Please note that this piece contains spoilers, some of which are significant.

Banjo-Tooie (2000) marks a significant place in 3D platforming history, yet it appears to be somewhat forgotten now, perhaps buried amongst its own brand obscurity. To be fair, the Banjo-Kazooie “brand” doesn’t lend itself to ubiquity in the first place—Banjo began his life as a character in developer Rare’s 1997 racer Diddy Kong Racing, along with other throwaway sentient animals such as Timber the tiger and Drumstick, an overall wearing chicken. The ulterior motive behind DKR, it seems, was to use the game as a vessel to lay the groundwork for future character-specific Rare titles (the only one to succeed was Conker the squirrel, famously), but, really, there doesn’t seem to be anything significantly endearing or memorable about, well, a bear with pants. Granted, sticking clothes on an animal mascot may not be the oldest trick in the book, but it sure seems that way, and I think that’s enough to result in Rare’s IPs getting glossed over with the same kind of dismissal that seems to befall every new Saturday morning cartoon show that isn’t specifically tied to an already popular product. Banjo the bear and his bird sidekick Kazooie had a very, very, very steep hill to climb when their first game, Banjo-Kazooie, was released in 1998—and despite its popularity (popular enough to warrant two sequels, at least), in the face of that OTHER franchise competing for consumer dollars on a Nintendo system, there really was no way that Banjo’s first solo effort would seem like anything other than an ostensible conglomeration of every other non-Mario mascot in existence.

Faded characterizations aside, however, I’m happy that Banjo-Tooie exists as both one of the platforming swan songs of the Nintendo 64 and as a recent re-release on Xbox Live Arcade, because it is a fascinating video game relic, a resolute and finite amalgamation of the N64′s capabilities and Rare’s boldness to address the trappings of a genre that it helped to define, even doing it with an almost parodistic zeal.

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Posted by Kurt Shulenberger on December 4th, 2009 :: Features :: Tags : Banjo-Kazooie, Banjo-Tooie, Conker's Bad Fur Day, Diddy Kong Racing, Environment, Nintendo 64, Platformer, Rare, Review, XBLA, Xbox 360
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Frame from Synchromy

Now that bump mapping and real-time shadow rendering are common vernacular, 3-D modeling is a career path to aspire to, and the consciousness of the gamer/consumer has been invaded by industry buzzwords and comparison charts, we often forget that the visual representation of the video game centers around a single element: the pixel, the simplest graphical unit by which all manners of computational drawing were first based. These literal building blocks (although “shapes” is a more accurate term, because you don’t dare call them squares) represent all that is good and right with modern media: a fixed system of creation that produces an endless variety of forms.

Severe technical limitations ensured that the first video games would have bare and almost laconic presentations, but, as Mark J.P. Wolf notes in “Abstraction in the Video Game” from The Video Game Theory Reader (edited by Wolf and Bernard Perron), the blocky and abstract visuals of the early games, while primitive by today’s standards, served as an educational tool as well: it was a way to wean people onto the different skills of manipulation that had to be mastered in order to succeed at the machines they were trying to play. With less ornamental distraction, one could better concentrate on the task at hand, namely, objective and input: What do I have
to do, and how do I do it? Without gamers even being aware of it, the pixel quietly and seamlessly taught them how to properly partake in video games, sharing in the interactive experience without becoming confused and disillusioned.

After the arcade machines of gaming’s infancy—and the graphics they introduced—laid the foundation for this new, interactive method of media reception, the first console systems began to appear in homes, signaling and embracing the convergence of abstraction, engagement, and technology. In a way, these pieces of hardware were the apex of post World War II consciousness, with counterculture, escapism, commercialism and raw information desperately trying to be contained into something compact and palpable, something that the average person could obtain—for the right price, of course. And what better way to distill modern thinking than through an equally modern and purchasable device that can also be switched off when things get too overwhelming or difficult?

It would be very easy to see these video games—and personal computers, which were tracing their own congruous path—as the first embodiment of this cultural merger, seeming to arrive suddenly and fully formed…but that’s not to say that other forms of art and media weren’t conceptualizing the forthcoming digital age. A few years ago I discovered the wonderful films of artist Norman McLaren, and I find such a close compatibility in his work to the notional quandaries that game scholars would later pose that I dare call McLaren the spiritual predecessor to electronic gaming, “pixelating” our world before anyone knew what the digital revolution would actually come to represent.

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Posted by Kurt Shulenberger on May 8th, 2009 :: Features :: Tags : Adventure, Atari 2600, Bernard Perron, Chiptunes, Cinema Studies, Mark J.P. Wolf, Music, Norman McLaren, Pixelation, Video
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The performative aspects of videogames are not lost on those who consistently play them. Games, in general, can be a form of recreation, a show. Their immediate audio/visual stimuli lends itself perfectly as a spectacle for an audience of others to passively watch, from the AI controlled “attract” mode first present in early arcade machines to the maximum capacity audiences that clamor to see gaming tournaments and record attempts taking place at conventions and venues the world over.

Ian Bogost, in his Gamasutra article “Performative Play,” provides some fine examples of how some games are, in essence, bringing the duality between fantasy-world action and real-world implication to light in a more immediate and explicit way, through “performative mechanics.” This is certainly apparent with games like Wii Fit (2007) and Dance Dance Revolution (1998), which actually require specific physical interaction, but also shines through in more experimental games like Attent, designed to be played in office environments as a means of assigning value to internal memos and email, with the hope of actually increasing productivity and reducing unnecessary digital clutter (as anyone who has ever crossed items off of a personal “to-do” list knows how satisfying an organizational meta-game can be). While there is still a kind of “separateness of play,” to quote a Johan Huizinga term that Bogost uses—a way to escape inside of an alternate reality while still safely being grounded in the tangible one we are all familiar with—games that utilize or experiment with, or even comment on, the performative mode inherent in other types of media are evoking, as Bogost puts it, “a special kind of play for which outcome alone is an insufficient criterion.” Roger Travis, in his own series of articles on performance in video games, labels this relationship as “Performative Play Practices,” which he defines as an “intersubjective performance that takes place in a cultural zone demarcated for play (that is, as not having an effect on material circumstances, although that demarcation does not mean in actual reality that material circumstances are unaffected).”

Bogost and Travis have both written great pieces on performative play, and I don’t want to retread over already covered ground, but I would like to offer my own thoughts and examples of what I consider to be “modes of performance” and how they affect gaming culture as a whole.

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Posted by Kurt Shulenberger on April 6th, 2009 :: Features :: Tags : Attent, Dance Dance Revolution, Grand Theft Auto IV, Gravity Bone, Half-Life, Ian Bogost, Interactivity, Metroid Prime, Roger Travis, Super Mario World, Video, Wii Fit
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I’m a self-proclaimed Mega Man fan (my first post was about a specific level in Mega Man 2 (1988), after all), and I think that stems mostly from the simplicity of action that the game provides. Move, jump, shoot, the occasional slide or simple vehicle segment—that pretty much covers the entire control set of the series (please note that I am going to be restricting these thoughts to the main numbered titles, and also please note that I have sampled them all but have also not completed them all), with the obvious and brilliant variations on what you can actually shoot and when, and why. A simple tool set, amidst an incredibly challenging and ever-changing environment, multiplied with the semi non-linear fashion with which you can tackle those environments and use your tool set as it becomes more varied, equals fantastic game design. I played Mega Man 2 and Mega Man 3 (1990) to death when they were released, and even backtracked to the first game, just because I enjoyed the formula so much. 

But I’m not here to wax nostalgic about those games or the series in general. There is enough material out in the world already to do it for me. What I wanted to write about is actually my experience with the newest game, Mega Man 9 (2008), and, more importantly, the way in which I interacted with it—specifically, the way that I related to the game world through the controller I had in my hands.

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Posted by Kurt Shulenberger on February 10th, 2009 :: Features :: Tags : Cinema Studies, Interactivity, Mega Man, NES, Wii
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“Braid: Everything and Nothing (as a Video Game)” has been posted at The Auteurs’ Notebook. You can find the article here.

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Posted by Kurt Shulenberger on January 23rd, 2009 :: Features :: Tags : Braid, David Hellman, Interactivity, Jonathan Blow
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