THE GUARDIAN FORCEA SEASONAL GAMING MAGAZINEVOLUME.I • ISSUE.0 • WINTER.2011

From the Editor I’ve always had a fascination with writing. When I was a young child, a writer was one of two things I proudly told my parents and teachers I wanted to be when I grew up. My favourite exercises in elementary school involved creative writing, and I must have been the only one in my fifth grade class who enjoyed grammar lessons. I adored my English classes in high school, even competing with friends to see who could earn the highest grades and write the best essays. Now that I’m attending the University of Toronto for a classical education, I find myself more and more distracted by the opportunities in journalism, where I’m a regular news writer and web editor for the newspaper, the campus’ independent weekly. The other thing I wanted to be when I grew up was a video game tester. In retrospect it seems like a pretty puerile ambition, perhaps even the male equivalent of the princess fantasy of young girls. Making a living out of playing video games will always hold a certain appeal. After all, games are inherently fun, and who doesn’t want to get paid to do what they enjoy? Only recently have I begun to mix these two hobbies, mostly as a consequence of using my modest talents with a pen to bring some good out of the many thousands of hours I’ve given to video games. I enjoy writing essays on my academic pursuits, so why not try my hand at writing on my leisure ones as well? Fortunately for you, this is not merely a vanity project. Fortunately for me, I am not alone. The Guardian Force is the product of a handful of like-minded individuals with similar interests in writing and video games. Every contributor to this inaugural issue comes from the forums of The Escapist, where I sent out a PM to some of my digital acquaintances in the hopes of their support a little over one month ago. While not everyone managed to contribute (entirely forgivable given the festive time of year), their pledges of support and interest were enough fuel for the modest 18-page PDF magazine you’re now reading. It’s a collection of three feature length articles and two video game reviews, lovingly crafted by total strangers and drunkenly assembled by me over several early winter nights. As time goes on, video games are becoming more and more worthy of consideration as the experiences they offer become more and more thoughtful. This is the idea which inspired The Guardian Force, the notion that we can always write about and discuss video games more meaningfully. To that end, we hope that this humble magazine will serve as an inviting quarterly forum for people to share what video games mean to them. This issue is just the beginning. I sincerely hope that our successes here will lead to bigger and better issues in the future.

Cheers, and we wish you the best in 2012!

Andrew WaltEditor-in-Chief

Andrew WaltJohannes KöllerJoshua Loomis

Taylor Hidalgo Francisco DominguezAndrew Huntly Peter KailisAndrew Govan-Prini Matthew Parkinson

MaetDeadpanLunatic

BlueInkAlchemist

NewClassicpigeon_of_doom

KasuramiPimppeter2

LevethianMarter

Special Thanks

Contributors

Content04

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Playing God

Setting sail, floating on

Gamer’s block

Christmas at 2Fort

Skyrim

(Real name) (Screen name on The Escapist)

Playing God

Technology enables mankind to accomplish wonderful things, but at what cost? A thematic exploration of Deus Ex: Human Revolution.

Written by Andrew Walt

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Adam Jensen is not human. Having nearly been killed in a terrorist attack on Sarif Industries, the company for which he is the head of security, his life could only be saved through transhuman augmentation. His arms were amputated and replaced with cybernetic limbs. His head has been equipped with various neural implants and ocular improvements. He is able to jump higher and sprint faster than any human can. Even his intellectual faculties have been mechanically increased thanks to the technological wonders of the not too distant future. Yet for all of these upgrades, Adam Jensen is not a machine either. He has thoughts and ideas. He can be creative and he can express human emotion. When he feels anger, he raises his voice. When he is annoyed, he becomes sarcastic and dismissive. When he is overwhelmed, his speech assumes the inflections and irregularities expected of someone in anguish. Although he may now be as susceptible to software viruses as he is to the common cold, he is driven by revenge and not by programming. Adam Jensen blurs the line of what it means to be human. While the common question the unending forward march of technology often asks is when artificial intelligence will rival the human intellect, Deus Ex: Human Revolution asks at what point a person loses their humanity through technology.

With all of his implants and augmentations shattering the limits of his natural potential, is Adam Jensen still human? Is he something more? Something less? This is the question which frames the world of Deus Ex: Human Revolution. In the year 2027, Sarif Industries is on the verge of a technological breakthrough which will revolutionize human

potential. Pharmaceutical giants have already been playing god with the human genome for years, but the results are less than ideal. The human body often rejects drastic augmentation, and the necessary corrective procedures and medication can enslave families to corporations for life. This innovation is poised to upset the current ethically nebulous balance of the world. Sarif believes that everyone should have the opportunity to become better than human. Pro humanity

movements such as Purity First believe that mankind should not play God. Other shadowy corporations in competition with Sarif are pursuing their own agendas with private military operations. Adam Jensen is caught in the middle. Many videogames are concerned with telling a story, but so few of them are interested in exploring a theme. Deus Ex: Human Revolution is one of these games; the theme of not just what it means to be human, but what the influence of technology means for our souls. For Sarif, himself a devout futurist with a cybernetic arm, there is no cost too great in

With all of his implants and augmentations shattering

the limits of his natural potential, is Adam Jensen

still human?

The Guardian Force • Vol. I • No. 0 • Winter 2011the pursuit of technological advancement. The work of his company has the power to improve human potential universally. Though he may be involved in shadowy military contracts to pay the bills, the public face of his company balances the ethical scales by championing the right for every citizen to reap the benefits of his life improving work. Regardless, part of the wider world views Sarif and those of similar inclinations as if they were false prophets, having become gods on earth from the marvellous machines they have created. This central conflict gives the title of the game weight beyond curious colloquial clumsiness. The popular phrase is “Deus Ex Machina” (pronounce each syllable and the “ch” as a “k”), the Latin rendering of an Ancient Greek idiom rooted in classical theatre. A deity would be hoisted above the stage by a crane or other such device in order to resolve the action with their godly powers, a technique modern audiences tend to recognize as egregious contrivance. Sarif has become a god thanks to his technology, an allegory perhaps none too subtly extended to Adam himself; less because he is the first man and more because Sarif did not save his life nearly as much as he constructed him from nothing. Deus Ex: Human Revolution grounds these lofty ideas in moments where Adam is free to explore

the rough outlines of an open world, generally consisting of less than one single square kilometre of streets, buildings, and sewers. From a narrative perspective these areas are shams, dotted with meaningless side-quests whose only gratification are experience points and which mostly distract from the overarching storyline. Perhaps this is no different from the side-quests in most open world games, but Deus Ex: Human Revolution is fundamentally linear. The story only develops in straightforward missions

taking place outside of its tiny sandboxes, not within them. Why, then, would its developers bother with devoting such time and energy into crafting cheap facsimiles of an open world? Surely it would have been better to invest those resources

in refining its core elements, improving its brazenly broken boss fights, or fleshing out its resolution to be more than just a multiple-choice question? In defence, perhaps Deus Ex: Human Revolution sought to capitalize upon the singular ability of videogames to offer audience directed thematic exploration. If a book or a movie decides to examine an idea, ultimately its participants only receive the ideas its creator intended with anything beyond being a textual leap of faith. In a video game, a theme can be presented and explored through the devices and structures central to its progression in

Whether or not it is a good thing to play god with

technology has far more weight when you can see its

effects on a human scale.

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the manner of literature or film, while the potential exists for further consideration beyond the ostensible. For over four years, Bioshock has been the gold standard of this possibility. Its players receive its core philosophies and ideologies through the narrative and mechanics central to the game, which can further be reinforced and explored by taking the time to consider the propaganda posters and advertisements lining the walls, to name but a single example. In this light, the narratively empty and inconsequential sandboxes of Deus Ex: Human Revolution take on greater thematic resonance. What better way to be exposed to the ideas than to discover them yourself? Adam doesn’t necessarily need to hear the word on the streets as he reacquaints himself with the world from which he’s been absent for six months in recovery, but moments like these colour the world and help the player realize that transhumanism may not necessarily be as entirely altruistic as Sarif thinks. Only the privileged can afford to play with the technological toys able to improve their natural abilities, while the impoverished and lower classes feel increasingly inadequate and insignificant in being unable to compete with their augmented aristocracy. As William Gibson once said, “the future is already here – it’s just not evenly distributed.” Without these occasional glimpses, the player would have no awareness of the broader social issues at play, or rather no impetus to consider them. The people populating the linear game are mostly terrorists, mercenaries, cops, scientists, and the occasional significant figurehead, all of whom are presented in isolation from the wider world. Without the consideration of how the blue-collar and those beneath them are affected by Adam’s activities, the ideas of Deus Ex: Human Revolution become polarized and dull. Social struggles and philosophical quandaries are more engaging than corporate power plays because they have universal appeal. Or rather, the question of whether or not it is a good thing to play god with technology has far more weight when you can see its effects on a human scale. I’ll admit, before playing Deus Ex: Human Revolution, I thought it was ridiculous to consider that futurism and the potential of technological innovation could be anything other than unerringly beneficial, as if it should be nothing less than a moral imperative. But the possibilities in boundless

technology to fracture the world by sharper divisions in not just wealth and social status but also by natural ability do raise some fascinating issues. However it must be said that Deus Ex: Human Revolution explores the ethics of augmentation better than it does the morals of it. The game makes an attempt to test the corrupting influence of seemingly absolute power on the actions of the player, but having been conditioned to view morality in the medium as strictly black and white, most players would likely equate non-lethal stealthy pacifism with good and guns blazing frontal assaults with evil immediately. Admittedly, it’s difficult to gauge just how sophisticated this mechanic is as my Adam seldom had his sneaky humanitarian approach acknowledged. But when the ending cinematic rhetorically asks how easy it would have been for him to abuse his augmented abilities, the question swiftly devolves into the trite “might is right” argument. Yet while I doubt that “might is right” is the intended philosophical focal point for a game with as many intriguing ideas as Deus Ex: Human Revolutions,

do see a certain elegance to its conspicuous inclusion in any outcome of the four ending sequences. Many of its ideas are adapted from classical thinking, the foundations of which are a mythology built on the principle that the most powerful deserve the most authority, as exemplified by

Zeus and the Olympians forcefully overthrowing the previous generation of gods. Even the man directly responsible for the condition of this fictional earth in 2027 fancies himself a modern Daedalus as he watches the manifestation of his genius threaten to tear the world apart. There are many ways the conversation can go when Adam meets this man and asks him what right he has to do what he has done, with every result offering a distinct justification for the way he has chosen to exercise his might. But whether through persuasion or otherwise, absolute power soon falls to Adam, and the player can decide how they wish to exercise their own will. The room of four endings may disappoint our gameplay expectations, but its thematically more powerful. Gods do not labour, they need only will their whims into existence and the world is shaped accordingly. After all, Adam Jensen is neither a man nor a machine. He has become a god.

Deus Ex: Human Revolution is not just heavily influenced by the classical world. The overall aesthetic design of the game evokes the renaissance, with its permeating sepia and orange brown tones calling to mind the dusty centuries-old manuscripts of scholarly men. The analogy is especially potent as the new brilliant minds of 2027 are seeking freedom from the boundaries of both government regulation and spiritual judgement, much in the same way as the cultural and creative flourishing that occurred as artists and philosophers broke free of religious meddling centuries ago.

There’s a sequence in an official cinematic trailer for Deus Ex: Human Revolution which depicts men in what appears to be a church examining the lifeless body of Adam Jensen, a knowing nod to Rembrandt’s famous 1632 oil painting The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp. While the painting is a static image, the sequence in the trailer later shows a likeness of Adam rise from the operations platform with magnificent wings, break through the ceiling, and soar into the sky. However just as Icarus flew too close to the sun and suffered the consequences of his hubris, so too does Adam. His wings are burned and he screams in immense suffering, only to wake up in his Detroit apartment.

Rembrandt’s, The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp, 1932

Image from the cinematic trailer of Deus Ex: Human Revolution, retrieved December 24, 2011

Deus Ex: Human RenaissanceThe Deus Ex prequel isn’t just a human revolution, it’s a cultural and intellectual one, too.

GF

Setting sail, floating on

Johannes Köller reviews

“Proper review’s supposed to start at the beginning,” muses the effortlessly soulful voice of Logan Cunningham, Bastion’s narrator. At least he might, if he were asked to review the game. “Of course, it ain’t so simple with this one...” Bastion, the debut of indie developer Supergiant Games, is not an easy game to classify. It dresses up like a dungeon crawler, but sacrifices many of the genre’s core tenets in favor of focusing on a strong, heavily structured, linear story. This mélange may not grab you straight away, as you’ll lament the rather stale gameplay long before the aesthetics and subtle world-building add up to anything meaningful. But Bastion is worth enduring. It may not pay off immediately, but boy does it pay off in the end. The protagonist, known only as The Kid, wakes up to find the city of Caelondia ravished by a mysterious calamity. His world is turned upside down, with bits and pieces of debris floating through the air, gliding up to form paths underneath his uneasy steps. A stranger’s voice fills his ears, guides him, and tells him to head for the eponymous Bastion, a safe haven for troubled times such as these. But no one got there in time. The Bastion is deserted, safe for Rucks, the engineer who built the stronghold. He’s not eager to share details, but the old man claims he can fix everything. He just needs a little help. So The Kid ventures right on into the Wilds, looking for survivors and the parts needed to rebuild.

In terms of gameplay, Bastion focuses more on top-down hack’n’slash combat than on the character-building, item-hunting of Diablo. Its approach is rather action-heavy, a flurry of dodges and well-timed attacks. The independent nature of the inputs, with movement and action tied to keyboard and mouse respectively, enables you strafe, evade, retreat, or take careful aim, and often turns combat into a positively visceral affair. Yet even with this revised mission statement in mind, the game could still have used a bit more polish as the controls tend to act up on occasion. Swings and slashes have the most annoying tendency

to glide off models ineffectually, which fortunately doesn’t affect enemies as much as it does near-indestructible crates. And though I’ve never been able to determine whether this is a real issue or just a matter of hard-to-spot hitboxes hidden against a backdrop of ragtag visuals, every so often you’ll find yourself placing an enemy square

in your sights and somehow still end up missing. In between various field trips, The Kid returns to The Bastion to build new shops with the parts scavenged along the way. The Destillery offers passive bonuses by way of magical booze, The Forge lets you upgrade your weapons (which are stored at The Arsenal), while The Shrine lets you kick it up a notch by praying for bigger foes and bigger rewards. The Bastion is also where the many buffs and upgrades earned, usually focused on either critical hits or reliable

A stranger’s voice fills his ears, guides him, and tells him to head for the eponymous Bastion, a safe haven for troubled

times such as these.

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damage output, can be applied. Yet while this measure of choice is nice to have, it doesn’t keep the game from feeling stale. Ultimately, there’s just not a lot to Bastion. Mechanically speaking, the game is sparse. Make no mistake about it, Bastion is more concerned with delivering an aesthetically pleasing tale than with providing gratifying gameplay, which wouldn’t be a problem if the story took a little less time to pick up the pace. The visuals, the music, the smooth, sexy voice of Logan Cunningham; all of the individual pieces are there from the start. But after a strong intro, the narrative loses focus, content to provide backstory while letting you wander around. Given the linear nature of the piece, it’s easy to feel abandoned. The narration starts to feel like a gimmick, a way to fill our ears with lore without stalling the frenetic gameplay this genre holds so very dear (occasional bits of self-aware humor not withstanding). It’s only some three hours in, roughly halfway through the game, that Bastion’s story is truly set in motion. After all this time exploring the impact and consequences of the Calamity, the game finally starts unravelling the causes behind the catastrophe. The Calamity was no random act of god, but was in fact engineered by Caelondians trying to rid themselves of a native tribe. The few survivors The Kid has been rescuing - all of them natives - soon realize this, and one of the outraged survivors reacts violently. Suddenly the narrative comes to life, and conversely the gameplay starts breaking down.

Bastion keeps a tight leash on its mechanics right from the start, keeping them minimalistic to the point of being crude, showing us just how much it’s willing to sacrifice for its story. The game starts tormenting you. The more you try to rebuild, the more things start to fall apart. Ingeniously, Bastion turns your previous successes to dust and makes you watch as things break down around you. With every sacrifice you start to care a little more. Before long you’re willing to give everything, and you will. Bastion’s first half is slow, with every aspect pulling it in a different direction. However the second half, with its immaculate visuals, forceful narration,

and absolutely stunning vocal pieces by Darren Korb and Ashley Barett, is a masterfully emotional experience. Bastion climaxes in a moment that is as profoundly deep as it is beautiful, as somber as it is hopeful, as sentimental

as it is heartfelt. The game grabbed my heart and wouldn’t let go. It had me tearing up, sitting through the credits and savoring every second of it. It left me dazed, staring at the screen, still lost in Caelondia. Not many games have the power to move a person to tears. This one does.

Bottom Line: Bastion may not impress as a game, but it’s a damn fine piece of art and song and memorable in every way. I recommend getting the soundtrack edition, at your earliest convenience.

The more you try to rebuild, the more things

start to fall apart.

The Guardian Force • Vol. I • No. 0 • Winter 2011

GF

Here’s where I don my old-man hat and shake my cane at you whipper-snappers. When I was growing up, I had two types of toys at my disposal that had nothing to do with my sisters’ Barbie dolls. One was my small selection of Transformers. I miss them to this day. The other was my plastic bin of LEGO bricks. Blacktrons were the highlight of my young constructive life, as I built all sorts of spacecraft and launched them into adventures. Sure I’d follow the instructions of a given set at least once, but after that all the bricks went into the same bin and, I’d cobble together whatever I wanted later. It’s this impulse towards free-form construction with basic materials that a pair of indie games appeal. One is Minecraft, the wunderkind title of Mojang which has captured the hearts and minds of nerds around the world with an efficiency and completeness to make the propoganda machines of the most nefarious of information spinners green with envy. The other calls itself Terraria, and is a side-scroller from ReLogic that at once speaks to the simpler days of graphics and music with bits numbering 16 or fewer while boasting an expansive world with objectives, oddball items to construct and bosses that will consume your soul the way games like this eat up your free time and idle brain functions. Despite similarities in premise and

foundation, the two games are actually very different. Yes, both generate the player’s world procedurally and spontaneously rather than giving you the same map every time. Yes, both have engines that account for gravity, the flow of fluids like water and lava and the arcs of projectiles like arrows. And yes, both have zombies, skeletons and other creatures that go bump in the night. In essence, both are bins of building blocks provided for the edification of player creativity.

So aside from their different viewpoints, what makes these games different? The divergence comes in terms of guidance and goals. Minecraft, for better or for worse, is essentialy a free-form construction tool. It is flexible and accomodating of players of all stripes. It’s the kind of sandbox-type environment where you can realistically envision a scale recreation of the wizard tower Orthanc from Lord of the Rings in

obsidian, if it weren’t for the explosive and suicidal Creepers bent on wrecking all you’ve built. In-game information can be difficult to come by, however. You’re pretty much dumped into this brave new world with nothing but the clothes on your back and only the vaguest of ideas on how to begin. It’s not unlike opening your bin of LEGOs to find you’ve misplaced all of the instructions. There’s nothing wrong with this

In 2011, two games built on the principles of endlessly variable creation and exploration were released - Minecraft for the creative

spirit and Terraria for the passionate explorer. Joshua Loomis grabs his trusty pickaxe and considers both titles.

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sort of freedom, of course, but it does mean in-game objectives are few and far between. On the other hand, Terraria comes pre-packaged with multiple layers of involvement. You may be comfortable just building yourself a house to ward off the nightly zombie hordes, or you can deal with what you encounter as you explore. What’s this? Corrupt ground rife with Lovecraftian horrors? Going to need some equipment to handle that. Even a helpful guide has followed you into this new world to tell you how to use those resources you’re digging up with that pickaxe in your starting inventory. There’s clearly some direction to the world and your progress through it, which lends itself to more of an adventure/RPG feel. Being more user-friendly, however, belies the challenges that await. And considering there are at least two bosses that only emerge due to players enacting specific items within the game world, you’ve only yourself to blame when your body parts start flying off. The two games are quite similar yet appeal to different mindsets. Purely creative-minded gamers will lean more towards Minecraft, where the intricate use of in-game resources can replicate complex circuits to the point of simple computers existing within the virtual world. Those with an eye towards an ever-growing progression of gear and powers aimed at overcoming complex monster encounters will be most interested in mincing into Terraria. These two groups do overlap somewhat, and it’s entirely possible to enjoy both games equally. Which of them is better is purely a subjective matter. However, both games allow for nearly limitless creativity, both present challenges that reward said creativity and both are extremely immersive and time-consuming. Whichever you choose, you’re going to lose to it. Given the nature of the games in question, it’s entirely possible you will lose all productivity to a serious case of gamer’s block. GF

Christmasat

2fort

On Christmas Spirit and Virtual ItemsJohannes Köllerwritten by

Looking past the overtones of commerce, the Christmas season is, or rather should be, a time of humble introspection. At heart, it serves as a reminder to value friends and family over hard cash; a lesson demonstrated by giving freely to your loved ones. This is Christianity’s take on a call for temperance present throughout almost any religion. As frequently as they tend to squabble, most faiths seem to agree that if you care at all for your immortal soul, you should not tie yourself to worldly goods. But what if the goods you care for aren’t real? The rise of the Internet has done truly wondrous things for videogames. Once limited to connecting two people facing the same screen, they now offer us entire continents to roam as we please. In a way, the massive realms of yore provided by the MMO-genre these days are more than just playgrounds. They are increasingly intricate, scale-models of human society, with complex economies and patterns of migration unwittingly created by thousands of people from all over the world. No matter how fantastical their premise might be, games can never quite get away from human nature. It bleeds into them. We bring it with us whenever we log in; not just our virtues, but also our vices. Our vanity. Our greed. So our virtual communities, far from utopian, are plagued by smaller versions of the injustices and sins all too common in our real world. Take, for instance, the growing importance we attach to virtual items. Some items have always been rarer

than others, and those who owned them take a certain pride in doing so. But this used to be tied to gameplay, a matter of owning the most powerful weapons or the toughest armor. Now we go so far as to hunt for accessories that serve no purpose other than to look pretty and to distinguish ourselves from those who don’t own them. They have become our version of status symbols. Instead of sports cars or designer clothing, we brag about epic mounts and unusual hats. Ironically, the virtual world manages to be just as materialistic as the real world. Traditionally, Christmas serves to remind us that money is only so much ink on paper. Today, it might be fruitful to go a step further and to keep in mind that your Bill’s Hat, your Dragonwrath Staff, and your Diamond Pickaxe of Fortune are only so many ones and zeroes. Their distinct purpose, the only reason they exist, is to bring you joy. If you put them on a shelf to be appreciated rather than used, if they’re gathering dust hidden deep in some virtual backpack or if you’re haggling to turn them into a profit, then you’re doing it wrong. I owe this epiphany to a man called Bear, a Nordic nerd and regular on my Team Fortress 2 server of choice. Some eight months ago, I had gotten it in my head that I really wanted the Sticky Jumper, a sidearm for the Demoman class that allows you to propel yourself across the map without suffering explosion damage. Since it doesn’t drop randomly, most people

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pick it up at the store for a few cents. However since I didn’t have a credit card, I decided to craft it. There is no recipe for creating the Sticky Jumper per se, but it’s one of several (at the time, three) possible results when crafting a secondary weapon for the Demoman. All I needed were some slot and class tokens, a bit of metal and patience. Probability suggested that I could expect to create a Sticky Jumper in three tries. Probability is a bitch. I crafted a Scottish Resistance, then a Chargin’ Targe, then another Chargin’ Targe, then another Scottish Resistance. Short on ingredients by now, I scraped together the tokens for a final try. At long last I crafted yet another Chargin’ Targe. “Bother this troublesome nonsense!” would be the polite paraphrase of my frustrated outburst in the chat. Noticing my aggravation with what I had crafted, Bear immediately figured out what I was up to. “Trying to craft a Sticky Jumper, Joe?” “Yeah. No luck on my fifth try though.” “I bought mine. It is kinda cheap.” More people pitched in sharing their own stories, and once again I ended up explaining why I was going through the trouble of crafting it. Bear, in the meantime, had fallen conspicuously silent. A few minutes later, an automated message announced that he had just wrapped a gift. There’s a rather obvious connection there,

but at the time I was slow to make it. “Did you die yet, Joe?” “No, why?” My curiosity piqued, I threw myself off the nearest cliff. A notification popped up, presenting me with Bear’s gift, complete with ribbon and colorful wrapping. Sure enough he had gotten a Sticky Jumper for me, the item for which I had spent weeks searching. Even with the added cost of wrapping it, it wasn’t a big gift. But I was taken aback by the fact that someone hundreds of miles away, someone I’d never met face to face and probably never will, bothered

to spend money on me. Bear was reaching out to someone who was, despite all the time we spent playing together, a total stranger. It may have been a small gesture, but it was surprisingly considerate; an

act of kindness I could not have anticipated. I thanked him probably a hundred times. Later on, I looked at my own treasury; a puny collection of a half dozen hats dropped in my lap by the game’s routines or crafted after gathering metal for weeks. The economy of the game dictates that each of them was worth several Sticky Jumpers, and yet the lot of them didn’t mean nearly as much to me as the three words in the description of my Sticky Jumper: “Gift from: Bear”. I loved the gun. This was no rational reaction. It was neither reasonable, detached, nor calm. Then again, it didn’t have to be. It was a gift. I did not

The Guardian Force • Vol. I • No. 0 • Winter 2011

appreciate it for its value, but for the wonderful moment of surprise,

the seconds of joy crowning weeks of disappointment. Was there ever a

more divine use for our virtual piles of gold? Why was I niggardly hoarding

everything the game handed me, when I could be handing it to others?

My thoughts turned to the movers and shakers; the people who make a point of

owning every hat in the game, the people who spend weeks going through the same dungeon

over and over again looking for a piece of epic gear, the people who spend hours on trade servers

trying to make a good bargain. Who are they if not the Scrooges of our generation, jaded misers hoarding a pile of digital riches that might brighten the days of a hundred gamers? Eternally discontented, they chase the buzz their wealth used to give them by adding to it, always looking for more and more. But more isn’t the answer. Less is.

Whether or not he realizes it, Bear’s gift has taught me a valuable lesson. So this Christmas, I decided to return the favor. Between his impressive collection of headgear and my humble assortment of items, I had a hard time coming up with a gift. But at last, lightning struck. Bear and I share a guilty pleasure: our fascination with the Huntsman, a significantly less effective bow-and-arrow alternative to the Sniper’s trusty rifle. Despite all the ridicule it earns me, I have been using it almost exclusively since the game first handed me a bow. It served me well for over two years. When I came across my first Name Tag, I gave it the custom title of “Face Invader,” a name well earned through over 100 hours of sniping. And now it was time to give it away. You could say that a Huntsman, one of the cheapest items in the game, doesn’t make for a very impressive gift. But I wasn’t just giving him any old Huntsman. I was giving him my Huntsman; two years of my online career and the sum of all those times Bear had fallen victim to my arrows. It was the Team

Fortress 2 equivalent of a personal gift. I’m ashamed to admit that I was initially hesitant to let go. After all, I had spent quite a lot of time with that bow and I cared for it more than I probably should. I had doubts. I felt so attached to that weapon that I didn’t want anyone else to have it. It was a weird realization, but at long last I noticed that I no longer truly savoured using that Huntsman. The joy had waned over time. I did not care for it any more, but the idea of not using it felt alien. Without knowing, without paying attention, I had let that item take a hold of me. It was no longer mine so much as I was its own. It was a liability, a burden. It needed to go.

At last, I let go. And in all that time I spent with my “Face Invader” I had not done anything more brilliant, more wonderful, and more delightful than giving it away. Nothing compared to the moment I handed the gift to Bear. Because then and there, I made him smile. And though it feels weird to go back to a bland, nondescript bow now, and though I might miss my Huntsman at times, I know that it’s in good hands. Bear certainly doesn’t have any qualms about killing me with my own weapon. Normally I’d be inclined to get a bit worked up over my virtual demise, but every time Bear pierces my head with another arrow, I get to see those three little words in the description of my assailants weapon: “Gift from: Joe.” And then I smile. So as you spend the holidays reuniting with loved ones, handing out gifts and (if your loved ones are anything like mine) gorging on delicious treats, keep in mind that in this enlightened day and age, the spirit of giving need not be limited to the real world. Count your virtual blessings. Perhaps you will find that you might find more joy in giving them away, than you would in keeping them. GF

At time of writing I have logged over 30 hours in The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim. Most modern games set in the first person perspective last nowhere near that long. One can knock out the likes of Alpha Protocol and any given shooter’s single-player campaign in a single sitting. And yet people will have been playing Skyrim since its release back in November and will still be wandering the frozen plains of the northern reaches of Tamriel well into the new year. As with previous Elder Scrolls games, you begin as a prisoner. Instead of waiting around for your cell door to open, however, you’re in transit to your execution. The opening dialogue, voices and character motions indicate we’re certainly not in Oblivion anymore. The player is faced with choice almost immediately when the execution is interrupted by a fire-breathing dragon. This rather ornery creature previously considered mythological is a harbinger of doom, resurrecting its kin and bent on setting the world on fire. Thankfully it turns out the player is also something considered mythological, or at least legendary: Dragonborn. It’s up to you to put an end to the coming draconic armageddon. Provided you can tear yourself away from exploration and side quests, of coruse. The wonderful thing about Skyrim is that there’s no one way to go about doing things. The accessibility of the ‘Favorites’ menu and non-linear means of building skills yeilds a completely free-form method of character progression. Add to this the fact you can craft your own weapons, potions, and enchantments, and you can either opt to kit yourself out with arms and armor of your own creation or patronize the local shops if you’d rather focus on making things explode, bleed, and fly backwards off of mountainsides because you yelled at them. With the exception of the shouting, everything

you do contributes towards your progression, both of the individual skill and your overall level. Every time you level up, you assign a perk to one of your skills. This allows a great deal of character customization and encourages repeat play. With so much to see and do in Skyrim, it’s highly likely you’ll want to play more than once. From delving into the fascinating magic system to aligning oneself with a variety of factions, it’s nigh impossible that you’ll do absolutely everything available in the world that’s been created. The only direction you get in-game is the occasional floating arrow, but beyond that your path is your own. This is a fantastic change from the sort of games that drag the player by the nostrils through linear progressions of encounter after encounter. It’s a strictly old-school role-playing experience with excellent graphics and a living world,

and it’s truly fantastic in that regard. Unfortunately, Skyrim has joined Portal in the tradition of games that have been overly hyped, memed, and parodied by the wonderful and diverse population of the Internet. The proliferation of Skyrim imagery and phrases can water one’s enthusiasm, and there are a variety of graphical and gameplay glitches that can happen more often than one may find comfortable. Lines of spoken dialog can occasionally run over each other and the UI leaves something to be desired, carrying as it does the stink of console port syndrome.

Finally, it can crash on you without warning which is always a pain. However, there’s an active modding community dedicated to smoothing out these rough edges, and the core of the game and the depth of its world more than make up for the issues. If you can ignore taking a meme to the knee, Skyrim can deliver hours of immersive gameplay that make it well worth buying.

Joshua Loomis reviews

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Volume 1 Issue 1 will be published in April, 2012.