Isometrics Awards: Best Game of 2015

So 2015 has been a fantastic year for video games on the whole, with fantastic games of all shapes, sizes and ideas being available. This list has changed repeatedly, being unrecognisable from a list of predictions I made last year. The long list had over thirty games on it at one point and whittling it down to ten has meant several games that deserve to be on this list are not, most notably The Witcher 3, which is essentially the unofficial number 11 on this list. I've tried to cover as wide a variety of games as possible.

Are you sitting comfortably? Good, then let us begin.

10: The Beginner's Guide (Everything Unlimited Ltd., PC)

Depicted: The only spoiler-free screenshot I have.

A game by the makers of The Stanley Parable that is pretty much as difficult to describe without completely spoiling it, The Beginner's Guide is a game that will become more and more important as gaming spreads its literary wings and begins to move into mediums of metacommentary and creative criticism. It is at once a short playable experience but enters into much broader dimensions and ideas, asking some questions that are really profound and never asked before either in or about computer games. It will not be for everyone, as many of my recommendations are not, however this is a vitally important video game to understand other games, and absolutely worth the very short run-time. I will be covering the game in spoileriffic length in an Isometrics soon as well so play it before that... please?

9: Dirt Rally (Codemasters Racing, PC)

Depicted: Hot Note Reading Action!

Narrowly escaping the worst list was Codemasters' major release this year, the horribly buggy, limited in scope and incredibly disappointing F1 2015. Dirt Rally is basically the polar opposite. It appeared out of nowhere in staggering form for an Early Access game, blew pretty much every other racer this year away and was completed in December, thus guarenteeing itself a spot on this list. Dirt Rally is the opposite in many ways to Codemasters' increasing attempts to streamline and simplify their major franchises, with Grid Autosport and F1 2015 being the biggest victims of this. Dirt Rally does not; you get no tips, no aids and absolutely no mercy, and you will not place very well for a long time in the game, until you improve, build up your team and learn a lot about care and patience in order to maximise those sector times. Otherwise you will crash and see just how gorgeous and capable that damage engine is. The only fly on the ointment is how locked up most of the content is, with you stuck in a Mini Cooper until you get very good at the game but it makes progression so very rewarding. A massively fun experience if you're willing to sink your teeth deeply into a racing game.

8: Downwell (Mappin/Devolver Digital, PC)

Depicted: The only meaningful screencap I could take before being decimated by the game.

Now this is a shock. Technically a mobile port, Downwell is such an addicting little shooter game, with a twist that turns things literally on their head. A scrolling shooter in reverse, you play a young little blob thing wearing gunboots sending your bullets down the well, hunting for gems and trying not to die repeatedly. One of those things is kind of impossible, but that is the joy of games like Downwell, Spelunky and The Binding Of Isaac. You feel progression and forward progress, and the game rewards you for trying and failing. For the amount of fun you'll receive it's an absolute bargain.

7: Grow Home (Reflections/Ubisoft, PC)

Depicted: Welcome to Sunny Floating isle!

Ubisoft have a lot of issues and have made many many mistakes in the past but one of the things is their forays into art games. Last year provided the wonderful Child Of Light and Valient Hearts, and this year has the wonderful Grow Home. The basic premise is simply to grow a plant two kilometers high to reach your spaceship but the way to get there is equal parts Katamari-esque odd and complete charm, with a world growing upward and yet thanks to some delightful controls very easy to get around. It was a thoroughly relaxing game, and I have spent whole evenings gliding across the map trying to find one of the crystals or star seeds. Ubisoft have done better this year any way, but Grow Home will probably stand out as their best contribution to gaming this year.

6: Toren (Sword Tales/Versus Evil, PC)

Depicted: Drowning In Symbolism

Toren was part of a great influx of Brazillian games, which included the phenomenal Chroma Squad (a game bumped from this list at the last minute), and stands to be one of the most beautiful indie games made at least this year. You play Moonchild, a young girl who grows while climbing the titular Toren, a giant tower reaching to the sun, while exploring vivid worlds and enjoying an absolutely fascinating story without a single line of dialogue uttered. On a personal level, this game brought me back into doing Isometrics, as the first game of the year that truly felt like an incredible literary experience, swallowing you into its world tinged with mythology and metaphor. At times it feels like a 90's video game with an air of new-age surrealism, and the fact that a game can do that in 2015 gives me hope for the future.

5: Fallout 4 (Bethesda, PC/PS4/XB1)

Depicted: Low Hanging Fruit.

A late entry that completely messed up most of my rankings, I was going to leave Fallout 4 until the ultimate edition came out and the game was in a playable non-buggy state. Apparently I didn't need to wait too long because Fallout 4 was an incredible experience, improving pretty much every aspect that needed fixing, and adding a level of customisation I didn't realise I really wanted in gaming until I realised I could add a bayonet to a sniper rifle. Some have complained that it was too “streamlined” or “dumbed down” but most of those arguments appear to have been complaining about genuine improvements. Outside of the more limited dialogue options, almost none of the changes to Fallout 4 have been for the worse. Combat is better and feels more refined, VATS still has an element of threat to it, the settlement system is way more involved and delightful than it has any right to be, and you have a dog. What more is there to love?

4: Undertale (TobyFox, PC)

Depicted: A game after my own heart

Undertale is a game that completely blindsided everyone, and managed to create a huge cult overnight over what seemed from screenshots to be another retro-inspired RPG. Scratch the surface even slightly however and you have a beautiful, incredibly well-realised game about choice, authority, agency and font-named Skeletons. It is a world that is easy to be attached to with all the characters being rather unique in design, personality and witty dialogue, and that is as true for the random encounters as the main NPCs, which is where Undertale truly shines. Combat can be like a standard RPG if you want it to be, but there are options to not fight and still win, and it's as valid if not more so to spare an opponent as kill it. A spellbinding experience filled with wonder, humour and meta-commentary on gaming as a whole, and absolutely worth playing, then again, and again...

3: Rocket League (Psyonix, PC/PS4)

Depicted: True Sporting Joy

Here I am, and you're Rocket League! Possibly the best multiplayer game in recent memory, Rocket League is a concept so simple and so brilliant I'm shocked it hasn't become successful sooner. Effectively jet powered car football, where Rocket League shines is in the sheer controlled madness of everything. Anyone can pick it up and figure out the basics but there is a lot of hidden tricks and aspects to master that high level play looks very impressive and not entirely based on luck. It basically works in the same way other sports do, and tickles that bit of your brain that starts hollering, oohing, ahhing and whooping in delight as that shot curls perfectly past the other team's goalie and soars in, explosions and horns sounding off. Another game that came from seemingly nowhere and completely blew me away as a game that could have very easily been game of the year.

2: Life is Strange (Dontnod/Square Enix, PC/PS4)

Depicted: Meta-Hipster Irony

One more game that seemed to be a complete shock, Remember Me developers Dontnod's follow up, the episodic Life is Strange will stand as one of the best if not the best episodic game of all time, and for me personally the game that made me finally get how and why episodic games can work. The story of a backwater town in Washington state, the game follows Max Caulfield, a photography student who learns she has the power to turn back time after saving her best friend's life. The first episode, while very good and showcasing the beautiful hand-painted textures they used, was impressive but did not make this game the herald of great episodic gaming. However by the second episode myself and pretty much everyone I knew who played the game was absolutely hooked to the twists and turns in the story, with a story that moved people (read: me) to tears on several occasions. The genius of Life is Strange is the time travel mechanic, which adds weight to the choices you make and forces the player to live with decisions they could have changed had they chosen to. Where the story goes is incredible and I don't want to spoil it so this is another game I could not recommend highly enough. Tantalisingly close to game of the year as well.

1: Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain (Kojima Productions/Konami, PC/PS4/XB1)

Depicted: Tactical Espionage Action! Also Dog.

Well, it was close, and at times I almost bumped it from the top spot, but ultimately Hideo Kojima's swansong for Konami had the top spot to lose. Much has been discussed, explored and described about the game and it's voyage into the deepest darkest patches of development hell, so I will stick with the fact that bizarrely enough, the narrative is one of the weakest aspects of the game. There is still some great strangeness and Kojima hallmarks but compared to MGS 4 there is definitely steps backwards in the way the story was told. The game feels like content was missing at times, odd for a game as long as The Phantom Pain is, and the DLC for the game literally includes Horse Armour, a gigantic in joke in gaming. All that aside though, MGSV is still a masterpiece, beautifully realised, brilliantly constructed and breathtaking in scope. Outside of the awful fee-to-pay FOB element, everything in the game is no worse than very good even with its flaws, which was ultimately why it ended up on the top spot despite my frustrations with a game that threw away the potential to be the best game of all time. Much of that can be ascribed to the bizarre business decisions made by Konami, and with their current mood swings about the future of the company, MGSV may well be the final swansong for them as well. For a game that has both the very best and very worst of 2015 in video gaming, MGSV encapsulates it all, and for that amongst many other reasons it gets the nod for Game of the Year.

One last thing to do is the Honourable Mentions, thanks for reading the Isometrics awards and feel free to let me know what you agree/disagree with.

Isometrics Awards: Worst Game of 2015

Welcome to the Isometrics Awards for Worst Game of the Year, the Rancid Retrospective of the world of computer and video games. There was a huge influx of games, a lot of which were fantastic, unique or at least competent. With such a morass of games however, the inevitable hand of the greedy, the incompetent and the both ends up leading to quite a lot of crap. That said my longlist for worst games was far shorter than my longlist for game of the year, but my word what we have here plumbs new depths of terrible. So without further ado, we shall begin.

10: Batman Arkham Knight (WB Games/Rocksteady Studios: PS4/XB1/PC)

Pictured: The first mission of Arkham Knight

Let's start controversially shall we, by putting a game on this list I actually quite like. Batman Arkham Knight, the kinda-sorta swansong of the phenomenal Arkham series of bat-em-ups is actually a very good game. It's beautiful, features some interesting mechanics to add to the already excellent core gameplay elements of Arkham City and has enough intruigue and darkness to be worth your while. This would all be true if the game worked reliably. Even as of me writing this six months after launch there are problems with frame rate, the Batmobile (an otherwise fantastic mechanic) falling through the world and other random glitches that really hamper an overall experience, to the point that Rocksteady pulled the game, offering full refunds and only rereleasing it in November with much of the same issues.

If you're playing on a console that didn't suffer these problems quite as badly, feel free to replace this with F1 2015, another game which could have been fantastic but for lazy porting, terrible optimisation, inexcusable glitches and a basically unplayable multiplayer, although with less actual content and innovation over previous iterations to justify this. I gave the slight nod to Arkham Knight on the sheer scale of disaster of the launch, but honestly both could have been Number 10 on this list.

9: Godus (22Cans: PC)

Depicted: Abject Disappointment

So Peter Molyneux abandoned yet another project half finished and missing almost all the content claimed by the developer. Since Black and White he has been doing this and since Fable it has really affected the games, with them getting worse and worse up until this utter nadir of a life-simulation. Godus was a successful Kickstarter campaign in 2012 that had an early access launch in 2013, allegedly owing to problems with funding and complications that occurred during game development.

The rest of the story ends up getting very upsetting, the winner of an alternate reality mobile game ended up getting precisely nothing despite being promised real world revenue from a feature that was never put in the game. Many of the Backer's rewards (Read: The most important thing to give out when doing a Kickstarter campaign) were unfulfilled, leading to demands for refunds from irate gamers. Technically the game is still in early access but given the reduction to a skeleton crew as of February 2015 it's safe to say the game isn't being finished this side of ever.

What's in the game is fairly bad too, including terrible terrain deformation that seems designed to cause repetitive strain injury, a microtransaction model for the Android and iOS versions (The absence of which is touted a little too proudly in the PC beta), lots of annoying features borrowed from mobile gaming and an alarming lack of content. There is a potentially fun game here but the game causes too much pain both figuratively and literally to be worth more than derision.

8:Burgers (storm_sharks, PC)

The game may appear mildly exciting from still screenshots. They lie.

Well isn't this an odd curiosity of a game. Burgers is a Metal Slug clone of sorts with terrible controls, a fairly naff art style, a thoroughly baffling storyline and about an hour of content, and it only got that much due to some of the worst controls in a 2D action game I've seen for a while. It has a button for walking back which only made sense in a 2D shooter when the rest of the appalling controls were taken into account. The shooting is unsatisfying, the animation would have been laughed off of Newgrounds and the difficulty curve wobbles between absurdly easy to inexplicably difficult, while lacking much in the way of variety to justify it. The story, such as it is is so nonsensically absurd and riddled with spelling, logic and sanity errors that it's almost worth the incredibly low price of admission to see though, which is probably the highest praise it will get.

7: Battle Ranch (Playboom, PC)

Depicted: Veg vs Pigbies

Certain games are epoch-setting and blaze a trail that other games can but follow for years to come. Battle Ranch is not one of those games. A clone of Plants Vs Zombies whose derivation is only matched by sheer incompetence, Battle Ranch is the ever-so-original war between pigs and plants. Apparently that's a wacky original concept or something. Somehow despite being released in 2015 it looks like a game made with Visual Basic 6, with a frame rate that aspires for double digits and animations which aspire to actually animate at all. A game that would have been laughed off of Newgrounds.

6:Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 5 (Activision, PS4/XB1)

Thinking Of Your Own Captions is much more fun than Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 5

There was a time, ever so long ago when Tony Hawk and his series of Pro Skater games were some of the most fun party games you could ever play, and the brand was a symbol of a great experience with a mix of brilliant gameplay and the perfect amount of sillyness. Pro Skater 5, released over a decade after Pro Skater 4 and eight years after the last good entry in the series, has regressed in a manner not seen since the execrable Flatout 3 in 2011. The game looks ugly as sin to start, with a graphical style so bad it was very quickly converted to a cel-shaded style in a failed attempt to deflect criticism (known as the “DS Gambit”). There's an alarming variety in pretty much every regard, with repetitive missions, limited tricks and a social element seemingly limited in practise to shoving other people over online. Worse than all of this however is the regression in gameplay, taking a formula that had evolved over a decade and somehow managing to mess up most of the core mechanics, either through streamlining or simple glitches. The game is monstrously unfun outside of watching those hilarious montages of the game glitching out uncontrollably. It's funny to watch but once you realise that is the whole experience, you'll have a bad time.

5:F-1 Chequered Flag (Turn6, PC)

Depicted: Bob Slayer's Dirty Little Secret

Speaking of Flatout 3, their developer Turn6 is back, releasing an F-1 game in 2015 which may go down as one of the flat out worst racing games in existence. Not having controller support may be forgivable in comparison to the more readily apparent sins of the game, such as the complete lack of competence in any technological respect. The graphics would be dated in 1995, something that is not hidden by terrible blurry visual effects. Every track feels the same and appears to be in the same environment and the only distinction between yourself and the other racers is what washed out colour you happen to be. The gameplay really sucks as well. One would assume you could not use the skidding mess that was the Glacier 3 engine in a formula one game, however Turn6 vehemently disagree adding terrible drifting and a destruction based boost mechanic to a discipline of driving intended to be about careful precision. An appalling, bargain basement excuse for a video game.

4:Temper Tantrum (Digital Homicide, PC)

Depicted: Baby Jesus Simulator 2015

So Digital Homicide are back, with their patented blend of bought, borrowed and stolen assets, mixed in with unbelievably pathetic gameplay. The sheer volume of crap they effused onto steam was so excessive I could have filled the top ten list with DH (and affiliated shell companies) games and had done with it. I was torn between this and the completely dysfunctional Galactic Hitman, and Temper Tantrum only won because of the sheer offence of it. It's a painful game to witness, partly because of the gaudiest textures ever sold via Unity, but also because of a bizarre framerate, unresponsive controls and a camera that seems obsessed with spinning. The one moment of respite was on my first attempt playing the game where I phased through a wall and ended up standing atop a swimming pool. When glitching your way out of playing a game is the best thing about it, you know you've reached a particularly rough level of bad.

3:Bloodbath Kavkaz (Dagestan Technology, PC)

Depicted: Race Relations. Also Depicted: A Repulsive Video Game

From mere technological failures to outright offensively awful messes, we have the Russian mockbuster take on Hotline Miami, Bloodbath Kavkaz. The steam page promises “all the horrors of russian [sic] modern culture” and it delivers in spades, providing a nonsensical experience seemingly made in MS Paint by a fourteen year old white supremacist. It is racism, terrible art and memes, and apparently there is no room for good gameplay, graphics that don't seriously harm people with photosensitive epilepsy and oddly enough for a Hotline Miami clone, a lack of difficulty for the most part. Beyond pathetic.

2:Gynophobia (Andrii Vintsevych, PC)

Depicted: An attempt to take a picture of the most repulsive part of the game, where the main character's dad is a massive homophobe.

Gynophobia literally denotes a fear of women, and the game takes this mildly intruiging concept with all the subtlty of a spider-shaped brick with breasts. The first issue is that the main conceit of the game is mostly a con, since two fifths of the game take place within another terribly generic zombie first person shooter, where you are wowed by awful controls, location damage limited to headshots, a grand total of three weapons (and I'm magnanimously including the knife in that as well), ugly store-bought enemies with AI completely limited to chasing the player and a level objective which consists of car maintenance. Once the actual misogynist parts of the game begin and you're shooting women-shaped store-bought zombies in the head, needless to say the game gets a little bit unhinged. The game is only an hour long as well, even taking into account the often unfair level design and lack of checkpoints, but by the end you'll have been so beaten over the head by this half-assed misogynist bollocks that killing a scorpion sorceress and the bizarre Oedipal aspects of the game are no longer even slightly amusing. A soul-destroying mess.

1:Hatred (Destructive Creations, PC/PS4)

Depicted: Deep Sociological Satire.

I didn't want this to be the winner in all honesty. I suspected there was a good chance this jaunt through the life of a spree killer was going to win the worst game award, but I wanted to give it the benefit of the doubt. After all, brilliant games sometimes cover insanely dark themes, and providing there is a level of balance, enjoyment or some form of enlightenment a game can be entertaining. Hatred manages to get everything wrong that games Hatred is so desperate to emulate got right, games like Manhunt and especially Postal 2. Hatred is not the worst game of the year because of its appalling graphics, inexcusable framerate, iffy controls, generic mission objectives, its litany of bugs or its short lifespan. Not at all, the game is the worst game of this year, and indeed the worst of all time because of how much of a complete and utter waste it is. It wasted the Unreal Engine 4, providing a game that looks bad by late PS2 standards and has a framerate that aspires to reach double digits on a good day when nothing's on screen. It wasted a graphical style that sought to emulate dark age comic books but is a generic sludge of black and white nonsense that forces the player to rely on the “Killer's Sense” mapped to the right analogue stick to actually find enemies. Most importantly, it wasted what could have been a fascinating conceit, of a twisted disturbed spree killer far too psychotic and murderous to be an antihero, who kills for some purpose never said and possibly never known. It is a conceit succeeded in the disturbing Manhunt, the shamefully hilarious Postal 2 and even the controversial Super Columbine Massacre RPG, a free game made in 2005 about a real mass shooting. Hatred inspires complete apathy, a complete lack of care, effort or interest in the game they are making and trying to sell, trying to pass this lack of effort and talent as some slight against the politically correct world. It makes me furious that a game like this hoodwinked masses of people on Greenlight, Gabe Newell who stepped in to allow the game to be published after an initial ban, and myself into thinking this was a game with merit being a victim of censorship. Of the top three games, at least Bloodbath Kavkaz attempted and failed at being as satirical as Hotline Miami, and at least Gynophobia had attempted and failed to cover its subject matter. Hatred simply did not bother, and because of this complete antithesis of fun, enjoyment and meaning, Hatred gets the Isometrics Award for Worst Game of 2015.

Thank you very much for reading, and have a lovely 2016. Much better games and the honourable mentions are incoming.

Isometrics Awards 2015: A Panoply of Light, Fantasy and Interactivity

Welcome one and all to the Isometrics Awards, the sidelong sneer at the best and worst of the literary world of computer and video games. The year has shot by so quickly hasn't it? I remember last year when I promised a regular schedule with lots of posts and gave my best games of 2014, and now I aim to promise it again, with a bit of a look back at the year as well as explaining the criteria I personally use to judge the best and worst games of the year of our game Two Thousand and Fifteen.

2015: A Panoply of Light, Fantasy and Interactivity

Two Thousand and Fifteen will probably go down as one of the best years for gaming of all time, in pretty much every regard that matters. From cultural shifts, to fantastic triple A titles, to complete out of nowhere smashes and some of the most wonderful explorations of a fantastically deep medium, it felt like the ethos of Literary Gaming was alive and well, and everything that is valued in an art form going through a veritable renaissance is visible here. My best of list has changed so extremely that my prospective list basically looks nothing like the list I will have settled on by the time the best of list comes out.

It was a year full of a ridiculous amount of games being made available, with Steam in particular swelling and buckling under the weight of releases at times. That is only a problem for a player who needs to play every major release though, and just means you are spoiled for choice for great games this year. It also means quite wonderfully that nearly everyone's GOTY list will be completely and utterly different.

The seemed to show a medium unafraid of itself and its fractured audience, which came to a head last year in tragic and ugly fashion. While elements of that still existed as they unfortunately always will, the general feeling about video games was far more focused on the creative, the positive and when critical, things that can be done to make games more for everyone (This is something we will definitely do an Isometrics on). The power balance between consumer and publisher seemed to shift in a far more positive way, albeit reluctantly, and following some of the most anti-consumer decisions and actions taken thus yet in the history of video games.

Pictured: Konami's Relationship with Hideo Kojima

In terms of major events outside of game launches, there were a few that spring to mind. The introduction of Steam Refunds was a great olive branch, finally holding developers to account for making PC ports that did not do the original game justice, and I have already seen cases of games where an appalling launch was rectified soon afterwards (and indeed some examples of that not happening where that is the direct reason they made my worst of list). There was the rather embarrassing fall of Atari into somewhat poor low-budget takes on some of their best franchises, as well as the half-hilarious, half-harrowing fall of (Fuc)Konami as a serious developer, the fallout of which still seems to be landing after all this time.

We also had the true power of crowd funding being released this year, though not always for the best. Along with the releases of some fantastic games we saw successful pitches from top tier talent for example for a new Banjo-Kazooie (Yooka-Laylee), a new Castlevania Symphony of the Night (Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night), Shenmue 3, Psychonauts 2 and I'm certain many others, along with other games from slightly smaller studios really stepping up, like the heart-stopping IndieGoGo for Indivisible. Along with this we did get some horror stories, like the cancelled Yogsadventures, some of the issues with the otherwise excellent Double Fine game Broken Age and the neverending launch window for Mighty No 9, a game that seems to go from problem to problem.

 

Add to this the huge issues some major releases had, from the onslaught of microtransactional elements in full price releases, the trend of paid betas that triple A games seem to be doing a lot of, and the less said of that utterly bollocks “Augment Your Preorder” stuff for Deus Ex: Mankind Divided that was mercifully scrapped. There did seem to be some pushback though that actually did some good.

Kickstarter's influence led to an influx of amazing games.

For me personally it was a banner year, where I finally felt far more confident about my writing and recording, was in a job I like with the perfect blend of stability and an end date, so I had less anxiety about the madness swirling around me, and actually had enough money to buy major releases at or soon after launch. There's a lot of oddities, and indeed a lot of games I still need to catch up on, but I feel more in the loop than I ever have, and may this continue into 2016.

On the whole 2015 was far more good than bad, which does give me a bit of unease as how long this can roll on for. With the disparity between big budget games and the rest getting to ludicrous heights, it paints an uncertain future for this truly diversely brilliant time in gaming.

2016 looks like it'll be pretty good so far though.

The Isometrics Awards

Once again, it is time for the Isometrics Awards, which will take the form of The Isometrics Worst Game of 2015, and The Isometrics Game of the Year 2015. They'll be top ten lists, with some room for a shortlist of course, and if I have time I'll try and actually have a list of awards to go with it.

I use slightly odd criteria because I feel it's slightly fairer, so I'll try and explain it a little bit more succinctly this year.

For a game to qualify for the Isometrics Awards it must:

• Have been released to stores in (Including online retailers, Steam and Bricks and Mortar shops) in Europe between 1^st December 2014 and 31^st December 2015. I give the extra month because I generally finalise my list in the middle of December so games released in December often get left out, which is a shame. Note: A game can only qualify for one year, so if I mentioned it last year it can't qualify this.
• Be a completed game. Early Access, beta releases and the like do not qualify until they are done. Even if it's near complete or feature complete, it needs to “go gold” or it's out.
• Be a full game. This is a grey area, but basically it means an expansion to a game that relies on the original does not qualify. Standalone expansions do however, if they are good enough to merit it.
• Be a new game. No ports of very old games or remakes without substantial updates. Generally The Binding of Isaac Rebirth is the standard for what qualifies, so a new engine and new content. Exception: a port from a console to Steam can still qualify if it is within 12 months, just for timed exclusives or games which have a release cycle between systems.
• Generally mobile and free to play games do not qualify, although there is no specific rule against them.
  In terms of judging criteria, ultimately it comes down to some subjective aspects, however I will do my best explain my justification. General rules of thumb is that a game that is bad that many people played is worse than a bad game no-one played, and that an actively hostile bad game is worse than a merely incompetently made game. The reverse is also true, a game that actively demonstrates imagination, daring and a literary sensibility will win out over a game that merely demonstrates technical competence, and also a great game for most is better than a game that is as good for less people.

Hope this all makes sense, it will in practise, and expect another update with the Isometrics Worst Games of 2015!

Isometrics: With Armikrog, Can You Separate a Game From its Creator?

Welcome to Isometrics, the clinically conflicted gander at the literary world of computer and video games. We are but a few days away from the release of Armikrog, the sequel in spirit to cult hit The Neverhood, a fascinating odyssey in plasticine from the creator of Earthworm Jim, and yet rather than unbridled joy, I'm completely conflicted with whether I should buy a game I know I will enjoy.

“Why?!” The dearest reader of this may well scream. “If you know you will enjoy it, why not buy it and support a game you love?”

The problem of course is the author is Doug TenNepal, creator of The Neverhood and Earthworm Jim, creating Armikrog after a very successful Kickstarter from pretty much everyone other than myself who played The Neverhood back in the day. See, I love Doug TenNepal the artist. My adoration for The Neverhood basically created my eternal love for FMV games, claymation, indie games, the surreal and weird obscure games few people seem to have heard of (although enough to crowd fund a sequel evidently).

For the uninitiated, The Neverhood was a 1996 point and click adventure in the clay eponymous world, where you play as Klayman and have to find the crown of the king Hoborg. This involved exploring the world of the Neverhood, solving silly yet creative puzzles, endlessly backtracking and collecting history disks, one of which was stored in the longest corridor ever, which told the history of the Neverhood universe in clay etchings and the slowest walk cycles ever. It's hard to tell sometimes whether some of the dafter design decisions were deliberate or simply the case of wanting to keep every frame of animation made over an agonising year-long production. It is a game that is hard not to see the love that went into it, and that adds a charm that forgives some of its more fundamental flaws. The game was packed in on an OEM bundle but even so it did not sell well, possibly being a bit too out there even for the unbridled creativity that was the mid 1990s gaming landscape.

Two years later, its sequel, Skullmonkeys, followed pretty much the same formula. Eschewing the point and click shenanigans for a full on side scrolling platformer, the game was equal parts barmy and beautiful, full of a lot of surreal, hilarious and innately charming moments. These hilarious moments, like the beans scene and the awesome Bonus Room song (basically the best reason to kill yourself on that one level to collect every Swirly Q) were of course tempered by some iffy game mechanics, and an absurdly high difficulty curve artificially exacerbated by the fact there were only passwords and no save system for a PS1 game in 1998. General consensus is that the Neverhood is a better game, and I'm not going to argue, however I suspect that some individual scenes in Skullmonkeys are so funny they do bring the whole game up, and make you want to play more to see the next bit of slapstick. I did love it.

So with that, and the obvious and inexplicably gigantic success of Earthworm Jim (seriously, only in 1995 could that game get a TV show), TenNapel naturally released a terrible fighting game and disappeared from video games to make comic books and flash cartoons based on Ape Escape (this actually happened). But hey, he returned with a massively successful Kickstarter in 2013, and Armikrog is set to be released at the start of August.

So why am I so hesitant, I hear you cry? Well, TenNapel has said some very interesting things in the interim period, things that certainly colour the opinion of a creator. Things of a “I'm not very fond of gay people” fashion. Now, several commentators have brought in his religious beliefs, being a Breibart-esque republican Christian, and while there is a connection between his opinions and those of the religious right, it seems somewhat hypocritical to tar all religious folk with the same brush as the people he is tarring. There is a fascinating article on the website Mostly Retro, which asks the question “But if you’re not a homophobic, sexist bigot and you still want to back Doug TenNapel, I have one question... [w]hat the fuck is wrong with you?”

James Eldred's article, which is a really good read posits that final support of a project made by someone with very questionable beliefs is a tacit approval of said beliefs. How far does that go however? Pencil Test Studios, the publisher and developer of Armikrog is more than just Doug himself, surely you can support the studio and not TenNapel personally? Perhaps technically, but that's not really the point. He's writer, creator and designer of the game, his name is tied directly to it and it is his creative vision. Even if that £20 (£25 for the deluxe edition) you pay for the game does not in fact go straight into his bank account to buy more bigotry, it does serve to define him as a creative asset, and every success justifies the use of his name and his talent.

Which leads to the ultimate question, how connected is an artist's beliefs and their art? The safe answer is that it clearly depends, between different artists, different works even. In some cases even different editions of the same work will receive edits to fit in with an artist's new beliefs, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein being a particular damaging example compared to the original work. We can think of many artists who made a “religious” album of course, but these err towards very general displays of worship, rather than particularly contentious issues of a faith. In gaming it is even more difficult to see, partly because of the long lead times and rather large teams working on gaming ensuring the most controversial aspects of a belief system are removed before release. TenNepal has never released a game which explicitly is transphobic or misogynist or homophobic, and it seems astonishingly unlikely that he would compromise or manipulate a concept to fit something so alienating in.

So far, we may not be able to separate a creator entirely from his game (although of course New Theorists will argue that point with me), is it possible that people can buy a game and support the studio, the publisher and the creative part of an author without endorsing these beliefs. I disagree with Mr Eldred on that aspect. You can enjoy John Lennon's music and not endorse the fact he beat his wife, an act he apologised and showed deep regret for before his death. You can enjoy Muse without buying into Matt Bellamy's conspiracy theories. You can even enjoy the game Shadow Complex, despite it being based loosely on a book written by a homophobe hiding behind his Mormon beliefs to justify his bigotry. In the end it is art, and whatever art you choose to enjoy is your business.

Just be aware that your favourite games may be made by your least favourite artists...

Isometrics: What Is Literary Gaming Anyway?

After trying to get around to it for so long, It is time to actually explain what on earth it means to be “literary” about gaming...

Note: This Originally appeared on the website Geek Pride, and I will bring back a selection of my older articles and set up some form of archive. Most of my old articles are very much based on issues current at the time of writing, but this is really my statement of principles on what I feel Literary Gaming is. I will try and get a new article done by the weekend, this is just a stopgap because work has gotten busy the last few days. In the meantime, hope you enjoy!

Welcome to Isometrics, a magnanimous meta-commentary on the synapse-sparking literary world of computer and video games. I have been doing these Isometrics blogs for a while now, and the response has been really rather nice. I've had a little feedback, suggestions and probably a better proof-reading team than most politician, and most importantly to me got people to think about these issues and ideas in gaming that they hadn't before, and for all that I couldn't be more thankful.

Clearly bogus and overwrought pandering aside, there is a point to this, because I kind of have some unfinished business. You see, while I spent the last few weeks talking about Twitterfalls and Grand Theft Auto and games so bad they're brilliant while talking about the aliterative appeal of literary gaming, I've not actually explained what on earth I mean by that phrase.

“Literary Gaming”? Isn't that a contradiction in terms? You can't game with a book, after all. Or can you? I think it's time to settle once and for all what this blog is about – with some video game examples too!

I think the problem is that “Literature” outside of academic circles has a very concrete definition. It has to do with books, specifically, high culture high quality ones. For that matter, the subculture of gaming has a very ludocentric definition; it is the playing of games that matters and anything outside of that is considered ancillary. So by these definitions, “literary gaming” makes absolutely no sense, even less so then gaming literature.

It is at this point I end up going into dissertation mode and lose a lot of readers.

First of all, in the true literary critic spirit of being massively pedantic about everything, including definitions, the definition of literature is “written works”. This does not actually exclude video games, or indeed most art. I will spare you my long digressions into etymology (this time!), but suffice to say a written work can include a theatrical production, a film, a comic or even a video game.

Part of the reason for this is that all these works have written scripts of some kind, something that is doubled for a video game (a narrative script and the game code, itself a form of written script), but that's not entirely the reason. Writing is composition, it is an act of creation, of using a language for a particular purpose. There is nothing to say that this language may necessarily be a printed script, it may well be evocative drawings, vocal evocations, body language, framing, tone, timbre, musical composition, even a reliance on the audience filling in the blanks.

Gaming, despite the vernacular, isn't necessarily about playing a simple game, about interacting with a set of rules to reach a determined outcome. Gaming is about interaction, about experiencing a world, a universe, a story in a way personal (either in subtle or significant ways) to the individual player/reader. It can be about both rules and experience, and it can be about neither, such is the nature of video games. They are in theory all code but this code can be used to create very different effects, like a blank canvas on which anything from tax documents to works of abstract majestic art can be created.

The act of gaming, particularly in a game with a story is to fill in deliberately left blanks, like a version of mad-libs with a physics engine. Consider a game like Mass Effect for example, a great science fiction epic tale (one I've mentioned two weeks in a row!), that makes perfectly clear that you are interacting in the narrative, and that your actions within the game's universe have consequences, some more far reaching than even the game designers realised at first. These things are true of most games, to greater or lesser effect. Pong, for example allows your actions to affect the narrative of getting the score to 21 with the consequence being the end of the game.

And therein lies the way in which the two can coexist. If literature is just writing and gaming is just interaction, than both can easily coexist, given that by this level of abstraction the act of reading is gaming. This obviously is useless to us though, so a different tactic is needed. One that will tragically remove Pong from our venerable list of literary games.

For centuries Literature has concerned itself with the fundamental question of what it is, which has in itself created an incredibly vibrant array of different works, each addressing that question with different frameworks, levels of intensity and outcomes. This tradition has spread to video games, with a lot of games focused self-reflexively on the history of the medium, but also on evolution and progression. One of my favourite games last year was a little indie title called Evoland, which told the technical history of the RPG through the medium of an RPG, each treasure chest opened being a new feature that radically altered and added to the game's world. And of course on top of that you have games like the sensational Papers, Please, a game which demonstrates more powerfully than most the ways in which a game can craft a very unique literary experience. Many great works of fiction have been about dystopian areas and corruption, but Papers, Please took you through the experience of fear, and poverty and destitution and the inevitable corruption that follows is a choice of the player that is never actually made explicit. I won't talk any more about either of these games because I feel there is definitely enough to write full articles.

To point out, a game does not necessarily have to be literary to be of high or worthy quality in order to be good or enjoyable. Literary gaming as an idea, or a descriptor (for lack of a better word), isn't necessarily a barometer of quality. Many terrible books are still literature, and many terrible works are still art. What sets them apart is that literary games can be explored in frameworks similar to ones used in literature, and given the broad schools of thought within the literary world, far more games are included than excluded, and I focus on games with interesting points, not just games of high quality.

To sum up, literary gaming as a concept is an exploration of games as a unique medium for telling stories and presenting experiences, through combinations of narrative, interaction and art. It is a reaction to the increasing criticism among mechanics focused game players that games have to be games first, art second and literature never. It is a celebration of games that explore that particularly strange relationship that the reader and the writer have, unique to any other artistic medium in history. It is a particular focus and school of thought that does justice to an art form, a literary form that can provide experiences, tell stories and evoke theme, ideology and metaphor in a way never seen before.

It is a celebration of video games, video gaming and the great authorial figures behind it.

What is your take? Was my defence spirited or ludicrous? Are games literary? Was this entirely necessary and could I have talked about anything else this week? Drop me a line in the comments before, on the facebook group or on twitter, @HuggyDave. Using the hashtag #isometrics will do nothing, but make a kitten smile. See you next month for a very special Isometrics! Thanks for reading!

Isometrics: Does Violence Really Beget Violence? A Response to Michaël Samyn

DISCLAIMER: This is very long, and really can be summed up with "This article is wrong", but I had a lot to say about this topic. This isn't the Isometrics article for the week, that will come on Friday and be significantly more optimistic in tone. In the meantime, enjoy me spending 3500 words arguing about a 600 word thinkpiece!

Hello, welcome to Isometrics, the oddly confrontational gaze at the literary world of computer and video games. My general philosophy of doing long form writing is that it is primarily about informing, explaining, introducing and expressing a love for the wider world of video games, hoping to try and make the reader think about the games they play. That way players will appreciate them more. I end up slipping into current affairs too, but usually as the framework for a literary idea, and I don't ordinarily respond to other writers. However, what Michaël Samyn, co-founder of independent games companyTale of Tales brings up very much merits serious discussion, and I feel a full response would not only stop a lot of the misconceptions of more controversial aspects of his article, but also very much keep in line with Isometrics' aims to focus on gaming as an art and literary form at the same level as older more established ones.

To offer the slightest scrap of context, Tale of Tales was a company that specialised in very unique games, generally short mood pieces where the key was peace, exploration and the experience and subtleties of the game being their own reward. Their 2009 game The Path was arguably the best example of this working well. There is a stated goal, follow the path, and if you do you will complete the game in about three minutes. However straying away from the path leads to a very interesting, disorienting, dark and melancholic piece. They also had moving experiences like The Graveyard, a very short game about an elderly woman walking through a graveyard to a bench.

That's the entire game.

The difference between the demo and the full version was whether the lady died or not, which sums up in a nutshell what Tale of Tales were trying to achieve. They wanted to create games that could not be summed up by two people the same way and were experienced and thought of differently depending on how willing a player was to operate and interact with the game not just via player input but inner thought. They were thought provoking, interesting as much in concept as in execution, unique for their time (while art games obviously existed before Tale of Tales, they did not quite attempt the same things) and surprisingly influential on the latest wave of literary game developers, such as The Astronauts (The Vanishing of Ethan Carter), The Fulbright Company (Gone Home) and thechineseroom (Dear Esther, Amnesia: A Machine For Pigs).

What they were not was successful.

While their aspirations were laudable, they were ultimately missed by the wider gaming community. Their latest effort, the “Gamer-friendly” Sunset, sold 4000 copies, in part because the advertising was so terrible for it I did not hear about it until the day I decided to start this article. In the end though, while financial success is kind of needed to pay those bills that Kickstarter cannot fill, a game should not be judged on sales, and at some point I will hope to cover it.

In the meantime, Tale of Tales closed down and Samyn started a Patreon to create a blog about video games, which is certainly interesting from a designer's perspective, and the first major article to come out of this endeavour is entitled “Violence Begets Violence”. I apologise that this is generally regarded as bad form in academia, but the best way to cover this and not miss any points is to go paragraph by paragraph, so please click the link and read along will you?

The first paragraph is just setting his intentions to look at the “gigantic elephant in the tiny games room.” Now I am already in two minds about this. What he is referring to of course is the gigantic, medium altering, centre of academic gaming thought which is the issue of violence and gaming. He will get into more specific points later but the notion of this as a colossal entity dwarfing the gaming industry is a fitting metaphor in the sense that violence is an issue bigger than pretty much anything in life itself since it concerns the destruction of life, however we will see going forward that this is somewhat unintentional.

“A Peaceful Oasis” begins the first part, and covers the concept of Tale of Tales' first game, The Endless Forest. TEF was a MMO game where you played as a deer with a human face and explored a forest while interacting non-verbally with other players, identified via pictogram. At one's most generous, it could be described as a deconstruction of the goal-orientated, text heavy, chat heavy complicated MMORPGs which would begin to peak in 2005 with the first few expansion packs of World of Warcraft. As Samya recalls “[t]o avoid behavior (sic) that wouldn’t fit our fantasy we decided not to include combat, competition or even chat. As a result The Endless Forest offers a relaxing experience of friendly contact between complete strangers.” The intent was for it to be a living virtual piece of performance art but there was too much stripped out to make that particularly special.

It continues to claim that the community of the game is a “haven for all.” The issue with this halcyon vision of course is there has been situations where neither the game nor the actions of Samya and Auriea Harvey lived up to the peaceful ambitions. When members of the SomethingAwful forums started playing the game (and bleating forever), this led to one of the most bizarre conflicts between an army of deer who wouldn't shut up and the rulers of this virtual dominion, who destroyed everything and managed to end the Endless Forest, at least temporarily. This entirely baffling scenario does undermine the claim that TEF did not contain “violent interactions” and the atmosphere of friendliness did involve calling other players “penis fawns” and wishing their deer had machine guns so they could kill said phallic baby deer.

There is a point to this reminiscence about a ten year old MMO about nothing, and problems begin to emerge in their argumentation in what is appropriately enough called “A rough environment”. They explain TEF as a reactionary game against the bullying and harassment redolent in gaming communities, which is interesting given that the TEF community and Samya themselves are guilty of this. This then leads to first an implication of the connection between violent games and violent actions which lead to direct accusations of said connection. I will try to avoid belabouring the point about hypocrisy, and instead discuss the question of whether all trolls play Hatred and Call of Duty and all manner of MurderDeathKill-em-ups (except of course MDK 1 and 2. The swines!) that is clearly the thrust of their argument. One would suggest the burden of evidence is on the writer to prove that gaming trolls and bullies all even play those kinds of games before we even get to the point of discussing cultivation theory!

There is also, and admittedly this will sound like nitpicking but is a valid point, not a terribly clear definition of what violence they object to and where they draw the line. Their objection is stated as “antagonistic, aggressively competitive glorifications of violence and gore” which is mildly more helpful, however by this logic Super Meat Boy counts. Think about it, it's aggressively competitive, if you're trying to beat a friend's time it's antagonistic and it glorifies violence and gore by making it really cute! Often you can get away without important distinctions because the nature of the discussion makes it obvious. As much as I disagreed with the Target Australia view of Grand Theft Auto V, they at least made it clear the issues they had with the game, and why they felt it had to be removed from store shelves.

Now we have had some discussions, minor implications and explorations of alternative ways to make games, regardless of the result of said experiments. However paragraph five is basically where any cogent arguments are lost entirely. “We don’t need theories about the correlation between violent games and violent behavior.” Samya cries defiantly from within a homemade sand bunker.

Um, not to nitpick, but the claim you just made is in fact a theory.

Lexical nitpicking aside, there are several theories that have been applied to violent video games. The initial appeal of cultivation theory (the idea that behaviours learned from consistent and lengthy exposure to depictions of said behaviours mean children will internalise them, generally used to explore the issue of Power Rangers and it's “violence is always the answer” attitude early on) was that it provided a way to look at gaming as it related to its influences. These days there are more refined theories based around active viewing and catharsis which suggest that violent gaming has no or a positive reaction on player's behaviour. (http://gamepolitics.com/2014/06/27/research-bad-behavior-games-can-lead-pro-social-behavior-real-life#.VZ8IxvmZJYo) (http://gamepolitics.com/2015/04/16/university-missouri-researchers-find-violent-video-games-do-not-cause-aggression-adults-a) (http://gamepolitics.com/2014/11/05/research-no-correlation-between-violent-media-consumption-and-societal-violence). While there isn't a complete consensus yet to acquit violent media (in part because no research body seems to have found a consensus for doing such a test), to dismiss all of that so bullishly is the pseudoacademic equivalent of sticking your fingers in your ears and screaming that you can't hear anything. Except more arrogant.

The paragraph of course doubles down on this and argues that not only is the issue of whether violent games influence or violent people flock to violent games is irrelevant, but that “[a]nyone who has ever been attacked by a gamer lynch party knows that a certain number of people who play antagonistic and violent games are aggressive, intolerant, reactionary, misogynist, and so on.” I have many problems with this, but what tops the bill must be that classic weaselly appeal to common knowledge to support a rhetoric that in practice means nothing. It's very much true that a “certain number” of people who play violent games are all those nasty things, but at the same time, a “certain number” of said aggressive, intolerant reactionary misogynist hamburger eating monsters do pretty much anything on earth, because a “certain number” is a completely meaningless term. They could be breathing, listening to indie folk, working in an office, playing games where they play as creepy deer then threaten to shoot people who moo. It's the worst, most dangerous kind of rhetoric, because it presents something completely normal as a shocking, horrible thing caused by one specific thing. It's the literary equivalent of those “CONTAINS VITAMINS AND CALCIUM” stickers you see on health bars.

Lynch mobs suck, especially on the internet, since the fear is of how far it will infect and corrode the rest of your life. The people who've been forced to travel with full security teams to engagements because of bomb, gas and other threats on their lives are utterly utterly abominable. It is also fair to say they do not represent all, or even a large amount of video game players. Even so, perhaps this is just a call to avoid overt glorification. Some games like the mildly reprehensible Hatred toe the line between satirically violent and meaning everything they say, and the outcry, while ultimately going too far in getting the game banned, did open a debate about the exact concern people have with violence in gaming and when it moves beyond red pixels animating over a polygonal model that looks like a person and into behaviour that is more concerning. There is a debate to be had and maybe it is ironically enough a passionate plea for diversity in game design that errs too aggressively.

I thought this right up until I read the next paragraph.

“Hypocritical industry” begins by accusing the game industry of creating the horrible violence obsessed players for profit. In pretty much those words:

“The game industry actively breeds a group of belligerent hooligans for profit.”

There is so much to unpackage in that single sentence that it is to a degree absurd. First of all, this goes beyond cultivation theory, this accuses mainstream Triple A developers of brainwashing and creating actively hostile, negative groups of gamers to make money. There are plenty of horrible things the industry has done, including the removal of a sexual relationship for Nilin in Dontnod's fascinating flop Remember Me because it would allegedly scare male gamers to play a sexually active woman. There was also the removal of Elizabeth from Bioshock Infinite boxes because the manly man's cover apparently focus tested better. Also, lest we forget the utterly appalling things said by the project manager of the 2013 remake of Tomb Raider, including that Lara would be nearly raped and that the game is designed to make the player want to coddle and protect her. At the same time however, it is one thing to accuse the game of pandering to a particular audience and quite another to say they breed a particularly hostile one. He goes on to say that it creates a vicious cycle of only violent games selling and being made, a claim that is only credible if you take a very loose definition of violence in games. Would Mario Kart 8 for example, a cutesely fun Kart Racer where you can throw turtle shells at mushrooms be violent for example? Or Hearthstone, an incredibly popular and successful (albeit free to play) game? What about games where the intent is to avoid violence like Thief? Even if we focus on multiplayer games where would the Squid/Kid-based Ink-em-up Splatoon fit? How about Elite Dangerous, a game where you can choose to be completely pacifist? The point is that this is a gigantic claim that hasn't been quantified so we don't even know if it is true.

This isn't helped by the next paragraph which accuses the game industry of hypocrisy if game devs “produce and support entertainment where the killing or wounding of others is central to the amusement.” In a situation like this, where would a game which uses violent action to completely deconstruct the narrative of violent war games fit in this? Because some games do indeed use graphic violence to make particular points such as Spec Ops: The Line, one of the greatest examples of storytelling in video games. Speaking of great literary adaptations, I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream was an intensely gory, horrid, disturbing game, but it used every element of its nightmarish atmosphere and events to make particularly interesting points about the human condition, particularly the human condition in crisis. I would not necessarily describe them as “entertainment where the killing or wounding of others is central to the amusement (emphasis mine).” per se, however they are absolutely vital to the narrative, themes and metaphors being expressed. To remove the violence in those games would remove the entire central point of those games. And yet, despite that, these games read as distinctly pacifist, or at least discretionary in terms of violent content. They are art pieces that use violence as a vital element of their subject matter and to argue these games are creating a culture of culturally-shut out violent sociopaths is completely missing the point and advocating for an incredibly dangerous precedent of censorship: one I would not expect from the developer of The Path.

Samyn does at least note that this probably is not meant to be malicious, despite the particularly hostile wording of the initial claim, however, comparing violent media to weaponry is such false equivalence it is difficult to come up with an appropriate comparison to make. It is like comparing reading a cookbook to eating lunch, in that it is at best tangentially related to any given violent act. Violent media does depict violence, that is a kind of truism, but there are so many steps that go in between a particularly abstract depiction of a violent act and committing a violent act oneself. Samyn follows the standard Thompsonian/Whitehousian argument that a violent game is worse than a violent film because you actually take part in the violence yourself, but at the same time I'd argue the opposite, because the violence would enacts in video games requires inputs far removed from video games.

The final part “We can do better” is difficult to comment on without getting very angry at its patronising, reductionist assumptions about video gamers. However, it is hard to argue about introducing more gamers to games that showcase a beauty in life, a beauty of interaction, of the world, of relationships, of peace. That is very true, and the best start to this sort of dialogue is not to make the assumption your audience is sociopathic. The second step is to make good games with these regards in mind.

The problem with a lot of Tale of Tales games was that they were intentionally niche in design, which mean they were often inpenetrable and difficult to play conventionally on purpose. This includes Sunset, their self proclaimed “gamer friendly” game, which wasn't the easiest thing. I can think of many great games that are both fun to play and present interesting messages about peace, tolerance, respect and other positive themes. Nintendo seems to be very good about creating these sorts of games with interesting ideas, although generally they don't aim for particularly deep meaningful things. There is also the incredibly gorgeous Toren, although that does have sword play at times. We are in the midst of a Kickstarter-powered adventure game boom, Minecraft is still one of the most successful games of all time and that provides so many messages about the importance of observation, the beauty of simplicity and punching trees to collect wood. A bit more of an obscure example, Soleil teaches tolerance and respect, through a deconstruction of the hero's journey.

There are certain loaded terms that cannot be used in the gaming community without ridicule, and one of them is “Murder Simulator.” It is a phrase that has a lot of baggage, needless to say, and I don't recall being used unironically for almost a decade by this point. For younger gamers and those without memories that long, Murder Simulator was a catchphrase used by disbarred Florida lawyer, anti-games advocate and one time GamerGate supporter Jack Thompson, basically implying that games actively teach people to kill. It was hilarious, partly because it was an idea that only made sense if you didn't think about it at all, partly because Jack Thompson was such a cartoon villain of gaming culture but mostly because anyone who has played a “simulator” game knows that they generally aren't programmed well enough to be realistic. We also have a problem once again with criteria, which was Thompson's issue as well. Thompson's targets were typically limited to whichever Rockstar game was out that particular month however Samyn doesn't seem to be very clear with which games are objectionable.

The problem with a lot of this article is that it reads like sour grapes. It is arguably better documented that Sunset was a failure than the game was even advertised, and due to the strong pacifist tones of many of Tale of Tales' games, it is easy to scapegoat their failure as a hunger for violent media brought upon by those eeeeevil major developers and their money and enjoyable games. I do believe it is completely petty and untoward to accuse game developers of criminal negligence vis á vis wrongful death by choosing to make violent media.

It is one thing to find a game like Hatred problematic due to its somewhat questionable depiction of an anti-heroic spree killer, or GTA V's torture scene to be unnecessary in context despite the establishment of your protagonist as a sadistic psychopath. An open debate showcases that there are many ways to create games and how it can progress in all sorts of directions to be even more fun and explore ever deeper themes, and how games can tackle difficult subjects in tactful emotive ways.

It is quite sad reading this, seeing someone with interesting though not perfect ideas be so bitter and blinded by purpose, unaware that the issues surrounding gaming's culture are not merely found within but outside of the games we play. Samyn is absolutely right in that we can be better, and honestly reading this made me feel like I do need to keep writing Isometrics, to showcase a gaming world where this is indeed the case, albeit not always to major critical or commercial success.

I just hope Mr Samyn also opts to channel this apprehension positively as well.

Isometrics: Is There Such a Thing as a Gaming Auteur?

Auteurs: the great powerful entities of the cinematic world, and a theory about how the authorship of a work goes beyond the written word. But does this idea of great artists uniting a team under a singular vision gel with the technical nature of video games? David Rose investigates...

Welcome to Isometrics, the long-dormant look at the literary world of computer and video games. Currently we're in a fairly interesting world of gaming, with lots of interesting news, but right now I want to talk about the Auteur theory. So while there's plenty to talk about with regards to commercial ethics, Steam Refunds, major releases being so buggy on launch they were recalled from entire platforms and the next wave of great Kickstarter games, for now we are going to discuss something that closely approximates literary criticism.

The Auteur Theory, commonly attributed to François Truffaut and the writers of the French periodical Cahiers du Cinéma (Literally translating to “Notebooks on Cinema”), primarily concerns itself with the notion of creation or authorship in a film. Unlike a work of fiction or even a scripted theatrical piece, where there is a clear author and often therefore a person (or small group of people) to ascribe particular stylistic, narrative, metaphorical and other literary quirks to, a film is usually a massive undertaking with a team of dozens, sometimes hundreds working to bring a project to fruition. In that sheer sea of humanity, who is the author? And given the multiple forms the language of cinema takes (photography, performance, framing along with the narrative content of the script), what does it mean to be the creator? This is simplifying, but the Auteur in cinema is the driving creative force, which in many cases is a role the director shoulders. A good director, so it is argued by proponents, unifies the creative process, and ultimately creates a film which has the particular fingerprint of that director.

Segue into the world of film aside, what does this have to do with video games that have evolved from the FMV watchathons of the 1990s? Well video games, much like films fall into that difficult critical territory of being designed by a large swathes of very creative people, and so can any one person really claim to be the captain of a creative vessel, steering the concept through his vision? Besides, given that the main artistic disciplines are so diverse and multi-stranded (A single author must ensure that gameplay, art assets, narrative, music and enough technical capabilities to put them all together work to create a unified whole).

Now before we go any further, I'm not necessarily talking about one man projects, or even projects with teams you can count on one hand, since the author of a one man project is pretty self-evident. The main interrogative thread is that, given the spate of incredibly successful kickstarters by famous video game developers, what the meaning is, if any, of a by-line in a video game. Is it simple marketing, or is there something to be said for the ability of a single artist who can bring these assets together? The best place to start is probably the most obvious.

Hideo Kojima is a name that either you are familiar with, or you haven't played enough games. The ace game designer at Konami and a man who revolutionised gaming in countless ways through game of the year after game of the year after game of the century. He's probably one of the easiest examples of gaming auteur to show in many ways, in part because his style owes at least a little to fellow auteur Quentin Tarrentino. His works are unashamedly postmodern: built on medium bending, genre manipulation and using that fragile nature of the game's reality as a powerful tool. There is a distinct style to his work, and that is what makes a game instantly recognisable as his, despite massive differences in game engines, technical sophistication, gameplay genre, setting, mood, atmosphere and even intent. Pretty much every game he's been involved him has some kind of fingerprint, from the metafictional construct of PT, through the bizarre and highly innovative solutions redolent in games like Snatcher to the delightfully literal solution to the insular nature of gaming found in Boktai.

Kojima is a very obvious case, and were the accusation that he desires to make films more than games actually to come to pass, he would probably be considered an auteur in that as well. But gaming doesn't quite play as simple a game as that, and a designer/director/project lead can show his/her influence in other ways. Roberta Williams' uncompromising attitude manifests very clearly not merely in the brutal and often sadistic levels of death her poor players suffer when playing any given King's Quest, but through a diverse legacy of adventure games that pushed the genre to new heights commercially, creatively and technologically.

On a similar note, Shigeru Miyamoto's fervered belief in “kyokan” (literally “feel-one” but generally refers to empathetic research based around emotional connections) is the emotional heart that Nintendo built its empire around and shows in an astoundingly diverse body of work and his influence will likely live forever in developers he has influenced.

The ever-controversial Peter Molyneux certainly counts as well, with his particular focus being the interaction between the player and the world in which they interact, which manifests in his god games (Populous, Black and White, Godus), his devil games (Dungeon Keeper), is paid particular focus in the Fable series with somewhat mixed results, and even his odd management sims like Theme Hospital. His incredible habit of overpromising on his games sheds even further light into this particular theme.

Finally, there is Kenji Eno, the force behind WARP software, and as interesting as he was when I covered all his US-released games. His distinct desire to not play by the standard rules and conventions of video games and his theories about the future of virtual media led to concepts like the virtual actor, games trying to be films to the point that they have a film-like length, games with invisible monsters and basically every single bizarre thing about D2 that wasn't a direct homage to Hideo Kojima.

So a gaming auteur (what's even the word? A Gáuteur?) can come from many different disciplines and bring a style in different ways. The key to each of these examples, as well as the other (Yu Suzuki, Suda51, Swery65) gaming auteurs out there is that they bring a style, a distinct vision and their own quirks that for better and worse identify them as the driving force behind a particular game. I could probably write a somewhat hefty book if I tried to cover every single gáuteur out there, but here's a small taster of how the Auteur theory applies to gaming, something we will cover in greater detail once I start showcasing the more literary examples mentioned here, along with a bunch of other crazy theories.

This doesn't mean of course that the rest of the team don't matter. Far from it, team management ultimately is the most important weapon in any auteur's arsenal, and it is even more important in gaming with the incredible amount of dependent artistic and technological parts to games. To answer the question more directly if the fact I'm trying to come up with pretentious words doesn't provide enough clarity: Yes, there absolutely is such a thing as a gaming auteur, and the fact that these authorial developers are influential, important and design incredible games in most if not every genre is a rather large smoking gun in any argument that games are a thriving art form.

All the people who bought Metal Gear Solid can't be wrong...

Hello there. Many thanks for reading Isometrics. It's been months since I've had the time and the opportunity to really get back into writing articles about something I love so much in an academic manner. The plan is to do an article a week at first, being put up on a Wednesday, though that may increase if I have time, and I may do some special articles concerning particular issues. The plan is not to cover as many current events and instead focus on gaming's place in wider literary debates. Hope you enjoy, and if you have questions, thoughts or names of Auteurs I missed (I didn't even name ten, and didn't even mention Geoff Crammond or Will Wright), feel free to drop me a line on Twitter @HuggyDave, in a comment below or on Facebook (look up David Rose – Writer).