Living The Nightmare: a look into Mirror's Edge and Dishonored as dystopic immersion

In my absence, I have been busy, busy, busy not playing video games (how I miss them) but critically examining them. On March 28 I traveled to the Popular Culture Association/American Culture Association national conference in Washington, D.C., ready to present on video game dystopias. The idea came from a seminar last semester where my classmates and I read several classic and modern dystopias (such as 1984, Brave New World, Fahrenheit 451, The Handmaid's Tale, The Hunger Games, The Maze Runner). That got me thinking: What about dystopias in video games? We had watched some dystopic movies, and I was well acquainted with music dealing with dystopic themes (Muse's The Resistance album). So for Christmas, I received Mirror's Edge and bought Dishonored, the former clearly being a dystopic society with the latter being more of a possible descent into chaos, death, and corruption.

Here I include my paper, which I hope to extend in the future, but I hope you enjoy it. I had a wonderful time talking to other presenters and watching other presentations in the Game Studies area of the PCA, and it's definitely something I would love to continue doing.

Achievement Unlocked: Acquire 3DS

I already loved Polygon before they did a giveaway on twitter for a Fire Emblem 3DS. Now I love them even more. I didn't think I was gonna win, but I love reading their articles, so I figured tweeting about one was worth it because I do so anyway! I don't win many things (ask my sister; I nearly cried at the Puella Magi Madoka Magica movie because I didn't win a poster; I later cried because the anime is heartbreaking), so this has got me so giddy. I'm going to be freaking out all day. I wonder how I'm going to get anything productive done today.

REVIEW: Dishonored

The rich get richer and the poor just get...dead.

Dishonored is a first-person adventure game, but it's different. Of course there are different endings depending on what actions you choose, but there's also an entire world for you to save.

I played this immediately after Mirror's Edge for a paper on first-person game dystopias, and I was grateful for the ability to take things slow in Dishonored and better absorb my surroundings. Customization of your character's magical abilities allows you to decide whether you want to go for stealth or public kills. You can choose not to kill at all, in fact. And the more chaos you cause, the more chaotic the city becomes. This facet is what drew me to Dishonored in the first place.

So often in dystopias we see a main character fighting against an all-powerful government. The government isn't all powerful in Dishonored, but the new guy in charge capitalized on a moment of shock in the people to institute "shock treatment" of the city, changing it to his whims. Adult dystopias usually wind up with the main character failing to make any change in society, whereas young adult dystopias are a little more optimistic by the end. It can go either way in Dishonored.

I chose to do a low-chaos route for my first playthrough. Most of my killing took place in the first two chapters when I was still getting used to being stealthy, resulting in failure after failure, leading me to stab someone and run the hell outta there. By the end when I rescued Emily, the captured daughter of the assassinated empress, she was able to gain control and aid the city in general peaceful construction. Had I chosen to kill anyone who walked in my way, when I rescued her, I would have seen the darkness take its toll on her. When you let her know the culprits are dead, she replies that she would have killed them anyway. This girl is a child, by the way. Even though power returns to the benevolent monarchy, I hesitate to believe that Emily would have ruled with an open, kind heart after all of the chaos affected her. In fact, you can see people fighting all around her in the epilogue if you choose to take this route. Fighting fire with fire isn't always the best idea. In the end, it hurts the society you're trying to protect. Even during the game, the high chaos directly affects you. More people die of the plague if you needlessly kill. This means there are more swarms of giant rats that feast on humans.

The controls are straightforward and easy to control. You select a magical ability from a screen. None of them require complicated button movements, but if you're trying to be stealthy, you have to be aware of your environment and the people around you. There were few times that I was directly frustrated at the game. As I often find with first-person stealth games, the game will work against me and forbid me from doing perfectly logical things. Once magic is thrown into the mix, then you can do almost anything. Chapters in Dishonored always have multiple ways of accomplishing them and moving through the given environment. You have to use your head--or your heart--to decide what's right for you. Sometimes it takes a few tries to stumble across a path that works with your abilities, but the game saves automatically, so you can go back to a previous save and take a different route rather than giving yourself away at one particular spot over and over.

You could say Dishonored punishes you for killing people all the while enticing you with quicker and easier methods of accomplishing your goals, more available ammunition for lethal weapons, and crazy awesome lethal magical kills. Why would the game give you more Weepers to deal with just because you have fun summoning swarms of rats to kill your enemies? I don't think this is a bad thing. I don't believe playing a violent game drives a sane person to kill, but I have to cringe when I see so many games plainly glorifying murder. Of course setting people on fire is fun in a game! But it's chaotic, and Dishonored's point is that responding to chaos with chaos leads to more chaos in the future until one person decides to break the pre-established chain of events.

The beauty of Dishonored is that it's an adventure that you feel like you're actively participating in. There's no lengthy and unnecessary dialogue you have to listen to in order to get the feeling of Dunwall. You get it through NPC chatter, the loudspeaker, the sight of watching a train drop dozens of dead bodies at a time. Kotaku has a good interview with Austin Grossman, a writer and designer for Dishonored.

Dishonored is fun, has comfortable controls, a beautifully-told story accompanied by appropriate graphics, and overall makes you think about what consequences your actions could have.

Dishonored was released October 9, 2012, for the PS3, Xbox 360, and PC.

Sometimes I'm lucky

I'm having a hard time containing my excitement at the moment because I just won a Fire Emblem 3DS.

The only way it could be better is if it were the XL, but this is just like the original Japanese Fire Emblem 3DS. It's Fire Emblem, plus it's free. I think I can let go of it not being XL.

Many thanks to Polygon for doing this giveaway! I will eagerly await its arrival and plot out what games I want to get conveniently in time for my birthday.

Good Reading: Game diversity

A previous classmate and a friend of mine, Bryant Francis, wrote an article on diversity in video games and why it matters. He spoke to me about how diversities are portrayed in games and paints a pretty good picture of the similarities in popular game characters today.

10 points if you can guess which character is my favorite. (It's not too difficult.)

I believe to aid the representation of minorities in games, game companies should hire more diversities. Do we really want the same character given to us in every game? I call for better game writing! I know there are plenty of talented people out there waiting for their chance.