A few weeks back I did a short series of three write-ups on Far Cry 3 for Shamus Young’s Twenty Sided. They did well enough over there, but I figured I’d post them here for posterity’s sake.
I’ll be delving in to Far Cry 3 in the next few days, but before I go too deep into the thematic stuff I thought I’d talk about how the game compares to - and at times goes to great lengths to distance itself from - its predecessor.
While I’ve said my piece on Far Cry 2 already, it’s worth reiterating that it’s sort of a challenging game. I don’t mean that it’s challenging in terms of raw game difficulty, I mean that it challenges players trying to engage with the game itself. It’s a game where the center cannot hold - Ben Abraham has rightly pointed out that its mechanics all tie closely to themes of entropy and decay. Guns break down over time, fire spreads and consumes foliage, cleared checkpoints are repopulated, friends betray you, the political situation continues to rip the country apart, and even your own body is under siege by disease. The player is never really in complete control of his or her situation and whatever gains they make are always eroded and undone. Part of this is to encourage the creation of memorable emergent situations, but there’s a serious thematic subtext there as well.
I picked the game up ostensibly because of Kyle Gabler’s unique art style and pedigree. While I was expecting something cute I wasn’t expecting something this genuinely good. However, it’s gotten very little buzz, which surprised me.
I’ve already talked about my feelings on Greenlight itself elsewhere. But there’s another issue that’s been unfolding across the twitterverse and blogosophere and interwebs in the days since Greenlight’s go-live. It’s starting to feel as if there are two indie communities* out there that share the same name but fundamentally different values. There’s an indie scene of commercially viable and comparably expensive-to-develop titles, and there’s an indie scene of smaller and more intimate games made by developers without the resources, credit, or cash flow of the other.
Whenever things are done in the name of the “indie scene,” both groups believe themselves to be the target audience. And, naturally, this leads to conflict as both groups have radically different expectations of what a game platform is or what it means to create meaningful works. It’s the debate that seems to crop up every year during the IGF nominee announcements - does IGF exist to celebrate the “best of breed” games that are likely to get or already have publishing contracts, or does it have an obligation to highlight smaller titles that won’t otherwise get attention? Greenlight seems to have provoked a similar debate in the indie community, and all of the usual lines are being drawn - only this time it’s tinged with issues of classism and the worth of a work, both because of the whole “$100″ issue and because the conflict is over generating sales rather than being featured in a contest.
A few days ago, Keith Burgun posted an article on Gamasutra regarding a proposed ontology for games - which pretty much declared anything that wasn’t a competitive winstate-driven game to be a vaguely defined and quickly dismissed lump of “interactive systems.” In this view, The Sims and The Walking Dead are out there next to traffic patterns and vending machines; a vast unexplored section of his Venn Diagram that might well be called “systems that aren’t the games I like.” He also made the poor choice of declaring Anna Anthropy’s ongoing quest to democratize games as misguided. All of this has prompted a fair bit of discussion, and I figured I’d put my thoughts from earlier up here.
I briefly considered doing a Vlog on the film, but since I generally planned to just blather on with a stream-of-consciousness about it without much editing or post production I figured text would work just as well. Hey, if I’m going to be lazy, I’m going to be really lazy. Anyways, my haphazard, unorganized, likely-to-change-over-time thoughts on the movie having only just seen it:
