Of Food and Games

I'm not sure if my parents know this but when I was 16 I wanted to be a 

chef. I wanted the freedom, the discipline, the chance to work with weird flavours. 

I'm now in a very different place and I have just come from a talk with a writer who tied their love of literature to recipes (she's Kate Young if you're interested.)

Following this,  I thought about my most important food and media memories. I remember firstly, and mostly, the scene in The Godfather where Clemenza stops Michael to make sure before he becomes a 'man' that he knows how to feed a family. His spaghetti and sausage recipe is one I've replicated numerous times in my life. It is truly a thing to behold.

It's an amazing scene because it forms as much as a part of Michael becoming a 'man' in the Mafia as his shooting in a restaurant a few scenes later.

With that, and considering several other moments I've seen that encourage food as conversation or indeed character development (Pose Christmas Epiosde take a bow)  I have started to consider the concept of food in videogames. What it is, whatr it means, and how it can be used as both a player growth and also a plot point. 

There's a great Giant Bomb series that has just started, ludicroudly named Jan Can Cook; Ben Appetit that is trying to create meals that are inspired by the world of videogames. It's absolute instanity, bad (perfect?) camera angles in place and just a loose sense of the concept. But these are mavericks - corn dogs infused by energy drinks are testament to this. What I am interested in is the ways in which games can use and provoke food as a game point. 

So I'll start with where I started - you may expect it, but it's the Streeets of Rage Roast Chicken 

[img]https://revenantpublications.files.wordpress.com/2012/05/foodsor2turkey.jpg[/img]

In the game, the item feeds you back to 100%. It's a roast chicken, hidden in a bin. And you're playing as a disadvantaged person fighting on the aforementioned streeets. I know I'm going to get called for this, but the concept of a nice roast dinner must seem so appealing to the characters who are out policing on a decrepit city. And therefore, the chicken becomes something aspirational. It's more than just a chicken - it feeds because it's aspirational. It's the 1% that is exemplified by the final boss, Mr. Big. It's a horrible hint about what you could be. 

The next food saga that really stands out (please exclude me ignoring such tie ins as Chester Cheetah and Cool Spot. For me is the Cooking Moma series on Nintendo consoles. I find these titles fascinating as it entered an era where the entire dynamics of what a game was, and, even more specifically, who it was marketed to, became such a paramount concept. 

Therefore, I can't get my head around whether Mama was appealing to a generation, or trying to encourage one. 

[img]https://i.guim.co.uk/img/static/sys-images/Guardian/Pix/pictures/2015/3/4/1425486699559/Mama-Cook-007.jpg[/img]

The concept of the Mama was a great one, gamifying an act that many people would be aware of, and in addition potentially introducing recipes that were unknown to people before hand. However, the game was sanitised, with many of the Japan-centric recipes changed, and the game, rather than having a focus on helping to cook, instead relied on being perfect, so that 'Mama' would be proud. It feels, still, like a wasted opportunity. One would only need to add real world recipes to the gamification to have the title become something else. 

And then there was Cooking Guide

[img]https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/917OHi2vBqL._SL1500_.jpg[/img] 

At the tail end of Nintendo's let's make everything for everyone era, there was Cooking Guide a title that was a literal recipe book. What's notably interesting about this title is the cultural differences that abound. In Japan, there are ramen, egg, and noodle recipes, but the game's localisers scrambled to figure out what this would mean in the UK and US. Sadly this meant a bunch of very generic recipies

that really, did nothing.

So where are we now? In Breath of the Wild, cooking is a centrepiece of the buff system, likewise in Monster Hunter,. In Pikmin 3 the quality of ingredients is prized as there are damn near pornographic selections of fruits in place. They are beautiful. But putting this all together reveals a common truth about the UK vs. Japan. 

In Japan, the concept of produce, ad takingpride in the quality of the work that is done to food is taken a priority - it only takes a cursory glance at a ground floor of any mall to see that. They made food, and they are proud of it. 

In the UK, much like the muddling through of videogame recipes, we just look for something to see us through, to give us a 'buff' for the next session. And that's heartbreaking. Japanese videogaming has got it right. We should take pride in what, and how we cook. 

And even if that's something like Mama's 3 veg dishes that just cook, and costs 90p to make, we should celebrate that.  

Crisis and Criteria

I spemt the years of 2002-2006 at Glasgow University, blissfully enjoying the Film and TV (and to a lesser extent, the English) course wondering as to how texts were chosen, and, what I thought, challenging the Western-based coverage (It turns up I was wrong about that, although I held constests with what may have been taken from my dissertation afterwards - nothingness I need to get over. Let's move on)

So.

One of the key areas I studied at university was 1980s cinema, and the whole concept (wait for it) of High Concept cinema. Those films that could be (as was the criteria) described in 30 words to the studio. For example - It's Tom Cruise but he's gotta be a pilot and has to be the best. Or Peter Weller got torn apart as a human and now as a robot he's going to enforce the law.

It was such an interesting period, with concepts such as Flashdance  and Short Circuit making the humanising concept between art/science and reality in such an interesting way.

However, looking at the release of Joker , I genuinely am unsure from the content of the film what we want young film students to take.

Joker  (2019, Warner Bros)

So, let's talk the basic financials. 

Joker uses, as in the above scene, the song "Rock and Roll pt 2" by Gary Glitter. The artist is a convicted paedophile, Now, I can only expect that the reaction expected by the film makers is one to make you go 'oooootttthhh' as you hear it. But when we talk about the unintentional effects of media, this causes massive problems.

I can only expect there's a number of young people seeing 'Joker' because it's tied in with the Batman mythos. And I get it. I saw Batman Forever when I was 9, knowing it was a 12 because my parents wanted to indulge me. 

Where can 'Rock and Roll Part 2' go wrong?

1) the film itself has to pay financials to a paedophile.

2) There's a lot of younger people, who, (anecdotally) have not heard the song, nor have known who it is. Do we want to encourage any type of streaming finance?

3) Bringing someone we had removed from the public consciousness back into it - did that song need to be in place, or was it just the 'naughtiest' entry because of the context. I am considering sticking Ziggy Stardust behind it - something that explicitly hints at the concept of a differing persona. 

Anyway, I'm about to go back to teach Higher Media, so let's be critical as sin. 

A New Genre Awaits

For the past few weeks, I have put over 40 hours into Fire Emblem: Three Houses. This in itself is nothing new or surprising - since discovering Awakening on 3DS, I have completed every game in the series, including all three pathways in Fates. Clearly, Fire Emblem is a series that is close to my heart.

At the start of 2019, however, I was also hooked on another game - one that has resonated even stronger with me than Fire Emblem ever will - Hypnospace Outlaw, perhaps a lesser known title, which is available on the Steam service on PC. Hypnospace is a game that I still think about - perhaps not on a daily basis, but certainly weekly. In many ways, it was a game tailored to my own age and demographic, in addition to my own online history.

In exploring both of those games, and by subsequently noting elements of these titles that resonate through other games I have enjoyed in the past 15 years, namely: Phoenix Wright, Virtue's Last Reward, and Persona 4: Golden, I have come to a stark realisation.


I really like visual novels.

(Hypnospace Outlaw, 2019, No More Robots)

(Fire Emblem: Three Houses, 2019, Nintendo)

In all of the titles mentioned above, there is a different mechanic with the way in which the player navigates the game; with Fire Emblem, your character engages, between discussions, with turn based combat with a multitude of enemies; in Hypnospace, you are surfing, and sleuthing, an alternate reality simulacrum of the internet, circa 1999; Phoenix Wright sees you making choices of evidence / conversation topics to win defence cases in court; Virtue's has your protagonist solve fiendish escape-room games in order to progress, and in Persona, the dialogue is couched within a massively-scoped role-playing game, requiring grinding (see previous posts) and careful choice of battle mechanics. 

All of these games, however, use the trapping of a variety of different genres of titles that all fold back into one - the visual novel. 

Popular mostly in Japan, the visual novel is as literal as its title suggests - that the narrative of a story will unfold with character reactions or settings to represent what is described. These can vary from the absolute mundane - a character's day at school, as in Persona, to romantic choices, to stories that carry elements of pornography in their descriptions. 

Perhaps to call this a 'genre' is a misconception.

What visual novels allow, is an element of author control that can often be missing in other titles, such as open world-games. Imagine a Grand Theft Auto where you are told on your screen that "Trevor walked in to the bar and sat and had a drink".For any players of the game, this is absolutely one of the things that Trevor may do. However, Trevor is also a psychotic, unhinged character, one who will murder for fun, and is supposed to be the player's cipher for whatever mayhem they may wish to unleash. The visual novel works when there is a story to be told, and the player may have some (note, some)agency as to the outcome, but these endings are set in stone. 

And yet, I play through a number of titles, including GTA, Assassin's Creed, Watch Dogs, Saint's Row, all open world games, despite enjoying, and preferring the authored content. The reason for this is I love an ending. I love to see where the game will take me - how will my murderous character ultimately finish the game?

In a previous post, I discussed the ending of the game GTAIV, because I believe the pathos of the finale made the rest of the game important. Every decision your character made, led them to one of two outcomes, one I believe to be more important than the other. I am a huge fan of authored content, and enjoy following the journey that creators take me. It may be time for the admission (and absolutely not humble-brag) that I have never played Minecraft as I did not see the purpose of it, and bounced off The Sims, although with a slower curve, because I could not see the end point.

The visual novel is exciting, because, as mentioned, the trappings around it can appeal to a number of different type of players. What I like most around it, much like good cinema, is following the vision of a creator. I want to see where they feel the characters should go, and, if I don't agree with this, to be able to at least have a concept of their journey. 

I Am Bad At Monster Hunter

It is a truth universally acknowledged, but never commented on. I am terrible at  Monster Hunter games. I have been playing them for a decade now, as of 2019, and I still cannot quite do the things it wants me to do.

For the uninitiated, Monster Hunter is a series of games made by Capcom, which have spanned consoles from Sony, Nintendo and Microsoft. These are third person action games, with very specific controls - for each action you do, you cannot stop it. Should you stop to sharpen your weapon (essential as it depletes its sharpness over time) your character is locked in a 7-10 second animation of sharpening, during which time, of course, you can be attacked. The games themselves may vare, but each of them is defined by a few simple ideas.

1) You will get better the more you play - more on this later.
2) The game is desinged to be replayed and replayed - as you kill monsters, they issue 'drops' which are specific items. Players will often 'farm' (replay) monsters to try to get specific items, which may show up as little as 1-3% of the time.
3) The monsters themselves have no health bars, or no otherwise explicit indicators as to how they are doing. The player is supposed to 'read' the health of the monster by looking for signs such as - deterioration of their scales on sides / tails; limping, particularly in combination with heavy breathing (shown by steam arising from their mouths) ; the running away of a monster, most likely towards a place it can sleep and restore energy.

The most recent title in this series is Monster Hunter World. This was released last year on Xbox, PS4 and PC. As such, it diverted from the previous place these games were published - the Nintendo systems, most notably the 3DS. As a result of this, I have had far less time to play the game due to not having it on transit
This excuses nothing. I am bad at Monster Hunter. 

Monster Hunter World (Capcom, 2018) 

The game is due to have its first massive expansion next year, known as Iceborne. This follows a tradition of games where the concept of 'G Rank' re-releases exists - you've destroyed all the monsters, let's add another 10-20 and they're REALLY hard. 

So it was that in advance of this, I returned to World this morning. I discovered I was seriously lacking behind, with several important plot points in front of me. And then I hit it. Paolumu. 

Paolumu is more fun to describe than to actually post a picture of. Imagine a bat. Now imagine its an albino bat. Now imagine that when it gets angry, its neck fills with air like a puffer fish and it uses this to attack you. Paolumu is cool. 

Unfortunately, it also exposed a glaring weakness in how I play the game. When I play Monster Hunter, in the varying ways a character can organise themselves, I always go for power. A weapon called the 'dual blades' is, well, exactly that. Thus it was this morning that I sprang into action and was thoroughly routed. There is a system called the 'SOS Flare' on the game - hit it, and it allows other players to join your game and try to destroy the monster together. No one came.

There is a type of game made in Japan, that Monster Hunter falls into, that I have never managed to engage with. These games prize player skill over gaining reward after reward. In these games, such as Demons Souls, Dark Souls, Bloodborne, the reward for the player is the knowledge they have earned - they have learned their enemy's patterns, they have mastered the 'tells' of their attacks. Knowledge is power. And Monster Hunter falls into that category. Whilst your character may increase their armour against particular foes, their health will never significantly increase. In the game, the ability to read each monster's tell becomes power. 

And I have never mastered this. Every journey I have made in these games was through brute-force, or relying on the support of people far better than I. I adore the Monster Hunter world. It's fun, funny, and always full of surprises. But what the title tells me is that my own skills lie in games that reward the individual - here, take this perk that makes X enemies do Y. It's a world beyond me. Again, or so I thought until I considered what I would play next - Mario Maker 2.

The game I love most, Super Mario World, also fits into the Dark Souls/Monster Hunter category. In Mario titles, Mario's move set is incredibly defined - it's very likely that people unfamiliar with modern games have a strong understanding of the mechanics of how the Italian plumber operates. Every move is co-ordinated, and in his world, every mistake that is made is one of the player.. It's a distillation of the concept of 'fairness' into videogames. Yet part of me cannot extrapolate that into other titles - Bloodborne remains and interesting enigma, I spent an hour once trying to find a ladder in Dark Souls. I will stick with Monster Hunter,  through thick and thin, because the game world,. and the sense of discovery far outweigh my own failings. 

Please help me complete Iceborne. SOS Flares are at the ready. 

Nihilism and Games

One hundred years ago, in one of my favourite novels, F. Scott Fitzgerald allegorised the death of the American Dream in The Great Gatsby. The promise of making it in the world, of being able to rise above one's assigned status was one that formed the founding of the Constitution, and of the deplorable Second Amendment that shortly followed - that the freedom of the individual had the right to strike back against governmental dictats.

In the past week, we have seen sadly all too-recognisable horror in The States, following two mass shootings. The subsequent fallout has seen people across the media and political spectrum, blame, amongst other elements, videogames. as a significant trigger, despite the overwhelming and regular evidence that suggests otherwise. My own first encounter with this blame-shifting came in 1998, following the massacre at Columbine. I remember, as a very young teenager, reading of Quake and Marilyn Manson as key triggers for the shooters.

Since those shootings, and considering the foundations of the 'American Dream', I've been thinking a lot about Grand Theft Auto IV, a game I can't say I particularly love - Rockstar games always seem more a curio than a game to be enjoyed to me. Yet, what sticks to me about the title, moreso than any other game in their canon, is the tragic arc that the character takes. Unlike Red Dead Redemption 2's solitary story, GTAIV casts a dark shadow not only over the protagonist, Niko Belllic's life, but over a country in which the society has been left to run, unchecked and unfettered by a 200 year old document. In doing so, it debunks the myth that videogames themselves cause violence, and instead looks at societal, political and economic causes that lead to people carrying out despicable acts of violence.

Grand Thedt Auto IV (Xbox 360, PS3, PC), 2013

With GTAIV I wish to specifically focus upon the ending of the game, so this is obviously a spoiler warning at this point. 

In the initial trailer for the game, channeling the film Koyaanisqatsi with its initial trailer, Niko Bellic hints at his past - fleeing from violence, war crimes, and the horrors of Eastern Europe, evoking such tragedies as those in Sarajevo. 

In Reggio's film, which the trailer replicates, down to the Phillip Glass score, the title translates in Hopi as 'a life filled with corruption', suggesting that Niko's dreams of escaping the horrors of his past to the 'utopia' of America will be one that is for naught.

And so it is. 

Throughout the 20-30 hours of the game, whilst dating, drinking, bowling with your cousin, and other sidelines of modern privileged existence, Niko's character becomes embroiled in a cycle of violence, one which shadows itself under the illusion of 'The American Dream'. Much like Fitzgerald's Gatsby, Niko has to become someone else, someone who can adapt into a variety of circles, be they biker gangs or the mob, in order to make his way in the world. And this brings the core of the game, and the reality of America, to the fore. There is not a sense of 'every man makes his own way' in either the game, or the country. 

Instead, what we have is a game in which there is one identity perpetrated, one in which the cycle of violence, guns, and power are perpetrated. In America, the only way to seem powerful is to look powerful. 

The climax of the game is an extended chase sequence in which your character, Roman, your cousin, and a Rastafarian character named Jacob end up chasing after either the mob boss Jimmy who initially told them 'everybody is trying to fuck over each other - they just do it with smiles on their faces.,' or with another immigrant, Dimitri Rascalov. The second of these two stories is the one I wish to focus on. 

Dimitri and Niko both share the same DNA in that they believe America will be the place where their lives can be changed for the better. Both are corruptedd by 'old' America, that is, Jimmy, where there is only the hegemony of 'America' as first and foremost one's own livelihood, as documented in the Constittuion. 

Dimitri does murder Jimmy in this ending of the game, however this is only for Todorovian purposes, to take his place as the new face of this status quo. 

At the end of the game, your character engages in a prolonged chase with Dimitri, only to end up murdering him. The site of this revenge? The Statue of Happiness, Liberty City's own version of New York's Statue of Liberty. Whilst the Houser brothers, voices of the game series, have never been known for their subtlety, the symbolism of the game's final act, one in which Niko becomes part of the system of violence, of destruction, of America, is an incredibly powerful one. Niko ends the game considerably richer than he started, but without the solace he was looking for when he first landed on Liberty City. 

Games have the power to do more than give us power fantasies. They can comment, they can criticise, they can suggest new possibilities. Grand Theft Auto IV is an an incredible game in scope, if not always execution. Beyond the wanton mayhem that the series constantly provides, however, is a prescient, if not important, suggestion about the state of the Nation, the failings of its original document, but sadly, not a way out. 

Mediocrity

Crackdown 3 (Microsoft, 2019)

A Quiet Place (Paramount, 2018)

Most of us exist in the normality of everyday life. We go to work, we see our direct debits come out, we power on. Mediocrity is the general status of our lives. Every now and again, a friend's wedding, a funeral, a birth serves to punctuate what we do, but we endure throughout, nonetheless. 

Mediocrity is fine, and it serves to allow us to feel the highs and lows of life. Where mediocrity seems to have no place, however is in criticism. To criticise is to hate, to love, surely? 

Where place for someone who shrugs at a film or text because it does not appease nor dislike them?

This piece is to discuss what toxic (and by toxic I mean both pro and con) fandom can do for the mediums. At present, it feels as if culture is determined by the best or the worst in society.

Now, let me not be the first to say that mediocrity can [url=https://www.sixthtone.com/news/1176/mediocrity-of-chinas-films-laid-bare-after-paltry-box-office-takings]hurt[/url] a box office taking, and that the concept of appealing or hitting fans is important. That's not what is being discussed here. The concept here is about saying that calling a title a 'mediocre' or '5/10' seems to hold with it some sort of toxin that requires fans to either adore or despise what has been said. 

Mediocrity is fine. By its literal definition.

So, let's move on to titles.

As of writing, I very recently played Crackdown 3, a title I had been awaiting for many many years, specifically because of the way that it was published and [url=https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2017-06-19-clearing-up-confusion-surrounding-crackdown-3-destruction]marketed[/url] right up until its release. We found it to be such a generic and sagging title.

A Quiet Place also showed up at the same time, having been so highly praised across the board. Yet my wife and I found ourselves giggling throught the course of the film. We didn't care for the main characters who seemed to exist solely for the purpose of falling into every trope we had explored in our lives. When you are literally running the [url=https://medium.com/@TheFilmJournal/updating-the-final-girl-theory-b37ec0b1acf4]final girl theory[/url] you must be aware as to what you aqr making.

This brings me to the crux here. I don't hate either. They're both decent things that will pass time. I wouldn't fight against either. The concern comes from the fact that in our current social media addled landscape, we attach our our identities to games, to films. Because we like them, they represent elements of us. And to a certain extent, this is nothing new, we have always projected ourselves through our media. What concerns now is the attachment of identity to a title. If one despises it, they despise me. There is nothing new about this brand theory, but living in 2019, it has never felt so unhappy. Crackdown 3 is not the best game of the year. A Quiet Place is not the best movie of the year. And that's fine.