Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles 2012

On the face of it, the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles franchise might appear to represent all that's rotten in pop culture. The core concept is novelty overload. The aesthetic and finer points piggyback on current and past trends (the latest theme tune is hip-hop influenced). The storyline suffers from attention deficit, in that rather than leading anywhere definitive, it's repeatedly reset over a multitude of mediums, with each iteration being targeted at a slightly different audience. Character development is shirked in favour of largely sticking to broad personality templates. The same toys are outfitted with a different set of accessories to be sold again. Outside of the comics, it belongs in that expansive but troubling bracket of media that rely heavily on violence while resiling from showing the consequences of violence (much bashing, zero blood). Its past iterations have aged badly (cowabunga, anyone?).

It also, however, has much to recommend it.

(Mid-post disclaimer: when I was in year 2 at school, I was so Turtles-mad that my teacher refused to mark any work I produced that bore a connection in a futile attempt to dissuade me.)

In particular, we should be thankful for any popular franchise that emphasises the idea of wildly different and conflicting personalities having their place in a triumphalist narrative. The Harry Potter archetype of individual saviour is king, and the idea that certain types of individual belong front and centre, while others are fated to be bit-part players, is part of a pervasive social mythology that sustains selfishness and greed. One might ask what sort of responsible society plants the idea in children's minds that the best result for all is obtained through an inwardly focused drive toward personal success, rather than through cooperation and the fostering of productive relationships. In TMNT, there is no 'hero'; there are four, possibly five or six heroes who are reliant on each other.

Furthermore, the Turtles are outcasts through and through, restricted to living in a sewer of all places, barred from normal social interactions. It's not just their nature as 'freaks' but the extremeness of their personalities that factor into that status: Donatello is a geek whose bookish intelligence is lost on others, Raphael has a destructive and alienating temper, Michaelangelo is a simpleton and Leonardo a Don Quixote who sees windmills everywhere he looks. It's heartening that the essence of Turtles is the balancing of personal flaws, rather than their elimination, and that its focus is always on how we might survive on the very fringes of a supportive society, which is where most of us, in reality, live.

Nickelodeon's new computer-generated take on the franchise, while firmly aimed at youngsters, makes some significant strides. Visually, the Turtles have never been more individualised, nor looked as much like their non-mutant animal counterparts (terrapins, in English English). They finally have three toes, their shells are both suitably rigid-looking and correctly shaped, their eyes are widely spaced and their mouths incorporate just a hint of a beak. On closer examination, they're different shades, different heights and finished with small distinctive details: Michaelangelo's freckles, Donatello's missing tooth, Raphael's cracked shell. At the same time, the rubbery nature of the CGI style allows them a degree of bold expression hitherto unseen - a graphic fiction aesthetic, with Manga-style sweat drops, emanata and indotherms, is layered on top to emphasise extreme reactions, and a full ink-heavy comic panelling style is implemented for flashback sequences.

The writing so far (four episodes have been aired) employs genuine wit and wisdom in place of catchphrases and trite morality tales. The Turtles' mentor, Splinter, is a principle source of both. When Leonardo complains that a fight 'wasn't fair', Splinter takes him to task, asking why he expects fairness in a combat situation. When Raphael's temper gets the better of him, rather than scold him excessively, Splinter mounts a practical demonstration of the detrimental effects of his anger, before recounting a tale of where his own, similar flaws had resulted in tragedy.

As far as the violence goes, while it remains cartoonish, the show goes further than any other iteration of the franchise (including the 90s live action movies) in depicting plausible martial arts techniques, favouring subtlety over impact. Conflicts are rapid-fire and satisfyingly even-matched when they need to be. The wood gives a meaty thump, the metal a sharp schiing, and there are, thankfully, very few fists to the face (a trope that I do seriously worry about, since an attack that barely phases fictional characters could put real life people in hospital). The use of robotic facsimiles of human beings, as ever, provides scope for the deadlier weapons to be used to some effect. The robots also double up as vehicles for some enjoyable slapstick.

The voice work is uniformly excellent, with Sean "Don't you worry, Mr Frodo" Astin's Raphael being of particular note. The city of New York is rendered in suitably stylised fashion. The only real issue so far is the CGI rendering of humans, which is pre-Toy Story in quality. Plastic-fleshed, with moulded hair and mostly spindly bodies, they never quite convince as counterparts to the protagonists' charming freakishness - although they perhaps work as a visual metaphor for the blandness we equate with 'normality' in our own world.

Guild Wars Diary #3

Overview: Guild Wars 2 is my first experience playing a massive multi-player online roleplaying game (MMORPG). It's an involving and sometimes overwhelming experience, since the game is steeped in genre conventions that have been built up over two decades, but also revolutionises and revitalises some of these conventions. My aim here is to record my critical response and analysis in such a way that it can be easily followed by gamers and non-gamers alike!

Links to previous entries:
Guild Wars Diary #1: Induction, The World
Guild Wars Diary #2: Character Creation

4. Story-telling

Although it's now normal for a computer game in almost any genre - from first person shooters to sandbox - to feature a story campaign, it's long been the defining feature of the role-playing game in particular, stretching back to Fighting Fantasy books I mentioned earlier, and the birth of tabletop Dungeons and Dragons. On some level, the genre is seen as part game, part collaborative story-telling, with the reader/player taking an active role in shaping the narrative.

In this part of character creation, the player can choose who their mentor was, a selection which affects the direction of the story.

It's no surprise that Guild Wars 2 promises a lot in terms of player involvement. At the time of writing, there is a section on the official website called 'Personal Story' which boldly claims that there are "thousands of possible variations" in the way the story can evolve and that "no two players will have the exact same experience". In an embedded video featurette, Ree Shoesbee, one of the designers, assures us that key decisions will affect the story's direction, and that "the story really reflects the game you want to see". The official Guild Was 2 sub-forum on the personal story section is bizarrely subtitled: "It really is all about you."

Emphasising 'you' and 'your' in marketing has been all the rage for the past decade, and it's perhaps unsurprising that the game falls far short of this enticing spiel. But before discussing the inevitable issues, it's worth taking a moment to reflect on just how ambitious the story-telling aspect of Guild Wars 2 is. In a game-world which is forever populated by dozens, perhaps hundreds of other players, many undoubtedly more skilful and experienced than you, there is still a sincere attempt to convince you that your own experiences are unique and that your skills might impact on the fate of the world. Plot points and events are divided between things that are visible to all players and things that are visible only to individuals (and anyone they've brought along for the ride). In the latter, of course, your avatar becomes a central character and a sense of chronological progression is allowed to pervade, as schemes are thwarted and dire eventualities draw ever nearer.

Cleverly, as certain areas of the world become explorable, they seem to reflect events in your personal story. For example, the Straits of Devastation zone features an imposing metal military outpost called Fort Trinity. It's always there, but players will likely only be strong enough to advance into this area once they've got to the stage in their story where the races of Tyria have formed a pact and elected to build the fort.

By the time you're strong enough to face this dragon, you'll have likely reached a part of your story where an all-out assault by its allies has begun, even though the dragon is technically present in the game world from the moment you start.

The way this is interwoven with the multiplayer activities is appreciably clever, if not ingenious: at all times, a green star on the map tells you where you need to be in terms of your own personal quest. Once you get there, you're transported to a kind of alternative reality. The immediate surroundings are identical, but there are no longer other players crossing your path (unless you've invited others to join you on your quest). Stray too far from the flashpoint where the story is occurring, and you return to the multiplayer world. Finish that short chapter of the story, and again, you return to the multiplayer world, this time with another star in another part of the map to travel towards.

Because getting between the story points necessitates travel, usually on foot, it's almost inevitable that you'll become entangled in many of the 'subplots' of the world before your reach your destination. These subplots are divided into 'dynamic events' and 'renown heart' quests. The latter are activities you can take part in in a certain area to aid some general objective - say, helping out on a farm or disabling enemy traps. The former are ever-changing cyclical mini-stories that can affect the surrounding area and often invite participation from large groups of players.

So for example, in the Harathi Hinterlands, there is a constant territorial war between humans and centaur. Help the humans take control of an outpost, and they will begin planning an all-out assault on a large piece of land which necessitates more players joining in. Leave the humans to their fate and the centaur may well in turn occupy a larger area, meaning less friendly faces as you continue your journey.

Here, a couple argue. He is thinking of joining a rogue enemy faction; she thinks he's betraying her. By following him and preventing him getting killed by the very faction he wishes to join, you can reunite them.

These mini-stories often feature the best and most immersive writing in the game. Help drive centaurs out of a village, and a child will tell you: "You were amazing!" A simple touch, but one which helps in convincing you your actions have real impact. The battlefield dialogue is largely uninspired, but the real treasures are in the smaller quests, where you're more likely to find flawed and witty characters. At the Meatoberfest celebrations in Diessa Plateau, one character insists he's the mayor of the event.

"Mayor? We never elected you," replies another.

"I won the barbecue competition ten years in a row. That qualifies me."

Here, a treasure hunt has ended badly for the leader of the expedition, but well for her comrades; they've uncovered a keg of beer!

The player isn't forced to appreciate these instances. In fact, they're easily missed if you don't pay attention to your surroundings, since the interaction is often between other characters. Sometimes a quest won't even begin if you ignore the pleas of a particular character, because they need your help to even make a start on their task.

Unfortunately, as you return to already traversed areas, the artificiality of the experience becomes harder to ignore, as the same events play out again and again. Occasionally, though, this is the source of a good joke. When you fail to save a particular captain from a man-eating spider, his second-in-command stoically says, "We'll have to make do until his brother comes along." His brother, presumably, is fated to the exact same demise, and so on and so forth through an infinity of family tragedy.

But what about the personal story itself? This is the part of the game where you are the hero, where you can't rely on other players for support, and where the main narrative of the game unspools. Alas, it's something of an ambitious mess. Firstly, there is a jarring disconnect, in that the principle actors in the personal story fawn over you, praise you, promote you and generally treat you like a world-famous superstar, while the rest of the time you travel the world as an unknown adventurer.

Secondly, in attempting to stay true to their aim of giving each player a unique personal journey, much of the story is fragmented into individual assignments that have little to no connection to each other and offer no satisfying character development over the long term.

A particular problem is the rate at which characters enter and exit your story. Many will only be present for a single ten-minute mission, during which their role is purely perfunctory: to provide an info-dump and make it seem as if you aren't quite on your own. Those that hang around for longer are, for the most part, one-dimensional and dull, their dialogue rendered all too often in a monotonous drawl, whether they're caught in the heat of combat, arguing or providing sagely advice.

Two recurring characters, who also feature in the novelised prequel to the game. I would struggle to define them by anything apart from their looks and ''great warrior' status. Eir, on the right, is my character's personal mentor, yet there is a pronounced lack of chemistry between the two of them.

By way of emotional pay-off, there are several attempts to establish close relationships with certain characters. These are almost always forced. Typically, a friendly, bubbly character is appointed as your partner for a number of missions. To be fair, these characters are fairly memorable and fun to be around. They will then be unceremoniously removed or killed off in a contrived scene, causing your character to deliver a dour monologue about honouring their memory.

To make things worse, the way the in-game engine delivers narrative denouements is clumsy at best, ridiculous at worst. Most of the conversation takes place against a flat background, with two participants standing facing each other, taking it in turns to say their lines. The acting is wooden, and the models seemingly incapable of physically emoting beyond a flinch or wave of the hand.

Often, the characters in these staged scenes don't even make eye contact.

When a dramatic interlude is rendered in the midst of the action, Guild Wars 2 fares little better. One particularly poor example sees an offshore fortress being overrun by an endless tide of Risen enemies. At all times, the doors to the fortress remain wide open. The number of troops manning this supposedly important outpost seems to be not more than a dozen at full strength. The commanding officer remains rooted to one spot throughout the battle, at first refusing to believe an attack is imminent, then insisting that a loss is unthinkable, finally dying from a blow I never actually saw. At the end of the battle, with escape looking less and less likely, an ally takes an absurd amount of time to make his farewell speech before sacrificing himself. The sacrifice consists of finally closing the doors to the fortress - him on one side, my character on the other. To all intents and purposes, there's no reason he couldn't have remained on the less dangerous side.

A similar death report, later in the game, is delivered while the screen is filled with nothing but featureless sea.

A rare instance of genuinely witty dialogue in the personal story.

The story is not entirely without charm, and the over-arcing plot is suitably epic. But GW2's developers have, to some extent, ended up with the worst of both worlds when it comes to combining an event-driven story with a player-driven story. The merit of an event-driven story is that it can be tightly plotted, but that is not in evidence here. The merit of a player-driven story is that the player is immersed in the role of their character, but that opportunity is squandered by the character appearing in cut scenes and delivering dialogue (as well as making decisions) that fails to take into account any of the player's own ideas about who their character is. In fact, once you reach a certain point in the story, whatever you experiences leading up til then, all player characters will behave identically: a serious issue for a game that is supposedly about role-playing.

As a final remark, perhaps the single most disappointing part of the personal story is that at around the half way mark, the player's role as chief protagonist is subsumed by another character: a Sylvari scholar who is fated (Harry Potter style) to defeat the arch-enemy. This would be agreeable if this character were a well-drawn, complex personality who begged some degree of emotional investment. Unfortunately, he's a foppish charisma vacuum with a put-on upper class English accent and a cod-Shakespearean diction, who quickly pronounces himself a Marshall after seeing a vision of his future successes. As a result, the story quickly runs out of steam.

Twat.

Gaming Innovations of the Future! #1: Infinitely Variable Aural Experience

In this series, I'll be suggesting innovations in gaming that, while purely theoretical at this stage, could significantly enhance the medium.

#1: Infinitely Variable Aural Experience

At the moment, games contain hundreds, if not thousands, of pre-recorded sound files - from orchestral pieces, to voice work, to the thump of a footstep - that play when certain conditions within the game are met. Music provides ambience and shapes the mood, voice acting draws the player into the story and sound effects add credibility and physicality to polygons bumping against polygons.

Eventually, however, the player will have heard every single one of these sound files multiple times, particularly in games that are designed to be played over months or years. It's simply too much work to record enough unique sonic backdrops and interludes to prevent frequent looping and repetition. What at first seemed natural or fitting, even revelatory, begins to wear thin, even grate. This is particularly the case with repeated lines of dialogue.

As to the dialogue, it's hard to conceive of a solution even in theory, but one thing that I can imagine being plausible in the future is a method of producing random variations on certain sound types and musical themes. Think of it as the sonic equivalent of a, say, a fractal pattern generator. Every clash of swords would have a subtly unique tenor. The warning shriek of violins would never be quite what you were expecting. Perhaps even moans of pain or defeat (or enjoyment?) could be individualised via this system.

Guild Wars Diary #2

Overview: Guild Wars 2 is my first experience playing a massive multi-player online roleplaying game (MMORPG). It's an involving and sometimes overwhelming experience, since the game is steeped in genre conventions that have been built up over two decades, but also revolutionises and revitalises some of these conventions. My aim here is to record my critical response and analysis in such a way that it can be easily followed by gamers and non-gamers alike!

Links to previous entries:
Guild Wars Diary #1: Induction, The World

3. Character Creation

In most computer gaming genres, it's someone else's job to create the character avatar. Although you might be the one who guides Lara Croft or Manny Calavera towards their eventual destinies, their histories (and their futures) are already written. Western role-playing games have ploughed an almost unique furrow through the past half century of gaming in persistently asking the player to conceive of their own avatar and mould him or her through a combination of possible characteristics, such as race, profession, class, sex, special skills, moral alignment and some elements of their past.

The trade-off is superficially simple: the player is likely to feel closer to, and more protective of, their avatar if he or she is responsible for creating them. In a way, they're like children. The avatar might also represent personal fantasies of the kind of person we might like to be, and enable us to live out these fantasies in a safe environment. On the other hand, with the game developers unable to predict or account for the thousands of iterations of character which a player might opt for, the ensuing story inevitably revolves less around the character and more around events at large.

Guild Wars 2 reliably follows the RPG route, offering you five races (of which human is one), eight professions and an array of physical characteristics with which to distinguish your character. There are also a few choices which determine your personality. For my first character, a Norn, I chose to be defined by 'charm' (as opposed to 'ferocity' or 'dignity' - the other options), wisdom (through the choice of Raven as my guiding spirit of the wild) and drunken antics (through the selection of a recent memorable incident in the character's life).

The first two of these, as far as I can discern so far, have little to no impact on the way the game plays. My character is generally a braggart and a brawler and not at all who I envisaged when I was putting her together in my mind. My 'charm' simply gives me very occasional dialogue options when speaking to non-player characters (NPCs). The last choice, the recent incident, does affect which path you take in the story - it turns out that in my drunken stupor, I absconded with an expensive war machine and lost it, which results in me being seconded to a Charr warband in an effort to retrieve the lost vehicle. After this arc of the story, however, nothing more is said of it.

Norn ranger Soudoutsubame

For a profession, I chose ranger, a choice which gives me the option of an animal companion, which held some appeal for me. The profession choice, however, only affects combat; it changes the story not one iota.

As for the options for physical appearance, these appear to be expansive but are actually oddly limiting. I chose a female avatar because male Norns can only be hulking goliaths. Skinniness is not an option (unless you opt for the Sylvari race instead, who are half-plant). The women, on the other hand, are not permitted any girth whatsoever, and although I picked the smallest possible chest-to-hip ratio, my Norn still has ample bosom and a lithe figure.

Across the five races, there doesn't seem to be any option at all for overweight characters, or even middle-age spread, and precious few chances to inscribe age and experience into their faces (I found one face with battle scars and opted for that). And although noses can be lengthened, chins squared and eyes angled, the most extreme settings only result in a look like cosmetic surgery gone wrong, rather than faces full of character, or anything that conveys everyday oddballness.

Things are even worse when creating humans, as these pictures demonstrate:

The widest frame available when creating a female human character.

The only face available with any 'lines' or signs of ageing.

My best attempts to stray from bland prettiness, resulting in a sort of Asian look.

A similarly problem exists with regard to the height slider. Shorter characters are not, as you might expect, stockier, and taller characters never come across as willowy. Instead, the game permits a world of perfect miniaturisation and proportionate scaling that is quite disconcerting when you get close to other players:

Here, a human stands next to a Norn (not the sword is behind the human). Fair enough; the Norns are supposed to be giants. However ...

... here my Norn character stands in front of another Norn.

There are a number of options for tattoo patterns on the Norn, in a choice of colours, as well as a wide range of colours to choose from in customising clothing. In the end, I did manage to create a black Viking with a Japanese name, so there is, at least, the possibility of doing something unusual.

I've also spent time creating human and Sylvari characters (the other two races, Charr and Asura, being more animalistic) and the upshot is this: character creation in Guild Wars 2 denies the player the ability to create characters who are physically representative of the vast majority of human beings. What it does attempt to do is to suggest other features - primarily colour and personality choices - as the principle way of expressing individuality. This is both a strength and weakness of a genre whose appeal lies at least partly in finding ways for human beings to explore aspects of their personality that modern life doesn't permit.

Sylvari thief Weatherteller. You can choose what colour he glows in the dark as well as kitting him out to be a walking  rhubarb stalk with autumnal beech leaves for hair. 

This potential for self-expression is particularly evident in the profession system, the part of character creation that has the single most noticeable impact on the way the game plays. Arguably, this is where Guild Wars 2 is most steadfastly conventional, for although its professions have unusual names and features, many of the archetypes are instantly recognisable: the weak but highly dexterous thief, who attacks from the shadows, giving life to our predilection to exercise subterfuge and predatory cunning; the Prospero-like elementalist, whose intimate knowledge of the strengths and weaknesses of the four elements speaks to our need to be endlessly adaptable and balanced; the simple warrior, whose brute force is for those players who tire of thinking their way through problems, and so on.

And rangers? They just like having wild animal companions. Here is Shodoutsubame again with Nook the juvenile raven.

It's a shame, however, that this mode of exploring the self has to be enacted through a gaming system that adheres too readily to Western standards of beauty. The humanoid characters may not always be sexy, but they never stray too far from the symmetrical sportsman/sportswoman physique which we hold to be more desirable. The clothing is, thankfully, somewhat practical on the more heavily armoured classes, if not on the lightly armoured magic users. As a 12-rated game, it's unsurprising that Guild Wars 2 treads the somewhat hypocritical ground of avoiding frank treatment of sex and nudity entirely whilst still allowing for titillation (not to mention excessive violence, which I'll come onto).

Human mesmer, as ready for battle as she ever will be.

It's only through the non-humanoid races that Guild Wars 2 strikes a blow for acceptance of the wider field of physical individuality, and I wouldn't be surprised if many players identified more readily with characters from these races than the mannequin-like humans, the women descended from Barbie, the men from Marks & Spencer catalogue models. The most played race, as I write, however, is human, which perhaps suggests that many people are more interested in the fantasy of being 'normal'.