A Defense of the Rage Quit

Anybody who has played a game, digital or otherwise, has experienced rage quitting.  The moment when the game has become has become so incredibly frustrating that the only response is to throw your golf club, controller, or team mate with as much force as possible.  This usually results in broken pride, equipment, and bones.  It is actually pretty amazing that the activities that we choose to engage in for pleasure can cause so many negative emotions, hurt feelings, and costly product replacement.

To have a successful gaming experience, in McGonigal's opinion, the game maker has to decrease the room for rage quitting in a game.  That a game should be engaging to the point that it causes minor frustration, but not a frustration that will cause the players to quit the game.

Why?

Here are the reasons I have heard for quitting a game all together.
It's boring.
The graphics suck.
The story line didn't make sense.

Never that the game was too hard.  This is something that I never heard come out of a gamer's mouth.  Now here I do mean gamer, not the casual 'only when there is nothing else to do' gamer, but people who actively seek out the pleasure that comes from playing video games.  I have watched my friend throw his controller into his flat screen smashing both the controller and the TV.  Why?  He had been going after the same boss for seven hours straight.  A week later he had a new (and bigger) TV, turned on his game system, and through gritted teeth said, "This Bastard is mine."  The rage quit is not permanent quit.  Gamer's will come back, no matter how many times they want to drive a stake through their system.

What more, I think that it is a positive to be able to rage quit.  I think it is safe to say we want to rage quit real life at least three times a week (not including finals week).  There are moments, i feel it's safe to say, where we want to take the boss and throw him through a window, and if a wood chipper is on the other side of said window, so much the better.  There are moments when the crap ass automobiles we rely on needs more repairs, that a crow bar and some old fashion smashing seems like the best idea.  There are moments when our significant others are so aggravating we all the sudden understand why 'accidental' poisonings happen mainly in the home.

I digress.

What I am saying, is that we don't do these things.  The same way we don't sell drugs and mow down rival gangs with Uzi's.  They have consequences.  I have no doubt that slapping an obtuse, insensitive, and lazy  boss across the face may be one of the most amazing feelings that one could experience.  The resulting assault charge and new inability to be hired may, however, diminish that joy.  An oil leak may be a pain, but an impromptu car smash is just going to drive that price up.  Your lover may not be waiting to accept your apology when you regain your cool and realize that you were, in fact, being an ass hat.

Games give us the an escape.  A break from reality.  We are able to save worlds.  Disengage from our moral bonds.  Fully explore a world that could never exist in our world.  These are bonuses.  I believe that the fact that we can see red, throw a tantrum, walk away in the most childish way possible, then, in a few days (or hours), come back ready to take on that bastard again is just as meaningful to the gaming experience as the rest.  Take out your rage on something that doesn't care if you quit.  It knows you'll be back

Disclaimer: I am not in support in busting TV's or controllers in the process of the rage quit.  My aforementioned friend was a tool for doing so.  Please punch a pillow or roommate, like an adult. Thanks!

Elephant in the Room

So, over that last three or so weeks I have been playing this little game called World of Warcraft.  Despite my person vow never to play aforementioned game I have actually enjoyed my experience.  I have leveled quickly, learned new skills, and enjoy the collection of shiny weapons to skewer my pixelated foes with.  My defining happy moment was gaining level ten while my entire guild was in world.  The praise that I received for this achievement (game world bar-mitzvah?) filled me with a self worth that was unexpected and well received.  I am constantly surprised by my want to return to the game.

Just one thing.....

Is it just me or is WOW racist?

I don't mean the millions of people who play every month flinging slurs about Worgen's or Tauren's.  I'm talking about that the builders of WOW have set up a magical, wonderful, masterly laid out world, and that world happens to be a racist as the one I live in every day.

Follow me here.  The first time you go to play WOW, you are asked a simple question.  Are you with the Alliance or the Horde.  Let's look at the species that make up the Horde (read "villians").  You have the Orcs, big, brutish, and stupid.  You have the Goblins, swindlers, untrustworthy, and greedy.  Blood Elf?  Addicted to magic, lower forms of the high elves, and hateful. The Tauren are a simple, backwater folk, who if provoked will attack.  Troll's (my adopted race) savage, with bones through their noses, and, just to ham fist it, Jamaican accents.  Lastly, the Forsaken.  They are dead.  Now, outside of the Troll accent, I have not connected any WOW race to any stereotype of race that we have in the real world.  I'll let the reader do that themselves.

Now the Alliance.  Hey! Look! White people! Oh thank God!  Yes, just to make sure that everybody was on the same page on who the good guys were, white people for the win. I do realize that you can change the color of skin on the humans, but when is the last time you saw an advertisement for the game that did not, when showing the human race, show whitey.

Just once I would like to play a game that opens on a peaceful four legged, green, and elongated toothed creature wearing a fedora.  He has a loving wife and high interest loan on a house.  He is going to a job he hates, because he wants to start a family, and while he would love to finish that novel he's been working on, he just can't find the time.  All the sudden the sky lights up and his city is attacked.  Not just his city, but his world.  His wife is dead, everything he knows is destroyed, and there is only one person to blame.  Whitey! Why did they do it?  No one knows.  All you know is you are joining the space army, and for the next foreseeable future you and your avatar are going to be rampaging against these sick bastards.  There will be no mission to understand, no talk of peace.   Let's be honest, they wouldn't do that for you if the roles were reversed.

Make it happen Blizzard!!

A man chooses, a slave obeys

I have just caved in my father's face with a golf club.  My reasoning behind this?  He asked me to do so.  Of course I am talking about the game Bioshock.  A mix of first person shooter, and action adventure RPG.  In the class all students had to choose a RPG to play while completing other course content.  I picked Bioshock for the simple reason of owning it, and never playing it.  While this game is not as free flowing as almost all other RPG's it does present some interesting theories on the choice.

In this particular game the main choice you have while in game play is whether to save little girls who have been horribly mutated by the drug like Adam, or to kill them to take their Adam for yourself.  I have chosen to save the girls, mainly because I kill so many other creatures in this game the thought of adding these girls to my gamer conscious was too much (turns out it helps you in game play as well).  Other games you choose everything form back story, sex, abilities, race, political affiliation (Alliance and Horde).  At the end of the day, is that what makes these games so compelling?

We all love Mario, and Sonic.   They are canonized, but they really compare to what is in development.  Isn't there a part of us that would love to see Mario give up his chase after the princess, and with the help of Luigi and Yoshi, help the Shy Guys free their home land?  Maybe, instead of rings, have Sonic quest downtown Miami, dealing drugs, wasting rival gang members, and putting Tails on a street corner.

I think it is a safe assessment that gamer's do not want to be told what to do by their games anymore.  They want their games to say, "I have made all of this for you, now what are you going to do with it?"

Identity Crisis

So far this semester, our class has read graphic novels such as Blankets, and Maus.  Well, this week it finally arrived.  Masked vigilante week, more commonly known as super hero week.  However, when your novels of choice are Watchmen, The Dark Knight Returns, and V for Vendetta it is harder to use the term super hero.  In fact, after reading through these titles, it may be hard to even refer to them as masked vigilante's.  Frank Miller and Alan Moore have seemed to give us a group of grown men and women who can only work through their personal "quirks" by putting on a mask and trying to make the world a better place.  

V seems to actually make some differences in the world around him, so kudoo's to him.  Batman cleans up the streets of Gotham (kind of),  but becomes America's most wanted in the process.  While the crack squad of Watchmen watch the world go to shit while working on their own personal issues, mostly revolving around mid-life crisis's. 

Which brings me to a scary thought.  Are hero's just as insecure as the rest of us.  Are the identity's they have made hide behind as important, or more important than the job they set out to do?   Do they really care about peace?  Justice?  Or are they so wrapped up in the cowl, the shield, or the cape, that the rest has fallen to the wayside?  V could have shown himself to the world, shown what Norsefire had done to him.  Billionaire Bruce Wayne could give more money than the police or correction departments would know what to do with.  Night Owl could have joined up with Rorschach in the first chapter, and actually saved New York.  

I realize that none of this makes for good character development, and therefore lousy story telling.  However, if art (yes, graphic novels are a form of art) are a mirror of the human condition, then what does that say about us?  Why do we identify ourselves the way we do.  Do we strive to become doctors, to heal, or for the white coat?  Do we become a cop to protect and serve, or for the gun and badge?  Could their be a simpler way of going about our life, but we will never see it because we are so obsessed with how we are identified by the world?

Or have I over thought the whole thing?  Is it simply that fictional people who dress up like ink blots and animals may have much more severe issues than that of the average (and not fictionalized) human being.         

Origin Story or Holy Backstory Batman

The year of 1993 was in many ways probably one of the most formative years of my life.  I was seven years old, I was in the second grade, had found the first love of my life in my class mate Kelly, realized my young hatred for division, and my parents had just divorced.  I remember my younger sisters emotions, Caitlin was angry and scandalized by it all and even rallied us into a failed attempt at running away. This attempt involved packing snacks, and toys, and then standing on the empty hill next to our town house till dark, when our mother came to collect us.  Hannah, the youngest, and always and forever, the most in touch with her emotions, cried.  Maybe only for a week, not longer than a month, but in the house of my memories it seems an eternity. 

And yet for the life of me I can not remember my own emotions, my own reactions.  Maybe there lies a small miracle there, the ability to wrap something so sharp, so dangerous, into a blanket for safe keeping.  
However, discovering my second, and greatest love I remember very well.  It was the summer, and mom and I were driving to Pizza Hut to pick up the standard, newly single mother/ small business owner, nightly meal of two thin crust pizza's, one pepperoni, one cheese.  It started to down pour in the way it only can in summer as we pulled into the parking lot.  We are a hardy clan, and had no qualms getting soaked running into the restaurant.  We stood there dripping wet, realizing that we would have to wait ten more minutes before our order would be ready, and the courageous dash from the car had been unwarranted.  That's when it happened.  Set maniacally at grade school eye level were two VHS's, four comic books, and a collector's cup.  All the covers depicted perfectly sculpted, if not a little freakish, men, and women standing in attack position, screaming, either at each other, or it seemed the very covers that held them! Emblazoned on all of them was one word X-MEN!

I blacked out then, for a bit.  It was too much for my mind to handle, the power that I could feel just by looking at the at that display had me at a loss.  Somehow, my guess is a healthy dose of single mom guilt, I walked out with one VHS, a comic book (Gambit and Rogue on the cover), and the cup.  Later that evening while mom was putting my sisters to bed, she put the VHS in for me.  This is how you start a cult.

Mother. Of. God.  I was hooked.  I was no longer chained to the body of a pudgy, asthma attack prone seven year old.  I could be as savage as Wolverine, as charming as Gambit, or a smart as Beast.  I could help them save the world just by turning the page.  As I left child hood, and entered the stage of unrelenting, uncompromising anger and sadness the Marvel universe followed.  While I may have turned my back on the X-men, I found the darker heroes such as Punisher, Ghost Rider, and Deadpool.  Not only that, but the villains started striking a chord with in my body that their plucky and true counter-parts could not.  I understood Magneto's mistrust of humans, Venom's jealousy of Peter Parker and Spider-Man, and Doctor Dooms need for control.  I was seething with the rage of hundreds of Super Villains.  I was Legion.

I was saved by a shield.  


I never payed much attention to Steve Rogers.  Even before the rise of my dark phoenix I always saw the exploits of Captain America as antiquated.  A hero fighting for beliefs that were no longer held by the flag that he so fiercely protected.  I don't remember what made me do it, what part of my mind made me buy those books.  Maybe I wanted to laugh at the delusions of a sad man still fighting a war long since past, someone who embodied everything I found so mockable in this drek of exsistence.

I was wrong.  He was strong, but The Hulk was stronger. He was fast, but Quicksilver was faster.  He was smart, but Professor X was smarter.  Yet, he was better than the rest combined.  The description lacks punch, but that's what it was.  He stood for something past the shield, the tights, the jaw line.  He was endurance, he was solid, he was hope.  He had seen it all, lost more friends than is needed, died more times than one has the right to, and came back for more.  Standing just as high, caring just as much.  He stood before me, and back handed my trench coat and my what-you-looking-at scowl right off.  He looked at me, and at once I realized what he thought of me.  


This is for a class.  Theories and Approach to Graphics and Gaming.  Over the next fifteen weeks I will write analytically and critically about graphic novels, and then as the semester progresses, about the gaming experience.  So why have I not done so here?

 I am a fanatic.  To say otherwise would be laughable.  However, this does not mean that I can not speak critically and analytically about this form of art.  To do so I feel I needed to exorcise my primal thoughts onto this page.  Now that I have done so, I can move forward with a (relatively) scholarly out look.


Before you judge my fanaticism to harshly, one more thought.  I'm not the only one.  You go into any comic book store across the nation, you'll find stories just like the one I've just told you.  Hell, go into any establishment anywhere, and you will find stories just like this.  People love comics.  This group of spandex clad, dysfunctional super humans is ,whether wanted or not, a part of our culture. They aren't the prettiest, the most refined, and their vocabulary may leave something to be desired, but they are a part of it just the same.

  Until next time. Excelsior.