Less Good

Part 1:  Old Times  

I had a dream this morning about ordering cardboard from a vendor, and then finding, somehow, a report or internal document or something from that vendor that complained about and mocked my participation in this transaction.  My response in the dream was a kind of angry glee.  That, I think, is the revealing and embarrassing part: I liked it.

But after the righteous anger faded, because there was nothing to be angry at, because it was a fucking dream, I was left with an empty space where that feeling used to be.  I still kinda felt like I'd been criticized, but not in a way I could respond to, because it didn't actually happen.  And now, as if I need to justify this feeling, I am calling up all the critical voices that linger in my memory.  I am inviting every accusation, the fair and the unfair, over to my place for drinks, so we can reminisce about old times.


Part 2: Hush

There is a game that keeps coming up when I blog surf about gaming and social justice, an indie, definition-bending game called Hush.  I want to play.  But it starts with an empty text box and this directive:

Describe a scene of intimacy in 50 words.

And I can't do it.  I start by writing about sex, but that's too easy and obvious and wrong.  Sex =/= intimacy.  And then I try to write about some other experience of intimacy, but I can't think of one that feels right.  The more I look through my memories, the less I know what I'm looking for, until I think that I have no idea what intimacy is or what it feels like. 




Part 3: List

I'd like to see someone make a list, a la McSweeney's or the fun page of the DI, except instead of "Porn Star name or Vin Disel character?" it's really, really obvious.  Like, "Sylvester Stallone movie or Babysitter's Club book?"

1.  Boy-Crazy Stacey
2.  Logan likes Mary Ann!
3.  Rambo
4.  Claudia and the Sad Goodbye
5.  Rambo III
6.  Demolition Man

Part 4: Away

I want to be somewhere else.  I want to be someone else.  I want to drive somewhere that no one knows or expects anything from me, where nothing means anything and I don't have to live with anything that happened another city, another life, away. 

I can't do that, so I put on Hedwig and the Angry Inch in the car as I drive to Gilbert and back.  I play it loud enough to stop thinking. 






(Babysitter's Club book: 1,2,4.  Stallone movie: 3,5,6.)

Another Long Post About Gaming, But Not as Long as the Last One

So I started Dragon Age 2 last night.  Obviously, I have expectations and opinions, and I don't quite know where to start. 

I guess a few little things:

1.  They've exaggerated Jenny's walk so that she sways her hips more dramatically which is fine when she's walking, but when she runs, it's sort of wiggly and silly-looking.

2.  I'm not a huge fan of frame stories, but this one isn't terrible.

3.  Loading screens and general graphic design are blah.

4.  Flemeth!  She's fantastic. 

5.  They're really getting to the uncanny valley here.  I mean, video games have been in the valley for a long time, but this is particularly weird because the face textures are so much more developed but the expressions and movement are way behind.  It's eerie.

6.  The "getting you started with combat" bit is more intimidating than I'd like.  I understand the appeal to other people, but for me, even if the enemy difficulty is dumbed way down, just having my first fight be a horde of darkspawn makes me cringe and not want to keep going.  It wasn't actually hard, it just felt like it would be.  And it's that feeling that they're going for, I know, the action-movie-feel.  But I'd much rather start the game by exploring and talking to people, then having a one-on-one fight while I get the controls figured out, and then moving on to battles. 

7.  So many terrible hairstyles to pick from!  (And a few good ones.  I ended up liking default Hawke better than anything I could make, so I'm going with that.)

Criticism of DA2 seem to focus on two main changes from Origins: dialog and combat.  And those are not minor elements.  That's pretty much the entire game.  Well, plot, character development, and all that, yes.  But dialog and combat are incredibly important, and both have significant changes from Origins.

COMBAT:  I played Origins with more of a hack-and-slash style than a turn-based-tactics style.  This is mostly because the console interface made it difficult for me to control more than one character or manipulate the battlefield.  For example, there was no way to tell a character "go here."  I had to take over them, and run them over in real time.  During that time, everyone else would be on autopilot.  So if I wanted Jenny to cast Hex and then Drain Life while Alistair was running to the middle of the room, that was really hard to do.  I could pause, tell Jenny to start Hex, then switch to Alistair and start running, but keep an eye out so that I could pause again as soon as she was done with Hex and tell her what to do next.  I couldn't tell a rogue to "move behind so-and-so" without controlling them in real time while they moved, and while I'm in real time, I can only do one thing at once.

The changes in the combat interface for DA2 have made it much easier for me to control a full party.  I can, actually, tell someone to go somewhere.  It's also much easier to select a target, especially for regular attacks.  The game stays paused while you cycle through your party's actions, and then they execute them when you unpause, rather than unpausing as soon as I make a selection for one character, and then needing to pause again if I actually wanted to order more than one.

On the other hand, as many RPG gamers have complained, the majority of battles in DA2 are with enemies who appear in waves, from seemingly random locations, so I can't plan out a battle.  If it's almost over, I might decide to risk someone dying because I have more injury kits than health potions.  But I have no way of knowing when the battle is almost over.  I can't place my mage out of the way, because an enemy might spawn directly behind her.  So, on one hand, they gave me better tools to strategize, but then took away the information I'd need to do it well.

DIALOG:  In DA:O, the NPCs are fully voiced, but Jenny's part of the dialog is strictly text.  I pick a line of dialog, and then the NPC voices a response.  In DA2, like in Mass Effect, all of Jenny's responses have been voiced, and what I am choosing from is a short paraphrase of the actual line.  For example, a dialog choice in ME might say, "don't study me," and the actual conversation line will be, "I'm not some artifact you can take back to your lab, doctor."  I loved the dialog in ME, and so when I saw people complaining about that system in DA2, I wasn't worried.

But here's the thing about voicing the main character: it's a risk.  And when it works, it works really well, but when it doesn't it's terrible.  And this isn't working for me.  It's not exactly the voice, and it's not exactly the lines, but something about the two together just rubs me the wrong way.  "Funny" options are almost never actually funny, and "charming," just sounds like someone trying and failing at sexy.  And I keep picking the "funny/charming" options, even though I always hate the result, because I can't quite believe that Bioware can be this bad at witty dialog.

And choosing a line feels like so much more guesswork than it was before.  I don't have any examples, but somehow I was never that surprised in Mass Effect.  This time, every time I say anything, I feel like I should save first in case I don't like what comes out.  And I know that the game doesn't really respond to the specifics of the line, that if I pick the "diplomatic" option, then characters will respond as if it were a diplomatic thing to say, but it's frustrating and annoying because I feel like I'm not in control.  I pick options by thinking, huh, wonder what this will be?

In DA:O, there were multiple lines that might be funny, or direct, but with different import.  One might humorously accept or reject a romantic overture, for example.  The actual words mattered.  In DA2 it feels as if all that matters is the tone of voice, because that's all I have to go on.

According to the wiki, "diplomatic/helpful" choices generally result in positive NPC responses, and "aggressive/direct" choices generally result in negative responses.  It sounds like party members become friendlier to me when I'm nice and more hostile when I'm aggressive, regardless of the context or the personality of the party member in question.  Morrigan and Sten didn't like it when Jenny was helpful in Redcliff, but Alistair and Leliana wouldn't have liked it if she wasn't.  That is soooo much more interesting and dynamic than a simple "nice/mean" scale that all NPCs feel the same way about.  When I was having a dialog with Morrigan, choosing the "sympathetic" or "understanding" option might piss her off.  She doesn't want your damn sympathy, thankyouvermuch.  And using humor with Alistair goes very differently than using humor with Sten.  Although it depends on who the humor is directed at, of course. 

I'm trying to remind myself that the game has just started, that I need to give it a chance to be what it is, and not a copy of another game.  I'm trying to remember that I didn't love all my NPCs immediately, that they grew on me over time, and I wasn't in love with Origins right away, either.

Also, here is a totally unrelated screenshot that amuses me.

Mystery Plot

I don't actually know what the plot of Dragon Age 2 is.  I mean, I know it's the story of the rise of Jenny, Champion of Kirkwall, but that's rather vague.  That's not a plot, really.  I know that the story ends with a cliffhanger.  I know that the Chantry is going to get pretty upset with Jenny.  I know the Qunari are involved.  But I made it past the introduction, I've set up home base, and I've been running around in the sandbox picking and choosing quests, and I still don't have an overarching quest.

In every other game I've played, by now I should be finding the water chip, or rescuing my teacher, or finding clues to the Sith Doom Device, or gathering allies to defeat the darkspawn, or finding the rogue special agent and bringing him to justice.  I'm not doing anything like that.  I'm just running around the city, saving up for an expedition into the deep roads.  And the motivation for that is purely financial at this point.  The darkspawn are on the retreat so it's a good time to go looting.

One of my first "main quests" was a search for a missing templar.  Along the way I discovered templars who believed that the Knight Commander was conducting mysterious initiation rites to weed out those who might question her orders.  I met Knight-Captain Cullen, who shared his superior's zealotry.  When it turned out that the templars were kidnapped by mages hoping to destroy the Chantry by raising demons in ordinary people, I killed the mages, rescued the templar, and the quest was over.  It didn't lead to anything else happening.  I got some money and went away.  The quest seemed to function as world-building rather than plot-advancing.  I wonder if this is the kind of storytelling risk that reviewer was talking about. 

And while this lack of focus on a single questline might have disengaged me from the story, the way that Skyrim did, I'm still very invested.  I think that, partially, it's because I believe that there will be something, so I'm invested in finding out.  It's less like a lack of story, and more like a mystery story.  I just don't know what it is yet.

Aveline

I want to talk about Aveline.

I'm only about 10 hours of gameplay into this so far (I started over when I realized that if I wanted to play Lawful-with-a-touch-of-Chaotic-Good, then I really should have signed on with the mercenary instead of the smuggler.)  There is a lot more story and character development yet to come.  Here's what I've seen so far.

Aveline Vallen is Lawful Good, Warrior-Class, Sword-and-Shield.  Gameplay-wise, she is a lot like Alistair.  She likes it when Jenny is nice to people and upholds the law, and she keeps enemies distracted while Jenny does fun magic stuff.  But she is not Alistair.

The first time you meet Aveline, she's beating the crap out of the darkspawn who was about to kill her husband Wesley.  You will not have him, she says, before she grabs its sword and takes off it's head.  This is Aveline: fierce, protective, determined.  But even though she saved Wesley from the attack, she couldn't save him from the darkspawn taint.  When Wesley asks her to save him from a slow, agonizing death, she puts her hands over his, and uses her strength to drive his blade down.

It's hard to not look at Aveline as a Strong Female Character^(tm).  She is physically strong, and physically tough.  She fights with strength rather than speed or finesse.  She continues fighting in the face of personal tragedy and heartbreak.  She killed the man she loved because it was the right thing to do for him.  But Aveline isn't strong because she's rejecting traditionally feminine traits.  She has a maternal protectiveness towards her friends, she cares more about relationships than sex.  When she presents a stoic face, she makes it clear that it's because she isn't ready to share her feelings, because her feelings are important to her, rather than because she's too tough to have feelings.

And, unlike so many badass women, she is believably physically strong.  She's not a waif with a sword bigger than her waist.  And she is believably strong without being a butch caricature.  She isn't stereotypically sexy, nor is she de-feminized.  She has a prominent jaw and a wide but not overly full mouth.  She has broad shoulders and muscular arms and thighs.  She is neither flat chested, nor can she store all her inventory in her cleavage.  Sometimes, I think she's beautiful.  Sometimes, I don't.

In Origins, Ser Aveline is a legend about a woman with no choice or agency, whose life only matters in the way she affects the men around her.  In DA2, Aveline Vallen is a woman who rejects that legend.  Her femininity is neither a weapon that defines her, nor something to struggle with, to reject.  Isabela is the standard femme fatale, who bares a lot of skin, uses her sexuality to manipulate others, fights with acrobatics rather than brute strength, and likes sex but avoids feelings.  I'm sure that Isabela will develop a backstory that gives her more depth, but there are so many Isabelas in the world already.  Aveline is herself.

I was so glad to see that Aveline was a romance option.  Having Jenny pursue a romance with Aveline would show that Jenny finds her attractive, that Aveline isn't any less of a woman for being a different kind of woman.  I was so glad to see variety in the kinds of masculinity and femininity being modeled.  But it turns out that I was wrong.  Neither Aveline nor Varric will enter into a romance with Jenny.  The dwarf and the lady-soldier.  As if they didn't count. 

Apostate Jenny

1.  I'm starting to think as Apostate Jenny.  I'm starting to get annoyed when people talk about The Hero of Ferelden.  Like, kid-sister-annoyed.  As if the subtext was why can't you be more like her?  They are, actually, related.  Mage Jenny is Apostate Jenny's second cousin.

Mage Jenny was happy in the tower, and from talking to other mages, that seems like the exception, not the rule.  She was always a special snowflake.  She was the teacher's pet.  The templars flirted with her.  She grew up in a gilded cage, and while I can't dismiss the cage part, I can't dismiss the gilded part, either.  She was never cold or hungry.  She was adored.  And now she's The Hero of Ferelden and everyone loves her.

You can see how Apostate Jenny, who has spent her life running from the Chantry, never settling anywhere for too long, learning her abilities in secret, through trial and error, who barely escaped Lothering alive while the Warden was off gathering allies to save everyone else, might be a little bitter. 

And what's really weird, is that part of this comes from knowing that I bent over backwards to give Mage Jenny a happy ending.  She got everything she wanted.  So, when I'm feeling prickly and defensive on behalf of Apostate Jenny, part of it is because I know that Mage Jenny got special treatment, not only from the people around her, but from me, as the person sitting in my living room with a game controller.  I'm sort of jealous because of...me.

I'm going to give that a little space so we can all awkwardly walk around it.







2.  Every child starts out as an apostate.  Unless the child is born in the Circle tower, which happens very rarely, a child with magic is an unsupervised mage.  But children are sent to the tower rather than hunted and killed, otherwise there would be no Circle.  So at what age does a child go from being "someone who is sent to the Circle," to "someone who is hunted down and killed? 

3.  I need to start paying attention when I play, but from promo images and what I think are non-modded screenshots, it's looking like DA2 has finally moved away from boob plate armor.  I even found a thread where someone complained that the female armor wasn't skimpy or "feminine" enough.

Check this out:

 I love it.

Two Weeks Left

I am thinking about the significance of the first person in writing, of the personal, the confessional, the ways that Silvia Plath and Anne Sexton are framed in the cultural narrative, the jealousy I feel towards Michelle Tea, the beauty of worms on the sidewalk after it rains.  I'm thinking about games as Art, about that damn question that gets asked over and over again.  Is it Art?  Can it be Art?  I'm thinking about the intersection between miniature dioramas, like dollhouses and terreria and train sets, and life sized dioramas, like natural history museums.  How are they related?  How are they different?  How do we interact with them, and why, and what does it all mean?  I'm thinking, always, about Dragon Age.  I am watching myself play, and now I am watching myself watching myself play.  Meta is my superpower.  I am stressed about work and life.  I haven't paid any of my bills for August yet, except rent which goes automatically, thank god.  I found this illustration of Anders, which is the very best fan art ever.

Sirinne at Deviant Art

I am thinking about the Iowa State Fair and how it felt to go, for the first time, with only my iphone for a camera.  I am thinking about how strange it is to be part of a vanishing category, the single person, how any gathering of friends will contain very few single people.  The strange part is how this was foretold to me in Bridget Jones' Diary.  Briget was 33 years old, too.  And, like Bridget, I am thinking about being fat.  How I hate being the fat person who eats more than everyone else, but if I don't then I'm the fat person who is ashamed and dieting, which isn't any better.  There is no unmarked way for a fat person to eat.  I am thinking about Merrill, who I have written about, but only in relation to her relationship with Jenny.  I want to write her a post of her own. 

Sadly, she only gets this awesome outfit if she has a romance with Jenny.

I am thinking that the coffee I had this morning wasn't enough, even though I'm not sleepy at all.  I'm thinking that I had ambitions for today.  I am wondering if it would be possible to entice Naamah_Darling to make me a Merrill pony.  I mean, she always makes her own characters, I don't know if she'd be willing to make a pony interpretation of someone else's character.  But I found this and now I WANT.

KageTakaiDoragon at Deviant Art

Not this exact pony, because I would want to give her more freedom than that.  I'd want to show her lots and lots of images of Merrill and describe Merrill's personality and history and everything and let Naamah Darling interepet how to translate that into pony.

I am thinking about ways to extricate myself from Bacon Sushi Guy, who sent me a text on Saturday, expressing disappointment that he couldn't make it to breakfast to show me his finished hat.  I am thinking about the way my experience with authority affects how I interact with video games.  The police always let me go with a verbal warning.  I follow rules, and expect to be rewarded for it. 

Romace updates, mostly imaginary

Alternate title: Swooping Is Bad

This is going to be rambling.  And long.

________________________________________

I restarted my OKC account so I could message someone and give them my email address, but I have to wait a week before I can disable it again.  And here is Bacon Sushi Guy, again, saying hello.

DO NOT WANT.

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At some point in DA:O, as I was going back to camp yet again, after a plot point or experience gain so I could see if anyone had new dialog, I wondered just how much time I've spent doing exactly this.  Going back to camp, or my ship, running around and having variations of this dialog:

NPC: Hello
JENNY:  I'd like to talk about something.
NPC:  Okay.  What do you want to talk about?
JENNY: Oh, nevermind.
NPC: Yeah, bye.

Every. Damn. Game.  It's not just DA:O, it's every other Bioware game I've played (including the non-Bioware sequel).  I really like the party member relationship arcs, romance or not, so I look forward to new conversations.  And since there's nothing that signals "new dialog," the only way to find out is to keep trying, over and over.

It is, in terms of gameplay, only slightly more fun than chopping wood.  But only because chopping wood takes longer.  (Worst use of day/night in a game ever.)

There is also a distinct lack of fat shaming in DA.

So I am glad that Bioware finally noticed how much of an annoying timesuck this part of the game can be, and found a way to avoid all those neverminds and goodbyes.  In DA2, when party members have something new to say, there's a quest notification.  Go to house, have dialog, quest over.  The dialog may or may not be particularly quest-like.  Sometimes it's just "Hey how's it going? You settling in okay?"  I don't love the framing, but it works out fine in gameplay.  Mostly it just means that I can't repeat conversations.

(I will admit that in DA:O Jenny and Alistair repeated conversations more often than strictly necessary.  After all, there are conversation options that involve kissing and sexing, and he says cute things when you initiate them.  Like, "Aha!  I see talking isn't what you had in mind.  Right then!"  And there was this one time when I experimented with giving him coal and rotten onions until he didn't like me anymore, to see what would happen to the relationship.  He was mad.  It was upsetting.  So afterwards I restarted my save game and we made out a few times to reassure myself that I hadn't actually broken anything.)

But, overall, the value of being able to rehash the same dialog is pretty minimal.  Which is too bad, because I'd really like to blame my last few hours of gameplay on the new dialog system.

I went through the Anders romance last night.  It was so bad I don't even.  And at first I tried to attribute the badness to DA2's conversation mechanics.  Maybe it was because the quest-dialog structure made for fewer conversation opportunities.  If Jenny and Anders had spent more time talking, joking, getting to know each other in more than one dimension, maybe the Very Emotional Declarations of Love woudn't seem so ridiculous.  If I had an emotional connection to Anders, maybe I wouldn't cringe so much when he gets all SRS BIZNZ.

But the thing is, I have an emotional connection to the rest of my party.  I think that there have been fewer conversations between Jenny and her party members, but not by a lot.  And the party banter is still one of the highlights of the game.  I can't blame the bad on changes in dialog structure.  Anders fails all on his own.

I dislike linking videos, so you should imagine these lines being read by a high school drama student trying to channel Dr. Frankenfurter:

You've seen what I am… I've tried to hold back, but I'm still a man.  You can't expect me to resist forever.

This will be a disaster, but I can't live without it.

If you're with me, we'll be hunted!  Hated!  The whole world will be against us!  If your door is open tonight, I'll come to you.  If not, I'll know you took my warning at last.

For three years, I have lain awake every night, aching for you.  I'm still terrified that I'll wake up.

(I wanted to make the quotes as purple as the prose but fuchsia was closest I could find.)

First of all, WHY THE FUCK is it NEVER mentioned that Jenny is ALSO an apostate, and ALSO running from templars and leading a double life and if her secret gets out she'll be hunted and hated and all the rest?  Secondly, all those cheesy oh I can't but I must lines, the don't tempt me's wouldn't be so obnoxious if they came from someone like Fenris, who seems to have a similar opinion of romantic entanglements.  But Fenris would say them with fewer exclamation points.  And a lot more smolder.  Anders just sounds angsty.  I keep expecting him to toss his hair or something.

(Part of me worries that Anders bothers me because he isn't performing masculine appropriately, that I'm attributing traditionally feminine traits to him and criticizing him for them.  But I think it's a boy/man issue for me.  I don't mind him being all FEELINGSFORYOU, I just want him to have some reason for them and some backbone about it.  Some self-confidence.  Some lines that aren't delivered with pity-me-eyes.)

The only good parts of the Anders romance scenes are the parts where he isn't talking.  A good heavy breathing can be a lot sexier than words.  I'm not sure I would have added the actual kissing noises, but the uhs and mmms were nice.  And the sex scene was pleasantly non-gropey.  It wasn't The Unstoppable Hand vs. The Unsquishable Boob.  Just a camera panning away while the two of them lie together, and then the screen fades to black before it gets embarrassing.   

But, dear god, as soon as the sex is over, that terrible dialog comes back, and it's like the dramaz is contagious, because Jenny starts saying things like, "I want you right here!  Until the day we die!"  And I'm looking around trying to figure out where the hell all this came from.  They never even talk!  Where does all this "love" come from?

I'm not saying that friendship has to come before romance.  There doesn't need to be a deep and meaningful connection before sex.  Jenny slept with Isabela without any deep, meaningful, conversations.  But love isn't romance, and it isn't sex.  Love doesn't just swoop down like that.  Love builds.  Maybe unawares, at first, but the pieces are there even we don't see them: the conversations, the emotional connections, the intimate moments.

It happens with everyone else.  Banter with Isabela becomes, "hey, you're a good person and I like you."  Fenris, after being helped and supported by Jenny, feels close enough to confide in her.  So does Merrill.  They talk about themselves.  And even though there are relationships forming, no one else has declared FEELINGS.

So, yeah.

I didn't save that particular game.

________________________________________

I'm also having problems with the romance with Merrill.  Because I actually like Merrill a lot, and it bothers me that Jenny doesn't seem to take her seriously.  Jenny flirts with Merrill by treating her like an adorable child, someone "sweet" and "pretty."  She never praises Merrill for her strength of belief, her bravery, her kindness and caring.  I know that Merrill has a childlike appearance.  Her voice is high pitched and unsure, she's got a child's big-eyed face (and the graphics people went to town on the whole shining-elf-eye bit).  But she is not a child.  I hate that Jenny treats her like one.  And it's even worse when "treating like a child," is part of "flirting."  It's gross.  Merrill, you deserve better.

Hmmm… who do I want to ship Merrill with?

Someone grumpy and stoic, I think, like Fenris or Sten.  Or—wait.  She actually might be able to get Anders to grow up.  Get him to think about something else besides his revolution.  It's not like Anders has a monopoly on "oppressed and hunted."  Merrill has a big goal for herself and has sacrificed a lot for it, and she still likes sun and flowers and stuff.  Question is, what does he bring to the table?  I can see why she'd be good for him, but would an improved Anders be good for her?  I'm not going to ship her as someone's manic pixie dream girl.

I need to think about this…

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Also?  I soooooo want to read this: