus Zero Escape: Virtue’s Last Reward

Here are two games in completely different genres which I’ve been playing on the Nintendo 3DS. Why review them together? What's the connection? It's not just their muddled, unfortunate titles – although I do feel there should be a market for a freelance Game Renamer whenever Japanese imports are concerned. It's a facet of localisation that needs more creative investment. Alternative titles for Zero Escape: Virtue's Last Reward include Welcome to my Kingdom and Savage Laboratory, while Code of Princess could stand to be rebranded Vagabond Princess or The Thief, The Zombie, The Princess and the Elf (the latter has the additional benefit of being an in-joke: Zozo repeatedly protests that she isn't a zombie).

But the connection I'm interested in is that both games feature – and lean heavily on – the sprightly, supple character designs of Kini Nishimura. In fact, here’s a sketch of the games’ casts mingling:

These are games that hang their hats largely on the appeal of these characters, since both employ vast tracts of dialogue in service of story, breaking up the action (or locked room puzzles, in the case of VLR) with long sequences of talking torsos, voice-acted to varying degrees of success while the player takes a back seat. For reasons that entirely escape me, VLR confines Nishimura’s fluid inks to the back of the box and uses polygonal duplicates as stand-ins throughout. The quality of these models, particularly their animation, is reminiscent of the cut scenes from 90s Tomb Raider titles, a truly bizarre style of presentation for a game that looks and plays more like an interactive comic than a three-dimensional virtual reality.

Nevertheless, the characters of both titles are attractive and individualised – their personalities demarcated as much by posture as by clothes and verbal tics. The approach in Code of Princess (a scrolling beat 'em up whose pedigree is Treasure's Guardian Heroes on the Sega Saturn) is to take a hoary old stock character type and then subvert it with a comedic twist. Thus the titular* princess, waif-like and clad in plate-armourkini, hefts a whacking great sword. The sexy witch, who is furnished with sidekicks, stitches, pink bunches and a fetching scarf, is also a surly goth, and the elf bard is a weasel-tongued shortarse with flying V guitar. Of the four main characters, only the thief, Ali, is all trope. She's pleasingly androgynous, but ticks all the thiefy boxes: fast-but-weak, quick-witted and droll, her amoral posturing a fig-leaf for a heart of gold.

VLR takes the considerable risk of cloaking its characters' true motivations and identities for the greater part of the game – understandable, since it takes its cues from the murder mystery genre, where every wardrobe is groaning with skeletons. But this leaves the cast poorly defined for long hours of play, while the script hammers away at the same high keys – Dio is a foul-mouthed cad, Luna a bashful sweetie, Alice and Clover best pals, and so on. The plot twists, when they arrive, are satisfyingly weird and dramatic, the overall conceit a head-spinning sci-fi yarn, and there are multiple intertextual references taking in quantum theory, advanced mathematics and Kurt Vonnegut (see screenshot), among others. But it's sometimes a struggle to work through to these very enjoyable moments, between the seriously misplaced attempts at mischievous eroticism (“If you're a C cup, I'm packing 12 inches!”), and lines of dialogue that are sometimes simply atrocious (“Your shit is whack. Hella whack.”)

The other striking similarity between these games lies in their efforts to stretch the limits of their respective genres. Code of Princess is only a few steps removed from the template laid out by Final Fight back in 1989, but consists of much shorter levels – almost striplets – interspersed with drama-comedy sequences. It folds in the weapons shop and levelling systems of Japanese RPGs as well as combo counters from brawlers. The individual elements all work as they should; it just doesn't add up to much more than the sum of its parts. In fact, it's a bit of a hodge-podge, particularly in terms of tone. Is the player supposed to indulge the thrill of an artful clobbering, grind their way towards greater power, or identify with protagonists who are very often fleeing for their lives? Environments, enemies and end-of-level bosses are re-used copiously, even by the standards of the beat 'em up genre, and although you can switch between characters, each one needs to be levelled up individually, which amounts to having to play through the game four times simultaneously.

VLR is more successful in carving out new territory for gaming. The needlework joining its locked-room puzzles and lengthy, exposition-heavy 'interactive novel' sections is so visible it could almost be Frankensteined from two different games. It actually bookends the puzzle gaming with bizarrely dissonant messages: “Seek a way out!” and “You did it!” The novel sections, meanwhile, have points where the player makes critical choices which affect the plot, but the outcome of those decisions is so random as to be entirely unpredictable.

However, VLR also ingeniously finds a way to work its entire ludic structure into a surprisingly intricate plot, and organically breaks the fourth wall at several points, making for a compelling and unsettling experience as the game successfully toys with your expectations, drawing you into its claustrophobic atmosphere. Without wanting to give too much away, its brilliance is in recognising that with any branching narrative, the reader-player will always want to know whether they made the right decision and will readily seize on the opportunity to go back and change it. This stroke of genuine creative verve, together with the various clever embellishments that follow from it, was enough to keep me hooked for most of the game's 30 plus hours, playing long into the night in the hope of cracking the back of its central mystery. It's a tale that could have been told through no other medium and points the way for all interactive fiction to follow – no small feat.

It doesn't, however, justify the many missteps VLR makes. On top of the info-dumping and repetitive dialogue (which actually gets worse as the game progresses), an unconscionable amount of time is spent ferrying the player at snails' pace through the myriad doors of a complex poised at the anodyne half-way point between gorgeous ruin and sleek modernity. Aperture Science this ain't.  There's no real freedom of movement, but the environment is still rendered as a three-dimensional space that must be trudged across until every drab stain of its surface is scored into the retinas.  Then there are the lingering shots of warehouse ceilings and far walls. There are a few dynamically drawn comic panels thrown in at various points, but in general, there's more beauty to be found in the tessellating tiles of early Sonic games than here.

Code of Princess, on the other hand, looks supremely polished, with lush cartoon graphics and hand-drawn animation throughout. It's a shame that this covers for a largely forgettable world-in-peril fantasy plot and workmanlike game mechanics – a potentially fun five-minute bash impossibly expanded by its plodding narrative arc.

Both games leave me wondering why more wasn't done to make sure that the dialogue-intensive story sections were gripping throughout. Both suffer from laboured jokes, one-note characterisation and generally sloppy writing, but both also have moments – periods, even – of intelligence and likeability, VLR its plot twists and Code of Princess its wry backchat (Zozo is a terrific moaner in the vein of Eeyore, Morrissey and Marvin the Paranoid Android). It's sometimes lamented, particular by The Escapist's Yahtzee, that developers see fit to drive a wedge between 'story' and 'game' sections, but this structure could work perfectly well where the story genuinely thrills, instead of meandering aimlessly. With the high standard of visual character design gracing both these titles, it really should have been a priority.

* Spontaneously occurring pun.

More versus reviews coming soon, but in the mean time, Kirsty and I were interviewed for Eurogamer about Coin Opera 2: Fulminare’s Revenge. Here’s the resulting article!

A poem from Super Treasure Arcade celebrating the form and language of 1976's Colossal Cave Adventure, one of the first text adventures.

Kirsten Irving is also posting the custom game poems she wrote for Coin Opera 2's Kickstarter backers on the Sidekick blog today, as we gear up for Seven Player Co-op at the Four Quarters bar on Thursday evening. Link to the Facebook event page.

'1985: Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego?', from Super Treasure Arcade

Virbexing (Virtual/Urban Exploring) #1: Flavian Ampitheatre vs. 'The Coliseum' from Tomb Raider Anniversary

The Flavian Ampitheatre in Pozzuoli is the third largest in Italy. It's nearly 2,000 years old, was abandoned during the middle ages after the eruption of the nearby Solfatara volcano, and is closed on Tuesdays.

The Coliseum of Tomb Raider Anniversary (2007) is an update of the Colosseum level from the original Tomb Raider (1996). Both stages are set in Greece and can be reached through the ruins of a monastery called St. Francis' Folly. The Coliseum appears to have been built underground, though daylight penetrates through a void in its coffered ceiling, similar to the dome of the Pantheon.

A and I visited the Ampitheatre on a daytrip from our base in Naples, on the one day of the week when it's off limits to the public. On the advice of a local, we slipped in from the roadside. Broken and felled pillars and rough-cut stone teeth were heaped up around the perimeter.

Multiple entrances offered themselves to us, some leading to the interior seating, others to the lower levels, where wild animals and combatants would have been penned. Sagging, half-hearted barriers suggested that some areas were intended to be permanently off-limits, including the tunnel we eventually followed.

In the deepest ring of the Ampitheatre, still more fragments of column - Corinthian or Composite - some laid on their side, some at an angle, and dust-gloomed visitor information boards long since retired. Skylights in the arched ceiling let in enough light to turn the stone white and blue.

At ground level, some of the original chiselled Latin signage remained, though broken and reinforced by modern metal frames, while stairs permitted access to the upper areas of seating. A and I avoided going out into the open in case for fear of making ourselves too obvious - we had earlier spotted at least one car parked behind the locked entrance, and what looked like a security office. So we lingered at various entrances, lightly veiled in shadow, taking in the view of the arena.

Fire hoses had also been installed at some point, though they seemed a little worse for wear, loosely ravelled in open-fronted metal boxes with rusted lids, their plumbing cobwebbed. In the darkest nooks, partially disfigured statues had been stored away, along with further visitor information boards.

Our exit was a little more hurried than we had intended. We spotted a man in blue shirt, seated and smoking, near the point of our ingress, and, thinking he was lying in wait for us, fled to a locked gate at the top a steep flight of steps strewn with autumnal debris. The street being at a lower level on one side of the fence than the other, we jumped from an uncomfortable height, A jarring one foot so badly that she needed painkillers to sleep, and was forced to visit a Neopolitan hospital the following day on crutches.

I entered Tomb Raider Anniversary's Coliseum without realising, at first, where I was, and was immediately set upon by a pair of large male gorillas with eyes like bright pinholes.

How they survived down there, without food of any real abundance, I don't know. I later investigated the pens, replete with cages, and found only sand and stone. Even more of a mystery was the sudden appearance, a short time later, of four carnivores - lionesses, by the look of it.

Compared to the Ampitheatre, the Coliseum was largely exterior. The lower levels were sparse, not following the ring shape of the seating but leading to dead ends, cave-ins or exits. I followed one such tunnel to its conclusion and discovered human remains atop one of the animal cages.

The perimeter was similarly strewn with ruined, fluted columns, however, though I'm not sure of what type. Those that were still mostly intact were horizontally scarred, which allowed me to climb up on to them and get a better view of the beautifully bare arena, as well as the coffered ceiling, lanced by dusty light.

Some of these columns looked dangerously unstable, liable to collapse if they were so much as breathed on.

The best views were afforded to me by clambering into what I presume would have been the royal box (or its equivalent), and then grappling across various part-fallen-away roofs. Throughout my exploration, the statues and murals I encountered were largely in immaculate condition, the lever-operated iron gates in perfect working order.

On exiting the Coliseum, my original point of ingress having become barred, I came on a statue of Midas, his plinth veined with roots and vines. What happened next is perhaps for another time.

Nuclear Throne (early access) versus Risk of Rain

Fireball and ice floe. Laser and dynamite. Fury and execution.

Nuclear Throne and Risk of Rain are both action roguelikes (or roguelike-likes, if you prefer) with procedural elements and the option to play co-operatively with friends. Both were put together by small development teams using commercially available GameMaker software. Players pick from a variety of survivor-type characters and gun their way through themed wastelands, acquiring further strengths and abilities as enemies mass against (and ultimately overwhelm) them. Since progress isn't saved, both games seem at first to offer no second chances. But really, there's always one more chance – the chance to start over, to do everything right this time. These are games for the bruised optimist, not the hoarder or completist. You'll never acquire every weapon, power-up and trinket in the game, and even when you've gathered those you treasure most - the perfect chorus of armaments - it can all be snatched away from you.

Risk of Rain is a side-scroller, Nuclear Throne a top-down shooter, but the real difference between the two lies in their respective atmospheres. Nuclear Throne is a lurid, neon thing, its title screen giving way to thrashed guitars and wailing harmonica. It's peopled by freaks, who set out to find salvation in a blistered post-apocalyptic world, tumble through swirling inter-dimensional portals and wind up being chased by futuristic police squads. Its sound effects are gutteral and splatterous, its bullets bright and beefy. Double flame shotgun. Cluster launcher. Energy hammer. Explosions shudder the screen, and the player runs on honed instincts, knowing one mistake or moment of idiot bravado could mean the end.

Risk of Rain, meanwhile, is a haunting, sonorous affair. Its sprites are much smaller, makings its bleak alien landscapes seem vaster. The music is lo-fi electronica, with subtle distortions, while the protagonists are silent, suited-up killers, crash-landed on beautiful, desolate worlds. There's something symphonic in the way spawning enemies multiply, surround and swarm the player, while the cool-downs required by each special ability promote a rhythmic approach to screen-clearing, with more layers added as more weapons and enhancements drop.

It's not true to say there's no element of collection whatsoever. Both games have an expandable character roster. Risk invites you to compile a Monster Log, while Throne keeps 'golden' weapon variants hidden away in later levels, allowing you to retain them after death.

As for the characters themselves, once unlocked, the selections are generous, with an imaginative array of specialist talents. Rain's characters are better armed, for the most part, with unlimited ammunition and various weapon-based acts of violence to coordinate, while Throne's hugely loveable mumbling monsters have to manage their ammo more cautiously, but can make corpses burst, slow down time or guzzle spare weapons, depending on your selection. Both casts do a good job of avoiding macho soldier archetypes, but Throne deserves special mention for its refreshing gender balance, featuring as it does four female characters and two gender-neutrals, none of whom feel particularly marked or differentiated by feminine (or un-masculine) traits.

Rain's two-to-four-player co-op can be played locally or between computers, while Throne's, at present, is local only and restricted to two-player. The larger sprites and lower resolution of the latter mean that you and your cohort must stick relatively closely together; the further apart you are, the more vulnerable you are to pot shots from off-screen enemies. The tension is palpable when one of you lets a grenade go astray. Both games offer, then demand, effective synergies. In Rain, the Bandit can line up a headshot from behind the Enforcer's shield, while in Throne, Plant's restrictive vines create chokepoints for characters with high damage output, like YV, to exploit.

Similarly, both games are unrelenting, forcing the player to adopt a fast-paced approach. The difficulty in Rain increases at timed intervals, however brashly or painstakingly the player progresses through the levels. Throne gives no respite, with unpredictable enemies hunting you across each level in packs, each barely survivable face-off chaining directly into another one.

Which you play may depend on the mood in the air. I'd say ideally, Throne is for whipped-up, wild afternoons, Rain for drizzly, strange evenings. Or:Throne for rage, Rain for sorrow.

Two Nuclear Throne poems published on Cartridge Lit

I'm reading at Gamecity Nottingham this Saturday

Why bother with #gamergate?

“MEN, it has been well said, think in herds; it will be seen that they go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, and one by one.”

Charles Mackay, Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds

I'm not a games industry professional. I'm not a journalist. I have my hands full with unrelated creative projects and in my precious moments of leisure time, I have Nuclear Throne to beat. Realistically, I have no time for this. 'This' being a social media smog monster going by the name of '#gamergate, which, like the antagonist of Godzilla versus Hedorah, is a rancorous, shape-shifting cloud composed of every kind of pollutant dumped into the ocean of the internet, driven by a malevolent sentience.

Okay, enough metaphor, Jon. What is #gamergate, literally and specifically? It's a Twitter hashtag. What else? What else indeed. While various patterns of behaviour coalesce around the hashtag, #gamergate's protean nature resists attempts toward summary and narrative. It readjusts and reinvents itself in response to attempts to disarm and disperse its noxiousness, subsuming disaffected voices in an act of continual regeneration, cycling through targets, pretexts, manifestoes and moralisms. Say that it began as a harassment campaign targeting a female indie developer, as reported by credible news sites, and you are subjected to contradictory objections - "No, #gamergate began after that, as a reaction to biased reporting" and "No, #gamergate has been building up for years"  - as proponents jostle for the story that paints them in the best possible light:

It's barely a movement and it's more than a controversy or consumer pressure group; it's a creature. And the only way to understand a creature like this is to look at the kind of material that circulates within it.

Taking it as read that much of that has descended, at this point, into post-hoc justification and mantra-like repetition, to begin with, here are some of the comments posted on early articles covering #gamergate:

The developer Zoe Quinn is repeatedly brought up, with references to her promiscuity:

Here's a particularly unpleasant lie that is aggressively perpetuated. It deviates even from the gossip on which it is based in order to exaggerate its claims:

Ignorance, in its various forms, is also plentiful. Here's the reaction to finding out professional games journalists use a private mailing list to discuss the handling of potential stories with each other:

(At this point, #gamergate became extremely excited that it had found proof of 'collusion' among the journalists it had targeted).

A favourite running theme is the rejection of any discussion of sexism in games:

Here's a widely distributed boycott list, targeting social progressives for 'ruining our hobby', promising to 'hit them where it hurts most'. A similar list was made targeting developers.

It's worth noting that both hit lists were drawn up well before material was uncovered to implicate any of the above journalists in the wrongdoing they have subsequently been accused of. At this point, the #gamergate argument was simply that 'SJWs' (social justice warriors) are unwelcome.

But beneath protestations that #gamergate is about 'journalistic ethics', the attacks on feminists continue. Here's Twitter over the past week:

Sometimes a more extreme political subtext creeps into the open, unguarded. This Twitter user later confirmed to me that he believes 'the gay agenda' is part of 'cultural Marxism' too.

#gamergate discussion for a long time revolved around high-pitched hostility toward prominent feminist game critic Anita Sarkeesian.

Like Zoe Quinn, Sarkeesian has received death threats, but the tactics employed to make her disappear are wide-ranging. Here's one of many, many attempts to discredit her:

(The 'gamers are dead' message refers to a series of articles in the games press exploring the death of the traditional 'gamer' identity as the gaming audience diversifies and sexism becomes less acceptable. These articles have been seized on as a pretext for targeting some of the journalists in the above hit list).

One man, Ben Spurr, created a game in which the player is invited to bruise and bloody Sarkeesian. Without a trace of self-awareness, a tweet pinned to the top of his Twitter page reads "The biggest mistake with declaring war on gamers is that they've been training their entire lives to combat evil. #gamergate."

Here's Davis Aurini, who is crowdfunding for a film that will 'investigate' Sarkeesian.

This is a quote from the video this still is taken from:

He appears to have no serious interest in gaming, but he has been a fixture of #gamergate since close to its inception.

Then we have Christina Hoff Summers, who has made a profession of apologising to men for feminism. Her books include The War Against Boys and Who Stole Feminism? How Women Have Betrayed Women. She has capitalised on #gamergate by releasing a video positing the question 'Are games sexist?' In it, she berates 'the video game gender police', her accusation being: "They want the male video game culture to die." She appears to have no serious interest in gaming but she has been embraced by #gamergate, who have even given her an affectionate nickname, 'Based Mom'.

Another youtube personality, Thunderf00t, is the author of the video 'Why feminism poisons EVERYTHING'. His popular diatribes against Sarkeesian are one of his sources of income. As well as providing ad revenue, they direct viewers to a donations page. He accused Sarkeesian of personally engineering the suspension of his Twitter account, and made two more (again, profitable) videos articulating his outrage. He has no evidence to back up his claim. He appears to have no serious interest in gaming but his views have been embraced by #gamergate.

There are numerous other youtube video essayists engaged in the project of continually re-invigorating and re-arming the mob, hyperlink-shuttling their enraged audience from one inflammatory call-to-arms to the next.

Here is Milo Yiannopolous, a right wing journalist and probably #gamergate's most popular and visible supporter:

Before #gamergate, his views on gaming were this: "Personally, I don't understand grown men wasting their lives playing computer games. It seems a bit sad to me. I mean, we've all been sucked in to a few rounds of Candy Crush, but if you want to shoot a gun, why not go to a rifle range?"

Here's another right wing journalist, James Delingpole, creepily courting #gamergate:

These agitators seem to recognise what #gamergate supporters repeatedly deny: that the driving force behind #gamergate is a reactionary conservatism that seeks to shut down and shut out socially progressive voices in gaming. Of course, in the manner of reactionary conservatism the world over, it seeks to frame this as a rebellion against a censorious 'political correctness' imposed by shadowy cabals and corrupt networks of power. If you search the #gamergate hashtag, this is the narrative you'll find being pushed most concertedly. That and 'journalistic ethics', which has become all but the slogan of #gamergate.

However, this shift in emphasis is the result of realising that the anti-feminist angle isn't very popular. Here are some excavated 4chan chat logs, courtesy of David Futrelle at We Hunt The Mammoth:

Meanwhile, #gamergate's witch-finder generals are out in force, furtively trawling through websites and documents to prove a malignancy, talking of 'exposing' - an exposure which they hope will act as intently as the flames that lick the stake. Yet another youtube video essayist, Sargon of Akkad, has set out to prove that feminists have taken over DiGRA, a non-profit academic thinktank with a focus on games. He began his investigation, of course, forearmed with the conclusion.

Other #gamergate protagonists coach each other in avoiding debate, a response to efforts by journalists to talk to them:

'Do not engage order' is also stamped in bold and red across screenshots of people's Twitter profiles and disseminated.

They also constantly remind each other of the need to be polite, having learned now that overt aggression is 'not the right PR play'. The order of the day is instead character assassination and pretext-hunting. Thus, an Asian journalist is pilloried for racist comments he made as a teenager which he has repeatedly, sincerely and profusely apologised for:

And even though the mantra of 'journalistic ethics' is now being employed like a foghorn, it can't quite drown out the underlying consumer revenge fantasy that has taken hold:

(Note, however, that gamers are not even the intended audience for one of the sites whose advertisers have been targeted. #gamergate is going after journalists its proponents have never even read).

So why even engage with such collective madness? Especially when the arguments made are ranging, fluctuating and hugely reliant on mischaracterisation of others' opinions and arguments. Think endless variations on Sommers' "They want the male video game culture to die" - a straw man shooting gallery. Now add in every conceivable objection, however wildly irrational, to several years' worth of journalistic content, because all of it is dredged up to support a claim of endemic corruption. Individual missteps and past controversies are linked to a general demand that games journalism be liberated from a socially progressive 'agenda', as if everything problematic about a constantly evolving industry were being orchestrated from behind the scenes.

It's admitted that in amongst the wide array of trumped-up charges a plethora of genuine issues have been touched on. So a small number of journalists and developers suggested these be discussed under a different Twitter hashtag, to divorce it from the anti-feminist rhetoric. Did this fly with #gamergate? Of course not - because it would have involved abandoning a juggernaut with vicious momentum and having an open, honest conversation with the 'opposition'.

Again: why engage? Firstly, there are those who can't exit the battle, who find themselves set upon repeatedly as part of a deliberate and concerted effort to wear them down, force them to abandon their careers, their passions. Unsurprisingly, and despite the composition of the hit lists, the most consistently targeted and spat-upon individuals are nearly all women. At the very least, I think it's worth drawing attention to this.

I also want to resist #gamergate's arrogant attempts to position itself as representative of ordinary consumers who play games - as representative of me. I would like people outside of gaming culture to know that this ugliness is the spittle and spite and self-immolation of a cornered minority, joined by the callous excitement of others who are seduced by the music of revolt and aren't particularly scrupulous when it comes to picking a side, while others still hitch their own misgivings, prejudices and grudges to an irresistible bandwagon.

Then there's the third thing: the grim fascination with how language is weaponised and used to obstruct, rather than facilitate, understanding, how every tool that has been effective in making social media a progressive force is repurposed as a method of obfuscation and provocation. It's like watching intelligent animals work out how to maim each other with writing implements, and it gives a disturbingly sharp insight into the limitations of reason when dealing with a collective mania.

There's no creativity to #gamergate's methods. It copy and pastes what has been seen to work elsewhere, whether for good or evil. Boycott campaigns, infographics, memes, petitions, sockpuppet accounts, hacking, doxxing, vlogging, dogpiling. On the level of daily interactions, every word or phrase that ever had a modicum of power is employed as bludgeoning instrument. The authors of the aforementioned diatribes drench themselves in the language of scrupulous philosophical investigation as if that in itself imbues them with moral authority, while displaying nothing close to real consistency, rigour or intellectual honesty. To anyone other than those predisposed to ardently agree, these essays and videos are appallingly unpersuasive - but then, they aren't intended to persuade. The effort is one of blunt force - to wield any tool available in order to club the enemy, and in particular to stoke the confidence and fury of the mob so that it attacks with greater ferocity. The death threats Sarkeesian receives reflect the agenda of hate preachers who simultaneously wish to position themselves as several steps removed from the worst excesses.

Sarkeesian turned off the comments under her own video series - something which is alluded to repeatedly with fierce disapproval. Why such ire? Not because this constitutes censorship (nothing #gamergate dubs censorship is really censorship) but because it robbed them of one of the forums in which they could freely wield their cudgels - by endlessly and irresponsibly repeating unfounded accusations against her.

Once a new word or phrase enters the collective vocabulary and is recognised as having some potency, it is chanted, chorused, abused and misused. "Shill, shill, shill," parroted the #gamergate collegiate, once they had got hold of a word that they understood could be used to undermine the intentions of apparently independent commentators. "Fallacy!" they cry, as if revealing the identity of a murderer, whenever an unflattering comparison is made. They understand the general moral pallor of any particular word all right - 'diversity', 'objectivity' and 'integrity' are good, 'hate', 'bias' and 'agenda' bad - but then go about using them with reckless inconsistency. Their enemies are 'colluding' but they themselves are merely 'like-minded'. Feminists are 'ideologues' and 'extremists' but the neoliberal utopia they espouse - naked of cultural criticism, ruled by consumer frenzy and corporate wile - is somehow apolitical and ideology-free. A mixed race female journalist is repeatedly described as 'racist' and 'sexist' on the thinnest of premises, but the term 'misogynist' is objectionable:

And of course, the word 'ethics' - repeated at every available opportunity, cherished for its aura of respectability.

Meaning is abandoned; only import matters.

This applies too to the metaphors #gamergate drapes itself in, right down to the absurd, hyperbolic soubriquet itself. I refer back to the tweet pinned to the top of the Twitter account of the man who made a game simulating the physical battery of Sarkeesian. It bears repeating: "The biggest mistake with declaring war on gamers is that they've been training their entire lives to combat evil." Metaphor allows #gamergate to target and hurt individuals under the guise of fighting 'evil'.

It's indicative of the level of commitment to a warped vision of the world that is uncompromising and - temporarily, at least - unswayable. There is no authority, moral or otherwise, so high that its opposition to #gamergate is perceived as a genuine indictment or reason for a sanity check. Games journalists, mainstream journalists, academics, Wikipedia editors - even the founder of Wikipedia - all become enemy collaborators when they refrain from endorsing the #gamergate narrative:

So too the owner of 4chan, one of the very online communities where the movement was incubated, as soon as he decided #gamergate had had its day and forbade further discussion.

What it speaks to is a failure of reason to penetrate through means of language alone. The language of reason is instead perceived solely as an aggressive force, and crudely wielded as such. The moral highground is a territory cynically - not sincerely - sought. How does #gamergate deal with the negative perception caused by the death threats against Sarkeesian and harassment of female journalists and developers? By conjuring up similar tales of victimisation perpetrated by its enemies. How does #gamergate react when a piece of cultural criticism is genuinely searing? By complaining that the critic is guilt-tripping (and thus attacking) their audience. #gamergate thinks critics should be using their powers of persuasive rhetoric not to call games culture to account, but to battle outsiders:

So what is #gamergate? #gamergate is a mob with torches aloft, hunting for any combustible dwelling and calling it a monster's lair. #gamergate is a rage train, and everyone with an axe to grind wants a ride. Its fuel is a sour mash of entitlement, insecurity, arrogance and alienation. #gamergate is a vindication quest for political intolerance. #gamergate is revenge for every imagined slight. #gamergate is Viz's Meddlesome Ratbag:

#gamergate is a madness that dreams it's a revolution.

Further reading:

Here is a concise list of genuine ethical concerns surrounding gaming and the coverage of gaming by Leigh Alexander.

Here is the developer Damon Schubert, trying to engage with #gamergate supporters.

The Most Charismatic Protagonists in Gaming #1: Geralt of Rivia

"I see."

"I hope this potion helps."

"I'm sorry."

"Fine."

"Where can I get some alcohol?"

"Well, no time for that now."

"We'll see what's happening inside and be back."

"You seem to feel at home here."

"Eskel, I have amnesia."

"True."

"Unfortunately."

The First 45 Minutes of Tomb Raider

Prior to last year's reboot, I'd played through every Tomb Raider game, including The Angel of Darkness - development of which was so vexed that it was released unfinished - and Lara Croft and the Guardian of Light, which is technically a spin-off in a different genre. I passed on Tomb Raider (2013) initially for a number of reasons, the most important of which was that it didn't seem to have much to do with tomb raiding. Instead, it's pitched as a realistic island survival game, with elements of resource management and murder cult horror.

I played it today for the first time for about 45 minutes. After about five minutes, I started writing notes on all the things it does wrong. These are my written-up notes. 

"In our darkest moments, when life flashes before us, we find something."

Lara's narration is excruciating. I presume Rhianna Pratchett wrote this? She comes across as thoughtful and interesting in interviews, but this is a poor effort. We find "something"? Very insightful. And I'm not sure we do, actually.

The game begins with Lara's ship - an ocean liner - going down. At one point, the ship is seen to have split in half, with both halves still afloat. That seems extremely unlikely. Also, Lara decides she has to jump from one half to the other. Why? She was already in the midst of being rescued, but instead of making for a lifeboat, she abandons one anonymous helper to make an ill-judged leap into the arms of another character, slips and plummets into the churning sea.

"This is going to hurt."

The voice-acting never ceases to sound like it was recording in a booth, one line at a time.

Right from the point you can interact with the game, it's clear that it doesn't really know whether it wants to be realistic or not. There are lots of visual effects (water spatters, camera-tilting) and interjections that are intended to lend atmosphere and a sense of naturalism to proceedings. In particular, Lara pants and gasps a lot, to show that she can't take the kind of punishment normally meted out to a protagonist.

But in what one might generously interpret as a nod to the long-standing traditions of the series, the environment feels like it has been arranged specifically to give you things to do. Initially, you're given fire as tool to solve every problem. Flammable materials conveniently flare up and disintegrate, clearing your path. One-use-only man-made contraptions are operated by burning through ropes, and exist solely to detonate barrels of explosives.

Sometimes you can squeeze through a narrow gap, or bump into a dangling object, and it feels fluid and convincing. But then you won't be able to climb a set of shelves. Instead, you have to make use of another improbable arrangement of dry rags and oil drums. This isn't so much poor design as a failure of aspiration. There is little sense in trying to make a game behave too realistically, because the details missed become the details that stand out.

"It'll be over soon."

Says the first antagonist if you don't wiggle your thumbstick fast enough in an approximation of kicking and screaming. This is a breathtaking mis-step, particularly if the developers weren't deliberately aiming for controversy.

When Lara uses a fallen tree to cross a ravine, it's suitably dizzying, but in a way that has been accomplished before, without the need for whimpering from the protagonist.

There's impressive use of a crashed plane as a climbable object that harks back to some of the series' best moments, but it's somewhat spoiled by the game's desire to manufacture peril at every turn. Naturally, Lara isn't able to clamber without losing her grip dramatically, prompting an on-screen instruction telling you to press X. This is nowhere near as exciting as when a game trusts you to be able to handle a stressful situation with the skills you've already acquired.

Lara's shivering (you have to build a campfire to stay warm) is oddly reminiscent of the many game protagonists (including past iterations of herself) who have glitched and spasmed when they've become stuck on the scenery.

The recording on a handheld camera acts as a narrative flash-back device and introduces some of the other passengers on the ship, but they're stock characters to a man. The dialogue is execrable, and so are some of the accents.

"Myths are usually based on some version of the truth."

Thanks for that. Still, at least it turns out they're on the hunt for an ancient civilisation. This is a Tomb Raider game after all. 

At a point soon after, you loot a makeshift shortbow from a corpse, and the game encourages you to kill deer for food. Realism again takes a dive, as the forest around you turns out to be littered with quivers of arrows, most neatly propped up against stones and trees. Maybe the crashed plane was carrying a cargo hold full of them?

Entering the lair of one of the island's savages, Lara won't stop talking to herself about what a bad idea this is. Does she want them to hear her coming? Moments later, she's delighted to find a Noh mask, and the game tells me there are three more to collect. I believe this is called mood whiplash.

One of the characters - heavily signposted as being the coward and traitor - finds a gate that needs opening. Despite the fact he's been given a gun, he elects to stand near this gate muttering to himself while Lara fends off wolves with her bow and arrow. The wolves approach as pairs, rather than forming a pack, and show no interest in attacking the plentiful young deer and rabbits.

After killing several wolves in self-defence, Steam awards me a Big Game Hunter achievement. This was about the point where I gave up.

Analysis of a Genre: MMORPG

Create your hero! Choose your race! Choose your faction! Engage in frantic skirmishes! Form a warband! Choose from thousands of weapon combinations! Embark on mammoth quests! Kill vermin! Explore jungles, temples and ice caps! Uncover a 1000-year-old demonic plot! Earn gold! Traverse dungeons! Level up! Help out on a farm! Trade! Fight some more! Play dress-up! Walk aimlessly for hours! Upgrade! Customise! Fight some more! Join communities! Build communities! Save the world! Save a child! Kill dragons!

Overwhelming much? Massive Multi-Player Online Roleplaying Games (MMORPGs) are every bit as unwieldy as their name, promising to thrall you with as complete and immersive an alternative reality experience as present technology permits, and built to exhaust you long before you can exhaust them. Cast into an online fantasy world you share with hundreds of other players, you play a hero in a milling sea of heroes, joining with others or going solo to complete a never-ending string of combat-based objectives, some of them creating the illusion (but nothing more than an illusion) of scarring the land, or turning the tide of history.

I confess at the outset that I've only played one MMORPG through to endgame - 2012's Guild Wars 2 - and that even after devoting over 100 hours to that experience, there's plenty I missed out on, including a 'living story' that is ongoing at the time of writing and demands players continue to log into the game month by month or risk missing out on wedges of a long-running narrative. Few other genres (indeed, few other pastimes) are greedier for your time, or more liable to assail you with biscuit crumb trails that lead only onto further biscuit crumb trails.

At its heart, the typical MMORPG is a plethora of engagements and distractions grafted onto an irredeemably repetitive play mechanism. The evolution of the genre has seen many more features plugged in on top of those existing ones but no substantial change in the core gameplay, which is best described as grinding for wealth. Yes, even if you play a character who is charged with delivering the world from the dark shadow cast upon it, or protecting a peasant population from marauders, your goal will require you to kill copiously and constantly, ransack the corpses and sell whatever isn't money, in order to buy bigger, prettier weapons and clothes and unlock new destructive powers.

In doing so, your stats rise and your stash grows, progress otherwise being impossible, as it's numbers that chiefly determine the outcome of all conflict. That is to say, the player's experience counts for little; it's the character's experience that bears on the result, and this directly correlates to accumulated wealth and kills. Can't defeat an enemy? Come back later, with more skulls on your belt. The outcome? Access to more areas with even tougher enemies.

When you work this treadmill alongside others, the choreographed semblance of strategy that emerges may yield a satisfying intrinsic reward, since you've worked together to overcome a problem. Sometimes the slaughter is lent a convincing narrative rationality, leading you to believe the outcome really does matter. Myriad tight-knit online communities are formed from these offerings, and millions of hours sunk into the experience, but for many gamers, it's butter spread too thin.

That is to say, MMORPGs run headlong into a gaming truism, which is that players are always pitted against either (a) other players, who can react and adapt to your own behaviour, or (b) a puzzle or mechanism that has been built for you to solve and is ultimately unreactive to your own adaptation and eventual mastery. If a game is structured around the latter, no matter how cleverly, it can only be a matter of time before all possible combinations and iterations have been explored and the only task remaining is to endure. MMORPGs attempt the apparently impossible: to convince players to continue playing a game long after they have mastered it.

There are several methods employed. Most commendably, developers often commit to continually updating the game world, proactively setting up new storylines and challenges within the overarcing system. On occasions, they will even react creatively to the way players chose to approach those challenges. One famous incident in Asheron's Call involved dozens of players working in shifts to protect a crystal, the Shard of Herald, that the developer-imposed narrative required be destroyed. Instead of coding their way around this insubordination, programmers waded in with their own characters to break the deadlock, and then erected a monument to the fallen players.

At the other end of the scale, and far more widespread, is the emphasis on an internal economy. By including a trading system and flooding the game with hundreds of near-identical items, some far rarer and more expensive than others, MMORPGs effectively turn players into grafters, working mechanically for their 'wages', saving up cash to invest and reinvest in order to accumulate symbols of wealth. The effect of this, in Guild Wars 2 and other games like it, is sometimes ugly. A frequent sight in the game world is bands of near-naked characters running in circles over the same area, mobbing everything they see. These are bots - computer-controlled impostors hoovering up as much loot as possible so that it can be transferred to a player's account, making him rich without the need to devote countless hours to the grind himself.

At the same time, players will receive messages offering to sell them in-game currency for real money. This currency may well have been acquired by slave labour in Chinese jails - forcing inmates to play games like World of Warcraft for long shifts so that gold can be hoarded and sold on to Westerners.

Both this, and the use of bots, are against the game's terms of use, but the rewards are so desired by players that developers end up engaged in a constant battle to outwit the ever more sophisticated software deployed by the hackers. Blizzard, the developers of World of Warcraft, famously took a company to court in 2008 for selling a bot called Glider to players for $25. The program sold over 100,000 copies before its distribution was ceased.

One obvious side effect of having an in-game economy is the disruption of player immersion in the role-playing aspect. As players spend more and more time trading, and butchering in order to trade, any pretense of heroic or altruistic behaviour, battle lust or even sadism becomes difficult to maintain, since everyone belongs to the ruthless mercantile class. Enemies who yield treasure are a bottomless commodity and cannot be over-fished, but the delicate illusion of a realistic, inhabited world is shattered when the same small patch of land can be furiously mined for its never-ending supply of small-change-carrying bandits or wolves.

In Guild Wars 2, one of the occupations you can choose is thief, but you won't be able to steal anyone's property or crack any cribs. Instead, your thiefiness manifests only in combat scenarios, and then as a form of stealth-violence. The need for a stable, player-driven economy has here nixed the role of one of the key fantasy archetypes carried over from tabletop role-playing games via Japanese RPGs - symptomatic of the fact that MMORPGs, in their quest to keep players addicted, sacrifice flexibility of role. In other words, these are role-playing games in which, increasingly, and despite superficial differences, there is only one kind of character you can play, making the name 'MMORPG' something of a misnomer.

To make up for this, and to further impress upon players the need to continue beyond the point of mastery, pseudo-flexibility and depth is offered in the form of detailed character creation, overlapping webs of storylines, reams of lore, and game-worlds that span miles, incorporating much visual splendour and spectacle. These are all fascinating aspects in their own right, but they're heaped atop the combat-based gameplay, rather than seamlessly integrating with it. You will never be any more or less intimidating to a computer-controlled enemy because of your appearance, reputation or knowledge of their racial history.

What the genre is left relying on, after players have burned through most of the possible combat styles on offer, is either a narrative hook, or else the creation of an 'elite' class of player through the provision of ever more exclusive gear and weaponry, and higher level enemies and dungeon complexes to match them.

In respect of the former, staff writers are severely hampered by the requirement for one-size-fits-all storylines, as well as the speed with which committed players consume narrative. Game of Thrones can leave its audience hanging six days a week, and then for year-long gaps between seasons, but MMORPGs aim to have gamers logging in daily. Plotlines, therefore, are inevitably repetitive, dragged out, threadbare and leadened with stock characters.

In respect of the 'elite' player, the problem arises that players join the game at different times, and proceed through the content at different speeds. Many are inevitably left behind as developers scramble to provide for those who're pushing against the ceiling. Even then, this 'elite' class are only repeating the same experiences as before - they remain in the game because they're completists, because their play is almost ritualistic, because they enjoy the social experience or because it's important to them to remain top of the tree.

The genre, therefore, tends to be viewed from outside as dying a slow death, providing little more than an elaborate themepark experience, followed by a descent into busywork, in a world populated by hoarders and show-offs.

Where MMORPGs excel in providing stories and experiences worth reflecting on is where play moves beyond the scope of the developers' control, where players attempt to break the imposed boundaries and limits of the game. Because their worlds are so large and detailed, and because policing them is such a mammoth task, flaws, exploits and variations are routinely uncovered, with sometimes catastrophic, sometimes revelatory results. Hear the one about the bard who rounded up and led a band of sand giants through a town of sedentary bullies? Or the time an entire World of Warcraft server was infected with a deadly plague, spread by 'terrorists'?

The way, then, to be a thief on Guild Wars 2 is to think and behave like a real thief, and risk capture and punishment, not to select the thief class and play according to the rules. MMORPGs are a genre built to be broken.

The Rum Chaunt of Locke Cole

I have a folder in my Google Drive called 'Nascent Collections', which contains a whole raft of files representing the beginnings of far-off, faintly-dreamt-of books that I hope to one day work more intently on, once more pressing matters (including long-promised books) are put to bed. One such file is labelled 'Thieves', and so far, its contents are three poems about thieves from various games, written in traditional forms with the aid of a dictionary of 18th century thieves' cant. Here's one of them, in its current state. The thief in question is Locke, a prominent member of the cast of Final Fantasy VI (or Final Fantasy III in the US). His major defining trait early on in the game is that he hates to be called a thief.

The illustration used above is from the concept art for the game, by Yoshitako Amano, who also designed characters (including Science Ninja Team Gatchaman) for Tatsunoko Production Co. Limited in the 60s.

Nidhogg vs Samurai Gunn

Gaming has pursued an expansionist policy for decades now: more levels, bigger levels, bigger worlds, more polygons, more features, longer campaigns, more enemies, more dialogue, more weapons, more moves, bigger bosses, longer fights, more hats. Also: build and decorate your own house when you've finished the main quest. Seduce and marry one of the NPCs. Amass wealth. Trade thousands of items with other players. Nidhogg and Samurai Gunn, both long-trailered indie titles from lone gun developers, represent a new wave of games that reject entirely the 'more is more' principle, focussing on core gameplay mechanics to the exclusion of nearly everything else. There's no single-player campaign, no unfolding narrative and not a collectible item in sight. Aesthetically, they evoke past gaming eras, deploying limited sprite and background palettes impressionistically and steering well clear of the uncanny valley that polygon-based games continually and enthusiastically plough. If this is a necessity in indie development due to limited resources, it also works in close harmony with these games' ludic sensibilities.

There are also no health bars. Armed with a sword (and a firearm with three bullets, in the case of Samurai Gunn), players must kill or be killed, the outcome being decided in a single moment, these moments (and the accompanying corpses) piling on top of one another until one player has proven their dominance.

The marketing doesn't boast of 150+ hours of gameplay because there's no upper limit to how much mileage you can get out of either game. You'll have seen nearly everything each has to offer in the course of a single session, traversed every inch of every level by your second night. Two things keep you coming back: the subtlety of the most minor and loving touches, such as blood turning water pink in Samurai Gunn, or the shifting colour of the sky in Nidhogg, and the value of the repeat experience.

What's absolutely essential to the philosophy of these games is that the outcome of every duel, every clash of weapons, feels bound inextricably to the split-second choices the player makes, and not to the whims of erratic coding. Samurai Gunn is the better game by far in this respect. Nidhogg's block-colour duelists wield épées and aim to run each other through, but far too often the result seems arbitrary and imprecise. Moving your weapon up and down into the opposing player's disarms them; however, it's possible to be disarmed in the same instance as impaling your opponent. It's also possible to be killed by an opponent standing motionless by thrusting haphazardly at them. On the other hand, it's not possible to kill a player who is standing higher up than you.

Samurai Gunn's large cast of miniature ronin attack with sweeping cuts that sever heads and tear midriffs, backed up by guns that punch through bone and flesh. Bullets can be deflected. Two players simultaneously striking are pushed forcefully away from each other as their blades meet. Every death is avoidable, if only you'd swung your sword a moment sooner or later, or if you hadn't misjudged the distance your opponent could cover in that last half a second. You can feel it - the sense of your thumb coming down just fractionally too slow, or else precisely at the right time, to be rewarded with an arc of blood and a brief pause while the game highlights your kill. You can only admire the enemy, computer-controlled or otherwise, who rebounds off a wall after being hurled backwards and takes your head before you can blink, or who employs the wraparound screen to deadly effect, turning an urgent retreat into a decisive ambush.

Samuari Gunn also makes better use of environment. At least three of Nidhogg's four stages look and feel intense: thick, choking smoke, swinging chandeliers, lush waterfalls, long, dense grass and so on, all rendered sure-footedly in huge, pulsing pixels. The fencers are fluidly animated, recalling the rotoscoped movement in Prince of Persia as they leap, cartwheel and desperately hurl stray weapons at each other. They bleed bright, colour-coordinated blood in copious amounts, painting the levels lurid orange and yellow. But interactivity is sparse, limited to standard platform death pits, vanishing clouds, doors that block sword jabs and the aforementioned grass, which partially conceals the duellists. The tug-of-war mechanics of a match, with each player attempting to advance to opposite ends of the stage, sees the same territory traversed back and forth repeatedly, to exhausting effect.

Samurai Gunn makes use of many smaller, single-screen levels, divided into four different categories: bamboo jungle, snowy mountains, ghostly graveyards and booby-trapped towns. Each contain various elements that can either trip up a player or provide them with the tools to surprise and savage an opponent. Bamboo blocks spring up in unpredictable directions, and can be hacked aside, as can tussocks of grass. Spike-traps open up suddenly when activated by misdirected attacks. Ice stalactites, de-anchored from their ceiling, can spear through an unaware swordsman. Water damps gunpowder, rendering firearms useless, and impedes movement. Pushing into any wall as you fall slows your descent, making strikes harder to time. Holding 'down' results in your character feigning death, camouflaging himself more effectively the more bodies strew the level.

A close-run finish in a player-on-player match results in a 'showdown', effectively a sudden death mode where players are transported to one of four plains with new factors to take into account. In one, arrows rain on both ronin, and can be deflected towards your opponent. Another takes place in a rainstorm at night, with both players invisible except in lightning flashes.

Both games include credible AI opponents to give single players a run for their money but are best experienced with two or more players. Samurai Gunn allows you to fight in teams or to unite against a common enemy (though you may still accidentally murder each other), while Nidhogg has a knock-out tournament mode, allowing for more players.

It's not quite a stalemate; Samurai Gunn is clearly the better game, brilliantly evoking all that's thrilling about jidaigeki movies through supremely clean platform mechanics and controls that are sharpened to a fine edge. Nidhogg is more of a delirious romp through dream-like corridors, fluorescent arterial gore spattering pistons and battlements. It's looser and less honed, but manages to make just as much of a rich spectacle out of itself. Through its victory screen, in which the winner is swallowed in one bite by the titular mythical worm, it also embodies the philosophy of this new movement in games: you're not playing to save some virtual world; you're playing to die violently and repeatedly, with your eyes wide and your heart buoyed.