I’m not sure that 2011 was the Best Year Ever, for games or otherwise. 2010 was pretty good, after all – and I’ve got very fond memories of 2007. And 1998. I am however pretty sure that games have never been better. That applies accross the board: from indies making the best roguelikes and platformers to the ever-increasing fidelity and scope of mainstream games. Nothing is perfect, but there are far more worthy games out there than anyone has time to play. That hasn’t always been the case.
My game of the year, I think, was Skyrim – and I’ll return to it further down the page. It doesn’t get top billing here simply because that’s not a fight anyone wants to have with Craig. Instead, I want to talk about a game that I loved for different reasons. It didn’t make me enjoy the walk to work more because being cold is just like climbing the Throat of the World, but it did cause me to high-five my ten-year-old self in a time vortex.
Batman: Arkham City
For a game as broad as Arkham City is, its successes are grounded in something very simple: all of the basic things it asks you to do are more fun than they were in Asylum. Combat is refined, fleshed out, and sped up; exploration is more rewarding and less dependant on magic blue find-things-o-vision. Most importantly, traversal is always a smooth, enjoyable, evocative experience.
If the measure of a game was how many of its mechanics could support a challenge mode, Arkham City would be close to perfect. It’s a comprehensive example of getting the basic mechanics of play right. Put it this way: Skyrim has fast travel because Bethesda can’t figure out how to make riding a horse fun. Batman doesn’t need fast travel, because Batman is part man and part impossible hang glider.
Personally, I’m of the right age and inclination to enjoy Arkham City’s grab-bag appropriation of the Batman universe. It’s absolutely a fan’s game, in that it requires a certain interpretive generosity not to look like a box full of action figures. That’s sort of the point, though: it’s the result of grown-ups playing with their childhoods, and not being entirely able to critically discern what to include and what to cut. I’m willing to forgive it on those grounds pretty much because, put in that situation, I wouldn’t want to leave anything out either.
That said, it stands alongside Portal 2 as one of 2011’s games with an actual ending – one that is telegraphed from the start, and substantial enough to alter the open world that you return to immediately after.
There are problems, certainly. Arkham City’s portrayal of women is dreadful, and it’s only something it gets away with because it’s such a broad-ranging issue that it seems unfair to pick out a single game as a culprit. That doesn’t necessarily mean you shouldn’t: but when we do finally start seeing even-handed gender representation in games, I’d still like those games to learn from what Arkham City does very, very well: moving, exploring, and fighing.
I don’t believe in very many hard and fast rules when it comes to games, but I do believe this: that all games should allow players to express their experience in a tangible, demonstrable way. That can take many forms, but in Arkham City’s case it’s the skill with which you land on the edge of a rooftop, pick out just the right guard, swoop down upon him, and then dispatch his friends in a seamless, flowing manoeuvre where each interaction flows logically from the one to the next. It’s not about creating Skyrim-style anecdotes (“I punched a man, and then I punched a man, and then I kicked a man”) but it is about creating images loaded with power. Those images are why Arkham City is so successful as a comic-book adaptation. It’s not about references or cameos, ultimately. It’s about empowerment, roleplaying, and a fantasy realised.
The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim
Skyrim, on the other hand, is a game about anecdotes. So was Oblivion, of course, and Morrowind. Skyrim stands head and shoulders above them for a few reasons. One: this is the first Elder Scrolls game that does not require the input of a hundred modders to be enjoyable. Two: it is neither wholly dependent on random encounters or scripted events but on an intelligent merging of the two.
Everyone has a dragon story. What’s interesting is that those stories usually share the same few elements – a location, a status quo, some NPCs, and a dragon – but that each of those elements bar the last is entirely variable. That’s hardly groundbreaking, from a narrative standpoint, but the results speak for themselves. Hopefully it’s a sign that we can stop seeing emergent narrative as a kind of miraculous happening and understand that these things can be evoked with sufficiently credible AI, design and animation.
Bastion
Finally, a game about being told a story. The way Bastion uses its narrator – and to a lesser extent, its soundtrack – to guide, educate and manipulate has been well-documented elsewhere. Where I think it earns special praise is in what it does with that control, and what that control means. Bastion is about the phrase You Can’t Go Home Again. In that regard, it belongs not just to games but a whole continuum of fiction about growing up, movement, and change.
The decisions you made at the end of Bastion, providing you made them honestly, are a decent barometer of where you sit on the Can’t-Go-Home-Again-O-Meter, seeding questions in the heads of those that need them seeded and allowing the more or less comfortable to air a part of themselves that needs airing every now and then. Arkham City is about embodying a person; Skyrim is about becoming a person; and Bastion is about taking the person you are for a short, simple, meaningful turn around the block.
Also: Star Wars: The Old Republic, Dragon Age II, Battlefield 3, Portal 2
