Get on with it

I've finished Uncharted 4. Finally. Good grief, it takes its time to finish.

I kept thinking "This must be approaching the end. We appear to be wrapping up." Nathan would get to the Huge Amazing Temple where surely the treasure was going to be, and I felt like I'd been playing forever, so this was probably it. But no, pretty much every Big Final Place would end up being wrong. Just another clue leading to yet another Maybe The End place.

Don't get me wrong, I was having fun. Uncharted 4 is an incredibly enjoyable game, full of variety, wonder and excitement. The locations are spectacular both in terms of their aesthetic and their level design. But it all just felt a bit... much.

Maybe I'm just in the wrong demographic now. AAA titles like this are aimed at players who spend many hours on their games - an audience that tends to be younger than me. People of my age, even those without children, tend to have less time to play. And maybe even when I have the time, I feel a little guilty about spending hours and hours pretending to be a man swinging around a jungle.



Balancing act

But I'm not sure it can be just age. I've played plenty of other games for longer. Metal Gear Solid V took many, many hours of my life - far more than Nathan Drake's zany adventures. And I happily spent whole evenings on Deus Ex, and even snapped up the DLC as soon as it came out.

So it must be something to do with the game itself. As I've noted in a previous blog, there is a decent variety of things to do in the game. Driving, climbing, shooting, sneaking and puzzling are all seamlessly integrating into the game's narrative and the timings are very smart. A frantic combat section will be followed by some calm exploration, which will then lead to a dizzying climb across clifftops.

But as well balanced as the game is, there is a limit to the amount of times you can pull the same stunts. Everywhere Nathan goes seems to be utterly impossible to get to, without leaping across chasms and clinging onto tiny ledges by his fingertips. It's fun, but it gets old after a few dozen repetitions.

So I started to experience some level of fatigue with the mechanics. As brilliant as the level design is, there's only so many times you can hear Nathan saying "Oh no, a dozen more bad guys got here before us! We must now sneak about strangling them all one by one," without starting to lose interest.

And then there's the narrative issues.


What are you doing here?


It's very apparent that the Uncharted series is not leaning heavily on 'realism' as its main selling point. Part of the joy is the ludicrous nature of the situations Nathan finds himself in, and the insane good fortune he has when swinging from collapsing roof to burning forest.

But I still want to feel like things matter. And it's the small things.There are so many places which are simultaneously:

a) Full of enemy soldiers and
b) Utterly impossible to get to without leaping across crumbling cliff faces.

How do the soldiers get there? Do loads of them die, every day, just trying to get to work?

Not a big deal. But I like the world to feel real. The Last of Us did a much better job of making the situations feel believable and lived in. Different tone, I realise. But maybe that's why I've played that game three times through and would play it again tonight. I believed in the world.


In conclusion

Uncharted 4 is certainly a good game. It has many exciting sequences and well designed experiences. But it's very linear and gets repetitive. So it's not a great game. I want a little more control, please.

Next up, Until Dawn. 

Short, cheap games

I just came across this excellent article on short but interesting games.

http://www.vulture.com/2016/10/best-short-video-games-under-6-hours.html?mid=twitter_vulture

There's some really good stuff on here. Most of them are pretty cheap and they can all be played in a few hours.

This is an excellent way to become very quickly acquainted with some of the best games around, while getting away from the standard AAA fare.

I've played all but a couple of these and I recommend the lot. Varied, creative games that will teach you loads about the possibilities open to game designers.

More human than human

Have you seen Westworld? The new TV series from HBO? You should, it's very good. And it's sort of about video games.

HBO seem to be positioning the show as a high profile, Game of Thrones like property - presumably because they're currently panicking about what happens when we have to leave Westeros in a couple of years time. They'll do a Thrones prequel, I reckon.

But if they don't, I think Westworld might do pretty well as a cornerstone of their schedules, because it's great. The basic premise, which is based on a 70s film of the same name, is this. There is a theme park, like Jurassic Park, except instead of them having dinosaurs, they have robot cowboys.

In fact, they have more than just cowboys. They have a whole town full of sophisticated android bartenders, whores, heroes, villains, and mad old men in splendid hats. Customers go there to have a wonderful holiday, immersing themselves in a believable artificial world. The android hosts, meanwhile, believe that they are real, and have their personalities reset each night, no matter what happened to them in the day.

There are lots of reasons to recommend the show. It looks fantastic. The plot is intricate and enjoyable, with lots of different strands to follow and a huge cast of characters. And the story asks interesting questions about God, man, responsibility, humanity, memory - all that cool stuff.

And it seems to be talking about video games. The essential premise is startlingly close to the experience of playing a AAA, open world game. Timely, given the recent announcement of Red Dead Redemption 2. Just like players of Rockstar's epic original game, the guests at Westworld get to play at being cowboys, interact with NPCs, go on missions and shoot people in the face. All safe in the knowledge that they can't really get hurt.

It seems like the show is very deliberately commenting on the fact that we, as a culture, spend a lot of time playing games like this. The creators of the theme park, who spend their time in a vast, futuristic underground complex, are the game designers.

In episode one, we get this, from one of those designers:

"You keep making things more lifelike. But does anyone truly want that? Do you want to think that your husband is really sleeping with that beautiful girl or that you really just shot someone? This place works because the guests know the hosts aren't real."

A very interesting comment, I thought, on what we want from games. One one hand, the pleasure of play comes from transgression - doing things that we're not allowed to in the real world. It's not enough to just exist in the pretend world. We must make the most of our opportunity to misbehave whilst there are no consequences. So we kill, and we steal, and we treat the artificial inhabitants badly.

But if it gets too real, then it stops being fun. We might enjoy the thrill of a perfect headshot in Red Dead, but very few of us would enjoy the prospect of real violence if it burst into our actually-happening-now lives. And the closer games get to real experience, the more they risk losing their appeal.

I'm still enjoying Uncharted 4. But there's one little bit of it that I don't like. The crunch and snap when Nathan breaks a soldier's neck. For some reason I'm fine blowing their head off with a shotgun, but that neck snapping noise sends a shiver through me. I think it gets a little close to reality, and I can sort of feel it. Brrrr.

The guests in Westworld are shown as nice, normal people who can commit incredible acts of cruelty and violence once they find there are no consequences. I wonder, do they do it because they know that they won't be punished? Or because they know that no-one is really getting hurt?

And what does that say about our urges to kill things, as gamers?

Uncharted

I've been full of cold this weekend and have played a lot of Uncharted 4 in direct response.

It's a very beautiful game, and it's very pleasing to play. This is hardly news to anyone, of course, as it is an incredibly popular tentpole release, building on an already massively successful franchise. But then, there are plenty of games that are also mega popular and somehow, strangely, suck. So I guess popularity isn't all that big a deal.

Anyway. I like it. I like that it has a few core mechanics which it uses in a variety of creative ways. You can climb stuff. You can sneak about strangling people. You can do shooting. You can solve puzzles. Just enough to keep the gameplay varied, but not so much that the overall experience ends up feeling fragmented.

Nathan Drake - our cheerful, murderous protagonist - spends an awful lot of his time jumping about, grabbing hold of impossible ledges and swinging about in a wildly improbable manner. And, when I'm playing him, plummeting to his death on a regular basis.

Excitement! Adventure! Really wild things.

Most of the time this is thrilling and fun. There are two primary pleasures here. One is that you feel smart - each sequence of rickety rope bridges and jagged rock faces is a puzzle to be solved. It looks impossible, but there's a way through. And when you solve it, there's a little rush of joy at being so very clever. Apart from all those times you died. Let's forget those.

Then there's the vicarious thrill of being, for a little while, strong and dextrous enough to skip across ravines and swing from rope to rope. I can barely get off the sofa without going momentarily dizzy, so it's fun to feel like a strong, fit, impossibly agile hero as I skip lightly across a cliff face.

I do get slightly irritated with the game occasionally, when Nathan's ability to catch hold of things decides not to kick in. The problem with a protagonist who can grab onto the slenderest of ledges is when the game suddenly decides that no, that wasn't the kind of ledge you grab - that was a bit of ungrabbable scenery. The guys at Naughty Dog have tried hard to differentiate between 'game' ledges and 'aesthetic' ledges, but once in a while the difference is minimal, and I was left cursing the makers as Nathan plunged to his unreasonable doom.

Take that, evil doer

The combat mechanics are fine and one of the nice things about gameplay is the way that a stealth scenario can turn unexpectedly but seamlessly into a firefight. But I always feel a little like I've failed when that happens. I'm at my happiest sneaking around a graveyard, avoiding the patrolling soldiers and knocking them off, one by one, like an archeologically inclined Michael Myers.

The stealth is pretty good and the AI of the enemy units is convincing. I've spent many happy hours crouching motionless behind a wall, observing and calculating the patrol patterns of the soldiers below, formulating my murderous plans. The character animation makes them all seem pretty believable - an illusion only spoiled by the fact that they don't seem to notice all their friends silently disappearing, one by one. You'd think they'd wonder to themselves, "I'm sure there were seventeen of us a moment ago. Why has it gone so quiet?"

The puzzles are probably my least favourite part of the game, as they were with previous Uncharteds. I get why they are there, and they are impressive in how they've been worked out. But it all feels a little trial-and-error in the execution and I don't have that same sense of satisfaction as I get from traversing a tricky ravine, or taking out a bunch of bad guys without being seen. Maybe I'm just bad at puzzles.

So. A lovely game, which is giving me great pleasure. It looks good, too, and the dialogue works pretty well. I'd recommend it, but what's the point? If you're going to play it, you've already decided.

It's nice to know that in the world of AAA franchise games, there are still things of beauty to be found.

They don't make 'em like they used to - thank goodness

This month's free game on PS Plus is the remastered Resident Evil. I had a go the other day, thinking it would be a decent game to play during Halloween month.

I have fond memories of playing the original back in the mid 90s. In my mind, I played it on the N64, but Wikipedia tells me that this is impossible. So I must be confused.

I definitely remember playing it, though. There's a point where a zombie jumps out of a cupboard, and I hurled my controller at the screen, falling backwards off the bed as I did so. Thrilling and exciting, to be so immersed in the world that I had a physical reaction.

And, of course, it's a very significant game. A huge, successful franchise, which is still going. A series of film spin offs, which are closer to the source material than most game spin offs manage. So I though it would be interesting to revisit.

And, unfortunately it sucks.

A hero with two left feet

What is wrong with the control system? How on earth did anyone ever play the game like this? I spent all my time trying to move Jill Valentine around rooms, constantly bumping into tables and wandering backwards into walls. A lot of the time, I just made her spin round on the spot, pointlessly.

The first time I encountered a zombie - the famous over-the-shoulder shot that has come to symbolise the game - I tried to back away. But once I backed out of the fixed-camera frame, the screen changed so everything was in a different place. And the controls I used suddenly made me go in different directions from the ones they had a second ago. Which, in this case, was right into the zombie I was trying to get away from.

Bite, bite, bite.

20 years on and I still want to throw my controller at the screen. But not for the same reason. How was this ever how we played games? Jerking between different camera angles, our relative positions and controls constantly shifting.

In short, I did not enjoy this and will not be going back to it anytime soon.

On a happier note, here's a lovely article about The Last of Us, and how it makes us identify with its characters.

Here


One thing it doesn't say, but which is definitely a reason why we identify with Joel and Ellie, is this: when you try to make them move somewhere, they just do it, rather than dicking about and circling on the bloody spot.

Podcasts of Joy

I listen to a fair few podcasts, while I'm walking in the mornings, or trying to avoid eye contact with people on trains. Some of them are to do with video games. Some are not.

I've already mentioned Richard Herring's Leicester Square Theatre Podcast (RHLSTP!) in a previous blog, and I recommend that without reservation. Each episode the hairy comedian interviews someone in a rambling, peculiar and often vulgar way. He talks mostly to other comedians, but there are lots of other creative, interesting people in there too. It's never less than fascinating.

There's Checkpoints - also a series of interviews, but this time all with game designers and other people who work in the industry. The conversations tend to be quite anecdotal, often rambling through memories of first game consoles and best-gaming-experiences, and are not always very illuminating. The age of the guests tends to be 30s to 40s, so their memories are largely the same. But there's some good stuff in among the chatter.

Ludology is more about board games, and so there are whole episodes about things I don't give a toss about. But when they get into proper game theory, they really know their stuff, and I've got a lot out of their discussions on how, and why, we play games.

The Psychology of Video Games podcast does what it says on the tin. Jamie Madigan - author of the excellent book Getting Gamers - talks to a lot of very clever people about the way games affect our brains. He's an enjoyable and knowledgeable host and there's tons to learn.

Random Encounter is fun and chatty. It's like listening to two people just having fun discussing games. Not always as much to learn, but they are pretty well informed and their opinions are worth hearing.

There's Shall We Play a Game, which I mentioned a week or so ago. Some very good games journalism, but with occasional lapses into nonsense which annoy me. But that might just be me.

And you should definitely listen to the IGN UK Podcast. These people know their stuff, are very entertaining and will also tell you good things about films. Their opinions on TV are often garbage, in my estimation, but I'm sure they are lovely people.

So there you go. Lots of lovely game related podcasts. Go listen. It's definitely easier than reading.

In the Cage

I watched episode one of Luke Cage - the new Netflix Marvel Universe show. And I had a very sophisticated response.

Man, I thought. This show is black!

I mean, really black. Virtually every character is black, doing black guy stuff, with other black guys. Hanging tough in the barbers. Doing gangster stuff and sexy talk in night clubs. Looking like Shaft. That kind of thing*. Even the camera angles seemed black. How did they do that? How are camera angles black?

It shouldn't be weird, should it? Watching a show in which there are hardly any white characters shouldn't be weird for me, living here in the multi-platform, culturally diverse media landscape of the 21st Century. But it is. It's a bit weird.

Checking my privilege

About half way through a white guy shows up. "Ah!" I thought. "This is probably the hero!" No, I didn't. Calm down. But actually a tiny bit of my brain did go "At last - someone a bit like me." Not a particularly pleasing part of my brain, I'll admit. But it's there.

Jessica Jones did a similar thing, with women. It filled the screen with interesting, complicated women who have their own lives outside of the nonsense of men. And most of the male characters were... well, they were regular men. Not the super powerful, cool, controlled guys of fiction. But weak, often unreliable idiots. Like me.

And there I sit, pleased that people are making shows like this, but slightly thrown off balance. I've been taught, over years and years of film, television and video games, that stories are about white guys like me. We're the heroes. There may be women and non white characters, but they exist in orbit around the main focus of attention. Me.

Even those men in Jessica Jones feel wrong. There I am, being represented on screen, upsettingly well. Spiteful, vain, confused by girls.  But that's doesn't feel right, because I want to be represented by some amazing, powerful protagonist. Surely that's who I am? Yeah? Yeah? Anyone? No?

The other half

So here's a wonderful and disconcerting experience. This must be, a bit, what it's like to be non-white and watch most television. Or to be a woman, I guess. This must be what it's like to be faced, all the time, with a sea of male white faces in most television programmes and films and games. To feel like you don't quite belong in this story.

Of course, my thoughts on this are probably a little patronising. I don't have any real sense of what it is like to be non-white or non-male, and being slightly weirded out by a bit of TV does not make me One with the Sisterhood, or the Brothers. (Are they things? Sisterhoods? Brothers? I'm sure I read that somewhere.)

But I do think it's something that more people could be aware of, especially privileged guys like me. Next time some idiot wonders why there isn't an International Men's Day (except there is), or a Straight Pride parade, or why it isn't All Lives Matter. Maybe they'd do well to remember this:

We live in an unequally balanced world. Representation is hugely skewed towards an idea of white, male and heterosexual as 'normal'. A little bit of rebalancing is probably a good idea.

And as game designers, and writers, and indeed as people, we should take a bit of responsibility for that.





*I feel duty bound to point out that I don't consider 'being a gangster' to be a core component of being black. It's part of the idea of 'blackness' that the show is playing with. That's clear, right? Yeah. Thought so.

Breaking up is hard to do

Sad Adam Jensen.       Sadam Jensen.

So I've finally finished Deus Ex: Mankind Divided (until the next bit of DLC comes and waves its cybernetic tassels in my face). Overall it was pretty good, and I'm definitely going to play it again at some point. But not for a while. I teach games, so I need to play more games. Otherwise every session will be about Deus Ex, which isn't really in the best interests of the students. I know - I asked.

So now I'm faced with what to play next.

The answer should be obvious. I've got Oxenfree, sitting on the dashboard of the PS4, looking at me with adoring eyes. OK, yes, I told it I loved it. I played it for a while and got all excited about how beautiful it is and how atmospheric, and ooh the soundtrack. And I do want to go back to it.

But, promiscuous tease that I am, I went and downloaded Uncharted 4 the other day, because the PlayStation store had it on sale. So now that's sitting next to Oxenfree, pushing it's manly chest out as if to say "Come on, we both know I'm next."

And Oxenfree is looking a little alarmed, if I'm honest. Yes, it's pretty, and intelligent, and fun to be with. But Uncharted looks so damn exciting. And I'm so very weak.

My biggest fear is that Oxenfree will talk to the other games on the console. Those games that got pushed further down the dashboard as new games came along. Unfinished and unfulfilled.

"Oh yes," spits Invisible Inc. "He told me he loved me too. Until that whore Adam Jensen came along, and suddenly I'm sitting here with a bunch of saved games that he says he's definitely coming back to."

"He never came back to me either," sniffs Soma. Who might be tearful, but might just have a cold because the entire thing is set underwater and makes you feel wet and shivery and hang on I'm remembering now why I stopped playing.

Other games mutter and sulk from their dark corner of the game library. Will I ever finish what I started with Beyond Two Souls? I did get very annoyed with how it kept changing its mind about what mechanics to wear. Then there's a bunch of games who I haven't seen since we had a furious row about an unreasonable difficulty spike. And some who just seemed too high maintenance. Don't present me with a load of rules on the first date and expect a second.

And I'm sorry Ethan Carter. You're beautiful, but you're dull. Yes, you too, Everyone's Gone to the Rapture. I could look at you all day, but I'd be thinking of Metal Gear Solid's excellent stealth mechanics and emergent gameplay.

But no. I'm going to play Oxenfree. It's probably not that long, and it's perfect for Halloween month. Uncharted 4 will wait.

Oh, hang on. I said I'd see Virginia again this week.

And what about Volume? I never called Volume back.

And didn't I just download the remastered Resident Evil the other day?

And Dishonored 2 is out in a bit.

Sigh.

When the monsters are our friends

Watched the Louis Theroux documentary on Jimmy Savile last Sunday. It was a follow up to the initial documentary he made in 2000, when Savile was alive and had yet to be accused of numerous sex crimes.

I'd heard Theroux talking to Richard Herring about this issue, a year ago, on Herring's podcast - Richard Herring's Leicester Square Theatre Podcast, which I massively recommend. You can find the podcast here. Warning - contains much swearing and adult humour.  It's podcast number 69, or you can go straight to it here.

In the podcast, Theroux discussed the original documentary, and is clearly vexed about how he failed to spot, at the time, that he was friends with a monster. He - Theroux - is an accomplished journalist. An expert at getting inside people's heads. His entire style, whether he is talking to the religious lunatics of Westboro Baptist Church or to people working in the adult film industry, is to disarm the subject and slowly, subtly let them reveal themselves.

The masks that hide us

It is clearly difficult for him to understand how he could have been so close to Savile and yet not seen the evil beneath the man's skin. The new documentary positions Louis as, to some extent, another victim of Savile. Another person emotionally abused and manipulated. If Savile was a monster, his crimes were not just physical. They were psychological too.

As always, part of my mind turns to games. What good villains are there in the games we play? Are there any who truly get under the protagonist's skin, in a meaningful way? Or are they all, when it comes down to it, a series of strong guys who you have to hit a lot?

There must be some villains who properly get into your head. The villain in Life is Strange, I suppose, has some elements of that. The mechanics of the game - choice based, with dialogue trees - allows for some sense of relationship and develops psychological consequences. Are there others?

Here be dragons

The closest I can think of is in That Dragon, Cancer. A deeply upsetting game, where cancer itself is the antagonist. A cruel, inhuman force that seeps into every scene. And games like that are important - ones which deal with real issues and proper horror. I see no reason why a game shouldn't deal with cancer, or abuse, or any of the things which humanity struggles to comprehend.

But then, That Dragon isn't a game which really allows for strong play mechanics. Can mainstream gameplay deal with these things?

As I mentioned in a previous blog, Deus Ex: Mankind Divided falls down a little when it tries to marry its story and mechanics. There is a side-quest villain who is very interesting and has some well written motivation. Pursuing her leads to a decent dialogue boss-fight, which I failed. But then it's just running about, shooting guns at each other. Which is over in seconds, because I'm a massive cyborg and she was just a psychologically interesting monster.

How would Savile function as a game villain? How would his slippery, complicated persona be communicated into the game world? Would I just end up chasing him round the streets of Leeds with a machine gun, dodging exploding cigars and listening to his repeated dialogue barks?

Opinions welcome.

Spooky Sounds

It's Halloween month, and so I'm trying to find spooky things to occupy my time. I watch as many horror films as I can and make playlists of creepy music.

Usually this is just  lot of John Carpenter. His score for the original Halloween is my favourite music ever, and the development of that score over the sequels is really interesting. But recently I've noticed that a lot of game and film soundtracks are starting to sound like Carpenter as well.

There's a real move, it seems, towards electronic, synth based scores. It was very noticeable in the film Drive, a few years ago, and then in the soundtracks to The Guest and It Follows. Sometimes warm and burbling, sometimes spiky, like shards of ice. A call back to the early synthesised horror soundtracks of the late 70s and early 80s.

You can find some great examples of it in the indie game Hotline Miami, where the music lurches queasily about in a quite unsettling way. I suppose indie games are going to tend towards minimalism, for the same reason those early horror films did - it's cheaper than an orchestra.

Synthesised reality

But it seems to be a real stylistic choice, at the moment. Dying Light - not a game I loved - had an amazing, eerie synth score which really evoked the zombie films of the VHS era. I didn't buy the game but I did buy the music, and I'll be playing it a lot this October.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9iDYnAireiw


Stranger Things - the delightful retro surprise of the Summer - went for the same vibe: electronic arpeggios that sound at once sinister and sad. And then the other day I played Oxenfree, a wonderful and unnerving 2D Indie horror adventure, accompanied by one of the scariest and most beautiful game scores I've ever heard.

There's a theory that culture moves in 30 year cycles. A generation grows up with a certain set of influences during childhood, then recreates those styles once they are adults. So the composers, film makers and game makers of today are reaching out to the music that formed their experiences when they were young.

I hope it continues. Orchestral scores are all very well, but they seem too distancing for me. There's something very personal and intimate about a synth soundtrack that I love, and that seems a lot more appropriate to game play.

Or maybe it's just because I watched Halloween 2 in 1984, on a flickery, warbly VHS. Either way, it delights me.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cNEgCziVY0U

A Burrito For Adam Jensen

I really liked Deus Ex: Human Revolution. It consumed me in a way that few games do, with its exciting world of side quests and mysteries and its cool cyberpunk aesthetic. So I was very, very excited about it's sequel - Mankind Divided.

I bought the game the second it came out and finished it last week. It's been an enjoyable experience, if not quite as absorbing as its predecessor. Storywise it is nowhere near as coherent - I finished the game without being 100% sure exactly how the world was different now I'd killed a bunch of cybernetic bad guys. But I did enjoy killing them. So I suppose that's a success of sorts.

Hacked

My absolute favourite thing to do was to hack security terminals and turn turrets and robots against their own masters. I found this hilarious and did it as often as possible. I don't think the game AI allowed them to respond any differently that they would to a regular attack, but my imagination added a layer of surprise, betrayal and indignation to the faces of the guards as their previously trusted robotic friends started to blast away at them.

So it's been a good experience. But I found the world slightly less involving, for some reason. A lot of work has gone into making future Prague feel real. The NPC dialogue is pretty good and gives a flavour of how it must be to live a normal life in the world that I charge excitedly through. The computers, all of which I hack into, are full of interesting, world building stories.

But there's something missing, and I'm not sure what it is. Maybe it's that part of me knows that all these details - all these wine shops and carefully decorated apartments -  are just a pleasing aesthetic veneer over the real stuff of the game. I want to hack door locks, find secret passages, disable security cameras and - crucially - fight guards. That's where the game play is.

No hard feelings

No-one is ever going to ask me if I care about the woman in apartment 23 whose husband got artificial augments against her wishes. It's not really going to feed into the story proper, except at a vague, thematic level. It's not gameplay, so part of me discards it. A sniper rifle, on the other hand, fills me with joy.

I don't always feel like this with games, so I'm not sure what it is.

Today I stood outside a burrito shop, in real life, waiting for it to open. I watched the people passing by. A big guy in a hoodie. Five young lads, probably in college. A bunch of University students. A shuffling guy, likely homeless, searching empty bags on benches. All people with stories and lives and agendas of their own. All of whom would react in different, astonishing ways if I so much as spoke to them.

Meanwhile the inhabitants of future Prague brush me off whenever I click a contextual prompt in an attempt to interact. They say their pre-programmed phrase, and turn away, to stare at the same thing they were staring at before. If I start to throw grenades about, they will cower and cry, but only for a while. Then they'll go back to their staring, motionless lives. I saw one man weeing into a urinal for the entire time I was knocking out guards behind his back. He never stopped, and he never will.

Salsa, cheese and sour cream

I wonder if there can be a game where Adam Jensen can buy a burrito. Where it can be as meaningful as my experience, choosing the salsa, the guacamole, the sour cream - not because it will inflate my health bar, but because I want it for its own sake. Because it's nice. Could a game make me do things for genuine pleasure, rather than through mechanics? There are some that come close, maybe.

I'm going to eat my burrito now. The matter will convert into energy to keep me going. The taste will activate pleasure centres in my brain, raising my mood. I also got another point on my loyalty card when I bought it.

But it's different. Isn't it?

The Girl With All The Gifts

Went to see The Girl With All The Gifts last night. Was in the unusual position of knowing almost nothing about it, except for a vague sense that it was kind of a zombie film but also a kind of British Drama thing.

My thoughts here will avoid major spoilers, but if you want to know nothing about it, you'd be better going to see it first. In fact, just go see it as soon as you can, because it's wonderful.

Wonder Girl

My main thoughts while watching were basically variations of "This is awesome. This is so well made. This is one of my favourite films already." It's basically the opposite to the thoughts and feelings I had while watching Suicide Squad.

Also ticking away was a thought that any gamer will have when watching this film, which is, "The Last of Us. This is like The Last of Us. Quite a lot."

Not that it shares the plot, so don't worry that I've just blown the narrative. GWATG is very much its own thing, and has a distinctive spirit and tone. But if you've played The Last of Us (which you certainly should have) you'll find some of the plot beats quite familiar. And the mise en scene is strongly reminiscent of the overgrown, deserted cityscapes that greet Joel and Ellie.

Girl Friend

The film follows a trend which I've seen developing over the last few years: the zombie as a sympathetic figure. From The Returned to In The Flesh to Warm Bodies, zombies (or things very much like zombies) have started to become more than faceless, shuffling monsters. They are sad, vulnerable, sometimes likeable. I wonder what that is about?

Are there any games following this trend? I'd be interested to see. And I'm curious as to what the trend means. Zombies have always had a significant symbolic purpose in culture, from the Western fear of foreigners in White Zombie to the directionless of 21st Century existence in Shaun of the Dead. So what does it mean when the zombies become likeable?

I'm aware that this is two blogs about zombies in a row, and neither have focused much on games. But we're talking about wider issues than just playing games here, I think. 

Anyway, go see this film. It is marvellous. 

How about them zombies

Early morning walk, listening to the 'Not a Game' podcast.

I've just started with this podcast, and so far feelings are mixed. The hosts are chatty and fun to listen to, and they know a fair bit about games, so that's good. But they seem to have some significant gaps in their knowledge.

The subject of zombies in games came up, as I suppose it must when discussing video games these days. Someone mentioned that they thought this fad was dying down, that people were losing interest in The Walking Dead and it's kind. That doesn't ring true to me. It seems that people have been predicting the end of the zombie 'fad' every couple of years, for about ten years. There's something about them that just seems to keep resonating.

They won't stay dead

The host alluded to the 'first cycle' of zombie films - the Romero films. And seemed to suggest that this was a similar cycle, and would also pass. Well, that first cycle lasted for about 17 years, with Romero's films being just three examples in a crowded market. So I'm not sure it was quite the short burst of activity this guy seems to think it was.

Worse, he seemed to think that Romero's films had a social significance that the current ones now lack. When he said this, I said 'Absolute rubbish!' out loud, in the street, apparently to myself.

Just because the zombies are no longer wandering around shopping malls, it doesn't mean that they're not a fundamental critique of society. Their very popularity would suggest that they are tapping into some very real cultural angst. For a start, I'd say The Walking Dead TV show is - like a lot of other Tv at the moment - about leadership and power. In a world where people like Trump can get scarily close to the Presidency of the USA, it's unsurprising to see television asking the question: whose leadership should we trust? Rick seems like a good leader, until you see his actions from another perspective, and then he looks a lot like some of the other, murderous, 'bad' leaders we've encountered.

And in games... Yeah, I get how we might get a bit tired of zombies becoming a kind of default enemy or add-on in so many games. But we're not long past The Last of Us, which managed to do something really engaging with the genre. So I think, ironically, there's life in them zombies yet.

I'm going to keep listening to the podcast for a bit - it's fun, and refreshingly uncynical. But I think they could do with a broader appreciation of wider cultural trends, at least when it comes to zombies.