{"id":110,"date":"2007-05-22T13:47:44","date_gmt":"2007-05-22T13:47:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/decisionproblem.com\/seminar\/?p=110"},"modified":"2007-06-16T23:11:06","modified_gmt":"2007-06-16T23:11:06","slug":"dispatches-portable-ops-or-because-everything-else-has-a-spin-off","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/gamedesignadvance.com\/?p=110","title":{"rendered":"Dispatches: Portable Ops; Or: Because Everything Else Has a Spin-Off…"},"content":{"rendered":"

Now, I’ve been keeping my distance from the blog for some time now. Mainly it’s because I haven’t had the time for it, since I’m spending all my writing time on my thesis manifesto, which I’m 47 pages deep into. Furthermore, I haven’t even been playing that many games, so it’s not like I’d have a great deal to write about here. Occasionally I dip into Another World<\/em>, mostly to alleviate writer’s block with the trade-off of gamer’s block (I still can’t get past those fucking guards after doing the reservoir puzzle), and at the moment I’m staving off Psychonauts <\/em>until I beat Ico <\/em>for a third time, as it’s my vacation for all the sweat, blood and editorial angst I poured into God of War<\/em>. Besides that, I haven’t even been doing that much with my PSP lately, as I spend my train rides to and from the city rediscovering the pastime of reading (Orwell’s Keep the Apidistra Flying<\/em>, for one, and Don DeLillo’s Falling Man<\/em> at the moment), yet when I do take it out I’ve only been playing exactly the same game you’d think I would be playing, after all this time. If nothing else, you certainly can’t accuse me of not getting my money’s worth out of MPO, even if I haven’t figured out how to get the damn online multiplayer option working. A little while ago, however, I had an experience with the game that I believe is worth sharing here, as it speaks something not only to the nature of Metal Gear Solid: Portable Ops<\/em>, but also to the nature of portable gaming in general.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

It was back during the finals, and I was taking the 7:16 train from Grand-Central to Stamford, getting off at Pelham\u2014my hometown might be New Rochelle, but that doesn\u2019t mean it\u2019s the train station I live closest to, necessarily. It\u2019d been one of those long, hot days filled with a great deal of business and very little in the way of getting things done, and all I wanted to do was get home and purge my memory of everything involving P-Comp and Maya. As always, I took out my PSP, when at the same time I noticed a ten year old boy next to me taking out his own Nintendo DS. We looked at each other for a moment and smiled, asking about our respective systems. Getting curious about Metal Gear<\/em>, a game he\u2019d never played, seen or heard about, he got permission from his parents to observe a little bit of it and asked me to play a little bit. As it so happened, I had my game primed to the final boss battle of the game, the fight with the brainwashing commander Gene, and as I put it on, I decided to demonstrate to the boy the importance of one of the most fundamental holdovers of Kojimian tradition: the cardboard box.<\/p>\n

See, I\u2019d decided to experiment with this boss battle a while ago, feeling dissatisfied with it, as besides its hallucinatory hypnosis effect of producing Gene\u2019s glowing psychic eyes exactly where the player\u2019s eyes are bound to reflect on the PSP\u2019s screen, there wasn\u2019t much in terms of the structure of this fight. Frankly, I\u2019d always had some trouble with it, since it didn\u2019t have many ways to usefully employ the pattern-recognition the boss-fight convention thrives one\u2014essentially, Gene will either attack you with knives, rush you with a fatal tackle or give you his Dr. Mabuse routine. One usually precedes the other, but there\u2019s not many ways to make Gene cycle through one attack without remaining absolutely vulnerable about it, thereby making the fight mostly one of blind luck and chance. As it stands, it isn\u2019t one of the best boss-battles in Kojima\u2019s repertoire, but I felt somehow that there had to be something else going on in this fight, something more that I had to be missing.<\/p>\n

Therefore, as an experiment, I decided upon bringing in some of the more unorthodox items to use against Gene, the first of which being my old-favorite, the cardboard box. What happened was pretty remarkable\u2014wearing the coardboard box made Snake completely invulnerable to Gene\u2019s lengthy and health-consuming knife attacks. Whenever Gene threw his knives they\u2019d pass directly <\/em>above the box\u2019s top, and whenever he tried to stab up close (after creeping and looking at the box rather surprised) only the box would take damage, and not Snake. Mechanically, this allowed me to sit through Gene\u2019s most common attack quite safely and wait until his more dangerous assaults, like the fatal tackle, for which I was able to find a strategy of avoidance by running up the stairs to the stage\u2019s second level, where my enemy could not reach. The box, combined with this strategy and a shot-gun, allowed me to get the gist of defeating Gene pretty consistently, quickly and satisfyingly, as I\u2019d been able to find, at long last, a pattern of sequential-action that was both mechanically sound and thematically provocative\u2014when condescending to Gene\u2019s low level, Snake is vulnerable and can only hide in order to evade assault, but from up above he has and advantage. The gameplay communicates the message that Big Boss, like Obi-Wan, has the high ground, both morally and physically. Of course, all this interpretation was merely afterthought. What I felt most immediately after discovering this really odd bit of gameplay, truthfully, was much closer to what the ten year old boy thought when I showed him:<\/p>\n

\u201cPathetic!\u201d<\/p>\n

Well, that\u2019s not the exact word I was using in my head, and that\u2019s not entirely what he meant, either. He was impressed by how quickly I was able to dispatch with a pretty tough customer with such a thoroughly weird <\/em>tactic. He\u2019d seen games that involved brainwashing and using the physical environment to your advantage before, but he\u2019d never <\/em>even dreamed of a game in which the principal strategy for beating an enemy involved hiding in a cardboard box<\/em>. As he watched, his sequence of reactions reminded me of the first times I\u2019d watched Kurosawa, Fellini, Kubrick or Lynch at his age\u2014he found it very surprising, then a bit confusing, then absolutely stupid<\/em>, then pleasantly weird, then somewhat addictive, and finally exuberantly brilliant. Whenever Gene brought out his knives, the boy repeated \u201cHide in the box! Hide in the box!\u201d<\/em> and made jokes of the whole thing, just as I was doing. By the time it was done and I got off the train for my stop, he thought it was the funniest goddamn thing he\u2019d ever seen. I\u2019ve got no idea as to whether he\u2019ll ever play Metal Gear <\/em>(Or Hiding In a Box Game,<\/em> as he called it) but what happened on the train didn\u2019t just show something about MPO<\/em>, but helped me realize something at the heart of the portable experience that\u2019s more or less lost at home\u2014public play.<\/p>\n

Again, this is fairly elementary, but I honestly hadn\u2019t thought too much about it before this. Public play is something I haven\u2019t had too much experience with over the past three years in which I\u2019ve thrown myself back into gaming. When I was younger, of course, I played things like Super Mario Bros. <\/em>with my father, my friends and my little sister, who to this day has never been able to learn how to play anything more complicated than Wii Sports<\/em> (she still can\u2019t remember how the pieces are supposed to move in chess, of all things\u2014she was pretty fond of Extreme G<\/em>, though). In the arcades I enjoyed watching Street Fighter II<\/em> more than I did actually playing it, partly because I was stuck at that awkward elementary school developmental stage where you have the most fun watching Chun Li or Cammy flaunt their assets, but you\u2019re still not secure enough to actually allow yourself to play as a girl <\/em>(not until the might-as-well-be-naked-so-everybody-knows-you\u2019re-playing-for-the-right-reasons Felicia of Darkstalkers<\/em>, anyway). The games I was much more fond of there were the cooperative beat-em-ups, the Double Dragon<\/em>s, Final Fight<\/em>s, even X-Men <\/em>and The Simpsons<\/em> if nothing else was available. Playing with <\/em>somebody always seemed more appealing to me than playing against <\/em>them. Any multiplayer games I had at home all belonged to that variety, until one system came along, which ironically promoted much more competitive violence in its titles than you\u2019d think it would: The Nintendo 64.<\/p>\n

See, that\u2019s where I had the most fun in sheer death-match competition. All my multi-player games back then\u2014Bomberman, GoldenEye, Mario Kart<\/em>\u2014were based on running around and killing anybody willing to hook a multicolored trident gamepad up to your console. I had a great time on those games, but it was also a fairly complicated experience. All that naked violence and aggression was fine and well when I was playing by myself, but in order to do multiplayer you\u2019ve got to have somebody else there, and that can be a fairly embarrassing experience, even if you\u2019re not showing anything on your face.
\nIt reminded me of being in a movie theater, once, waiting to go see something in middle school\u2014seeing Mortal Kombat<\/em>, actually, of all things. Sitting in the lobby for kids to play while they waited for their theater to open was a large cabinet for Terminator 2: Judgement Day<\/em>, with the Uzi that you use to mow down hordes of skeletal T-800\u2019s in the future war against the machines. Being a 12 or 13 year old kid, whatever I was at the time that movie was out, I naturally felt a slight twinge of interest seeing a game like that to play, but couldn\u2019t bring myself to do it, even after I\u2019d put the money in. Instead, me and my friends played NBA Jam <\/em>until we got into our movie, and while I would\u2019ve liked to say back then it was because I didn\u2019t want to get caught up in the ugliness of all-too-real violence (though that\u2019s part of it\u2014wielding an Uzi with a Dual-Shock controller is much different from wielding a Uzi with an Uzi-shaped lightgun) or that maybe it was due to the fact that a group-oriented game was just much more polite <\/em>than a one-on-one action title, <\/em>the truth of the matter was I felt too revealed out in the open to play a game like that. I felt the same way when I was 7, guilty almost to the point of tears asking for permission and quarters to play a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles <\/em>arcade game, where everyone could see me. Playing a game like that was too personal for public, where anyone could watch you win or lose. That\u2019s a very vulnerable position if you\u2019re playing sensitively, rather than sensibly, feeling passion in the game rather than thinking out strategies to win it. At that point in my life my own magic circle wasn\u2019t developed enough to accept anything other than solitary play, because I didn\u2019t want to be surrounded by eyewitnesses. Playing alone is a very non-judgemental experience\u2014the only ones there to tell you you\u2019re not playing well enough are you and the game, and at times like that, you are often your worst enemy.<\/p>\n

This is why I kept myself to console gaming\u2014locked in your room, nobody can make fun of how you\u2019re playing. This is also why I was dependent upon the Game Boy for so long, playing with it pretty much wherever I could get away with it. The Game Boy was something really spectacular for its time, not merely because you could take it into public areas and play within your own personal space in the same way you could listen to a Walkman without being bothered by other people, but also because you could take it into private areas you didn\u2019t have the option of gaming in before. Stuff like the Game Boy, the DS, the PSP and even those rinky dinky Tiger Electronics handheld things are meant to be taken and played everywhere, into places you could never haul a TV set or computer into without costly electronics bills\u2014basically, they\u2019re designed to be taken into the bathroom, and for long trips on cars or planes, and for public transportation. They\u2019re designed for trips to your grandma\u2019s house where you don\u2019t want to socialize with relatives, so instead you go into an empty room and shut out everybody else. They\u2019re designed as excuses to be alone<\/em>, much in the same way the iPod is. That\u2019s how I experience gaming, along with the N64 experiences of personal exhilaration and public revelation, all up until 1999. That was the year, pleasant dreamers, that I gave up gaming entirely, and didn\u2019t come back for five full years.<\/p>\n

What made me drop out, so suddenly? I\u2019ll tell you: The Green Mile<\/em>.<\/p>\n

To this day, I\u2019m not sure if I really enjoy that movie, or how much I did in the first place, even, save for a few political graces it once possessed which have long since been overshadowed by others, far more prominent. 1999 was a great year for movies that I enjoyed while others either hated or didn\u2019t understand them\u2014I loved The Phantom Menace<\/em>, and still do not care how much naysayers naysay it. I loved Fight Club, <\/em>and still do no matter how much of a gimmicky clich\u00e9 it\u2019s become of the beloved underground. I enjoyed American Beauty<\/em> for a little while, but it wore off quickly, and the same can be said of my appreciation of The Green Mile<\/em>\u2014while its style was dazzling and acting not-bad, I really can\u2019t see that movie as anything other than disturbingly racialist, if not outwardly racist, in its attitudes. At the time, however, I loved it because it was a movie about the death penalty, which from the time I was eleven was a matter close to my heart\u2014at that age, I could firmly and definitively pin down my first genuine political opinions, because even a child can decide whether or not putting a human being to death is wrong, which I felt and still feel it is.<\/p>\n

Because of that I appreciated its harsh, upfront depictions of the horrors of death by the electric chair, and there was something so searingly, vividly real about that picture that I couldn\u2019t bring myself to play games anymore. After seeing the movie, I unhooked my Nintendo 64 and gave it away. I pawned off my Game Boys (I had several at the time), got rid of my collection of LucasArts bought adventure games\u2014everything. I dedicated myself to bettering my intellect, to reading as many books, seeing as many films, watching as many plays and whenever possible writing <\/em>whenever and how much I possibly could. Partly, I wanted to grow up quickly, find myself as a learned adult, be the studied type who could walk into a college party and talk extensively about Joyce with the crowd (the very fact I thought that\u2019s what college parties were like should tell you a lot about why I\u2019m so pretentious nowadays.) Part of the reason I couldn\u2019t enjoy games at that time is because I couldn\u2019t yet psychoanalyze them. It took getting a few years of college bullshit under my belt until I was able to distance myself from everything enough to be able to do that, and moreover it wasn\u2019t until I was forced to go back into the public for long periods of time thanks to forces wildly beyond my control:<\/p>\n

Jury duty.<\/p>\n

I wouldn\u2019t have been in White Plains, close to the Galleria, if I hadn\u2019t been called up, and quickly deselected, to serve on a jury of my peers (good thing, too, unless it happened to be a death penalty trial, in which case I could’ve gotten to play as a Henry Fonda stand-in amongst eleven angry…um…people). I wouldn\u2019t have gone to the Galleria if I hadn\u2019t been in White Plains. I wouldn\u2019t have bought an NES themed GBA, a copy of Super Mario Bros. 3<\/em> and A Link to the Past <\/em>if it hadn\u2019t been for all that, and pretty much everything snowballed from there. Frankly, I haven\u2019t been an avid gamer since 2004, and even then it was mostly by pure instinct that I dove back into them. It\u2019s actually quite surprising to me to look back on the fact that I\u2019ve only been playing such games as Metal Gear<\/em> for a little more than two years, and yet even that <\/em>wasn\u2019t what brought me back into the fold. In the end, it was portable gaming, that public-yet-private zone of personal space which social laws dictate nobody should ever interfere with in the same way those same rules are more or less open for arcades. Playing on a GBA or PSP, you can pretty much ignore the world even while you\u2019re enveloped by it\u2014be in the world, yet not of it anymore. That\u2019s a more invigorating experience, in and of itself, than sitting at home, locked away from everything as though you were in a cave.
\nConsole gaming feels like sleeping and having visions in bed\u2014dreaming in an empty room. Portable gaming, on the other hand, feels like having visions in your waking life\u2014daydreaming in an empty world.<\/p>\n

Now, if I\u2019ve been writing something overly personal here, it\u2019s largely because to me there\u2019s nothing in the world more personal than the experience you have while playing a game. All the other mediums out there have very personal experiences for their appreciation, but none are quite so intimate as games, in which the consumption stands almost as a facsimile of the production itself, giving you an experience akin to the actor\u2019s, the writer\u2019s, the director\u2019s instead of merely the audience\u2019s\u2014in games, they mix to such an extent that the distinction sometimes pliant enough to rest easily between them. The personal story I can latch onto games like Ico<\/em>, SotC<\/em> or even the early Zelda <\/em>games is one I can\u2019t quite explain to people in the same way you might describe how a moment in a film, play or novel made you feel\u2014whenever I play A Link to the Past, <\/em>for example, there\u2019s always a moment after rescuing the Princess and delivering her safely to the church, as the player is commanded to go out and explore Hyrule, that I have Link pause at the doorway and turn back, as though to offer one last look at Zelda before setting out on his adventure. I\u2019ve done that as far back as I can remember playing that game back when I rented it for the SNES (which isn\u2019t a good way to play a long-form game like ALttP<\/em>, by the way), purely as a performative gesture. The fact that I did it wasn\u2019t in spite of the fact nobody else was there to watch it, but rather because of it\u2014I wouldn\u2019t want to let anybody else see me delving so deeply into the game, let them know how seriously I was taking it. That\u2019s how personal games are to me\u2014they construct realities any of us can access at any moment, but most of the time we go about replaying them in ways entirely for ourselves, reliving moments more or less the way we want to remember them.<\/p>\n

Games, to a certain extent, can be seen as the fruition of allowing one\u2019s self to experience the past just like it was yesterday\u2014after you\u2019ve played a game once, it becomes a time capsule, and once you start playing it again, trying to play it the way you did before or even change it through experimentation, it becomes a time machine.<\/p>\n

Console gaming is personal, but it\u2019s private as well in a sense that one feels invaded if anyone interferes. Arcade gaming is far too social for me nowadays to put up with. Portable gaming is personal, but it\u2019s something I can share very easily, even with a perfect stranger. Therefore, until I get my feet back on the ground enough to try out Psychonauts<\/em>, I\u2019m going to track down a new GBA (my precious NES one broke many moons ago) so I can relive the experience of Link\u2019s Awakening<\/em>, a game I never finished back in the day. Before MPO<\/em> I steadfastly maintained it was the finest indigenous portable game I\u2019d ever played, and now I\u2019d like to test it against my new favorite bangaround title. Once I\u2019m ready for that, pleasant dreamers, I\u2019ll come back to detail my experiences both in the playthrough and as much as I can muster as to how it related to the environments I played them in.<\/p>\n

Until then, you know where to find me. I\u2019ll be the one hiding in a cardboard box.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Now, I’ve been keeping my distance from the blog for some time now. Mainly it’s because I haven’t had the time for it, since I’m<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":19,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/gamedesignadvance.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/110"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/gamedesignadvance.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/gamedesignadvance.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gamedesignadvance.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/19"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gamedesignadvance.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=110"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/gamedesignadvance.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/110\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/gamedesignadvance.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=110"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gamedesignadvance.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=110"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gamedesignadvance.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=110"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}