Early Thoughts on Thief (2014)

I am the night! This is my thieving corset!

Thief: The Dark Project pioneered the concept of a stealth computer game; in particular a first-person stealth computer game. It wasn't the only game using stealth, but it was just about the only one where being forced to actually fight was a fast-track to a hole in the dirt. It brought us the light gem (a wonderful addition to a stealth game because it means that concealment is not reliant on your estimation of depth of shadow and at the mercy of your brightness settings), pickpocketing, lock picking and of course the sneaky blackjack to the brainpan. It brought us also Garrett, the master thief, a snarky loner in a city full of snarky loners. Finally, it brought us two sequels: The Metal Age and Deadly Shadows.

After a decade long hiatus, the franchise was revivied with Thief, and by many estimations immediately shove back into the grave again and the headstone defaced. Thief did not receive a standing ovation. I have only picked it up because it was cheap, and came with the original games for me to take another swing at.

My immediate impression was 'holy shit, did the franchise that Dishonoured knocked off come back with a serious intention to return the favour?' It's as if they took the basics of Thief and Dishonoured them up, from the illuminated stealable items (essentially there seems to be a particular lustre to items that are not nailed down) to the grittier incapacitation move (instead of a swift conk to the noggin, you move in for a choke before smacking them in some kind of nerve cluster.

The backstory adds some pointless emo (your disappointingly bloodthirsty student was apparently killed when some old dudes summoned a ball of energy bigger than their heads and you have some guilt for nicking her homemade climbing/murdering tool*) and the supporitng characters homage spit on the original game. In The Dark Project one of your missions is to spring Basso the Boxman, supposedly so you can get friendly with his sister; in a call back in The Metal Age you then have to help Basso spring his fiancee Jenivere from indentured servitude. In Thief, Basso is at best a seedy serial monogamist and at worst some sort of rapacious Bluebeard and Jenivere is his pet magpie.

The new Garrett has also been dressed by Man at image Comics.

The game also has a lot of supernatural gubbins, and yet drops the Keepers, the pre-existing explanation for Garrett's preternatural skills, in place of an as-yet unexplained 'focus vision' which makes enemies, travel routes and stealables glow blue and allows a degree of Matrix-y time dilation. The fact that this ability is fuelled by opium should be a warning.

The world of Thief is a gothic-industrial hellhole with elements of Steampunk. It's not a million miles from the original, but post-Dishonoured it seems a little derivative, especially with the original antagonists (the pseudo-Catholic Order of the Hammer) replaced by some bad aristocrats ruling with an iron hand (and admittedly some wizardry.) Remakes are difficult beasts, but all in all this Thief feels like it has less invention and innovation than the original, and that isn't a good way to go.

Still, I've got the originals now.

* Also, apparently Garrett the 'Master Thief' can't climb shit without 'the Claw'.

Revenge Solves Everything

When stealth runs go wrong...

In Dishonored you play a good man brung low by the iniquities of the tyrannous, or so we are told. The truth is, you have options, few of which are entirely suggestive of a good man, but rather offer you a choice between a brutal 'poetic' justice and the razor-edge finality of personal vengeance. The Loyalists who spring you from prison to aid their cause speak of your unique contribution, and given that at that stage you haven't gained the favour of the Outsider yet, there really is only one thing that you, as Corvo Attano, are much better at than almost anyone: Making people into dead people.

I guess it's true what they say about a good man going to war.

The defining characteristic of a run in Dishonored is its level of 'chaos'. To what extent have your actions increased the general shittiness of the crapsack city of Dunwall? The primary factor determining this level is how many people you have killed, be they enemies, civilians or even the barely more-than-zombie weepers in the final throes of the rat plague; corpses mean chaos and chaos means corpses, as more chaos means more rats, more weepers and more death.

So, a low chaos run is the 'good' path, right? Well, sort of. It's probably the better path, overall, but it's not a nice option. As noted before, the nonlethal options are in a lot of ways nastier than honest murder, however much 'justice' may be attached to them. The High Overseer is a corrupt and monstrous hypocrite who uses his 'faith' as a maul against others while violating its strictures for shiggles. Among his crimes are the abduction of children to be trained as Overseers and the murder of a prostitute (or three) he believed to be blackmailing him. There is a certain narrative symmetry in exposing his crimes simply by marking him as anathema to his own order. Likewise, Slackjaw the gang boss will proudly explain how apt his punishment for the Pendleton twins is, having them shipped off as mutilated slaves for their own mines.

Whatever they may have done to deserve these fates, and however much they may avert the increase of chaos in the city, it would take a warped perception indeed to see them as a righteous course. Rather, the point of Dishonored is more that there is no righteous course. As Bioshock Infinite subverted the moral path of its predecessor by presenting choices that were mechanically meaningless and all led to the same deterministic ending, so Dishonored subverts the same expectations by providing equally or more horrid alternatives.

But why, you might fairly wonder, do these acts of horror produce less chaos than a simple kill? Perhaps it is because there is an appearance of social justice, in place of personal vengeance. When you brand Campbell you force the state to treat him as if he had earned the brand (and, as various notes will tell you, he has done.) The disappearance of the Pendletons is more mysterious, but less personal than the discovery of their stabbed corpses in the Golden Cat 'bathhouse'. When the assassin strikes, the city is at the mercy of a lone nutter with a shiv; when shit happens...

I guess that's just Chinatown.

Many articles have considered the question of Corvo's dishonour, and by what standard, if any, his conduct after the prison break can be considered 'honourable'. Some, in particular this article, make the point that while to an 18th/19th century pseudo-British perspective his actions (spying, murdering, witchcraft, trap setting and bomb throwing) are appalling, they adhere rather more to the vendetta code of the Mediterranean, and in particular Italy.

I would like to make a different point, and one only tangentially related to the protagonist's concrete conduct. Consider the discussion on the boat as Samuel returns Corvo and the rescued Lady Emily to the Hound Pits Pub. Samuel praises Corvo for 'doing the business' on the Pendletons. "What business is that?" Emily asks, to which Samuel awkwardly replies: "Grown up business, m'lady."

Emily is the future Empress of the Isles, although she is yet a child, but the Loyalists shelter her from their own actions and arrange for her to be instructed in etiquette while they plan insurrection on her behalf. Is this because she is a child? Perhaps, but perhaps it is because the dishonour is not Corvo's at all. Corvo was never an honourable man, although perhaps he was once a good one. It is the Empire that is dishonoured by the murder of the Empress and the ascendancy of a treacherous spymaster.

We're never actually told whether the late Empress was an effective ruler, but she was the rightful ruler, and Emily is the figurehead of the Loyalists not because she is expected to be perfect, but because she is the rightful heir. Her ascension to the throne is just and proper; it is the honourable thing, however terrible the deeds that lead to it.

Corvo Attano is not a shamed man fighting to regain his honour. His honour, such as it is, was always a bloody and personal thing and no frame in the world could have taken it from him. Rather, he is fighting for the honour of his country, his Empress, and for his daughter figure if not actually for his daughter. Like Serenity's Operative, he is the monster whose deeds bring about a better world than he has a right to live in. He is the scapegoat who bears the sins of all; or perhaps the angel with the fiery sword standing at the east gate of Eden, protecting paradise but ever standing with his back to its perfection.

The Escapist article also notes that Corvo is the weapon of the conspiracy, rather than a member. I would note also that the Loyalist nobles never give Corvo directions on how to undertake their missions. They are King Henry asking who will rid them of a turbulent priest, and none of their doing if the means of ridding are not within the rules of war. Maybe they thought that he would call the Pendletons out properly, as with Lord Shaw and the bizarre duel by proxy, or at least intended to claim so if the awkward questions were ever asked.

This of course begs the question of the nature of Corvo's work for the Empress. He is referred to as her bodyguard, but his skill set is not typical of that profession. His alertness is given no special note, his defensive fighting is of a fairly common standard. As I noted in the opening, what Corvo Attano is good at is taking alive people and making them into dead people. If he protected the Empress it was surely through the knowledge that attacking her could elicit a visit - just one - from the Lord Protector. One wonders if the 'bodyguard' job wasn't just a cover to explain his frequent proximity to the Empress, or if the Lord Protectorship might have been his door to a world of honour; a door slammed in his face when he is forced back to the path of the assassin.

Poor Corvo; was he ever destined to be more than a blade in the hands of an Empress, of a conspiracy, or of a remote and uncaring player? Is the whole game really a comment on the psychology of the first person shooter?

Gamergate, or how I learned to start worrying and hate the comments

I've written before on sexism in gaming, specifically Ubisoft's Assassin's Creed Unity, but I've not mentioned Gamergate. As a casual gaming commentator, this feels remiss; like a home design pundit refusing to at least acknowledge the statement of an indoor pachydermal installation.

I'm not going to go into background detail, as anyone reading this journal almost certainly knows them, but just in brief: Gamergate is a movement within the gaming community dedicated - they say - to the purity of gaming journalism and the elimination of the corruption created by certain female game designers and critics determines to use sex to foist a gynocentric agenda on the holy, phallocentric temple of gaming. In reality, it is a campaign of toxic hatred targeting female critics and designers, ranging from passive-aggressive comments to actual death threats.

I find the whole thing to be upsetting, not just because people like Zoe Quinn (the designer of the indie game Depression Quest) and Anita Sarkeesian (of the Youtube channel Feminist Frequency and, specifically, the critical video essays Tropes vs Women in video games) have been subjected to such a vicious tide of vitriol and hate, but because it reveals a level of toxicity which I would not have thought possible. The sustained death threats are bad enough, or the threats of rape, but what truly shocks me, after a decade and a half of regular internet access, is that there are people on the internet, people who purport to represent a community of which I am a peripheral member, who actually believe that they are right and righteous in threatening children.

Not long ago, Sarkeesian cancelled a speaking engagement at the University of Utah after a graphic threat was made to perpetrate 'the worst school shooting in history' if the engagement went ahead.

What the actual fuck is that?

I'm not going to start on the Utah Police and their refusal to conduct weapon searches of people entering an institute of higher education which had been threatened with a massacre, because I would probably never stop. In the same way, I'm not going to talk about rape threats, because it would end up as a meaningless spew of expressions of horror and disbelief. I will, however, reiterate my utter horror that there is anyone in the world that thinks that this is in any way something that is not just okay, but right, and that there is a substantial body of gamers who support them to one degree or another.

Now, in fairness (because I like to be fair, possibly to the point of fault, although not to the point, you may notice, of actually putting any links to Gamergate sites; I'm fair, but I absolutely have a side in this*,) the incident created some schism in Gamergate itself, because apparently some of them are able to see that there is a degree of evil that isn't legitimate protest against journalistic corruption (although the lower level hate-speech really should have tipped them off, but internet comments are a natural breeding ground for complete idiocy) I am still disappointed that it hasn't ended it completely; that the sane end of the spectrum haven't looked at this, or the other death threats, and said: "Well, fuck; we're part of something pretty damned vile here, aren't we?"

Gamergate, in short, has actively and materially damaged my faith in human nature.

*In Gamergate terms, this makes me a 'white knight' hoping that backing the feminazi agenda will get me laid. If I believed that the world as a whole was as misogynistic as Gamergate, such that merely expressing this opinion made me irresistible catnip to any woman not completely ground down by hate, I would be too mired in depression to ever have sex again.