science | Mohammad Moshtaghi

Control

Fri, 03 Sep 2021 19:08:32 -0700

Control exerts full mastery over videogames as a unique narrative form, blending motion-capture acting performances, live-action filmed skits and monologues, puppet shows, radio programs, rock albums, short stories, technical documentation, a whole slew of homages to other videogame genres, and — of course — shooting weird shit that needs to be shot. While not a must, Control and its Oldest House are best experienced in the progressive revelations and immersive weirdness so carefully crafted by its developers. The remainder of this review may contain atmospheric and thematic spoilers.

Control should be remembered, if not for any of its other solid qualities, as a milestone in storytelling with the gaming medium. It’s one thing to have high quality voice acting and motion capture — especially for facial expressions — so that your game characters can converse more naturally than, say, Siri. It’s another thing entirely to film talented actors and put that footage in the game, a technique Remedy continues here from their past work in Quantum Break and, to a lesser extent, Alan Wake and Bright Falls. The narrative tricks needed to pull this off (namely, the Hotline and littering the Oldest House with instructional films and research updates) are clever. Weaving tie-ins between those short films and the mass of mixed-medium work throughout the rest of the game is impressive. But slowly coming to grips with the collective efforts of directors, writers, actors, visual artists, programmers, managers, and the many, many others involved in developing a game of this caliber is staggering. To experience artistry that feels genuinely new is a deep joy.

Jesse Faden (Courtney Hope), our protagonist, is solid ground in the physically and metaphorically shifting strangeness of the Oldest House. We get to watch the depth of her inner worries and assessments balance with her do-what-we-came-to-do attitude to round out a reasonably believable human being. She’s relational, witty, and exceptionally brave: unlike me, she does not freak out when ambushed by shrieking resonance zombies. The player may be holding the controller, but this is Jesse’s story and she is in control.

Control, aside from being the literal name of the game, is a central theme under exploration. What does it mean to have control? Who had it before and who has it now? What do you do with control when it’s yours?

Power, the story posits, is not the same as control. Control is more elusive. It requires understanding, trust, and genuine leadership — qualities that Jesse’s predecessors Northmoor and Trench traded away in their pursuit of, ironically, control. But instead of probing this theme more deeply (for example, asking whether control itself is just an illusory sense of security), the game’s conclusion is satisfied with replacing entrenched, toxic leaders with Jesse and other critically thinking young people and calling it a day. The Foundation and AWE DLCs do a little more work in this direction, but fall short of staking out a thoughtful value claim to complement the robust narrative creativity. I’d hoped for more.

Amidst all this focus on artistry, narrative, and hopes for philosophy, it’s still worth mentioning that the gunplay and paranatural combat abilities feel great. Returning to other games after being Jesse Faden is markedly disappointing. Said another way, you know how exhilarating the combat in Control is going to be from the first moment you accidentally bump into a table and the physics engine sends it flying into a wall, papers thrust into the air.

I’m excited to know the talented folks at Remedy are already working on new stories in the Control universe, and for what other developers and artists this quality of videogame storytelling might inspire.

Bugs

It’s minor, but there was an occasional issue where the floor would just… disappear. At first I thought this was a thing the Oldest House did; then after an extended period of confusion I realized some textures just weren’t loading.

Also, while not a bug, I’m highly skeptical of an office building with lids on their public toilets. Like. Who does this? The Federal Bureau of Control, I guess.

Outer Wilds

Sat, 24 Jul 2021 12:00:00 -0700

Against the backdrop of a diorama solar system in a diorama universe, Outer Wilds plunges forward into an ambitious adventure of wonder and exploration. You play as the sixth member of your species to venture out into space — and the first to do so with a translation device for the language of the Nomai, an ancient species that mysteriously disappeared a long time ago. Remnants of their civilization are scattered all around your solar system, like bread crumbs in a nonlinear trail, inviting you into their mystery. What were the Nomai doing? Where did they go? What’s it all for?

I enthusiastically recommend Outer Wilds to anyone who will listen; it’s a resounding 10/10. I love the world and its inhabitants, and their ideals to explore and to understand. The music frequently brings me to a very emotional place (more on that in a moment). But this game’s best quality is its unique ability to engage players at the intersection of imagination and discovery: learning new information pushes you to form new questions, which in turn makes you seek new answers, and then the cycle repeats. The nonlinear narrative supports your curiosity in whatever direction you decide to go; there are no artificial checkpoints or cutscenes pushing you towards a specific experience. The way you engage with this world is your own.

Outer Wilds is surprisingly capable at blending the whimsy and brutality of space exploration. Your spaceship is made of wood, of all things, and yet is often your only life support in the cold void of space. Plummeting into a black hole is surprisingly non-lethal, but what awaits on the other side is nevertheless crushingly isolating. Extremely bizarre things happen on a regular basis — like getting launched from a planet into low orbit only to crash back down — but manage to feel more bemusing than terrifying.

And the music! Funnily enough, when I fired up Outer Wilds for the first time, I didn’t make it past the main menu. I was captivated by the title track. As I watched the little campfire come to life, the theme’s dueling banjos sang optimism and hope into the deep black of space. The composer, Andrew Prahlow, layers a bright foreground he recorded just before development wrapped with a background that he’d recorded seven years prior — a detail that’s both beyond incredible and very difficult to appreciate without having first finished the game. Suffice it to say, this is my favorite game soundtrack, and I’ve listened to many.

Lastly, Outer Wilds achieves a mark of masterclass sci-fi, wrapping the vast happenings of the universe into a story that is deeply personal. It sets us off asking questions about physics and ancient anthropology but, along the way, teaches us to ask questions of ourselves. How could we be more open-handed and filled with wonder, like the Nomai? What do we do with the memories of people and experiences long gone? How can we live bravely in the face of a constantly uncertain future?

It’s tempting to linger in this moment, while every possibility still exists. But unless they are collapsed by an observer, they will never be more than possibilities.

The Story of More

Tue, 26 May 2020 13:52:54 -0700

Climate change has become one of many sources of existential dread that I share with my generation, albeit one that I was slow to understand. Growing up in a conservative evangelical context, global warming was right up there with evolution in terms of science that was treated as if it contested the nature of God, his creation, and humanity’s place within it. Combined with teachers that were shy about the realities of our earth’s sickness and our hand in its decay, our plight was fuzzy to me, at best.

Yet activism and justice (social, environmental, political) are in the water now — albeit often diluted and consumed in the form of social media. The United States' withdrawal from the Paris Agreement was another Trump decision to throw on the pile of his wrongdoings. The March for Science is now a three-year-old movement to use science for the common good and spur change. Natural disasters are now frequently linked to “weirding weather.” And yet, while I know climate change denial is an ostrich’s approach to problem solving, my knowledge on what the Paris Agreement says, what the March for Science marches for, or the cause-and-effect behind why the weather is now weird is embarrassingly limited. I’ve been drawing lines in the sand about “good” and “bad” approaches to our natural world without real knowledge, which is a lousy and ineffective place to try and enact change from.

Hope Jahren’s The Story of More is a wonderful primer on our natural history and how we got ourselves into the mess we’re in. By seamlessly weaving chatty stories about growing up in the American Midwest with no-nonsense, no-jargon statistics, Hope expertly guides us through Climate Science 101 less like a lecturing professor (though she is that) and more like a wise and smart friend. For nearly the entire book, she simply presents her findings without bias or interpretation — with a brief break in character to rant about how much she hates cars — seemingly trusting that we can wrestle with the implications ourselves. She shows us that it all boils down to some basic fundamentals: how many of us there are, the food we eat and where it comes from, the energy we use and how we produce it, and, finally, how all of that affects the natural world we live in.

The idea of scaring the public for the sake of scaring it scares me… People don’t make good decisions out of fear, history seems to have shown, and at least some of the time, people who are afraid are also prone to doing nothing… My own goal is to inform you, not to scare you, because teaching has taught me to know and respect the difference. I’ve found that fear makes us turn away from the issue whereas information draws us in.

— The Story of More, pages 139–140.

The Story of More is the story of our relentless pursuit of more food, more energy, more variety, more transportation, more possessions, more comfort. Conservation was discarded in favor of efficiency; instead of targeting “more for less”, we pursued “much more for more”. This mix of scientific findings and historical narrative is powerful and helped me understand modern first-world life in new ways.

In the appendix entitled “The Story of Less,” Hope offers some reflection questions on how we each can use less and share more. There are no cut and dry answers (and, as it turns out, there are more problems than any one of us could solve alone), but she provides a framework that gave me clarity beyond the behavior and tone matching of today’s armchair activism. I’m very thankful for her voice.