Last Monday, on April 16 2012, I presented my MSc thesis to the Danube University’s committee. I’m happy to say it went extremely well.
My thesis is about:
Aesthetic, Immersive and Transmedia Potentials of Game Platforms – Taking the Example of Assassin’s Creed
Now let’s be clear: My thesis is 160 pages cover-to-cover, so these are very limited, selected results.
I’ve stated three research questions in my thesis:
Immersion:
“How do technical parameters define a platform’s aesthetic, and in further consequence, immersive potentials?”
Transmedia Storytelling:
“What are the transmedia potentials of a multi-platform game franchise?”
Convergence:
“If there will be not one single “black box” to replace all other platforms, will smartphones become the focal point that integrates with all other platforms?”
These were the platforms I selected, and the reasons why:
I’ve conducted a comparative analysis of these platforms in the theoretical part of my thesis, and then asked questions about them in general, as well as related to Assassin’s Creed, in my online survey.
Here are some results of my survey:
Now, since the context is a bit less academic than within my thesis … if you do not know Assassin’s Creed, go play it – the respondents of my survey agreed that AC2 was the best one. And if you can’t, check out the Wikipedia article or look at some YouTube videos.
Now, these were my main observations about Assassin’s Creed on a few selected platforms:
Now, let’s finish this up with a selection of conclusions about the three main topics:
That’s it for now. If you have any questions, let me know in the comments!
Hines also links to this gem, a blog post in which a martial artist and contortionist talks about how he tried a typical female action hero pose – and failed.
2nd post for #52games. Posting from my phone, so it’ll be very short again. VERY VERY short. Promise to be better with most of the remaining 50 topics.
The current topic is fitting for the weather in Central Europe: cold (Kälte); and since I played 153 hours of Skyrim, I just have to comment that the inhabitants of Skyrim must guzzle potions of cold resistance like crazy. Even those who live in huts without big fireplaces or doors (!) sleep without blankets, while it’s snowing outside. Yes, the Nords of course have adapted to their environment (blah), but all immigrants have the same unhealthy habit. It’s funny if you pay attention to such details, but of course very nice if you want to pickpocket people.
The female armors in Skyrim are very similar to the male version, so at least there’s no freezing to death in Daedric bikinis like described in this recent post about another freezing RPG world.
PS: The title is a pun about a track by a German band, so “Nordisch” is not a typo.
I’m participating in @zockworkorange’s project #52games, where lots of people write posts about ONE topic that reminds them of ONE game. I’m doing it in English because I can …because I don’t want to neglect my usual readers.
Missed the topic “new beginning” (Neubeginn) last week, but I need to catch up on this. VERY QUICKLY. Very briefly.
Warning: Contains spoily spoilers for the beginning of Mass Effect 2.
Mass Effect 2 was a great game. I loved many things about it, but it fell especially short in an unexpected regard: The story. In my opinion, the game focused so much on the “recruit teammate – gain teammate’s trust – recruit next teammate…” cycle that there was no “Shepard story” as in the first game.
Unfortunately, and with this I’m returning to the topic “New beginning”, this becomes evident quite early in the game, when Shepard is resurrected (a bit prematurely) after two years during which everyone had to assume (s)he was dead. In terms of the cinematics and escape from the station that is under attack, this is presented very well.
If you haven’t played the game, here is a YouTube video of these starting minutes of ME2:
It’s also a nice explanation for the opportunity to change his/her class entirely; and advance the plot, allowing ME1 veterans to discover many new things that have changed since the end of the first game’s narrative.
But most reactions to his/her reappearance from authorities, friends and enemies are simply underwhelming, and the topics of life, death and resurrection are never dealt with in any detail. This would’ve been difficult (but hey, it’s BioWare), but the way it is now, it’s a missed chance (yes, hey, it’s EA) to discuss something immensely meaningful in a computer game.
The following ad for “Last Chaos” popped up from some game site. Now, I do not know anything about the game (and don’t care much, either), but the images caught my eye, after reading various posts about the depiction of male and female characters in games recently.
The Titan character is one of the few examples of male characters without full plate armor, the rogue (Schurkin) one of the few of females with full (leather in this case) armor. [Note: The image is photoshopped to see both characters without the icy layer, which disappears on mouse-over.] Yes, the second one, the Knight, as well as the third, the Mage and the last, the Healer characters are pretty stereotypical again, but it was enough to screencap it and post it now.
"You can do it, oh no you can't." (Devs create characters with sensible armor.)
However, seeing that this world seems to be covered in ice and the heading reads “Survive the icy times”, I don’t see much of a chance of survival for any of them if they don’t have a warm coat and thick fur boots ready somewhere.
I fondly remember Robinson’s Requiem and The Dark Eye/Realms of Arkania, where your characters would die quickly without the proper equipment. Mind you, I wasn’t so fond of this when they died the first time.
So, as I said elsewhere recently, I either want all characters to wear silly armor that exposes their vital organs while emphasizing their assets, or the laws of physics (however exotic they may be in fantasy/sci-fi worlds) to apply to all sexes equally – and that means they should cover up for protection from the weather as well as their enemies’ steel.
Another note: Proud to announce that this post was featured on The Border House! If you want to see the comments that were posted over there, follow this link!
I was very excited when The Witcher 2 was released earlier this year, but I quickly got annoyed with a few things (controls, balance) so I took a break from the game soon afterwards, somewhere in the middle of chapter 2. Then, I’ve spent a lot of time playing a lot of Assassin’s Creed for my thesis. When that was done, I put 153 hours into Skyrim and now I’m back to The Witcher 2.
These three games combined would make for an amazing experience: I love the openness and the beautiful world of Skyrim, but the characters are generic and flat. I love the way Assassin’s Creed makes the virtual world physically plausible and movement realistic even though your avatar is pulling the wildest stunts. I love the “adult” setting of The Witcher, it is dirty, gritty and damn funny.
Posts about the other two will follow, but this one will be about Andrzej Sapkowski’s (I spelled that correctly right away, wow!) creation in general, and specifically regarding the representation of women in the game and in its promotion. I am a huge Witcher fangirl, in spite of many things that initially annoyed me about the franchise – I went into detail on this in this post and explained what changed my mind here. I am currently reading one of the books, partly to see whether these problems are built into the franchise by its creator or if it’s the gaming industry’s doing.
If you made out the latter as the culprit, well done, but it wasn’t too hard, eh? Get this bit from the Witcher Wiki about one slight but revealing *giggle* difference between the novels and games:
After her fall at Sodden Hill and her consequent resuscitation, Triss mentions that she “will never again be able to wear a dress with a low neckline”, suggesting that some skin disfigurment still remains on her chest. In the game however, she displays a generous amount of cleavage without any traces of damage whatsoever.
While Triss’ normal attire in The Witcher 2 is almost chaste, you have ample of time to… uhm, inspect her skin for possible scarring in her nude scenes. Here is, though, her outfit, which I adore:
Triss in The Witcher 2... when not naked
A general statement before you get me wrong: I do not criticize nudity (in games) per se, I just don’t want it to be an end in itself, and one thing that annoys me in particular is the double standards many guys have, i.e. female characters are expected to wear plate bikinis in combat and nothing at all in romance/sex cutscenes, while male characters wear reasonable armor in combat and keep their pants on at all times. It doesn’t make sense from an in-game perspective and it’s immature if you can’t look at a naked person of the same sex, especially if it’s just pixels.
In a scene in which Triss and Geralt take a bath in some ruins, Triss immediately removes her clothes with a spell and jumps in the water. Geralt begins undressing, but when he reaches his pants in the process, Triss grabs his arm and pulls him into the pool – pixel penis exposure averted!
However, The Witcher 2 does a good job on some counts. While the very explicit sex scenes – which must make BioWare with its “mature RPG” Dragon Age blush – caused “complaints” on forums from guys who didn’t know how to complete the game with just one hand, Triss and Ves are both reasonably dressed when out of bed. And the romancey dialogs are quite well done.
Ves is a kickass soldier, who exemplifies the “beauty vs. talent” dilemma, because she does get picked for special assignments that make use of her pretty face.
Her journal entry in the game reads:
The fair-haired Ves stood apart from the rest of Vernon Roche’s unit, and not only in that she was the only woman in an elite formation of hardened cutthroats and swashbucklers. Her girlish face and shapely body would stand out even if a uniform did emphasize them. For there is something in soldier women that attract a man’s gaze, and Ves was no exception. The reader should not, however, be mislead by this description – one does not earn a Blue Stripes membership with good looks, but with skill, determination and, at times, ruthlessness. Anyone disregarding Ves would pay dearly for misjudging this young woman.Because of her gender, Ves would sometimes receive assignments where her beauty was more important than her combat abilities and efficiency. Roche had used Ves as his trump card more than once.
Here’s a screenshot of Ves – I love her outfit, stance, hairdo, everything!
Ves, as she should be
Of course, we can’t have reasonably dressed female characters, so we have to create a mod that changes this outfit to the default whore apparel… I do suppose people who prefer this one have no imagination whatsoever. Their loss, right? (btw, when I last looked, the mod had only 400-something unqiue downloads.)
The extremely essential "Ves Whorification Mod"
Incidentially, a bug in The Witcher 2 made it possible for Geralt to undress without exposing *any* kind of skin…
They DID say he can't keep his pants on...
Seriously though, unlike the first game, there is much less blatant sexism in the second one. The awkward pin-up cards were dropped, to name one example. Similar to the two main relationships in The Witcher 1 with either Shani or Triss, you can choose whether Geralt remains faithful to Triss or not. In general, I find Geralt to be very respectful towards women, taking into account his general disrespect towards authority, religion or mages.
Yes, The Witcher 2 is a very adult game (both regarding the general setting and sexuality), but it is much more than that. It has a beautiful world, interesting quests, intriguing and nuanced characters, original details like the bestiary that is refreshingly different from other RPGs and much more to please a fan of the genre, whether male or female. It certainly diserves the Mature rating for the nudity alone, but apart from that, there’s cursing, blood, torture, incest, drug abuse… and the aforementioned dirt and grit that makes it “adult” in the other meaning of the term. It’s not a fluffy fairy tale, it’s a story filled with pain, death, injustice, prejudice, loss in a harsh setting.
What has been used to promote the game, however, boils down to naked skin in its truest sense. For example, Triss was on the Playboy cover in Poland and in Russia, a nude calendar was produced, here’s a video from the shooting, showing a completely naked Triss and a fully dressed Geralt:
[Side note: Perhaps she dropped the Triss outfit because it didn't look as awesome as in the game?]
I really don’t care about the calendar or the video per se. What I do care about is that this is the part of the campaign that sticks, and gives a skewed image of the game. It does not do the game justice at all. I am not sure if I would have given it a second look if confronted with the marketing campaign. This is hardly how you promote a game to female gamers (who, if I am any indication, might come to love this game almost as much as the guys), or to male gamers who expect more from a game than pixel porn and are against sexism in or outside of games. Most feedback I get here on my blog is from guys, not girls, so I know they exist.
Now for a little experiment: Imagine an Oscar-winning Hollywood film with a great plot, characters and special effects that features some explicit sex scenes was marketed primarily with explicit material. I am finding this incredibly hard, to be honest. It is economically stupid to give your product an image that does not correspond with its actual content, but will most likely alienate parts of your audience while not gaining considerable new target audiences. This is of course guesswork, but I don’t think that many RPG-hating shooter fans (sorry for the stereotype, but I’m trying to make a point *cough*) would think “Hey, I hate RPGs, but this one has sex scenes, so I’m going to buy it” especially in times where you can watch screencaptures of everything on YouTube two days after the game’s launch.
After noticing similar differences between the content and campaign for Dragon Age 2, I get the impression that while many developers are (trying to be) more inclusive of the interests of female gamers (and the wonderful group of male gamers that support gender equality), the publishers go behind their backs and leave out these aspects and emphasize the “made for the male gaze” parts instead. So I can’t help but wonder: Why is the game marketing obviously more sexist than the game development? Are they too dense to realize that pleasing a decreasing percentage of gamers while alienating an increasing one is plainly irrational?
Playing Assassin’s Creed like a madwoman right now, both to catch up before the release of Revelations and for my thesis on gaming platforms, I registered for a Uplay account, which lets you earn points in all Ubisoft games and unlock items and other nice stuff (not the big DLCs though, too bad).
There was no question about my gender, and even though it was already linked with my Facebook profile, which states that I’m female… here’s what I ended up with:
Lookin' good! I intended to get another haircut anyway.
Now, I’m not overreacting or claiming that women are the predominant demographic for a service like that, but… since I already allow you access, can’t you either use my profile info on FB and assign me a soldier chick pic (or my FB profile pic), or go the Twitter/XBOX Live/etc. way and use something neutral, like an Assassin whose face you can’t even see properly? [Side note: I think I'm going to buy the Ezio black women's costume.]
Yes, it’s the little things that make me happy. Or laugh out loud, as in this case.
Here’s another one: I can’t at all change the profile pic. What would be so hard about taking Claudia, Rosa or a courtesan’s image and offering me a choice? On the other hand, it *almost* fulfills what I said about obscuring the face so much that it’s unisex. Close, but no apple (of Eden).
I’ve conducted a comparative analysis of these platforms in the theoretical part of my thesis, and then asked questions about them in general, as well as related to Assassin’s Creed, in my online survey.
Now, since the context is a bit less academic than within my thesis … if you do not know Assassin’s Creed, go play it – the respondents of my survey agreed that AC2 was the best one. And if you can’t, check out the Wikipedia article or look at some YouTube videos.
Now, let’s finish this up with a selection of conclusions about the three main topics:
That’s it for now. 
