MOBAs Make Me Mad, But Is Madness Mandatory?

Multiplayer Online Battle Arena (MOBA) games are a relatively new genre to the gaming scene. Among those in the limelight are Valve's Defense of the Ancients 2 (DotA), Riot's League of Legends (LoL), and S2 Games' Heroes of Newerth (HoN). Blizzard is also planning to add its own game, Heroes of the Storm, to the mix soon.

The premise is simple: you and nine other players are sorted into two teams of five. Each player chooses their own character to play from a pool. To win the game, your team must destroy a specific structure in the other team's base before they do the same to you. Gameplay gets complicated when you consider how to effectively combine the unique skills of each character, how to match those heroes against the enemies' choices, how to deny the other team resources while maximizing your own, how to counter the enemies' strategies, and so on. Matches take on average 30-45 minutes, and each match starts from zero - a fresh map, new teammates, and new enemies.

Having sunk 1000+ hours into DotA2 (no shame) and several thousand more into its predecessor, the DotA Allstars custom map for Warcraft III: The Frozen Throne, (okay, a little shame,) I have had plenty of experience with the MOBA scene. I've had flawless games that made me feel like the king of the online world and I've had awful games that made me uninstall and re-think my identity as a gamer. But, through thick and thin, I remained with DotA2 because games, like people, are not perfect. Even though DotA2 can be enraging at times, there is a lot of good things going for it.

Alas,

 

There's no excuse for poor game design that leads to unnecessary complications and dreadful playing experiences. Little to nothing can be done about the obnoxious community - this much I will forgive. As much as I hate being harassed by monosyllabic kunckle-draggers who are too obsessed with the current meta to give anything else a second look, I recognize that this is something that game developers can't control. Sure, you can implement mute options, reporting systems, punitive measures, and everything else, but you simply can't make people stop being a**holes online.

This is why engineers need to work on sending punches through the Internet...

"No! YOU buy wards f**kface!"

But there are plenty of things that Riot, Valve, and S2 could be doing to deal with other very pervasive problems with these games.

I'll start with one of DotA2's most notorious mistakes: No forfeit option.

Seriously?

As I said above, a typical match of DotA takes about 40 minutes. Usually by the 20 minute mark, if the teams have been working hard, there's a definitive lead for one or the other. Now, it is possible to turn a game around when your team is behind. It is incredibly important to not lose faith just because you're down 10 kills and 3 towers. I played a game once where our team had lost all of our rax, our T4 towers were under attack, and we still managed to pull out a win. I don't mean to say it's common - it isn't. But it is possible to have an upset victory.

Now let's leave the land of hypothetical and come back to reality.

Some games don't have an "edge" after 20 minutes. Some games are all but over by that time. It's possible to come back from being 10 kills and 3 towers behind, but what about 20+ kills and 5 towers? And, while it would be great for the other team to march into your base and end it, they don't have to; they can sit outside in the jungle and wait it out. Now the game, which is essentially over due to the massive gold imbalance, is dragging on because the other team is in no rush to win. 

And I can't blame them. Winning feels satisfying, and wanting to savor that feeling is natural. But while they're grinding neutrals and Roshan for half an hour in order to complete their next expensive item, 5 players are sitting around base with their thumbs up their butts, waiting for the match to end. This time could be spent playing a different match where they have a chance of winning and having fun. Oh, and should you try to leave early and spare yourself the pain of watching the match drag on? Enjoy the punitive measures - several matches in Low Priority Queue, filled with sub-par, rage-aholic players.

The hero I miss most from Allstars (aside from Techies)

And the worst part? The DotA Allstars custom map HAD a forfeit feature back when I played it in high school. LoL and HoN also have forfeit features. Valve seems to be the only developer who doesn't feel it necessary to give its players the mercy of conceding matches.

However, that's just a DotA problem. There's one issue that is uniform across all MOBAs. A problem so pervasive and infuriating that it has been the cause of thrown headsets, smashed keyboards, and punched monitors.

I'm speaking, of course, about foreign language barriers.

I've lost count of the number of times I've entered a game of DotA, after queueing only for US East and US West servers, to be hailed by players in Portuguese, Spanish, and Russian. For the record, I've played with plenty of non-English speakers who were stellar players and kind to boot. The problem I have with these players in general isn't that they're from outside the USA, it's that they don't speak English.

 

Same difference? No. Let me explain.

I queue for US East and US West not because I believe in Freedom, Justice, The American Way, and other 'Murican tenants, but because I only speak one language - English. And since I'm supposed to be playing cooperatively with 4 other players, I figure I should queue for servers where the primary language of the server location is English. After all, how can we coordinate attacks, talk strategy, or even set up our team if we can't communicate?

I'm not naive. I recognize that not everyone in the United States speaks English. And I'd be tolerant if this language barrier only popped up once in a blue moon. But for every other game to have me hitting my head against my desk because I can't communicate with my team is not a sign of diversity in America; It's a sign of a serious design flaw on the part of the developer.

Nothing like trying to go for rune and having 3 different people on my team typing things like "cyka," "nob," and "jejeje" at me.

The fix could be simple: the game server could issue a ping for each player, see where the player's country of origin is, and re-queue them for an appropriate server. Since players can already check their ping with the server, I know the capability is there. The programming wouldn't be too difficult. Hell, DotA Allstars had a third-party program, Banlist, that allowed for independent hosts to check countries of origin and latency of the connecting players. If some independent developer can work up the protocol in his spare time, certainly Valve could devote some man hours to getting players into their local servers. This would lead to better chances at communicating with our teams, and therefore, better chances of actually enjoying the playing experience.

It'd also stop me from feeling so horribly, horribly racist.

Got any gripes about MOBAs that you'd like to share? Leave them in the comments. Maybe I'll pick them up in a later blog.

Looper, or "Why Time Travel Breaks Stories"

<Spoiler alert>

<Duh>

Don't look directly at his forehead.

Looper is a movie set in the future, where a hired killer named Joe, played by Joseph Gordon-Levitt, works for an organized crime syndicate responsible for taking out people from the future. See, in the future, it's very hard to dispose of a body. So future crime syndicates use time travel to send people back to the past to be executed. The people who perform the executions, like Joe, are called "loopers."

This all goes to hell when Joe is ordered to kill his future self, played by Bruce Willis.

Why didn't Willis get prosthetics to look like Gordon-Levitt?

(For the remainder of this review, I will refer to Joe from the future at "Old Joe" and Joe from the present as "Joe." Like I said, time travel makes things difficult.)

Old Joe avoids death and goes on a manhunt for a person called "The Rainmaker." Old Joe says that this man runs all organized crime single-handed and is the source of the future's suffering. According to Old Joe, only a few things are known about The Rainmaker:

1) He saw his mom get shot.
2) He has had reconstructive surgery.
3) He's an unholy terror, capable of killing entire complexes full of baddies by himself.

Who IS that mysterious man?

While Old Joe is on his hunt, Joe finds a farm with a single mother on it named Sarah. Sarah's son, Cid, is an extremely powerful telekinetic with anger issues. Sarah believes that if she can teach Sid to love then he won't grow up to hurt people. Old Joe finds the farm and it is revealed that, in the future, Sid becomes The Rainmaker.

All four of them are drawn into a final, deadly showdown and Joe watches the scene unfold. Joe realizes that if Old Joe shoots at Cid, Sarah will jump in the way, killing her, and leaving the bullet only to graze Cid's cheek as he gets away. This is the event that will create The Rainmaker, and all the pain he will bring. The only way to stop that process is to stop his future self once and for all. Joe turns his shotgun on himself, fires, and dies. Old Joe vanishes from existence. Sarah and Cid are left alive and with a lot of cash, signifying, hopefully, that The Rainmaker will never come to be.

That might seem all well and good, but...

There's a theme in this movie about missing a mother figure. Joe misses his mother and turns to a life of crime. Another looper, Seth, missing his mother, is duped into not killing his future self and ends up getting tortured for that mistake. This theme illustrates how much influence a mother has on the development of a child - in particular her son. It is my theory (well-supported, but a theory nonetheless,) that this theme intended to include Cid as well, suggesting that, without Sarah's presence, he'd become evil. With her presence, however, he might be good. This is also supported by Sarah's own dialogue in the film.

Here's the sticky part: Old Joe was tormented in the future by The Rainmaker, so he comes back into the past to kill Cid. It is this attempt on Sid's life that robs Cid of Sarah, and turns Cid into The Rainmaker. Then The Rainmaker torments Old Joe in the future, and so on, and so forth.

So these two support each other's existence across the timelines. Their lives make a sort of loop. Hence the movie's title.

Here's why that's bullshit: who came first - Cid or Old Joe?

Think about it: The Rainmaker needs to exist for Old Joe to have a reason to go back into the past. But without Old Joe existing in the first place, The Rainmaker (presumably) would never come into being. This is a Chicken-Or-The-Egg kind of question, and the answer could completely dismantle the premise of the story.

There are two logical explanations I can come up with that would explain the first instance of the Rainmaker and the subsequent loop without having to bring in any theoretical science, fuzzy mechanisms, or string theory.

1) Both The Rainmaker and Joe were created at the same time by some intervention of fate.

If this is the case, however, then it takes away from the agency either character has for controlling their destiny or altering time. If both The Rainmaker and Old Joe can be thrown into existence by some cosmic coincidence, how can we be sure that Joe's heroic act at the end of the movie really did anything? If fate could make it not so, then his suicide is pointless.

2) The Rainmaker came into being a different way the first time.

"We are Legion, for we are many!"

It is possible that Cid became The Rainmaker by some means other than Old Joe's assassination attempt. Perhaps a vagrant wandered onto Sarah's farm, killed her, orphaned Cid, and he grew up to be The Rainmaker that way. This is entirely plausible. Then The Rainmaker would go on to create Old Joe's timeline, and Old Joe would then be the cause of Sid's transformation in the remaining timelines. However, if this was the case, we end up with the same problem as before; if Cid can become The Rainmaker without Old Joe, then Joe's sacrifice is pointless. Sure, he gets Old Joe out of the equation, but if that vagrant could still show up and kill Sarah, then nothing is really resolved at the end of the film. The whole cycle could happen again.

The first time I watched Looper, I felt like something was off. I liked the story (even if the middle felt slow,) loved the premise, and, other than Joseph Gordon-Levitt's make-up, I thought the film was put together really well. But the more I dwelled on it and mulled over the sequence of events, the more I realized that this Old Joe - Rainmaker feedback loop was flawed. It was only after really digging into it that I realized it wasn't just flawed. It was total bullshit.

(If you can think of something I'm missing, please feel free to leave a comment and tell me.)

Call of Duty and Innovative Gameplay

Call of Duty is an insanely popular first-person shooter (FPS) video game, available across several gaming platforms. It has always had a large following, but ever since Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare, the franchise has become one of (if not the) highest grossing video game IPs on the FPS market. Each game since CoD4 has done little to change the original's formula, sticking with similar gameplay, match variants, and weapon load-outs. Sure, the story changes dramatically from one game to another, but any CoD player will tell you that you don't buy the game for its story - you buy it for the multiplayer.

Not me, but I'm familiar with his game-face!

I, like so many other gamers, really do enjoy the visceral, pulse-pounding thrill of matching my reflexes and skills against nameless, faceless opponents in online multiplayer. The current Call of Duty series does a great job of scratching that itch for its players, and its (relatively) simple control scheme makes it easy for new players to visit their friends and pick it up themselves. This generates an ever-expanding pool of potential CoD customers, and this money-generating formula  has put Activision and Infinity Ward on the map.

Now:

Imitation in the video game market is not a new thing. I'm sure even Pong had imitators. But there seems to be a startling shift in the gaming industry to shy away from more artistic endeavors in order to go for games that are sure to make money.

Take a second and breathe. I know this is shocking news that an industry is focused on making money. I didn't mean to spring that on you so suddenly.

But the problem is bigger than that. Older generations of games you'd find in the arcade, like Frogger or Mortal Kombat, tended to cost less than $10 million to produce. That still seems like a lot, but compare it to the games that have come out in the past 5 years, like Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, which have budgets of $200 million or more. The sad truth is that modern video game companies have to put more skin in the game in order to produce a title. That means that the business end needs to be fulfilled.

"Sure, Mr. Molyneux, we can produce your innovative new hit... But can you be sure we'll get our money back?" And the answer, sadly, isn't looking as sure as it used to.

"I would gladly pay you Tuesday for a video game today."

So how do these companies ensure they'll get their money back? Well, they look at trends. "Which games made money before, and which elements can we borrow from them to hopefully pad our own numbers?" Taking a look at Call of Duty: Modern Warfare, it sold 10 million units within its first year on the shelves. At $60 a pop, that's $600 million in revenue - at least 3 times what it cost to produce. Since it hit the market, many new FPS games have borrowed elements of the CoD formula. As video game reviewer extraordinaire Ben 'Yahtzee' Crowshaw has put it, they've all become "same-y, brown, realistic shooters."

"But isn't this what innovation means?" You might ask. "Taking what works and then adding your own spin to it?"

Well, on one level you'd be right. Yes, it is the nature of all human achievements to capitalize on the ground-breaking ingenuity of our fellow man by adding a little bit of our expertise to it. But the ugly trend is that we're not seeing that last step. Instead, developers are recycling the same tired game mechanics, over and over again, without any innovation in design. In short, they're being copycats.

Don't believe me that copy-catting is rampant? Do you remember Flappy Bird, the maddening mobile game that required you to try and navigate a small bird through a series of pipes? Did you know the game made the creator, Dong Nguyen, $50,000 a day at its peak? And did you know that now, after Dong Nguyen deleted the app and later restored it, more than a dozen Flappy Bird clones hit the mobile market every day?

Flap onwards to fortune, little bird.

And these creators are only looking for a single buck of your hard-earned money. Imagine the pressure when you have a $200 million budget you're trying not to blow.

The problem with recycling the same tried-and-true mechanics over and over again is the same problem as marrying your brother/sister and having babies: it's gross and makes Jesus cry. But, more seriously, you don't end up with a healthy gene pool. If the same mechanics keep being recycled, games could become indistinguishable. Was the "jumping from the helicopter while gunning down armed terrorists" scene from Call of Duty, or was it from Battlefield? Or was it from Counter-Strike? Without distinctive innovations in game play, the dividing lines between these games all start to blur. Even if it is against the interest of obtaining the all-mighty dollar, I (and hopefully many other gamers,) encourage game developers to try something new for a change.

Let's take a look at the innovations of the past: FPS gaming made massive strides between the iconic Doom of 1993 and GoldenEye of 1997.

Similarly large strides can be seen between Halo of 2001 and Battlefield 2 of 2005.

But what about Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare in 2007 and Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 of 2011?

I don't mean to imply that graphics make a game. Look at the innovations in gameplay between these years: Goldeneye gave us a fully-interactive 3D shooting environment, something that Doom could only pretend to do. From Halo to Battlefield 2, we saw a lack of emphasis on running-and-gunning, and more of an emphasis on taking cover. But CoD4 and MW3 are very much the same game: not much cover to work with, health regenerates if you stay out of combat long enough, the weapon payloads are almost the same, and it's all staged in an urban setting. There was the same period of time between the games and yet not much innovation. Even the Halo series made innovative tweaks to its UI and game play between Halo and Halo 2, emphasizing bone-shattering melee attacks at close range and getting rid of the health-bar system.

I don't blame Call of Duty, Activision, or Infinity Ward for this startling decline in innovation. I do blame the growing presence that the business side of the gaming industry is having over the artistic side. While it's nice for games to be taken as a serious medium, deserving of hundreds of millions of dollars of funding, I'd hate to see game development going from art to assembly line.

Without Danger, There Is No Drama

This is Obi-Wan Kenobi.

You may recognize him from the Star Wars prequels (even if you'd rather pretend they don't exist.) What makes Obi-Wan Kenobi such a bad***? Well, what doesn't? Watch in the following scene how he and Yoda expertly dismantle about 8 bad guys with all the effort of spreading butter on toast. (Please forgive the quality.)

Awww man, wasn't that cool?! I mean, did you see how Yoda was all flipping around and stuff? And did you see how slick Obi-Wan was at the end? Like this wasn't even a challenge or anything! That's how you know he's so bad***! Because he never seems to be in any danger.

Actually, no.

 

It's natural to think otherwise, but for us to be really engaged with characters, be it in film, books, or video game, we need to sense they are in danger. Don't believe me? Look at Game of Thrones - an HBO adaptation of the Song of Ice and Fire novels by George R. R. Martin. Game of Thrones is infamous for killing off every character that the audience knows and loves. Seemingly no one is safe. SPOILER ALERT (highlight the rest of this sentence to see it on-screen): In the first season of Game of Thrones, Sean Bean, the highest paid actor on the show and seemingly the main protagonist, had his head cut off by episode nine. It is this unpredictability that infuriates and yet keeps fans interested. When you see your favorite character getting circled by wolves, or hounded by enemy knights, you suddenly have to wonder - is s/he about to die? And as nervous or anxious as you might be, you just can't bring yourself to look away. This is what real drama is like; it engages you and forces you to pay attention.

This holds true for books and video games also. Have you ever played a video game with the cheat codes on or the difficulty turned down low? Sure, you breezed through the game and got to see some of the content, but did you really feel excited about doing it? Can you imagine the thrill you would have had if, at every turn, you were scrambling to stay alive and barely beating the odds? 

Don't pretend you don't know what this is.

And in books, even if the protagonist is at no risk of dying, there's still the risk of something terrible happening to them. Take Harry Potter for example: there are seven books in the series, so I was sure he wasn't die to the basilisk in book two. But what if Harry was expelled from Hogwarts and separated from his friends? What if he was stripped of some precious magical protection, like in book four? Or, even worse, what if he started giving in to evil, like Voldemort? Even if the protagonist doesn't die, there are still plenty of reasons to be worried for him/her. And if you're not worried about the protagonist, there are others to worry about - like their friends and family.

Please don't get be started on Hedwig or Sirius Black. I might cry all over again.

Let's go back to Star Wars and see what not to do.

Giving your protagonist a window into the immediate future, superhuman reflexes and strength, a laser sword that reflects attacks and cuts through anything, and also the ability to throw objects and people around with his/her motherf***ing mind isn't a recipe for drama. It's a recipe for a power fantasy. When Obi-Wan stumbles into 12 droids, I'm not thinking, "Oh s**t! He's in trouble!" I'm thinking, "Let the robo-dicing commence!" And while watching him remove extraneous limbs from clone troopers or carving aliens into smoldering bits might be entertaining to watch, it simply isn't dramatic. With the lightsaber in his hand and the Force on his side, Obi-Wan is practically a walking deity. Yeah, sure, he might lose a limb flipping that laser sword about, but that's little more than an inconvenience in the Star Wars universe. Influenza takes a normal person out of work for a week, but a cybernetic arm will get you back into action within a day.

It'll also make you a beast at arm-wrestling.

To better illustrate my point, let's compare young Obi-Wan to Luke Skywalker. Obi-Wan, it seems, has grown up with the Jedi influence all of his life. He knows the teachings, is powerful with the Force, and certainly knows his way around a lightsaber. He's a deadly and skilled warrior. Watching him expertly cut through enemies is similar to watching Superman fly around - it loses excitement because it's exactly what you'd expect him to do. If your local UPS delivery truck driver were to suddenly take flight, however, you'd likely piss yourself. That's the difference - it isn't an amazing feat if it's something you're expecting.

Now look at Luke Skywalker - a poor farmer's nephew, interested only in getting some power converters and joining the Imperial Academy. Suddenly, he's thrust into an adventure involving a kidnapped princess, a galactic rebellion, and a force so sinister that it threatens to destroy or enslave everyone. He's outmatched, but he struggles valiantly despite the odds. When Luke gets into a fight, we know for a fact that he has no experience, and this uncertainty makes us worry for his safety. "Oh s**t! He's pinned down by rifle fire in a narrow corridor without anything to defend himself with! I hope he gets out!" This, in turn, creates satisfying drama.

His past says "scruffy nerfherder." His future says "Jedi Knight."

"But we already know from A New Hope that Obi-Wan survives." You might argue. "It isn't fair to expect the writer to threaten him for the sake of drama, since we know he'll live." And you'd have a point. Yes, I know that Obi-Wan has to survive the prequels because he's present in the REAL Star Wars movies. But, similar to my comments about Harry Potter, Obi-Wan can be brought into danger without necessarily threatening his life. Consider this: we first meet Old Ben Kenobi as a hermit, hiding from the world in the remote desert wastes of Tatooine. What made him distance himself so much from other people? Is there a dark secret in his past? Was he forced to do something he regretted? Did he lose someone precious to him? We do find out that, technically, all three of those are the case, but their significance is played down and practically lost in the prequels.

Think about it: all the time in the prequels that could have been spent showing the relationship between Anakin and Obi-Wan was instead used to give details about boring political intrigue and mindless lightsaber fights. We're told that Anakin and Obi-Wan are great friends who have shared the field of battle and seem to have a rapport, but we never see them grow to respect each other through the trials on-screen. Usually Obi-Wan spent screen time chiding Anakin, and then Anakin skulked off to complain about Obi-Wan. By the end of Episode III, we weren't heart-broken that Obi-Wan had to dismember his pupil and "friend" - we were ecstatic that the child-killing, angst-y bast**d finally got the thrashing he so rightfully deserved.

A-HAHAHAHA!! Serves you right, you dick!

All joking aside, what I'm trying to say is that human drama - the deep stuff that really touches our hearts and makes us pull for characters - is not easy to produce. It takes time. We have to know our hero's weaknesses, vulnerabilities, desires, and personality. We need the hero to show us these elements of him/herself through interactions with other characters on screen. What we don't need is a bunch of flashy swordfighting which serves more as a distraction than as a tool for building tension. Obi-Wan is so disgustingly overpowered in the prequels that we can't expect a handful of droids to challenge him. So, if the outcome of the fight is already decided before it starts, then why bother showing the fight at all? It's just filler. The action becomes pointless, and offers only a cheap thrill instead of a satisfying plot point. There's no drama to be had and no character development. Just a cheat-code empowered demi-god breezing through any potential challenges without so much as breaking a sweat.

And I don't know about you but I can't relate to that.

If you're interested in more in-depth, critical analysis of the Star Wars prequels and why they suck so badly, please watch the Red Letter Media series about them. Below is the first video in the series. 

 

Introductions Are Bulls**t

I grew up with video games and movies the way a lot of "normal" people would grow up with friends. I spent many nights chasing down Bowser or watching an animated Batman beat up the bad guys. I cried when Goku died (each time, really,) and I itched with anticipation for each new release of Halo. Loving these games, movies, and shows, I found myself ardently defending them whenever their quality was called into question. Simply put, I was a fan; I refused to let anyone attack these nostalgic figures of my childhood.

Having said all of that:

Video games, movies, television shows, cartoons, or any vehicle used to tell stories are not exempt from criticism just because they're popular. My preferences are not necessarily the preferences of the majority. That's fine. But it's important to recognize the difference between preference and criticism. Someone might not 'like' the Star Wars prequels because they thought Luke Skywalker was a better protagonist. That's a preference. But if someone says that the Star Wars prequels failed to elicit drama in action sequences because the characters never seemed to be in any real danger, then that's a criticism. The difference between the two is that one cannot be substantiated and the other can. One has no evidence to support its claims and the other does.

Well I've got some bones to pick and I've got plenty of evidence to go with 'em.

In this blog, I will address commonly held beliefs about games, movies, and cartoons, and give them a thorough second look. I will provide social commentary about these popular forms of entertainment, discuss interesting or disturbing trends, and possibly use a bit of adult language. In other words, on a semi-weekly basis, I will be taking a poke at a lot of the entertainment I, and so many others, hold dearly and I do not intend to be kind about it.

You can like it or not - that's your preference. "Let Me Tell You Why That's Bulls**t" is my criticism.