This post eventually gets around to a long discussion of “Red Tide” by Neko Case

I just realized I could’ve done a whole series of awful “Criminal“-related titles for these Thief posts – the Thief II one could’ve been  “I’ve been a bad, bad girl/I’ve been Karras with a delicate man,” and, of course, the morality post, “I’ve done wrong, and I wanna suffer for my sins.”

Hindsight.

Anyway, it’s probably for the best. It’s easy to ruin a great song by associating it too much, even jokingly, with something literary or nerdy. I’ve already done this to Neko Case’s deadpan cover of “Never Turn Your Back On Mother Earth” by connecting it with Thief’s dangerous nymph Viktoria, but like Viktoria I have no regrets.

I’ve obviously drifted quite a distance from this blog’s original music focus, for the simple reason that my short- and long-term obsessions are rarely musical and I’m better at talking about other things (unless the musicians are Kristeen Young and Morrissey and so on, people whose writing is knotty/plotty/referential, and therefore more suited for a fiction person like me). But while I’m talking about Middle Cyclone, “Red Tide” is the best thing I’ve heard since Music For Strippers:

It feels so dark and inexorable. I think it’s about the abuse of nature, and how so many romantic and nostalgic American images are inseparable from that abuse (“there’s a smell here of gravel, and cigarettes lit/when the match made them sweet/when the engine turned over…”), and then she twists it all into an apocalyptic sketch, which all makes me wonder if “that was a day…to remember” is a reference to my childhood obsession, the Titanic. If so, it’s very subtle, and therefore the only good kind of Titanic reference.

The fevered “I want to go back and die at the drive-in/die before strangers can say/’I hate the rain, I hate the rain!’” (a strongly musically emphasized line, spoken in obvious passion, which is interesting given how much she distances herself from this strange remark in the actual lyrics) gets at some kind of truth about Fifties nostalgia, a truth that -if she’d spelled it out- might have been dubious and dull. Instead it hits like a hammer to the side of the head. Which I’ve recently experienced quite a lot in virtual form.

All I need is a good defense, ’cause I’m feeling like a criminal.

In true fantasy fashion, this concludes a trilogy of posts which will eventually have one more sequel. The past two were about why I loved Thief II; this one will be about why I can barely stand Thief III, and I’m leaving things open for some eventual commentary on the first game. After a break.

First, for the record, I know it’s not called Thief III, but Thief: Deadly Shadows. The studio’s refusal to use a numeral -one of their many attempts to appeal to new players by avoiding the appearance of a sequel- is only one of the silly naming issues that plague the series, starting with the pleasantly literal title (after I finish Thief, I may play a couple of rounds of Violent Guy, or even load up Puzzle Solver for old times’ sake), continuing with the vague subtitles (in our house, we cut to the chase and simply call the games Thief: The Dark Problem, Thief: The Metal Problem and Thief: Deadly Problems) and inevitably cumulating in Eidos’ much-giggled-over, probably not-even-serious decision to call the next sequel Thi4f. So I’ll stick with “II” and “III,” if that’s okay with you, and let our respective gods sort it out.

I also know I’m in 2004 right now. I was in 2000 earlier; we’re still moving forward.

So here you are, making a sequel to a beloved duo of aging PC games. You know they already have a dedicated fan base, but you want to expand your audience; you’re also doing a console version this time, and you’d really like to streamline this game -a relic of the late nineties, with its massive nonlinear levels- into something that’s both comfortable on a console and appealing to people who aren’t familiar with all the mythology. How do you do that?

Apparently, you change your steampunk noir to something that is, at least spiritually speaking, a fantasy RPG. And that means -for our first Deadly Problem- derailment for the main character. This sounds strong, but the transition from a noir hero to an RPG hero is more drastic than you’d think, and a character derailment can be devastating to a game so driven by a certain kind of wish-fulfillment.

See, noir heroes are essentially passive. They’re highly competent characters, but the Man is always in their way; he needs their services, but he won’t give them a home. In Garrett’s case, he spent most of the first two games being ushered from one mission to another by political forces far beyond his control or understanding. His egoism, empty wallet, disdain for others and surprising naivete left him wide open to flattery, unlikely financial offers, and other obvious manipulation.

Whereas RPG heroes are essentially active. In fact, they always have to be the most active characters in any room; the only ones brave and smart enough to take the risks and make the hard decisions. Now, it’s not impossible that Garrett could be an RPG hero. He’s enormously charismatic and well-drawn for a game protagonist – but those standards are not high; outside a system where the reader/viewer/player is expected to do serious imaginative work, he’s still largely defined by what he does. That means an easy re-definition. And he wants his independence badly, which could very easily lead to a more dominant plot role (especially if he snaps from frustration, as he already sort of does at the end of Thief II).

My problem is in the execution. For sneaky, downtrodden Garrett to be believable as an active hero -while remaining vaguely recognizable as the character we know- the game has to use some narrative tricks that rarely come off well: surrounding him with characters more passive than himself, and stretching his existing motivations too far. It’s true that the Keepers are deadlocked by definition, and that Garrett at the end of II is strongly motivated to find out what they know and how he can push things in a favorable direction. But when it comes to the scenario where the game lost me -the Keepers are meeting; Garrett is with them; he proposes a plan which is briefly considered and then ignored; he sweeps out, coldly saying, “you’re forgetting something: I don’t take my orders from you”- you’ve gone too far; you’ve re-cast the character.

It’s not because what he does is out-of-character (though its consequence is shockingly so). This kind of instinctive “you’re not my dad!” sulk is part of his accepted pattern of behavior, especially regarding the Keepers, and he even did something similar at the end of Thief II. The difference was that -unless someone failed hard- the II storm-off was not presented as a heroic moment, but as Garrett simply flipping out, being irrational. His alliance with Viktoria and her priestesses, despite their ugly past, had been solid and productive, even friendly; he left solely to preserve his independence, missed the fight, nearly ruined everything, and only came back to save the world because his friend pleaded with him. If this was meant to reflect well on him, I’m missing something, but that’s precisely why it was good storytelling: the game kept you empathizing with the character even as he acted idiotically.

This worked, I think, because Garrett’s character in Thief II is (once again) about a specific kind of player wish-fulfillment. You’re burnt-out, you’re broke (at the start of the second mission, Garrett bemoans his brutal landlord and his recently dashed dreams of retirement); everyone runs all over you; you have no physical advantages over other people, and you have a lot of difficulty dealing with them in conversation. Your only solace is knowing you’re the best at what you do. In other words, the game valorizes, though not beyond reason, the kind of person who might enjoy playing it.

Whereas Garrett’s character in Thief III is about another kind of wish-fulfillment: telling your dad off. Being the only person who ever gets anything done around here; the only one who’s ever right, who takes the risks — but mainly telling your dad off, because you are not a slacker, and you do have self-control (the Keepers actually totally do accuse Garrett, in nearly so many words, of being a slacker and having no self-control).

Besides (Thief III continues) – your real friends appreciate you. All you have to do is leave the house to know it. All the other criminals are your buddies; they think you’re brilliant – the women throw themselves at you; the men pretend to be you to impress the gullible. (Contrast to Thief II, in which you had more realistic contacts – friends, respectful and less-respectful co-worker types, and guys who’d sell you out without a second thought). Anyway, you’re the fucking best at what you do, and that’s not just a consolation, that’s what you are.

If the execution had made more sense, Garrett’s increased autonomy could have been a logical character evolution. But since you’re being asked to relate to being Garrett in such a completely different way -to see him as an opportunity to feel bold and well-admired, rather than empathize with him as a slightly idealized version of you- the game doesn’t seem like a logical offshoot of its predecessor. The character doesn’t connect with his past self, even though he’s still voiced by Stephen Russell, a fifty-foot-tall man who intones into a microphone implanted directly in his throat as he fondly gathers the player into his giant lap.

It doesn’t help that there’s also been a huge sideways turn in the worldbuilding. I mentioned that one of the things I liked about Thief II was that it reproached bad moral decisions with pathos rather than punishment, and III does that too, but not as well. The pathos tends to come in the form of being told off; killing is no longer inherently horrific. This is mostly because they take your sword away, and now you can only kill by backstabbing people, which is quick and quiet and doesn’t give you a sense of the weight of what you’re doing. Sure, it was silly for a thief to carry a sword in the first place, but it’s a damned videogame; if I can suspend my disbelief that Garrett can carry an infinite number of goblets, than I can suspend my disbelief that he can carry a sword.

The world is also different in more concrete ways. Many of the interesting trademarks of the Thief II universe -the things that would’ve signaled this as a sequel with the same traits- are missing: the mixed-gender guards (with the interesting sense that the female ones were particularly zealous and brutal, moving into a newly open field and eager to impress); the rapidly modernizing city; the long, claustrophobic underwater sequences; the sense of dangerously supernatural, rather than controllably magical, forces at work.

Now here Garrett is with magic gloves that let him scale walls like fucking Spider-Man. He also drowns on contact with water, and dodges a conga line of interchangeable dudes in chainmail. And it really is jarring that, suddenly, most women in the everyday world are wenches of some kind. The only women whose response to you is asexual are the lone female criminal and the over-50 set (who are also, for some reason, all British).

I realize that to explain all this, I need only return to my mantra of “the game was trying to appeal to new players; it had to take a more conservative turn” — but why does this have to be so? All players were new players once, and somehow the Thief series still has a fan base. Even if you have to Year Zero it, what’s to stop you from using elements from the older games, given proper explanation? Where, for example, is the Mechanist technology from Thief II? It wasn’t all destroyed in the end of the game; it had been installed all over town, the whole society was rapidly technologically evolving — but nobody alive now has the savvy to fix it. Omitting it is not just an inexplicable worldbuilding decision; it’s a great missed opportunity for atmospheric decay. Robots in growing disrepair, inexorably dimming electric lights, perhaps even some trouble with Garrett’s mechanical eye (whose continued perfect functioning is beginning to mystify me).

But the real punch in the face of Thief II is the changes in the City. This, even more than the changes in Garrett’s character, even more than the backslide into medievalism, is what kills the noir.

I know that people complained about the breaking-up of the city levels -with those awkward portals connecting them- to accommodate the Xbox’s memory. This alone is a problem, but the real issue is simply that the City is not big enough; not dark enough; insufficiently inhabited. In the second game (where you essentially parachuted into all your missions) it was a hellish, organic maze, dark and unpredictably guarded, with defined public spaces, squares, courtyards and varied, accessible roofs; in the third (where you have to hack through the town on your way to every mission, and therefore see the entire world, such as it is, every day) it’s a low, bright area which is plainly trying to appear organic, but doesn’t, because you always remember one of those damned mystic-smoke transition points in your immediate past and anticipate one in your future, and also because it looks like fucking Hogwarts. Why does the light sparkle? Why is the sense of scale gone? Where are the squares and alleys? Why does this city have no public spaces, no market, financial sector, and almost no commerce of any kind?

Especially that last. Virtually the only transactions that take place are in thieves’ stores. Explain that whole idea if you can: purveyors of illegal items maintain clearly marked storefronts; the ubiquitous cops never enter their unlocked doors. Sure, you had a screen to buy water arrows in II as well, but I always assumed -I don’t know- that you got them in the backs of bars from guys called Creepy Pete. Or from seedy, well-hidden storefronts that posed as antique shops. Or something other than a Mae West impersonator behind a single counter with five items on it.

Honestly, you shouldn’t even have that much focus on how you get your water arrows. The more that happens, the more the player wonders what the ever-loving fuck water arrows are.

I realize that I’m leaning way too hard on Thief III, just as I was slightly too gentle on Thief II – I’m willing to forgive a lot of flaws for a believable world, and I’m very unsparing when disappointed. If I were a little less focused on character and a little more focused on technical strength, I think I’d have a very different (and much kinder) perspective. It might also help if I finished the game.

Related:

I liked this take on the Thief series, looking at it specifically as a trilogy, and discussing its “strangely life-affirming” nature.

This article on Ken Levine -the force behind Bioshock, and apparently heavily involved with Thief as well; I know so little about development, Christ!- is a great contrast to my Thief vs. Bioshock post on morality systems. He’s comparing the same games (though the first rather than the second Thief), and also with an eye toward their portrayal of morality and religion, but through a completely different lens. It’s worth reading just for the point about writers using Bioshock as a universal negative contrast, of which I stand justly accused.

Th1ef, Thi2f, Thi3f

Finished Thief II. I loved it like family, but I can’t say it’s my new favorite game — I hated the last level so much that I asked my partner to finish it for me; this may be a sign that I’m not going to blow the dust off Thief II and lovingly place it in the shadowbox beside Portal and Half-Life 2. I mean, that’s how you’re going to top ten hours of staggering, if not always fully realized, ambition? Two hours of factory work?

Well, fine. I admit it is very ambitious factory work.

But like I said, it’s still a brilliant game, one from which I would like to learn. Even nothing else about it were good, I’d be impressed that Thief II can leave so much of the drama to the player’s imagination (the game’s all about what you think about in the agonizing pauses, while you wait in a closet for the guards to calm down) while still relying on cutscenes to get the player from mission to mission, having Garrett chat to you every time he has an idea or needs to pee, and bugging the player with a shopping list of “objectives”:

Garrett will die if he doesn’t drink some milk soon. Find some milk in the fridge.

The guards here are very fast. Try to move slowly to defeat them better.

Failure is the mark of an amateur. Don’t fail or your mom will know.

The game gets away with this constant interference because it prioritizes so well; it leaves reasonable tasks -such as, oh Jesus, reading the map- to the player, and lets the character do the rest. Essentially, instead of playing a character where the required disbelief-suspension is “this violent man can get shot every day,” you play one where the required disbelief-suspension is “this sneaky man can hide effectively by standing against a dark surface; he can also figure out the plot, which is a good thing, since I’m busy maneuvering him clumsily through the doors upon which he continually gets stuck.”

(I am happy to report that, by 2004’s Thief III, the developers had successfully transformed Garrett from an invisible block to a grotesque marionette, and therefore you can now get through doors 100% of the time.)

Anyway, that brings me to my main point, which is that the writing of Thief II is really good. Yes, it all leans toward the hokey, we all know that; most game writing does (and maybe has to; is there an Uncanny Valley for words? Is this why literary realism rarely works for me?). But the plot is an extremely solid supernatural mystery. The worldbuilding is straight but self-aware fantasy, and surrounded as we are by fantasy that’s either parodic or unintentionally parodic, that’s an impressive thing. It is especially nice that the religions make sense.This is partly because they’re straightforwardly ripped from medieval Catholicism and generic paganism, but why not, if you can execute it well? And with a base that everybody understands, you can riff and expand on things freely — hence the convincing sense of tradition when Karras expounds, even somewhat esoterically, on the gospel of the Builder.

Speaking of which, some credit probably goes to the direction, but Stephen Russell’s voice acting (as smooth, sarcastic asshole hero Garrett and the perpetually disappointed-in-you, Droopy Dog-sounding, bizarrely approachable villain Karras) is outstanding and does much to carry the game. If you read these lines, they do exactly what they should. When he says them, they’re nuanced, tragic and often quite funny. It’s a performance I’d put with Ellen McLain’s in Portal.

I actually think Russell is even better as Karras; the performance breaks every reasonable law of voice acting (starting with the fact that it’s plainly a cartoon voice; ending with the fact that Karras has a very limited emotional palette, ranging essentially from “me” to “ME!”) — and still manages to contain an enormous energy and pathos. Part of it is that, due to technological limitations and storytelling prowess, you barely ever see Karras. Instead, you hear him on a loudspeaker, or as the recorded voices of his clunky steam-powered robots. The contrast between his silly voice repeating the same three lines and the robots’ brutal lethality, all encountered at unpredictable moments of unrelated tension, is very effective at generating new moods and shades of nervousness. It’s an entirely mental effect which, again, the gaming industry has spent the ensuing nine years trying to replicate with increasingly complex AI.

(Valve later used the chatty-invisible-cartoon-villain trick in Portal, and seems also to have lifted the idea -and some of the content- of Karras’ final speeches during Half-Life 2. It’s not like the developers of Thief II invented the loudspeaker, but the similarities are striking. Not that I mean any criticism by this. It worked just as well the second time.)

Where to end? It was a great game which, quite often, I wanted to murder. It was slow, hard to get used to, klutzy, with a hero who can’t put down useless items except by throwing them with the full force of his personality. (It’s hard to tell the gold candlesticks from the iron ones when you’re in a hurry, and it is precisely when you are in a hurry that it’s least helpful to fling them against the wall and make a giant clanging sound, Garrett. Honestly, you are like a petulant goddamn child, and if you do that one more time, I’m not sticking a keyboard in your butt and making you do stupid things anymore.)

But on the other hand, I actually thought that! These characters feel real, to the point (even) where you gleefully want at least two of ‘em to get a room, and you normally hate unresolved co-worker/partner love/hate sexual tension like the lazy, stupid characterization device it almost always is. Every person who writes fiction can learn something from this game. I’m not sure exactly what, but I’ll keep thinking about it.

First-person shooters, second-person morality. Also: by Karras, a weed!

Because I love to reach out to an ever-smaller audience, here it is: a gaming post. We’ve come so far.

I recently ran out of good first-person shooters, and squawked incoherently at my partner until he suggested Thief III, which I hated. I couldn’t get used to the stealth game; because of the more complex and harder-to-simulate choices involved, it has to be more stylized than a shooter, and III is not good enough -just makes too little internal sense, and sacrifices too much worldbuilding for the sake of graphical cuteness- to make me want to learn the required intuitions. Fortunately, the uglier but better Thief II clarified the appeal. It was intriguing that I was meant to sneak around the levels, avoiding killing when possible — and that when I did kill, the game made no clumsy effort to double-underline my guilt. It trusted me to feel bad on my own. Why, I wondered, was this so rare?

I’m only what my partner calls a “casual hardcore” gamer, and so I was surprised to learn that a lot of shooters do tell you whether to feel bad about what you’ve done. Their endings depend on how discriminately you fire. The first one he remembers was from ‘97 (Star Wars Jedi Night: Dark Forces: The Guy-Shooting Game On: Your Computer); more recently, similar systems were used on Bioshock and Fallout III, which I’ve played myself.

Bioshock’s morality system was particularly thought-provoking because it fit with the game’s plot and themes (you learned about free will while fighting your way through an undersea Art Deco wonderland full of psychotic Ayn Rand fans with magic powers — and yes, when I put it that way, it sounds fun; fuck you, Bioshock! -Sorry. -Sorry).

The thing was that Bioshock was a silly disappointment as a meditation (I hate that word in this context, and use it only of things I dislike) on the morality of killing. Even if you didn’t murder little girls for the magical power-ups they stored in their bellies (the choice which actually decided your fate), you spent the whole rest of the game killing violent masked acrobats with increasingly complex and inventive conventional, biological, magical and chemical weapons. There was not any obvious reason why this had to be so. I got through the whole game on Easy with a fireball and a shotgun. And all that was fine. Straight to the good ending, so long as you kept your hands off the little girls.

I don’t think I particularly need to list what’s wrong with all that. You can choose to kill only in self-defense, and you can choose not to kill innocents, and you can choose to kill relatively gently, but you can’t choose not to kill. More importantly, you can’t choose what your various murders mean. The game has decided for you. Little girls are innocent (even if they’ve been “genetically” altered into walking power-ups with identical, plainly unnatural personalities). If you kill one, you are a bad person, even if you kill her because you just want to continue playing the game (and have been informed onscreen that, without the power it’ll provide, this will be enormously difficult). Conversely, killing some fugue-stater with hooks for hands is good, even if they attacked you while under various autonomy-erasing influences. Those people chose to read Ayn Rand, shoot up with magic drugs, and go crazy.

Bioshock is a good game on many levels -it has at least one masterfully cinematic cutscene, some very nice writing, and beautiful art- but it claims, as a major selling point, to insist that the player make choices based on a complex valuation of human life, and it plainly does not.

Do I need a game to do that? No. But I really need it not to be so openly hypocritical. Bioshock did somewhat make me reconsider the first-person shooter and what it asks you to do, but I’m not sure I needed to do that. It’s like asking someone to question the mainstream action movie. Can you do this on symbolic grounds, in terms of its social coding and so forth? Of course, and in general you probably should. But should you question what it does to the action hero’s psyche to open that airlock and let the space soldiers pour out? No. Why? Because the mainstream action hero is not a character. He’s a cipher, and the only interesting thing is what’s being done with the cipher.

Arguably, of course, the FPS hero is different from the action-movie hero in that you live in his head, and you do inevitably start to wonder what it’d be like to actually be him (or her, in maybe two cases). I’ve lain awake wondering when Gordon Freeman sleeps. But the main thing is that it doesn’t matter; it wasn’t killing me that I didn’t know when Gordon Freeman sleeps, because a wild unrealism is part of the nature of the thing — an unrealism in which empathy is largely impossible, and in which moral choice (since it has no resemblance to anything most people experience in everyday life, and only the most insulting resemblance to warfare)  is more or less irrelevant.

Besides, it’s not as if I’d have actually done any of these things, which renders the whole education even more moot. In reality, I would’ve drowned long before the game offered me the non-option of not shoving a mysterious syringe full of lightening, which I’d found at the base of an abandoned vending machine, into my arm.

Thief II, in contrast, does nothing whatsoever to suggest or reward moral choice. Yet in this game, I rarely kill anybody, and when I do, I feel a realistic awareness of the moral consequences of these deaths. What does Thief II do that Bioshock doesn’t?

1. It bothers to establish the hero’s personality and identity. Garrett is a thoughtful, cynical career burglar with a rigorous sense of professionalism (no killing), relentlessly abused by police and exploited by underworld factions. A standard enough trope, sure -pure noir- but that only helps you get into character. The more you want to roleplay the hero, the more likely you are to identify with what he does and make choices you’d actually stand by.

2. In Thief II, it is very difficult to kill at a distance, and killing close up is an agonizing and disgusting process. What the graphics lack (the game’s from 2000, and the characters do not show injuries, aside from a few apathetic blood drops spurting from an unbroken shirt) is made up for in sound design: thwacks, clangs, crunches, screams. Garrett screams too. You do not want to be there.

3. Even though most of them are voiced by the same dude, the developers still put a lot of effort into developing the guards and servants and cultists. They chat and talk to themselves and whistle and so forth, and when they’re badly hurt, they get afraid and run away from you.

There! That’s how to generate empathy! That’s how you make the player feel bad about murdering dozens of people! You don’t need a different ending, all you need is sound and imagination. It’s not that hard, and if you don’t do it right, it is very apparent that your priorities are hopelessly conflicted between wanting the player to feel his enemies’ pain, and arming him to an increasing degree of omnipotence. Nobody who’s played that fucking submarine level will call Thief II perfect, but if we’re going to talk about morality, it gets everything important right.

I love E.M. Forster

I just reread A Room With A View. I think it’s probably my favorite Forster novel.

I never liked so much the books that have actually entered the canon, his later, longer, more serious, less youthful novels; they’re eminently sane and honest, but I love the freshness of A Room With A View, its impatience with stuff like sane character establishment and linear time, its shameless pedantry. Usually I balk at pedantic novels (and most of them are), but Forster is one of those teachers who shames most of the actual profession. You couldn’t fault him for writing instructively any more than you could fault any person who breaks a rule made for less talented people.

Exactly what Forster teaches is probably a question I should leave to him – in the early novels, it’s usually about differentiating between oneself and others, something to do with accepting passion, and the choice between caring for sincerity or for harmony, but since I’m not a natural teacher, I can grasp his points without doing them justice. In my hands they make the wincingly easy transition from philosophy to platitude.

Forster teaches mainly by example, and mostly by showing failed characters.  This sounds brutal and dull, and it’s true that he presents life as a series of errors and disasters, with ostracization the only alternative to assimilation into an inherently hateful society – but he’s actually an extraordinarily gentle and nonjudgmental writer. It helps that likes his characters, isn’t partisan (presenting bohemia and suburbia as complementary traps), and is always frankly chatting away at the reader in his own voice, which helps to avoid the impression of a sugared pill. In general, Forster’s insistence on dictatorial control over the narrative (Miss Lavish and Miss Bartlett would never say so many double entendres if he weren’t behind the curtain) is a very flattering trait in a certain kind of author.