Enforcement and Education: A short rant

Quote: We already need help in schools because of all the PC crap and not enough defined rules that teachers (and parents for that matter) can inforce without being crucified for. No wonder our children are confused about societies boundaries.


For many individuals, “enforcement” is just a way to push back with more violence and anger. And, as has been shown through the example of History, violence begets violence. You may lay the blame for this on parents, and you may be right, but as teachers, we are here to change the societal example of violence, to show that violence isn’t necessary to achieve greater things, to show that understanding and compassion help build positive communities, to show all students that there is a happier and more stable world they can grow up in without ever resorting to enforcement; when a teacher or parent tries to enforce a rule, they only give the example that pushing your will over other people is absolutely fine. Now extrapolate that out on students who are not fitting in or have some serious pent-up anger inside them.

Enforcement is the refuge of the weak who need to push their will over others.

Student productivity decreases when class sizes increase because there is not enough one on one time for students and teachers. This one-on-one time is ultimately the deciding factor as has been proven,and can only be achieved in smaller classes and more teachers. Strict rules and reinforcement only alienate the students who neither understand nor relate to the rules. And the argument “but rules are rules and everyone needs to abide by them” holds no water in a multicultural environment where all students have different values and personal beliefs. The only rule in any classroom that all need toabide by is that we look after each other and respect each other’s opinions while sharing communally in our acquired knowledge.

Healing, Injury and Death in Video Games

There is/was an interesting discussion at AWTR¹ about the healing mechanic in games and their ability to break verisimilitude in games “in a way that magic, dragons and sword-fighting don’t.” Personally, I find just dying breaks verisimilitude in games. Every death reminds me that I am just playing a game after all, and not living through an immersive experience along with the character I am controlling.

The discussion focuses intensely on RPGs because the author is “less interested in [FPS-type games] in general” but I would like to look at two games outside of RPGs as ways of exploring the idea of realistic healing, or injury, mechanics.

The first is Dead Space. One of the aspects of losing health in Dead Space is that Isaac Clarke’s body slows down and at it’s lowest starts staggering with heavy breaths. It’s a great mechanic that adds intensity to the game when you are also low on ammo and you know that the last batch of necromorphs were a struggle to dispatch and if you don’t find health soon, those next lot of necromorphs down that dingy looking corridor are going to be the ones dispatching you. It’s intense and at least semi-realistic. That is, until Isaac finds health and all of a sudden he’s back to his old boot-stomping, leg and arm decapitating self again. It’s amazing what Med-Packs can do in the future!² Could Med-Packs actually work that quickly in the future? Well, I guess it’s possible. With a little adrenalin mixed into the concoction, I’m sure a standard Med-Pack could get you back into tip-top condition almost immediately.

I would like to propose a way of getting around that in a more contemporary scenario without the mechanic causing frustration for the player. Imagine being injured; you struggle, you limp, but you can still shoot – that’s important of course, and no programmer would be daft enough to take that away from the player. But what about after finding your health pack? Do you just spring back into action like you have just been injected directly with heroin? Perhaps. If the health pack had heroin in it … So let’s assume that it doesn’t. Maybe it takes time to heal properly. Not an overly long period of time, but just enough for the player to still be cautious about what they do with themselves, where they tread, how often they recklessly poke their heads out from behind cover, knowing full well that they need to nurse that wound like their life depended on it. Because after all, that’s exactly what an in-game injury should simulate.

There is also the scenario of being able to mix different concoctions. Say a Med-Pack is slow working but heals you fully when the healing is complete, and an adrenalin pack gives you that much needed stamina boost. Mixing those two together would literally cause you to spring back into action allowing the healing pack to still do it’s work in the background³.

I like the idea of healing having a real-time consequence, especially in games like Dead Space, where your injury causes tension in high-strung scenarios. It seems to have a lot less consequence in Fantasy-based RPGs when magic is flying all over the place and healing happens as quickly as inflicting damage. In fact I want a game where being injured is a huge factor, and where injuring an NPC is just as consequential for them – they stagger, they limp, you get an easier target, but at the risk of being hit by the stray bullets that the NPC is now recklessly firing at you to try to keep themselves covered. Although I may not be a huge stealth game fanatic, Dark Souls definitely tested my patience (I passed!), while Deus Ex: Human Revolution gave me the enjoyment of choosing stealth if I desired it. Maybe it’s a case of programming, where the logistics of dividing pixel bodies up into parts that are affected accordingly might end up taking up all your programming resources. However, if Fallout 3 could do a minor simulation of it in an open-world, I don’t see why a linear shooter couldn’t do it to an even greater extent.

“The healing mechanic is perhaps small fry in relation to the overall issue of integrating storytelling and gameplay. […] But when I look at such actions from a distance, they do affect the degree to which I'm immersed in the story, and looking ways to increase immersion is never a bad thing.”(sic)

I would argue that the healing mechanic is only ‘small fry’ because no one has found a way to integrate it with a story that continues to move forward. This is where every environmental object has weight and is able to be used as cover, something to lean up against, something to rest and inject yourself with a health pack, or drink water and allow for the time to heal; a chance also to check directions, clues and inventory items. Like in Dark Souls and Dead Space where inventory checking does not pause the game, it would seem logical not to be doing this out in the open but in a secluded or safe area – the bonfires as an example in Dark Souls. Waiting for your leg to heal might be a good time to check some details with that sidekick of yours that hangs around also. I just like the idea of an injury that takes real-time to heal, creating a cautionary play-style for the player. It’s something that could do wonders for the stealth game, or the tactical horror game.

Down on page 3 of the fifteen (!) pages of comments, CultureGeekGirl says:

“I feel that the idea of death and respawning in a video game is more immersion-breaking to me than any other mechanic possibly could be. The death mechanic is deeply engrained in the way games have worked from the very start, so you have to have that to some extent, but dying always kind of jolts me out of any reality I may have invested myself in - even in really game-y games”

But no mention was made of that much maligned game Prince of Persia (2008) where death was skipped altogether and whenever you screwed up you were saved by the comforting hand of Elika. While many saw this as making the game too easy by not dying therefore not learning a lesson, few realised that it was the gameplay that didn’t make the game challenging enough, i.e. ‘teach the player anything’. Dark Souls has one of the most integrated versions of respawning to story and setting that I know of,⁴ but despite the ‘YOU DIED’ in red fading into my screen, I never actually felt like I died in Dark Souls. Sure, my humanity was stolen from me, but respawning is respawning; it’s still not dying and the game loading to a previous checkpoint as though nothing happened. Instead, it’s like being killed figuratively but still being able to keep all your memories and inventory of collectibles and losing only your souls (‘money’) and humanity (‘human spirit’), and then restarting from a previous checkpoint.

With Prince of Persia (2008) I had finally found a game that made internal sense in relation to the story that it was telling. If the character is going to win, because that’s the role of the hero in the story, then he literally can’t die. In Prince of Persia (2008) the Prince doesn’t die, he is saved each time by the hand of Elika. “Where is the fear of dying to create the challenge for the player?” asks the detractors. Admittedly, in this game, there was little challenge. But that had nothing to do with the ‘no-death’ mechanic I would argue. That had everything to do with the environmental challenges, the boss battles and the general fighting mechanics themselves being too one-button easy to traverse.

What the ‘no-death’ mechanic did was not only eliminate the loading screen, but also keep the player’s story immersion intact. Very rarely did I ever feel like I wasn’t a part of the game.⁵ Also, just as a minor note, PoP (2008) had an injury mechanic, though very basic and pretty ignorable. If the Prince was hit while in battle, he would clutch at one arm.

“The death mechanic is deeply engrained in the way games have worked from the very start.” We know, as discussed in a number of other online critiques, that win states are a simple part of gaming that drives player accomplishments, and dying seems to be tied up in the failure state. But that certainly doesn’t mean it has to be. It’s just there because so many games are combat based and death seems the logical failure of playing these games - “you’re supposed to stay alive, idiot!!” But why can’t it be “You’re supposed to traverse that area without the walls collapsing around you and setting you back at the start and needing to find a new way, idiot!!” Sounds like too much thinking would be involved. But I do like the idea of being injured setting you back as a failure because now you have to work harder to achieve the goal that you could have achieved easier if you weren’t injured. See, now that’s an injury that makes sense and would become a challenge to overcome: “Don’t get shot! No, you’re not going to die, but you are going to have to work a whole lot bloody harder at this section now that your injury is slowing you down, idiot!”

Artrant 2: From the mouth of the unlearned

“In Péguy’s time, the time of our grandfathers and great-grandfathers, the visual arts had a kind of social importance they can no longer claim today, and they seem to be in a state of utter convulsion. Did cultural turmoil predict social tumult? Many people thought so then; today we are not so sure, but that is because we live at the end of modernism, whereas they were alive at the beginning.” (p. 9)

The Shock of the New: Art and the century of change (Robert Hughes)

Space art (space environments, its ships and its people) is a form of projected realism that harks back to classicism – a time when form and the portrayal of classic themes (more often than not, representing reality) were paramount.

When art, or culture, is done and dusted with realism within the natural or man-made environment, it absolutely has to project forward and beyond in order to cover new ground of some sort, if only to avoid regurgitating the past. Abstract art and surrealism was the result of this need during the early 1900s, but now art is done and dusted with those forays as well and is asking itself “where do we go from here?”

What I see, especially on deviantART and the artwork of video games, is art projecting into the fantasy realms, not in the abstract, but through realism. Abstract art and surrealism were born from the known reality as a way of twisting it and trying to uncover the unknown; but there is little known in outerspace to begin with so most space art is a manifestation of the known – you could almost refer to it as practicalism, as many tried to understand space as environments that humans can fit themselves into and survive within, therefore realistic of our current environments. I see the work of Jim Burns as a great conveyor of this sense of realism in space, and much space art has followed on from his work. Ian Miller and John Harris are good examples of the abstract needing to express the unknown - Ian Miller’s work is where fantasy fornicates with reality; the work of John Harris is a dream state that provides little trinkets of knowledge about a far greater unknown.

What’s weird is that what I see is most space art moving away from any sense of surrealism like in the 1960s and 1970s (exaggerated spaceships of Chris Foss), beyond the abstract impressionism of Harris, and back to projected realistic environments in an attempt to grasp some kind of concrete acceptance of the unknown.

“Many people think the modernist laboratory is now vacant. It has become less an arena for significant experiment and more like a period room in a museum, a historical space that we can enter, look at, but no longer be a part of. In art, we are at the end of the modernist era…” (Hughes)

 It’s actually funny that someone can (potentially, if they haven’t already) have an art exhibition called ‘the history of space’ because of their chronicled paintings of a projected space age.

The future is a museum.

-         26/06/13, Gisborne

How Many Enterprises Can We Destroy?

Star Trek: Into Darkness has everything that both an action fan and a Star Trek fan could want: space battles, fist fights, Klingons, canon characters, aliens, a baddy who is truly threatening and Kirk giving every woman who walks past ‘the eye’.

What more could you want?

Well, for a starters, a storyline that doesn’t end just as it gets going.

One of the great failings of Hollywood producers and writers is their inability to trust an audience with more than just one thread of story – one single thread. Into Darkness was written as though the producers saw the secondary storyline they had presented us with – that of an Admiral wanting to start a war with the Klingons – as too much of a hassle to try to flesh out and incorporate further into the film so decided that it was far easier just to kill it. What we get left with is a bad guy story so standard that you could take out all SF trappings and it would be, at the most, just a second-rate action film.

Warstub, you’re being too harsh. Didn’t you enjoy it?

I certainly did enjoy it. It was action-packed with a story that kept pushing forward, that is, until I realised that it wasn’t pushing forward any more and had settled for the action sequences to wrap everything up with. ‘But, but, what about the Klingons? What about all the death that the bad guy caused while Kirk was on the Klingon home-world? Shouldn’t they be blaming humans for this and deciding to retaliate?’ Heck, with that scenario, the Admiral barely even needed to show up to try to ‘fix’ things and start the war he was after; the Klingons would have been so pissed off that they should have been gathering all Birds of Prey together and initiating a battle in space regardless of what the humans were or weren’t doing. There was this feeling throughout that the writers felt like they needed to fall back on using a canon character to draw in our attention and interest. ‘What else you got writers?’ Well, they said straight back at me, wanna see us destroy another Enterprise? ‘Gee, I don’t know. There seems to an abundance of Enterprises going down in feature length films that it almost seems old hat’ I say back at them. Oh, in that case, we’ll save it then. But just in case, here’s a really, really, big Federation ship crashing into the sea causing a massive wave of destruction and then skidding onto land and ploughing through tall buildings and killing lots of good innocent people!

And it’s not even the fall-back technique in the end – Christopher Pike, Kirk dying for dramatic effect and motivational drive, the attempt at learning human emotion through Spock and Lt. Uhura having a relationship; it’s the fact that none of these things moved together in a fleshed out storyline. Into Darkness did little more than present characters and a bad guy fighting against each other as if to do nothing more than justify itself as back-story. And don’t even get me started on the inconsistencies to canon that seemed to get thrown right out the window for the sake of dramatic effect!*

For the first half, if not even three quarters, this film was really enjoyable and actually quite strong, one I recommend but with serious reservations; and the critique that I’ve bombarded it with is really aimed at the writers and studios who never seem to balance good story with original characters and original plot. On reflection,¹ I’m actually disappointed in how much the film falls back on old characters, because if anything, that’s just a sign of not being able to come up with their own wonderful and original script. I find the story parallels to previous Star Trek films and canon actually souring my original enjoyment of Into Darkness.

“I guess less Trekkie, more action might be the short story,” Anthony Marcoly told TheWrap.² And when you look back on the story, it actually does feel short – even at a full two hours!

What is ultimately disappointing is that the writers had an action-packed bear-bones script that could have still remained faithful to canon instead of sacrificing characters that appear later on in The Original Series just for the sake of drama. That’s just poor writing as far as I’m concerned.

Is it too much to expect more in Science Fiction?

Is it too much to ask for better consistencies in extrapolated universes?

I don’t think so.

1This paragraph was written the following day.

2http://www.ign.com/articles/2013/05/12/star-trek-into-darkness-enjoys-strong-international-debut...
*Yeah, yeah, I know... "It's a different timeline" I say flippantly "whatever!" The use of TOS canon characters is what is so souring - they are only being used for dramatic effect, not as potential storylines. Pike being killed off is proof of this. NO ORIGINALITY!