Fire & Sonic

The new Bioshock 2 trailer looks very handsome and full of activity but, um… I can’t tell what’s happening. The environments, the atmosphere, and Heaven help me the vibe of this trailer all make me physically hungry to touch the game. The gameplay footage makes me want to put a cool towel over my eyes and have a lie down.

In my defense, I haven’t actually played the original yet; the Baker got me a copy for our anniversary, and I’m waiting for a chance to play it together since I heard the story is great. Perhaps once I’ve gotten more familiar with how the action looks it’ll all make sense. For now, though, as someone new to the franchise, this trailer is equal parts intriguing and painful.

Continue reading Bioshock 2: Kinda Seasick

Chris Dahlen has a brief article/post (it’s getting so hard to know where to draw that slash) up at Edge Online that tries to draw a contrast between anti-government sentiment in real-life American politics and imagery of the destruction of American iconography in games like Fallout 3 and the upcoming Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2:

In August, a few protesters started bringing their guns to presidential events, including a town hall down the street from me. On September 12, roughly 70,000 “tea partiers” came to Washington to protest. Well, it’s not clear that any one thing ticked them off: they complained about taxes, creeping ‘socialism’, and some of them were just mad that we have a black man in the White House. One gentleman brought a sign that read, “We came unarmed (this time)”.

But it gets weirder. Around the same time, the Canadian embassy in D.C. announced (then cancelled) plans to set up a demonstration of life in Afghanistan. Visitors would walk through a village and enjoy simulated IED blasts, to see, hear and feel what life’s like when you can’t count on the rule of law. One writer who would’ve enjoyed that is John L. Perry, who wrote an article for the rightwing website Newsmax speculating that the military might unseat Barack Obama in a coup. Here’s the best line of his entire fantasy: “America isn’t the Third World. If a military coup does occur here it will be civilised.” C’mon, Perry – that’s what they all say.

Are the gun nuts, the tea partiers and the Canadians engaging in protest? Street theater? Live-action role-playing? Or do these people really believe they can and should attack the government? My advice to these would-be militants: don’t shoot the President. Please. Instead, go home and play video games, ‘cause they’ve been dreaming up the same doomsdays.

Except, no. In the scenario of a of violent rebellion, a la armed parties of teapartiers rampaging through the nation’s capital, the smashed Washington monument and nuked White House would be symbols of revolutionary success, the destruction of a despotic and un-American tyranny. In video games they are by and large symbols of failure: the collapse of the glorious past, the violation of sacred values, the unthinkable. Video games don’t hate America, they just love a good story, and as the dramatic ante has been upped there have beena few storytellers that have gone to the deepest water in the well and dragged out the imagery of American catastrophe.

I’m not really sure what Chris is getting at – his story meanders a bit, which maybe dooms this comment to do the same. If his point is that, hey, it’s kinda funny how often DC gets blown up in video games, I’d urge him to watch Independence Day and perhaps Live Free or Die Hard again. We blow up our capital in action stories because it adds drama and allows us to abruptly go back to being the scrappy underdogs that our national mythology is built around. More importantly, in games and movies we defend the capital, or at least mourn its passing. We don’t walk in with guns to tear the place apart.

-ssr