The Blogtastic Blogfest That Is Getmeoutofthis.net!

Jason Rohrer is a guy who I’m glad exists, overall. He’s just one of those insane visionary types, and you can’t help but respect his single vision and urge to create art. Many of those attempts work (Passage is pretty good, and I’ve heard great things about Diamond Trust of London, though I have not played it). Some of them don’t, really (Remember Sleep is Death? Oh man). With The Castle Doctrine, he’s kind of on his way to another failure.

I’m sure I’m not the only person writing about this. People were already complaining the moment he announced it. But I recently read an interview with him about the game on Rock Paper Shotgun, and I am just overwhelmed at how much he himself is not seeing what he’s doing and how ineffective, at best, and offensive, at worst, it is. I’ll let others ramble on about how he’s creating a world where all women are literally objects worth money, a treasure that must be protected with no free will, because that’s certainly there. There is so much he has said about this game that is just offensive. I just want to talk about how it certainly sounds like he’s not even accomplishing what he’s trying to do.

If you read the Rock Paper Shotgun interview, you’ll see him repeating one thing over and over. He wants you to care. He wants you to care about your house, your family, he wants you to care. He wants you to invest emotion into his game. He wants you to care about it! It doesn’t work without that!

I think it’s very possible to care about his game. I think the themes he is going for, of being scared, of wanting to feel secure, and of never knowing if you are or not, are very universal themes that could speak volumes and be really reflected in a game of the general sort he’s putting forward. I think I could really get into that. But the game is created to make it as hard to care as possible.

In the game, you are male, and you have a family that consists of a wife, a son, and a daughter. These characters are randomly generated and randomly named. You have no control over them. You have to protect them by building traps. If your wife dies, you lose half your money, so you best keep her alive, but there’s no gameplay reason to keep the kids alive, so, you know. Do what you will with them. Maybe they can be bait. You can also buy dogs to protect your house. They’ll probably be shot, then just you can just buy another, why not?

I’m not a male. My family does not consist of a wife, a son, and a daughter. The number of potential players who fit that description are relatively low. Even if you’re the male part of a married straight couple with two kids, one girl and one boy, the characters in the game are not going to resemble your family in any way. They’re just virtual doodads. They’re bragging rights. “My kids aren’t dead in the game yet, I’m good at this game.” That’s all it is. Rohrer sees this, and his solution was to make the wife simply be a method of keeping some of your money. So now you care about her as a person even less, since she’s simply your cash personified. Awesome.

Anyone who has played a game like the recent XCOM: Enemy Unknown knows the value of assigning people in your life to people in the game. It means more when that soldier you named after your best friend bites it, because you aren’t getting him back. Perhaps it’s not a TON of investment, but it is way more than if he was just a random dude with a random name, since that investment is probably 0, maybe a little more if he’s leveled up a few times. There’s extra agony to it, losing this monument to a relationship you find important, you know?

If Rohrer wants me to care about this virtual family, I should be able to make it like my real family, which consists of an awesome male partner and a puppy dog. I should be able to customize them to make them, and myself, look close to our real counterparts, at least as far as the graphics allow. Then I care a bit more. Then coming home and seeing the dead pixel body of my dog, Mr. Q, on the ground from where he tried to protect my house means something. Fuck, I got a pang of sadness just picturing that just now. NOW it’s important to protect the house. Now I’m invested. Roll me up a random family, and they are just stats to show my skill, and nothing more.

Rohrer claims that making the game work this way would ruin his artistic vision. He compares it to movies. Let me quote what he said.

Well yeah, but then it wouldn’t be my personal art. It would just be this pandering product. This is a game that’s from my perspective, just like in Passage the main character is me. So you don’t get to play as the girl, because I’m not a girl. Just like if you go to see the movie Memento, no-one walks out of that saying ‘why isn’t there a version of this where there’s a girl with memory problems?’ It’s the personal statement of the director who is making this and telling the story, and you don’t even question it, but for some reason in games we question it, because we’re so much stuck into the role of this character.

This is such a nonsense defense I don’t know where to begin.

In Passage, you’re playing through a linear narrative. You can change the outcome, unlike a movie, but like a movie, you’re telling a linear story. You’re telling one person’s story. As such, it’s cool to be in someone else’s shoes, and see someone else’s story. You’re on a train track to the end. It’s expected. What’s more, in a movie especially, this main character is, well, a character. It’s not a player avatar. It’s a complete person with hopes, dreams, and goals, and we see that throughout scripted scenes. Someone has crafted a person for us to engage our minds with. Even in Passage, it’s clear this character is not you. I mean, I don’t have any desire to open treasure boxes. Most people don’t. He’s a particular person. He’s a character, even if not a deeply fleshed out one.

In The Castle Doctrine, there is no character. It’s a massively multiplayer game. Everyone is making their own houses, their own way, by Rohrer’s own design. There is not a set arc. It does not reflect Rohrer’s actual reality in any way, and there is absolutely no reason to believe that the dude I am in this game is a particular person, since every player in this multiplayer game is him, any more than when I pick the Marcus Fenix skin in Gears of War, I don’t truly believe I’m playing the one and only Marcus, and nobody else is him, since tons of other people are playing as him online at that exact moment. The only character that exists in The Castle Doctrine is the character I put into it, and I’m not going to invest in those avatars without reason. Rohrer is actively discouraging me from investing with his game design. There is a reason I name every character in every game I play that lets me enter a name Alexis (or Alex if I can’t be a lady for some reason). It’s because then I’m more invested. I build that character up with skills I would want. I make them my own. I invest in them, and try to shape them into me, or a much cooler version of me who can throw fireballs.

Rohrer is right. He can make any game he wants, any way he wants. He doesn’t have to have a female playable character. He doesn’t have to let the player be gay or whatever they might want. He has that power as designer of the game. But by making these decisions, he’s not protecting himself from pandering. He’s protecting himself from success at his goal: conveying those feelings of being scared for his family and wanting to protect them. Without investment in what is going on besides being the best at the game, those feelings are not going to be felt by the player. If art can’t transfer those feelings, the type that can’t be explained in text and can’t be spoken, then it’s not very good art. Rohrer is not making very good art with The Castle Doctrine. It’s a shame, and maybe the end result will prove me wrong. But from what he’s saying, I kind of doubt it.