Book Review: "Introduction to Game Analysis" by Clara Fernández-Vara

"Everyone probably knows what roguelikes are, right? I used to have to explain that, but now I don't, which is kinda cool." The innocuous question, posed by designer Keith Burgun during one of the talks at the 2013 PRACTICE conference, was directed to an audience of professional and student game designers, as well as people otherwise interested in the discipline. The room responded with a silence that confirmed, indeed, that this bit of knowledge was commonly held by the assembled crowd.

For the briefest of split seconds, I actually considered raising my hand and outing myself: I am an impostor in your midst. I have no idea what a roguelike is. It was high school geometry class all over again, and I still didn't know the answers.

It was about a year ago when I began to seriously contemplate exhuming a long interred dream of my youth: working, in some capacity, in the video game industry. At the time that this dream was among the living visions I had for my future life of impossibly far-away adulthood, I imagined that I would like to be a designer or perhaps a producer. But life had other plans

Finally, more than a decade on, I am returning to my first love, reacquainting myself with its broad features and learning more about the discipline and medium. In the course of this new and heretofore autodidactic enterprise, I've read a lot: digital media scholarship that is canonical and on the frontiers alike, books on incorporating ethical play and values in game design, game design primers, and personal essays on player experience.  

Yet as an aspiring designer and critic, nothing has given me the distinct pleasure engendered by page 135 of Clara Fernández-Vara's recently published Introduction to Game Analysis:

"Games such as Rogue are famous for generating most of their content procedurally—this also means that it may not be possible to complete the game, since the levels generated are not optimized or play-tested to be completed. Games that use this approach to design are called roguelike, and include the so-called dungeon crawlers such as Diablo."

Perfection.

This small snippet is emblematic of what makes Fernández-Vara's book such a wonderful resource: it's commitment to taking as little for granted as possible. Among its stated goals are "to make the tools of academic analysis more accessible to everyone" and "to encourage everyone with an interest in games to learn more about them and produce thoughtful reflections" in order to realize a more sophisticated discourse on the medium. This is largely, though not exclusively, framed in terms of scholarly exercise; more specifically, the tone of the book is unequivocally that of a professor addressing undergraduate students, although its lessons are undoubtedly useful to those pursuing advanced degrees or completely removed from academe. 

The meat and potatoes of the book is its survey of three different areas that may serve as sites for analytical writing in games: the context, defined as "the circumstances in which the game is produced and played, as well as other texts and communities that may relate to it;" game overview, "the content, the basic features that distinguish the game from others, and how it has been read, appropriated, and modified by different audiences;" and formal elements, "how the text is constructed, the pieces that make it up." Each of these is in turn unpacked into smaller, discrete, and interlocking elements. Indeed, the various aspects of game analysis that Introduction to Game Analysis seeks to introduce readers to is wide-ranging indeed: from orienting oneself for meaningful and conscientious play to proper theoretical grounding, from cognizance of genre history to sound research methodology to myriad other topics. 

The purpose and presumed audience of the book—a survey and guide to thinking and writing analytically about games for those with little prior experience doing so—necessarily demands that breadth takes precedence over depth in some areas, such as in its treatment of the various theoretical frameworks referenced throughout. Yet if one looks at the copious notes and suggested reading, Fernández-Vara's book is a veritable gold mine for those seeking a pathway into more intellectually rigorous and satisfying contemplation of the games we play. 

Introduction to Game Analysis is a triumph—with its lucid prose unencumbered by arcane academic jargon (save for that which the author actually takes time to explain), Fernández-Vara has made cracked the gate of sophisticated discourse on video games, from within ivory towers or without, appreciably wider. I highly recommend it.

Where Dreams Don't Come True

I can still hear his mama cries
Know the family traumatized
Shots left holes in his face about piranha-sized
The old pastor closed the cold casket
And said the church ain’t got enough room for all the tombs
It’s a war going on outside we ain’t safe from
I feel the pain in my city wherever I go
314 soldiers died in Iraq, 509 died in Chicago

The first time that I ever really thought about these Kanye West lyrics and the gun violence ravaging Chicago's black community was as I was preparing to go on an activist delegation to Palestine in October 2012. Among more than 40 others, I had the pleasure of traveling with Aisha Truss-Miller, a community organizer involved with black youth empowerment in Chicago. During our pre-trip orientation, our diverse cohort engaged in a group activity wherein we all shared a 90-second-or-less version of what our motivations for joining the delegation were. Aisha's minute-long story certainly made the most impact on me: she told us of how her 17-year-old cousin, Leonard "Man-Man" Truss, was gunned down that summer; a random, innocent victim felled by bullets from an automatic rifle. I can't remember her exact words, but I remember the chill I felt as she recounted, voice faintly cracking under the calm surface, the pain of having to bury her young cousin with a large hole in his face. You can hear Aisha and her mother tell the story of how they received the news and their initial reactions below.

"Think globally, act locally," she said toward the end of her allotted time in order to summarize why tragedy and injustice at home was motivating her to learn more about the systemic injustices leveled against the Palestinian people. I must admit what she meant wasn't entirely clear to me then; and if I'm being really honest, I should also admit that my intellectual concerns and activism more often revolves around the global than the local. But as time goes on I continue to grow in my understanding of the connections between the struggles of ghettoized, criminalized peoples from Palestine to right here at home in the United States.

It was with this backdrop in mind that a recent feature on Polygon, "We Are Chicago: A Game About Gang Violence," resonated with me. Polygon writer Charlie Hall profiles the game's designer, Michael Block, and how he came to understand how a community rendered invisible despite being a stone's throw away could provide ripe material for a narrative-heavy, biographical game. Through his nascent involvement in local charities and community improvement initiatives on Chicago's South Side, Block—a white dude from Wisconsin (which is, really, just perfect)—met a local activist and rapper named Steve Young, a black dude who grew up in the very milieu which Block was seeking to make a game about. With guidance from Young and interviews with Chicago residents, Block has created a composite character that players will inhabit, "a teenage boy on the South Side, a boy who lives in a single-parent household struggling with poverty."

I am personally very excited about this game and I wish Culture Shock Games, the studio developing it, much success. Judging from the Polygon profile, it seems that they have both their heads and their hearts in the right place; the former manifested by the seeking of voices from the community they intend to represent to be involved with the project from its earliest stages, and the latter by their apparent intent to not only feature an appeal from Chicago violence prevention and mitigation groups from within the game, but by giving some of the proceeds to such nonprofits. 

Two larger questions came to my mind, though, as I pondered the development of this game. Neither of the concerns reflect negatively on the developers, mind you. They are both related to systems.

The first system-related concern is the make-up of the developers. As I've stated above, I admire the people working on this game based on what I've read so far and have every reason to believe that Block and co. are sincerely concerned with the people they seek to represent. Still, a larger question that begs to be answered is what more can be done to give marginalized peoples the means to represent themselves through creative media. Naturally, this question isn't limited to video games alone, although it is particularly salient here since the demographic homogeneity of this medium's producers seems to be peculiarly resilient whereas the same cannot be said for the demographic makeup of its consumers; not to mention the gradual democratization of production seen in other creative media. This very subject was addressed in a recent talk by Shawn Allen, an independent game developer based in New York. Unfortunately the sound levels are way off in the recording, but you should sit down, crank up your headphones, and give Allen a listen. 

The second system-related concern is related to a design challenge that doubles as a political one. Returning to the Polygon article, the following two quotations touched a nerve:

“Suddenly the evening news meant more to Block than ever before. It wasn’t just an endless string of killings and arrests that plagued Chicago’s poorest neighborhoods. There were areas of Chicago’s South Side where the cycle of poverty remained unbroken for generations. There were people lost in there.”

“These things are actually happening every day, and it’s such a different life than the life that I live, and I’m 10 miles away. It’s not even ... somebody living in China or somebody living in rural Afghanistan. It’s my neighbors that are 10 miles away from me. How is this such a drastically different life?”

This rubbed me the wrong way. The state of Chicago's South Side is not the result of a mere "cycle of poverty": it's an intentional trajectory of poverty set in motion by a business and political culture whose operative ethos was (and, to a lesser degree, remains) rooted in anti-black racism, a trajectory set in motion during the Great Migration—which itself was the result of oppressive, systemic, white supremacism of the worst kind. 

While it is the images of white supremacist degradation and terror in the public sphere that live the strongest in public memory and attitudes about America's congenital racism—lynchings, segregated facilities, police brutality and the like—what has arguably had an outsized impact on the living conditions of black people in this country far grander in the scale of its detriment than the psychological, physical, and social wages of such terror is the psychological, physical, and social cost of economic exploitation and housing discrimination. 

The full scope of such housing discrimination practices—red lining, block busting, restrictive racial covenants—is beyond the scope of this humble blog post. Suffice to say that this sordid and storied history of systemic, urban housing discrimination is at least as old as the Federal Housing Administration itself, established in 1934. As Ta-Nehisi Coates writes: 

If you sought to advantage one group of Americans and disadvantage another, you could scarcely choose a more graceful method than housing discrimination.Housing determines access to transportation, green spaces, decent schools, decent food, decent jobs, and decent services. Housing affects your chances of being robbed and shot as well as your chances of being stopped and frisked. And housing discrimination is as quiet as it is deadly. It can be pursued through violence and terrorism, but it doesn't need it. Housing discrimination is hard to detect, hard to prove, and hard to prosecute. Even today most people believe that Chicago is the work of organic sorting, as opposed segregationist social engineering. Housing segregation is the weapon that mortally injures, but does not bruise.

Apartheid policies that intended to segregate and ghettoize have been strikingly effective over the last century. Without denying poor, urban blacks agency over their actions on the one hand, and without gravitating to the acontextual ruminations of Paul Ryan or the concern-trolling histrionics of Bill O'Reilly on the other, we should acknowledge that these grand forces of public policy and the culture of the communities thus targeted have a dialectical impact on one another, resulting in what we see most chillingly exemplified on Chicago's South Side: an economically disadvantaged community cannibalizing its young. As Aaron Huey says in his amazing Ted Talk that documents the history of poverty of the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation: "The last chapter in any successful genocide is the one in which the oppressor can remove their hands and say: 'My God, what are these people doing to themselves? They're killing each other. They're killing themselves while we watch them die.'" For a thorough, lengthy, and historically well-informed examination of the issue of housing discrimination (and other forms of institutional racism), one could hardly pick a better place to start than carefully reading Ta-Nehisi Coates's magisterial article for The Atlantic, "The Case for Reparations." A shorter read that can serve as a primer is "How We Built the Ghettos."

Which brings me back to my second concern: the design challenge of constructing a game whose narrative and mechanics honors the history and politics of ghettoization, or any other trans-generational social injustice for that matter. We Are Chicago certainly seems like a good start toward humanizing this marginalized population for a game-playing public that may not otherwise be inclined to reckon with the lives of people ostensibly so different from themselves. But part of me fears that designers and consumers alike are more amenable to the relatively simple and cognitively challenge-free task of sympathy for characters thus humanized as opposed to having their understanding of how large and impersonal structures impacts the intimate social lives of said individuals, and the continued resilience of "elegant racism," perturbed. But how can we design for the latter?

Honestly: I'm not entirely sure. But as I write this, I can't help but think of a talk given by the hilarious and affable game designer Brad Muir about the work of his studio, Double Fine, on Massive Chalice, which he has described as "a tactical strategy game on an epic timeline." His remarks begin 37 minutes into the video at right. He declares that one of his design goals of the game is "Character attachment through mechanics," manifested in part by the permanent death (or "permadeath") of [playable] characters who grow old and die, leaving their [playable character] children to carry the epic, trans-generation struggle against the ghouls and monsters that periodically attack the fantasy kingdom of the game's setting ("periodically" being every 5-7 years in game time). The progeny of these deceased heroes will also pass along family relics to be used in battle in future generations. Muir also states that one of his design goals is for the generational component to "inspire self-reflection" in players.

Hmmmm. Although Massive Chalice is a strategy game in a fantasy setting, I think that there's something to be gleaned from this take on mechanics and possibly applying them to not merely facilitate audience sympathy with playable characters, but to facilitate reflection about the legacy and impact of choices made long ago on the present day. 

I'm not sure how this design problem can be solved, but I certainly think it's important that we try. As Alex Cox says: "The reason I care so deeply about videogames is because I believe they are one of the strongest ways to create empathy.  No, I KNOW they are one of the strongest ways to create empathy." She made this statement at the end of a talk praising Gone Home and its deft portrayal of [spoiler alert] a teenage girl grappling in that unsure, exciting, scary, gleeful adolescent way with her own nascent sexuality. Maybe We Are Chicago will be the first game that helps build empathy for a believable, non-criminal, inner-city black character contending with the economic hardship and violent environment he was born into. And maybe someday a game that, through its mechanics, explores how that environment got that way will be in the offing.

And with that, allow me to close this post as I began: with Kanye West lyrics.

Imagine working so hard and you can't cut through
That can mess up your whole life like an uncle that touched you
What has the world come to
I'm from the 312
Where cops don't come through
And dreams don't come true

Social Collapse, Human Suffering, Refugee Resilience... and Zombies

Once upon a time—from June 2008 until June 2009, to be specific— I lived in Damascus, Syria, where I pursued my graduate studies in Arabic. During that intensely fraught and indelibly formative year of my life, I met a lovely Syrian girl by the name of Shurouq*, a student in the English department of the University of Damascus, where my master's program was hosted. Shurouq had an eminently gentle soul and warm demeanor. Soft-spoken but sweet, friendly, poised, and thoughtful, her quiet charm was accentuated by her competent yet occasionally unsure, endearingly accented English. Needless to say, I was smitten. 

Residents of Yarmouk Camp in Damascus queue for food aid distributed by UNRWA on January 31, 2014.

We went out a few times together doing the simple, perfectly innocent sort of things one does with a girl they have a crush on when living in a socially conservative (relative to the West), Muslim-majority country: strolls in the park, devouring fresh cinnamon rolls at the one French cafe in town, long talks in the campus squares. She was one of the few Syrians that I made it a point to stay in touch with after leaving the country. She got married almost two years later, in the spring of 2011.

At that point, the nascent Syrian uprising was still largely characterized by a cycle of peaceful protest followed by bloody government crackdown.

An eerie, ten-minute scooter ride through Homs in the summer of 2012 gives a taste of the scale of its devastation.

By the time she gave birth to her daughter Loujain a year later, the civil unrest had turned into civil war. Large portions of Syria's third largest city, Homs, the hometown of another friend of mine, lay in ruins due to heavy fighting between insurgents and government forces. Two bombs had went off near her house. As part of the Christian minority, I imagine she and her family felt particularly threatened

And by that time, I had almost stopped talking with my Syrian friends altogether. Just what do you say to someone living in a country tearing itself apart in a whirlpool of internecine bloodletting? "Hey, how's work going? How many of your loved ones have been buried or imprisoned?"

When Shurouq Facebook messaged me out of the blue late last summer, I felt a shock of pleasant surprise tinged with guilt and worry. She told me the latest news: through some minor miracle, she and her family managed to get out of the country in what she hinted was a harrowing journey a few months prior. She skimped on the details.

I didn't pry. 

*          *          *

I've been reading Dancing in the Glory of Monsters: The Collapse of the Congo and the Great War of Africa by Jason Stearns. The book, an excellent, compelling, and dreadful account of the wars that have wracked the Democratic Republic of the Congo for the past twenty years, is full of depressing and horrifyingly violent anecdotes. The one below in particular caught my attention:

The [church] elders described successive waves of soldiers and refugees intruding on their small village. First, a wave of fleeing soldiers had come to town—Mobutu's soldiers mixed with ex-FAR. They had terrorized the local population, taxing and stealing their livestock. Then the refugees arrived, "like a band of walking corpses." They were starving. Instead of talking, they just stared and cupped their hands. They pulled up cassava roots and peanuts from the fields and and picked raw mangos from the trees. As dire as their situation was, if the villagers shared the little they had with this horde of foreigners, they knew they would all die of starvation. The men from the church helped organize vigilante groups to guard the village and the fields. They patrolled with machetes and sticks. If they found someone stealing, they would beat him to death. There were no prisons and no courts. Justice was swift and decisive.

Like a band of walking corpses. 

*          *          *

"Nooooope. Fuck that."

This was the reaction of a co-worker last night when I recommended that he play The Walking Dead. 

"I hate zombie shit," he said. "It's so dumb. You see, zombie shit is used as a foil to have a backdrop of complete social collapse and disorder," he said. "But here's the thing: if you want to have such a backdrop, there are so many more plausible ways to do that!"

He was so enthusiastic about communicating his point that I'm not sure if he realized I was in agreement. I mean, The Walking Dead is a great game. But on another level I am sometimes uneasy with the use of genre fiction as a way of framing stories that are, in their most salient thematic aspects, often lived by real people in real places. A Hobbesian mode of survival is not the exclusive province of fantasy; it often characterizes the lives of far more people on this globe than we in comfortable, developed, stable nations bother to think about. Chris Franklin takes on video games' depressing paucity of things to say about real-world challenges (albeit in relation to non-violent contexts) in his review of the critically acclaimed game Gone Home. Emphasis added:

The Walking Dead and The Last of us prove stories about people can be affecting even in the face of absurd genre fiction.  But too often and too easily we don’t use that artifice to construct meaning; we just take shelter in it.  We champion escapism because it feels good even as it means our coming of age stories need to be about gunning people down and our father-daughter stories need to happen in zombie apocalypses.  We use it to give crackle and zing to stories that might better be told here in the real world with people you grew up with or people know today; people whose suffering isn’t due to zombies or monsters but the way we operate socially, culturally, or economically.  Escapist fantasy is wonderful, but escapist fantasy can only hint at problems that affect real people in real ways. This game, and a precious few others, take a bold, powerful step in trying to reclaim a relatable humanity in video game characters, and it does so by insisting they’re as boring and normal and real as everyone else.

I think about how Shurouq, this wonderful girl that I used to walk in the park with, that had dreams of traveling Europe, of using the English that she worked so hard to acquire in her career somehow, of giving her daughter the world, is now a refugee in Macedonia, sharing a two-bedroom house with seven other people. I often wonder how she makes it through her days. I wonder what she hopes to impart to her precious daughter, Loujain, who may never again know the feeling of her homeland's soil beneath her feet. How will Loujain make sense of the world as she grows older? 

I continue to make my way through Stearns's account of recent Congolese history, and I think about what sort of pressures must one feel to, as an ostensible man of religion, resolve to beat and hack starving, helpless refugees to death to protect one's own community haunted by food scarcity.

And then I wonder: in a videogame landscape dominated by conflict-as-power-fantasy, how can we make room for the stories of the Shurouqs and Loujains of the world. The stories of conflict-as-trauma. Conflict-as-exile. Conflict-as-loss. Conflict-as-quiet-strength. The stories of men driven to violence by forces much larger than themselves, not preternaturally engaged in it. If I ever make it into the game industry, my hope would be to make a game that honors, in its own way, the story of Loujain, this little girl that I've never met.

Without zombies.

---

*Names have been changed

First-Person Jihadi

I watch a lot of jihadist war porn and I have never seen something like this. This short video produced by the Yemeni affiliate of Al Qaeda profiles a "pre-emptive assault" against a very small outpost, jointly manned by the Yemeni army and (so they say) Shia militiamen. What makes this video so unique is that one of the members of the jihadist assault element has a camera attached to his head, which gives it the look and feel of a first-person shooter. 

No, this is not a game. 

The first two minutes of the video feature an explanation of who they're attacking and why, along with scenes of them casing the target and training for the assault. If you want to skip straight to the action, start watching around the 2 minute mark. 

One thing I've been pondering lately is the notion oft attributed to François Truffaut that there can be no such thing as an anti-war film, because "to show something is to ennoble it." Something about this question bothers me, and I think that it's its underlying premise: that, absent some mediated conveyance that necessarily reduces the grander exigencies and consequences of war, there is nothing "glorious" or seductive about it. This strikes me as intellectually myopic or perhaps delusional in its idealism, a suspicion that is deepened the more I actually talk to combat veterans and watch this sort of videos.

It's horrifying to watch this and realize that actual people are dying while reconciling that with the fact that the actual production quality and direction is, at a visceral level, kinda awesome. Isn't that why we watch action movies or play FPS games? For the adrenaline, for the ineffable, base awesomeness of violent spectacle? Are those any less extant factors when it comes to real life combat (and mediated conveyance thereof)? 

Back to Where it Started: PRACTICE

I was beyond ecstatic to receive the e-mail announcement: registration for the fourth annual PRACTICE: Game Design in Detail conference hosted by the NYU Game Center is now open. I completed my registration within minutes of receiving the e-mail, cheery at the prospect of, surely, being among the first to register. Never have I so gladly and hastily parted ways with $370. 

Before I continue: no, this is not a sponsored post from the Game Center! I just really love the place that much. Let me give you the short version of the story.

What are you waiting for? Register!

Last spring, I was laid off of my job. It was during that period that I began to seriously reconsider not just my career path, but the things that mattered to me in life. I decided that, even though I needed a job right then and should probably seek employment in the same industry (e.g. national security) from which I had just been removed, I owed it to myself to investigate the possibility of rekindling my childhood dream: working in the game industry as a designer or producer. Three months later, my old employer ended up taking me back, but the bug stuck. I started investigating grad school possibilities for game design studies, which led me to discover NYU's Game Design MFA. Lo' and behold, it turned out that they were having some sort of conference of game designers a couple of months later. The timing could hardly have been more propitious. PRACTICE, I decided, would be my first step towards possibly orienting my life in a new direction, my first opportunity to get a close peek through the window of the game industry/academia and the discipline of game design to see if it held any real appeal.

Me gushing at the opening of PRACTICE 2013.

The fact that I am now writing this blog is evidence of its impact. It was an absolutely fantastic experience; never had I been in an environment that was at once so fun and intellectually stimulating. I'm not gonna lie, I was a bit disappointed by the rather drab opening remarks of the only speaker whose name I recognized, but there were so many other intellectually rich, compelling, engaging talks given that gave me a new appreciation for the art and science of design—stand-outs for me include Rob Daviau, Sean Vanaman and Jake Rodkin, and Robert Yang. But, just as important as the talks, it was my first time actually meeting and talking to people involved in making games: during coffee breaks, at a ridiculously awesome house party, on the sidelines of a break dance battle (yes, really!). It was all that an unsure, curious, enthusiastic, quarter-life crisis drifter could ask for. 

Turns out that the discipline of game design had real appeal, after all.

The Beginning البداية

I don't like this game.

This is the thought that echoed in the corridors of my mind a few days ago as I found myself firing at a parade of impersonal assailants in a gloomy and dank subterranean room with a newly acquired automatic weapon. It's not that I didn't want to like the game, a AAA Playstation title released in the first half of 2013 that I was just getting my hands on. Nay. It's just... even with the aforementioned circumscribing clues, how many games could that description accurately apply to? The answer: too many.

I was bored. Bored of navigating ominous, dark environments in anxious anticipation of gotcha! scares. Bored of the tired, poor writing. Bored of being expected to shoot people in the face for no good reason. I turned the game off, went to my computer, and proceeded to watch an hour's worth of Let's Play videos and cutscenes from the game, stopping intermittently to read a full synopsis of the plot on a wiki. Curiosity satiated, I went to bed. 

Maybe it has something to do with my day job. I am currently using the Arabic skills garnered through years of study in far flung places (Jordan, Syria, and Yemen, to be specific), originally for purposes of personal edification, translating as a cog in the machinery of the national security-industrial complex. One prominent aspect of my work is the consumption of war porn, bearing witness to the mediated presentation of armed groups' battlefield exploits. It is a strange thing to be the frequent voyeur of real life violence.

Yet even stranger is the curious heartbreak that is watching a place you once called home—a place whose streets you've walked, whose sounds you know, whose people have been both enemies and friends—rip itself apart in a horrifying vortex of bombs, bullets, and bloodshed. The young woman with beautiful English who helped entertain you through the tedium of data entry at your internship? In exile. The handsome guy with the perfect stubble who you drunkenly hugged at a party? Also in exile. The skinny girl, all limbs, with the delightful laugh and curly hair? Detained. The other one, the one you had a crush on? A refugee.

Violence seems a lot less palatable as a vehicle for entertainment and fun times when the gravity of its impact in real life is so frequently, cavalierly disregarded in popular media. 

Playing Triple-A Title Where You Shoot the Dudes, Again was boring. I don't know if my days of training my virtual sights on hapless cookie cutter goons are over, but they're certainly not as appealing as they used to be.

But I still love games. I hope to make my own some day. But why? How? 

Funny enough, the night previous to my forlorn gaming adventure, I was having a conversation with a buddy of mine—who happens to be, irony of ironies, a special forces combat veteran—which may contain some semblance of an answer. He's one of the hippest, most cultured dudes I know, yet knows little about video games. Still, when discussing my interest in this medium and my nascent aspirations for contributing to the creation of games that speak to aspects of the human experience other than conflict and competition, he offered a word of wisdom.

"If play is integral to human evolution, to the evolution and development of species in general," he said, "the way we play today needs to catch up with some of the higher visions we have for this world." He later posed a question: "How do you create through play? How can one engage in play as an act of creation?" Posed by someone who spent years dealing in death, these inquiries had particular resonance.

I don't have the answers, but they're damn good question. And it's those issues—how the video games we play can investigate and evoke a broader spectrum of the human experience, and, more challenging still, expand its limits—that draw me to explore this medium as a creative practice. It's the primary reason for the creation of this blog; at the same time, it will not be the only purpose of this blog. Intellectual and cultural cantonization is one of the reasons for the video game industry's sadly limited horizons when it comes to its mainstream production. So expect to find my thoughts on a range of subjects informed by my various identities and interests; as an activist, progressive, Arabic speaker, Middle East "expert" (an annoying term, I know), African-American male, and fashion enthusiast, among other things.  

Oh, and that game that I put down the other night? It was the 2013 reboot of Tomb Raider. Was anyone else as unimpressed as I was?