How do you write about video games? Until recently, nearly all writing on games was done under the auspices of the “review,” a consumer-minded evaluation of game as product, designed to help determine whether or not a particular title was worth buying. This led to a lot of unsavory practices: scores tying aspects of the game’s presentation to arbitrary scales, meaningless comparisons to existing games (“like World of Warcraft in space!”) or gushing endorsements from sources paid for their positive coverage.
It’s true that games are products––the sales figures of any AAA title are enough to affirm that. But commercial rubrics like reviews have a habit of reducing a game down to a series of bullet points, such as regenerating health, the ability to take cover and realistic decapitations, that say little about the actual experience of playing the game. Worse, this fetishistic enumeration of features leads to reviews that criticize titles for lacking all of the characteristic bells and whistles of its genre, preempting any meaningful consideration of the game on its own merits. Imagine if movie reviews worked the same way: “While “The Avengers” contained satisfying levels of superhero violence, it lacked the transforming robot cars that “Transformers 3″ had shown were a vital fixture of the action genre.”
The problem with the review model is that it’s essentially a response to the question “Should I buy it?” The corollaries of this question––Will I enjoy it? How long is it? Is it expensive?––don’t lead to an insightful treatment of their topic. More interesting questions include: What is it like to play it, and why? What are the rules of the game, and what effects do they have on the player in combination with one another? How does the game create meaning? And what role do you play in its construction?
One game I’ve been playing recently, Brogue, gives interesting answers to all these questions. Borrowing the format and name of the 1980 dungeon crawler Rogue, the game presents an overhead view of a dungeon rendered entirely in text characters. The player is represented by a “@” symbol, a jackal by a lowercase “j,” and so on. The dungeon has 26 floors, each more dangerous than the last, and at the bottom lies the Amulet of Yendor, which you can retrieve to win the game.
Death in Brogue is permanent and means starting the game over from the first floor, but the topography of the dungeon and the placement of its inhabitants are different with each new attempt, meaning you’ll never play the same game twice. Unlike many seemingly more complex games that force you along a linear narrative, Brogue is unpredictable––the same azure potion that healed you last game could poison you the next, forcing you to consider your actions carefully and stay alert to your surroundings.
The enemies, items and features of the landscape all interact with each other in meaningful ways: gas-filled bloats explode when hit and fill the air with a caustic vapor, forcing you to dispatch them from afar or contain the gas behind a door––or you can sneak past and avoid them entirely. Even though winning is nearly impossible, the stories Brogue tells––with your help––are compelling enough to make even dying fun.
Brogue is free, and can be downloaded for Mac and PC at https://sites.google.com/site/broguegame/.
