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Before writing this final exchange, N'Gai Croal from Newsweek and I had already written over 10,000 words about "Manhunt 2." What more could we possibly say? What was there left to debate? Oh, I just wanted to question the very nature of gaming. That's all.

The discussion appears in full below as well as on N'Gai's "Level Up" blog.

Read on. And thank you to all who commented here and around the web. The discussion has been fascinating.

To: N'Gai Croal
Fr: Stephen Totilo
Date: June 26th, 2007
Re: Who are we?

N'Gai,

Sometimes you make me sad.

One time you made me sad recently was yesterday. That's when you told me once more that "videogames are not a narrative medium."

Before I could even grab a box of tissues you chopped a few more rhetorical onions in front of my face. You said that the newness of games and the medium's "requirement of repetitive action, reaction and interaction to maintain the player's interest; the thinness of its characters; the perfunctoriness of its plots; the lack of complex or even complicated psychology" made it hard to argue that games have depth. You said, "It would be like arguing that an activity--a mountain hike, laps in a pool or a game of chess--is profound."

You know what I have to say? Something I've wanted to say for years now, Croal: "Go take a hike!"

The world does not believe that repetitive actions lack the profundity of a book. My brother-in-law certainly doesn't. He is hiking the Appalachian Trail –Georgia to Maine -- this summer. I think he could spot some deeper meaning amid his repetitive actions.

I also bet the people who like long pieces of classical music that repeat the same musical themes find artistic beauty inherent in repetition.

I suspect our fellow gamers who killed giant after giant in the majestic but sorrowful "Shadow of the Colossus" and will soon blast psychopath after psychopath in the drowned Utopia of "BioShock" will have little trouble identifying deeper meanings in their favorite entertainment.

Not all games can be as shallow as "Tetris" (nor as good, uh, coincidentally?)Sometimes some meaning will get in there. And the more game designers figure out how to embed it not in between moments of gameplay ("Final Fantasy X," "Half-Life 2") but actually into gameplay ("Silent Hill 2") or in the background while gameplay is occurring (the voice-over during the platforming action of "Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time"; the value systems expressed through real-time graphics changes in "Fable") the more meaning has the chance of seeping into some games. I don't want deep meaning in all my games. I don't think I even want it in most of my games – certainly not in my racing games or any of the descendants of "Pac-Man" that I play (except "GTA", but not "Crackdown").

I'm just an optimist, I guess. I think games are still evolving and that there's hope for profundity yet. Now I thought I was supposed to be the curmudgeon in these exchanges!

Back to talking about the game: so there I was hacking and slashing with my arms while seated in the Rockstar offices last Friday and I thought, "this Wii sure makes me feel more involved with this 'Manhunt 2' game than I thought I would." At one point I had the lead character, Daniel Lamb, leaping off a roof and down onto some victim that must have deserved it, because… why else would that victim have been in the game? Anyway, Daniel had garden shears in hand. Holding the Wii's nunchuck and remote in my two hands I followed on-screen cues and hoisted my hands up (Daniel lifted those shears) and then drove them down (Daniel, shall we say, forcefully gave the shears to his victim). In another display of Wii-enabled immersion, one of the Rockstar guys in the office held the Wii remote like a saw handle and sliced it back and forth while Daniel sawed something other than a 2x4 in the game. You talked, rightly so, about how the repetitious actions of games weird non-gamers out. But how many repetitions of these actions do you think it would take to wig out the non-gamers – and maybe even some actual gamers? I'm guessing one each.

I think the ultra-violence we see in a lot of video games today is the product of an upped ante that started rising as soon as developers noticed that it is action -- space ships blasting other space ships, for starters -- that can make a game interactive and therefore fun. Those repeatedly raised stakes have brought us to Daniel Lamb's raised shears, and in an unexpected twist, my simultaneously raised hands. It's going to be a long time before a gamer can describe "Manhunt 2" and not have some explaining about themselves to do. I know I'd wonder why a person who was into "Manhunt" couldn't just settle for the gentle swings of "Wii Sports" tennis.

In September I interviewed Nintendo of America president Reggie Fils-Aime and asked him if he'd try to get Rockstar to support his company. The developer's owner and publisher, Take Two, hadn't produced its "Grand Theft Auto"s for Nintendo's GameCube. What about Wii? "I'll be spending some time later today with the folks over at Take Two to see what type of support they can give our console," he told me. Look at the support he got! He might as well have asked 2 Live Crew to re-write the "Super Mario" theme song.

But I say, thank goodness they made "Manhunt 2" for the Wii, because it provides a new way to think about where games are going. Let me quickly establish that I think the Wii controls in "Manhunt 2" are quite effective. They don't force you to imitate exactly what Daniel Lamb does on-screen, but the spirit of the player's and Daniel's actions are the same. A sharp move from one is a sharp move from the other. A powerful swing from me is a powerful swing from whichever hand Daniel is holding his axe. You pointed out that the Wii was not your console of choice and that the reliance on gesture controls made the game feel unnatural But I've played a bunch of Wii games and feel comfortable with the system. As a result, I felt my moves were in sync with the game. Without meditation, I can say I, at times, felt one with it.

When "Manhunt 2" asks the player to trigger the game's signature stealth kills it slows down the passage of time in the game. This gives players time to do the right move and not worry that what's happening on screen is passing them by. Then, once the gesture is properly done, the action reverts to normal speed and the animations of the stealth kills reach their gruesome climax. In other words, the game finds a way to both ask you to take the time to focus on your own physical actions and then restore your attention to what's happening in the game without missing a beat. The system is smooth.

The promise of the Nintendo's system is that we Wii players will feel more into our games. You can have your fancy shaders and bump-mapping, Xbox gamers (actually I play the 360 too). We've got motion control! We're more into our games.

I believe that for years gamers have expected that the thing that will draw us more deeply into what we play and that will win games new respect among non-gamers is improved graphics. It will make these worlds seem more real and that will make them seem more worthy of spending time in. What other drives, besides those and commerce, have there been for better graphics? I think there's been a hope that games would ride the improvements in graphics technology to a new era, in which people play them without thinking of them as games.

The word "cinematic" gets bandied about, which is short-hand for "exciting and real-seeming." Why have so many games and gamers aspired to the cinematic? What is there to admire in film? That good movies looked cool, for one. Even better: when people watch them they buy into the fiction as a form of reality. People watch "Star Wars" and don't quite believe that the Death Star exists, but they buy into the idea that it could and that it might as well in the galaxy where Luke and Leia live. Go to the movies and you won't start thinking that boys in England attend magician's school, but the movies make it easy to pretend, as a viewer, that such things are real. Movie-goers buy into all kinds of oddities, like the one that suggests that a conversation looks like a close-up of one person talking, then the close-up of someone else, and then a picture of both people together. That's not what a conversation looks like in real life, but people both buy the fake realities shown in the movies and easily comprehend the unreal way real things look when put in film. People can do this because millions of people have been watching movies for decades. We all get it. Cinema makes sense.

Oh, to have video games be cinematic too. If only the video-game-rendered visions of "Call of Duty" and "Gears of War" and "Mass Effect" could be as convincing as film. Then that would show the world. Maybe. But "Manhunt 2" on the Wii reminded me that there's this other way to get people to buy into a fictional world: make them – bodily – participants in it.

You've played "Manhunt 2" on the Wii, what do you think? Given how the world has so far reacted to "Manhunt 2," and given what I experienced when I played it – something even I, as an experienced gamer, wasn't quite ready for – I wonder who is ready for this?

Just when we were inching toward a point at which non-gamers would be able to understand the potential immersion of 3D games, the Wii came in. Can society handle a legion of gamers sitting on their couch gesturing a burger flip and a sword swing? Is this the easier mode of play that people can accept over the mode that has you tapping buttons on a controller? Or is this the weirdest expression of the desire to game yet? How odd it is, this desire to sit there and fake things, to act with our hands, to replace blank stares that mask who-knows-what-thoughts with energized gestures that prove we were animated by playing roles? Does gesture control make gaming seem like a more natural activity? Or does it remove the veil and reveal how peculiar and arresting the desire to become participants in a fantasy world is?

Who are we when we game? What kind of people does the Wii reveal us to be? Who does a Wii game turn us into, just for the moments we're playing it? Worthy of censor or not, who does "Manhunt 2," at least momentarily, make us?

I don't know if I have another letter in me, N'Gai. I'm eager for others to pick up this exchange instead. So if this is the end for now, let me just thank you for another illuminating exchange. Next time we'll keep it brief, I promise!

Oh, and for the record, readers, Rockstar wasn't able to let us back in to play the rest of the game. Who know what lurks in the game's final 10 levels. Will we ever find out?

-Stephen

To: Stephen Totilo
Fr: N'Gai Croal
Date: June 27th, 2007
Re: Dead Game Walking?

Stephen,

If my last post made you sad, this one might just make you mad. But not just yet.

I'm going to start out by talking about how I think Rockstar could have made an even better game out of "Manhunt." As you know, I was very taken by the conceit of The Director and the way that he gives voice to the vicarious, voyeuristic side inherent to the designer of a videogame: he makes the rules; he tells us what to do; he controls where we can go; he wants to "see" us perform his bidding. But the Director isn't the only voyeur at the party. We are as well. We steer the avatar; in this case, "Manhunt" protagonist James Earl Cash. We control his stealthy movements. We direct his gruesome attacks. We, like the Director, very much want to see what the fist, the stick, the knife, the gun will do to these bodies. So on the lower frequencies, the Director speaks for us too.

Fine, then; the game represents the callous and the sadistic, and it does so exceedingly well. What about its antithesis? What if we-as-Cash were confronted by a non-player character with a completely different take on seeing violence, someone who abhors watching it completely? There's a female journalist in the game who's trying to solve the mystery of what's going on in Carcer City; at one point in the game, we have to guide her to safety even as crooked cops and thugs abound, while still carrying out the twisted fantasies of the Director. During the mission where we must escort her to safety, we can't leave her alone for too long while we scout ahead and take out our enemies; otherwise, she'll freak out, make noise, and the bad guys will come running. Rockstar could have done a lot more with her. What if she also freaked out whenever she saw or heard us committing acts of violence, and made comments on the disgusting nature of what she's witnessing? We could lead her around with a blindfold, which would allow us to pull off silent kills, but the blindfold would also reduce the amount of time we could let go of her hand. We could put headphones on her blasting loud music, which would let us carry out noisy kills, but we'd have to do so outside of her line of vision. We could make her wear a blindfold and headphones, but that would drastically reduce the amount of time we could spend away from close proximity to her. In other words, she would be the anti-Director, the un-voyeur, representing the side of us that doesn't want to see or do these things.

I'm suggesting a "Manhunt" that finds a way to further complicate our responses to the actions that the game is forcing us to carry out, within the language of the game and without breaking its fiction. If, as I suggest, the essence of a game is in its repeated action, reaction and interaction, the only way for Manhunt to meaningfully incorporate an auto-critique--to make us question what we're doing while we're doing it--would be to do so in the same terms of repeated action, reaction and interaction. That's how single-player videogames can achieve depth, or rather, meaningful shallowness, by wedding meaning to action. Any other approach is not only cheating, it's unlikely to be truly memorable. The example I always give of this is in "Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty," when Raiden reveals to Snake that he had been a child soldier. Because I'd done some light research on child soldiers for a play that I'd directed a few years earlier, I found this particular cutscene moving. But it didn't drive home the horror of child soldiers because it was just a movie sequence. Had Hideo Kojima found a way incorporate child soldiers into the gameplay--very, very carefully--his point would have had a lot more resonance.

I'm about to share my thoughts on how Rockstar could have improved "Manhunt 2," based on the six missions we played. Which means that it's time for a...

[SPOILER WARNING: Skip the next three paragraphs if you don't want to read about plot points and speculation that may affect your enjoyment of the game should "Manhunt 2" be released.]

Where Manhunt explored both ultra-violence and voyeurism, "Manhunt 2" replaces the theme of voyeurism with that of (in)sanity. I know that you weren't as observant as me during the demo of the first level of "Manhunt 2," but I pretty quickly figured out that Leo Kasper is a figment of our protagonist Danny Lamb's imagination. (Or he appears to be, at any rate; with about ten missions left to go, Rockstar might have a few more twists lying in wait.) So rather than being urged on and cheered on in our murderous ways by a voice inside our ears (the Director) we're now being prompted and applauded by the voice inside our head (Leo.) Danny is reluctant towards the old ultra-violence; as you pointed out, committing his first murder causes him to throw up. This creates a nice tension, but as demonstrated in the six missions that we played, this tension exists only in the narrative. That's a mistake.

What if this tension existed in the gameplay as well? What if "Manhunt 2" let us switch between playing as Danny Lamb and playing as Leo Kasper within the same virtual body? The posture, the walk, the facial expressions, head tracking; all of that would change, but the clothing and the character model would remain the same. And whichever character is not being played would now be the voice inside our heads, each with its own perspective on observing or performing gruesome acts. As in the movie "Primal Fear," this would call into question whose personality is the original and whose is invented. Leo could also play somewhat differently from Danny--a rage mode; bare-handed execution kills--and since one of the ingeniously morbid details in the games is that the amount of blood splattered on Danny's clothes, face and eyeglasses represents the number and intensity of his executions, Leo's emergence could be triggered by the quantity of blood soaking Danny's clothing. Those dynamics would go some ways towards weaving the theme of insanity more thoroughly into the game.

"Manhunt 2" also periodically includes hallucinations in the game--a little child; a ball that appears out of nowhere--but they're purely cosmetic because they in no way affect the gameplay. If Rockstar really wants to mess with our heads, to truly provoke a feeling of madness in us, they need to do so using the very fabric of the game to undermine our ability to trust what's real and what is not--virtually speaking. You mentioned the health packs that flicker as if they might be hallucinations. What about judiciously applying that same flickering filter to our foes? To the games corpses? Weapons? Doors? What if once or twice, after an enemy killed us, the Retry screen flickered in and out, then showed us, alive, standing over the battered corpse of the man you believed had just killed you? What if there were an enemy that we'd patiently set up for a stealth kill and dispatched in a particularly grisly fashion, only to see the corpse flicker and disappear; or even more disturbingly--and playing with repetition--get back up as if nothing had happened, requiring us to kill them all over again? If insanity is indeed a central theme in the game, the gameplay ought to reflect that as powerfully as possible, to make me feel like my mind's playing tricks on me.

[END SPOILER WARNING.]

Let me return to your opening point about the potential for profundity in repetitive action. I like your brother-in-law; I had the good fortune of accompanying him on the drive from the Atlanta airport to the small town where your wedding took place. While waiting for his bags at the airport, we had a lot of time to talk about his hike, of which he'd completed about a third, along the Appalachian Trail. His reasons for doing the hike were interesting. Some of the stories he told and events he described were compelling. But if your brother-in-law had described every single step that he'd taken on the Appalachian Trail, would that have been deep or meaningful? I don't think so. It would have been the videogame equivalent of a walkthrough. What he did was pare back, compress, omit, extend, pace, embellish and editorialize--in other words, he created a narrative--so that his *story* about his hike could begin to develop its profundity.

This is what I meant when I said that it's difficult to "read" or derive much meaning from a game. That's why in our three Vs. Modes, we ultimately don't spend very much time talking about or analyzing the experience of playing a game, because it's hard to do so without turning our emails into "I went here. I did this. I picked that up." Which is, after all, what games are. So if the essence of a game is located in what we do, is a walkthrough--go here, do this, pick up that--the most truthful way to write about the experience of playing a game? I hope not. But it's something we should consider. Once again, if the essence of any game is located in its action, reaction, interaction, and the rules which circumscribe those three elements, what does the narrative do? It provides some context for each of the above. But if the meat of the game were in its narrative--even in the most story-oriented RPGs like "Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion" or "Final Fantasy XII," which must deploy shards of context far more frequently than do action games like "God of War II" or "Halo 2"--I'd say that Bethesda Softworks and Square Enix were working in the wrong medium.

Now, choice and consequence--which Next Generation columnist Eric-Jon Rossel Waugh recently argued are essential to making games that are more grown-up--are an excellent place to embed meaning. After delivering an extended jeremiad about what games currently are, and some recommendations about where they could go, Waugh wrote:

"So assuming we accept all of this, what's the alternative? Better videogames, is all. Videogames that actually do what videogames are supposed to do: present circumstances in which the player may make meaningful decisions, with real human consequences, and allow a nuanced range and quality of response.

"That sounds nice. What does it mean, though? It means emotional consequences: remorse, shame, pride, relief, affection. Making the player feel the effect of his decisions. If the actual videogame takes place in the space between the mind and the machine, then it follows that the player should bear at least half the responsibility. The trick is to quit quantifying everything. Instead of experience points and power-ups, allow the player the freedom and nuance to develop and perfect his own skills and methods. (The Wii should help here.) Instead of offering trinkets and material rewards, offer the insight needed to further empower the player in his decision-making. Instead of compelling the player to act, persuade him. Instead of showing the player cutscenes, telling him how he is supposed to feel, give him difficult choices with emotional ramifications, and let him find his own meaning.

The thing is, choices and consequences in video games sit on top of repetitive action, reaction and interaction. To remix what you wrote above, adding a "Manhunt 2" bass line: rip open the chest of "Oblivion" and you'll find the beating heart of "Pac-Man" inside. Waugh is arguing that videogame developers should, like Adam and Eve after eating from the tree of knowledge, conceal the naked truth of what their medium really is. Maybe he's right that videogames should quit quantifying everything, but they can't; those numbers that he resents are part and parcel of a game's rules and systems. All a developer can do is hide the numbers, but they'll never go away. Waugh favors the offering of insight into better decision-making over that of trinkets and material rewards, but games aren't particularly good at the former, while they excel at the latter. And as for difficult choices with emotional ramifications, well that's a worthy goal, but you can't make a game entirely from difficult choices--not if you want those choices to have emotional ramifications--which means that there's still going to be plenty of that repetitive action that Waugh doesn't much care for.

I find myself more in agreement with David Jaffe, who responded to Waugh in comments and on his own blog by writing.

"Great article and as someone who has struggled with this issue before (as a designer with my own games and as a player: a game like "Facade" comes to mind as something I've played that has set its sights on the lofty goals you suggest we pursue), I can tell you that many designers have the intent and some of us lucky ones even have the freedom to puruse [sic] the goal of making games matter more than they currently do. The biggest issue I've come up against--besides my clear lack of talent--is the inability to convince players that the fiction matters. Unless you- as a player- make a clumsy self-conscience effort to force yourself to buy into the fiction, you are always aware that the game world is meaningless in any context other than the surface goals given (i.e. get thru the door; kill the enemies). So in "Facade," instead of caring about the fate of this young couple's marriage, I just went around and either started messing with things to see what would happen (kissing the man's wife was the very first thing I did, ignoring the fiction of the scenario alltogether [sic] because I wanted to see what would happen), or I just focus on how to 'win'. It's not because I don't WANT to care about the story and scenario. I love character stories and political drama and all sorts of 'mature' subject matter when I see it in movies and read about it in books. It's just that- in a game- I simply don't care about anything other than my goals. Until we figure out how--if it's even possible in an interactive experience--to make players suspend disbelief and really buy into the wolrd [sic] fiction (while they are playing, not by watching a cut scene), then all of the effort that would go into making players care for characters and situations will be wasted on all those other than the few willing to force themselves into buying the fantasy...and I don't think that is close to even 5% of the folks who go into EB and buy the latest hit title.

"Again, loved the write up. It was great and thought provoking. But I would love to see someone address what I feel is the real problem with this issue versus simply telling us designers that the solve is coming up with characters we care about and scenarios more involved than: kill the bad guys! We get that, and some of us have even done it. It's just not working."

Still, as much as I like to be black-and-white in my writing, the problem of meaning vs. interactivity is not a zero-sum game between Waugh's theories and Jaffe's practice. Even though Kojima is certainly cheating with the attenuated cutscenes in "Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater," the cumulative effect of the Socratic exchanges between Snake and the bosses he encounters on the battlefield culminates in an emotionally powerful conclusion when he finally faces off against the Boss, kicks her ass and takes her name--I mean, defeats her and assumes her title. (I'd still like him to embed more of that directly into the gameplay, however.) One of the security guards at Newsweek, who is a huge fan of "Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion," will regale me from time to time with stories of his experiences, and he's definitely having some complicated emotional responses to the choices he makes. (Being a gamer, though, complicated emotional responses aren't getting in the way of him pursuing his objectives.) Ken Levine is adamant that "BioShock" is in its bones a first-person shooter, and it is unquestionably so, but he's worked some morally problematic choices into the gameplay from time to time, and I can't wait to play it to see how that makes me feel.

Finally, I spent yesterday at Electronic Arts' Los Angeles studio looking at a game that Steven Spielberg is working on with Doug Church. I can't talk about it just yet--sorry!--but I will say that I was impressed by the ways in which they're building an experience that could, if successful, take a pretty big baby step towards addressing some of Waugh's objections about videogames without surrendering any of its action-adventure credentials. It's going to be a slow, halting process, however, to get action-adventure games to move in this direction in a manner that truly works. And even if developers succeed, we the gamers will always have a certain degree of double consciousness when it comes to our play; we'll always keep the underlying mechanics in mind even as the fiction becomes more seamless and all-encompassing. So to Waugh, I say that games will forever be games, so make your peace with that fact; and to Jaffe, I say that we frogs are already in the pot of boiling water, so if you gradually turn up the heat by embedding a little more meaning into every game that you makes, we're probably not going to jump out.

A couple of quick points before my hour on the stage comes to a close:

1. We'll have to agree to disagree about the added immersiveness of the Wii controller when it comes to "Manhunt 2". "They don't force you to imitate exactly what Daniel Lamb does on-screen, but the spirit of the player's and Daniel's actions are the same," you wrote. That's true, but I found myself intently focused on the icons in the upper left corner of the screen so that I could match the Simon Says-like mini-game, rather than the execution kills themselves. And even though that wasn't enough "alleviation or distancing" for the British Board of Film Classification, it was too much for me. I wish that Rockstar had taken a page from the Wii version of Electronic Arts' "The Godfather" and given me a set of gestural controls that mapped onto real life movements, then let me handle each execution in a free-form, improvised manner. As I said in my last entry, they might have gotten a Seniors Only rating for my version, but why just use the Wii's controls as little more than button presses with the added sensation of gesture without the accompanying freedom that gestures allow? I guess open killing went a bit too far for even the masters of the open world game.

2. In your second post, you asked me whether I thought "Manhunt 2" was edgier than the first. I actually think that the experience that I had playing the original game was more disturbing, but I suspect that the various ratings bodies were more freaked out by the newfound presence of sexual themes in what is also an extremely violent game. That, along with the use of the Wii remote; the environmental kills, like the iron maiden execution opportunity that you botched; the non-interactive sequence in which someone's tongue is severed with a wire cutter; and an earlier scene that looked a lot like the aftermath of a castration--yes, all of that seems a step beyond what I remember of the first "Manhunt." We're hearing that Rockstar is trying to make alterations to the game in hopes of securing a new rating, but even if Seth Schiesel over at the New York Times believes that removing the most intense executions from each weapon will put Rockstar in the clear; I remain skeptical about their chances.

Putting myself in the mind of the ESRB and the public relations challenge they will face if a revised "Manhunt 2" hits the market, I think they may require that Rockstar completely jettison the sexually themed content. The Wii version may have to be scrapped entirely because of the gestural controls, which won't play well on the six o'clock news and YouTube videos. The PSP version could be a vulnerable because of its portability. As for the Brits and the Irish, I don't see how they can approve it even if changes are made, given their public statements. The BBFC said that the context of "Manhunt 2" is objectionable, the IFCO said that there is no context. (C'mon, guys; which is it?)

The irony is that with stealth games, you have to think, which involves distancing yourself from the game's content to focus on its mechanics. You have to focus on the underlying rules more than you would an action game, which is mostly stimulus-response. Shouldn't a game like "God of War II," where you can rack up a massive body count without that much thought, be of far more concern to raters? Then again, perhaps it is precisely that amount of thought and forethought that freaked them out, like the difference between manslaughter and murder. And when you think about the amount of clinical death and destruction in real-time strategy games like "Supreme Commander" and "Command & Conquer Generals 3," perhaps Stalin was right: one death is a tragedy, 200 gruesome deaths is ban-worthy, and a million clinical deaths is E10+ for Comic Mischief, Fantasy Violence, Mild Language.

3. The other interesting thing about Schiesel's piece about the three hours he spent playing "Manhunt 2" was the snippets of his conversation with Strauss Zelnick, the new chairman of Take-Two. Zelnick, showing either his naivete or his lack of familiarity with the medium, attempted to defend "Manhunt 2" on the grounds that it's not photorealistic (that's technically true, but what's his defense going to be when the PS9 ships?)--and that it's tame compared to movies like "Hostel" or "Saw" (qualitatively, yes, but quantitatively, there are far more killings in "Manhunt 2" because of its repetitive action, reaction and interaction). These are losing arguments. All he needs to say is that it's not real.

That's it for me, Stephen. Thanks for the exchange. It looks as though your wish has been granted and other people are picking up the conversational torch. I hope we'll get to play the rest of "Manhunt 2" someday, in whatever form it finally takes. And as you hinted at in your final words, we're planning to tackle small games in our next Vs. Mode. Will shorter posts ensue? We shall see.

Cheers,

N'Gai

So, for the second time, the Pharisees summoned the man who had been blind and said: "Speak the truth before God. We know this fellow is a sinner."
"Whether or not he is a sinner, I do not know," the man replied. "All I know is this: Once I was blind and now I can see."
--Final title card from "Raging Bull," taken from the New English bible, John IX, 24-26

In Round 1 of Vs. Mode, Newsweek's N'Gai Croal leapt to the defense of the controversial "Manhunt 2" and slammed the game raters who have currently blocked the ultra-violent game from being released: "Unless they have good reason to believe that this game is an imminent threat to the public order, or that it will in and of itself incite adults to violence, their decision seems to me to be based on taste, and I will never believe in substituting anyone else's tastes for my own."

The Internet applauded N'Gai's impassioned defense. But it is my job -- nay, my calling -- as N'Gai's Vs. Mode partner to call him out for it, to try to poke his argument full of holes.

You can read my counter-point as well as my suggestion of a hybrid "Manhunt"-"Sex and the City" (Rockstar, take notes!) and my description of the most extreme moment of "Manhunt 2," a moment that you haven't read about anywhere else. (Actually you can read it in one other place. These Vs. Mode exchanges also appear on N'Gai's "Level Up" blog.)

Here we go:

To: N'Gai Croal
Fr: Stephen Totilo
Date: June 24, 2007
Re: “Manhunt 2”'s movie moment

N'Gai,

Thanks for the "Final Fantasy"-length letter. I just wish you hadn't censored yourself.

No, I'm not joking.

By focusing your analysis on the decisions of the British Board of Film Classification and Entertainment Software Ratings Board you've offered a de facto defense of "Manhunt 2" that you could have given -- and I'm certain would have given -- the game had you never played it. I respect that. But in so deftly arguing why games and gamers should be treated with the same respect for intelligence and range of taste as films and filmmakers, you managed to write 3700-plus words that never describe any of the features of "Manhunt 2" that would obviously set it apart in many people's minds from any movie they've ever seen or ever heard of.

For example: the game's prime mechanic, the three tiers of stealth-murder. Other stealth games, like "Metal Gear Solid" and "Splinter Cell" ask the player to sneak and ask the player to kill. Failing to sneak into that kill alerts the intended victim, which either makes them put up a fight and/or forces you to re-try a few minutes' worth of the game. You either pull off the sneaking well or you fail. The better players might be able to actually sneak by enemies instead of sneaking up to them and killing, but for those who choose to go in for the kill there are only two possible resolutions: a successful stealth kill or a failed one.

The "Manhunt" series is different. In "Manhunt" I can put a plastic bag in my character's hand and stalk an enemy thug who is pacing through an alley. I can tiptoe up to within a few feet of him, softly as to not alert him. My character will raise his right hand. That's the cue that I'm within range of a kill. I press a button on the controller. A targeting reticule surrounds the enemy's head. It flashes white. If, in the first game, I then trigger the kill the camera angle switches and I see my guy throw a bag on the enemy's head and suffocate him. It's nasty. But if I had waited while the white reticule flashed – if I had had the nerve to keep my guy right behind the enemy, maybe even tiptoed in step with his pacing to keep close – then the white would have turned to yellow and the triggered kill would involve not just a suffocation but a follow-up punch to the bagged head. Had I waited longer, yellow would have gone to red and the murder would have been more grisly.

You talked about your initial revulsion at seeing "Fight Club." You initially viewed the film as Fascist. Then you watched it again, and as far as you're concerned, you got it. You figured out what the filmmakers were really trying to say. I think we could say you feel you played your role as movie-viewer better the second time. What reward did the filmmaker have for you? A subtler understanding of what you just watched. What was Rockstar's reward for you when you played your role as a stealthy gamer better? A more grisly murder to watch your character commit. On a deeper level there may be "Fight Club" readings and mis-readings that you could have applied to the first “Manhunt.” Maybe a mis-reading would have been that the game is pro-violence. Maybe playing the game in full reveals that is actually anti-violence. Whether that's the case or not, I certainly believe that games can be interpreted in their entirety, and maybe one can view understanding the game properly as some sort of super-reward for playing the game well. But the moment-to-moment rewards of “Manhunt” are an increasingly vicious spectacle.

From a game design perspective, this is smart stuff. The "Manhunt" games, like few others, have a system that actually rewards brazen play. I see a parallel with the city racing series "Burnout," which gives the player extra speed boost power for every near miss and for every second they drive on the wrong side a double-yellow line. I like the "Manhunt" system and think other games should reward bold displays of skill. (For those who can't sympathize because they are so put off by "Manhunt"'s content, let me put this in terms of a made-up game: imagine a game called "Manhunt" that puts you in control of a woman who is seeking Mr. Right. If you have her approach a guy and just briskly say hello, then maybe you'll just get a clipped greeting in reply without the guy breaking his stride. But if you finesse that hello, maybe he'll stop and smile. And if you really finesse it, maybe he'll stop, smile, ask you your name and ask you for your phone number. That's how the real "Manhunt" works, but with plastic bags and, as far as I've seen, only man-to-man murderous interaction).

Given this central mechanic of the game, I don't have hard time seeing how people would find "Manhunt" and "Manhunt 2" to be a class apart from any of the movies you mentioned. This game asks something of the player – clinical killing -- and then it encourages them, but notably does not require them, to accent that killing with a butcher's callousness or even a torturer's sadism. Is this game series a laboratory for human behavior, testing how far a player will go? Is it a game that revels in the interactive nature of the medium by presenting players with opportunities that will haunt them, a horror experience genuinely distinct from horror films because it allows the player to choose how revealing of their own dark side they want the macabre experience of "Manhunt" to be? Or is this just violence porn? Is it condemnatory, bad-taste over-kill?

I respect defense of games as speech. But I think for too long those who write and talk about video games – and I'm thinking primarily of reviewers -- have ignored the effects of ultra-violence on games and the nature of that violence as it relates to the quality of what we play. I'm not talking about anything that would affect how games are rated. The people who rate games seem primarily concerned with how the interactivity of games possibly teaches or at least desensitizes gamers to real violence. What about how gamers have been desensitized to violence in games? It seems to me that the very thing that makes a game a game – its interactivity – encourages game makers to fill their creations with an inordinate amount of one of the most reliably engaging things there is to do with the press of a controller button: squashing enemies in "Super Mario," shooting them in "Call of Duty," committing an act of virtual violence. As a result, gamers' entertainment is soaked in far more blood than other forms of entertainment. Is it a wonder games get such a bad rap?

Yet who would argue that "Ratchet and Clank" would be more fun if Ratchet went pacifist and negotiated peace deals or if the next World War II first-person game shelved the rifles and focused on repairing tanks. I don't think it's weird that so many people are freaked out about games. I actually think it's weirder that so few gamers are freaked out about games. What are we having fun with?

I played a near-final version of a PS3 game called "The Darkness" on Saturday. It's a first-person shooter with a twist. The twist is that you gain two magical snakes that slither in the air in your peripheral vision and can snatch a dead enemy's heart with their long, sharp teeth. But before you learn to do that the game teaches you to wield a pistol in each hand and trigger special execution kills. Just tap a button. I did. My game's anti-hero put a pistol in a mobster's mouth and fired. And that wasn't even the point of the game. The snakes are. Frankly, the gunplay felt gratuitous.

This is what I think it comes down to really: What's the point? Until the day an ultra-violent game impresses upon the world that it has a point beyond sadistic thrills, I doubt a game like "Manhunt" can find its place. You certainly appreciate the first as in invaluable psychologically provocative experience. That's not how most of the world that's heard of the game views it. At least, that's not how they talk about it. It's easier to decry it as crude rubbish -- possibly as something evil.

I can't dismiss "Manhunt 2" like that, though. For one thing, it's hard to outright reject something that exhibits craft, that exhibits the signs of being made by talented people. Craft alone is no automatic apology for subject matter -- certainly not in a world where one of the most technically lauded films of early cinema was "The Birth of a Nation," a celebration of the Ku Klux Klan. But if you identify craft you can at least begin to consider a work as serious and worthy of dissemination.

So a few notes on "Manhunt 2"'s signs of craft. Graphically, it's solid. On the Wii it doesn't look quite as good as the first "Manhunt" did on Xbox, but it looks good. It's a little grainy and its scene transitions are intentionally scratchy. Camera work is a little wobbly. This isn't bad programming. It's an attempt to make the game feel just a bit verité, a bit homemade. It suits a game that begins in an asylum and puts you in control of a mental patient.

In some ways its craft seems superior to that of the first game. The first relied on the video game cliché of the floating health pack. Walk into this item and your hero's health meter is re-filled. The sight of a floating health pack is a reminder that you're seeing a video game on your TV screen. In "Manhunt 2," the floating health pack still hovers. But it also flickers. It looks like a hallucination and suits the setting.

Compare the first level of each game. The first "Manhunt" is straight-forward in its opening minutes. It's a little plain, actually. You stalk people in a few alleys. It begins with the least subtlety I've seen in a game: Your fist victim stands with his back to you next to a wall spray-painted with the command "Kill this f---ing guy." The second "Manhunt" begins as I described it in my first letter, weaving its tutorial through the asylum's progressively madder halls and cells. You play the first level of "Manhunt 2" with a decent enough goal: escape that crazy place.

Another example of craft is that one scene that had both of us laughing.

[SPOILER WARNING: Skip the next two paragraphs if you don't want to read about a scene that may or may not remain in any possible edited version of the game.]

I was in control of protagonist Daniel Lamb in the last full level we played. I walked him down a staircase with a pistol in hand. The game gave me a cue, instructing me how to kill the man at the end of the hallway ahead of me with a stealth pistol kill. What struck me was that he wasn't looking my way. He was half-turned away from me, watching something through an open doorway. Whatever he was watching sounded like a couple making love. Taking advantage of his distraction, I followed orders and killed him.

Then I walked through the doorway expecting to see a TV playing a dirty movie. Instead the camera angle switched, and the TV you and I were watching was filled with a movie screen showing a pornographic movie – a watered down one, that is, with a virtual man and a woman hot and sweaty but revealing none of their most private parts. Daniel Lamb was standing right in front of it, fully armed. Then I walked a couple of steps and the camera angle changed (players don't control the angles in "Manhunt 2," which is a change from the first game). Now the movie screen was to his back. I couldn't see it. I could just hear it. The love-making continued. I looked out at the rows of empty seats. I was in a movie theater. A group of hit-men rushed in. Suddenly I was in a tough firefight. The whole time the guns were blazing, those sounds kept on playing. Do you think that scene was crafted to say something about sex and violence, by any chance? After I took out each of the hitmen, they lay there and the movie kept on playing. I could hear the rattle of the film projector and see the dusty beam of light it projected over Daniel's head and onto the screen. I looked over to you and to the Rockstar employee who had walked in to see what we were laughing about and said "I'm going to put an end to this smut." I pointed my Wii remote at the film projector and fired. The sound from the movie warbled. The room went dark and quiet. That was quite a moment – and one that I think is worth grown-up gamers experiencing.

I'm anxious to hear more of what you thought of the game. And I'd still like to know what your experience of the first level was like (you never answer my questions right away, do you?). Also, how do you think this game compares to the first? People are focusing on the “M” vs “AO” rating of the two titles. Whether you agree that they deserve different ratings from each other, do you find one game edgier than the other?

-Stephen

To: Stephen Totilo
Fr: N'Gai Croal
Date: June 25, 2007
Re: It's Not Violence, It's Pixels

It's not blood, it's red.
--Filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard, responding to criticism of the violence in his film "Weekend"

Stephen,

Are you sure that you don't want to join Greg Kasavin and Luke Smith among the recent ranks of journalists-turned developers? Your alternative take on Manhunt as the videogame equivalent of "Sex and the City" is very intriguing. Perhaps the Alpha Moms who have made the Wii such a hit could use your game as an escape from the quotidian routine of their suburban lives. But given all the ratings troubles facing Rockstar at present, allow me to suggest that your version of "Manhunt" focus less on the sex and more on the city.

You're absolutely correct that I spent no time describing "any of the features of "Manhunt 2" that would obviously set it apart in many people's minds from any movie they've ever seen or ever heard of." Then again, wouldn't the word "features" obviously set it apart from any movie that people have heard of? Or any book, play, TV show, painting and sculpture, for that matter? In that sense--among many others--movies aren't games, games aren't movies, and I fear that you may have misunderstood why I spent so much time reminiscing about my film-addled college days. The point was to explain how I became so relatively sanguine about a variety of extreme subject matter, both in terms of form and content. But implicit in your challenge is that the "ultra-violence," to use your subsequent term of art, is the only thing that many people would have a problem with.

I submit that that is not the case, particularly when it comes to people who are not gamers. What they often have a problem with, whenever a videogame stray beyond the bounds of the relatively childish, and what they can almost never articulate, is a fundamental objection to what a videogame is at its most fundamental level. Violence is not the basic unit of gameplay. Rather, it is repetitive action, reaction and interaction. Repetitive action, reaction and interaction, along with rules, are what define all games, whether they're digital or analog. In basketball, the ball is passed, shot, rebounded, blocked and stolen--repeatedly. In football, the ball is hiked, passed and kicked--repeatedly. In poker, cards are dealt, discarded and laid out--repeatedly. In Monopoly, dice are rolled, pieces are moved, and properties are bought and sold--repeatedly.

This is the essence of a videogame.

But because videogames look like narrative media--particularly film and television--people are often tempted to compare videogames to other narrative media. This is why we have to be careful to use the right analogies at the right time, because videogames are fundamentally not a narrative medium. A film is narrative; it's always about "What happens next?" A game is interactive; it's always about "What do I do next?" Just as something is always happening on a movie screen from moment to moment, beat-to-beat, in a game, you always need to be doing something; otherwise, it's not interactive. Hence, repetition.

As long as videogame creators confine themselves to the stuff of Friday night action movies (PG-13, please), Saturday morning cartoons, Saturday night Dungeons & Dragons or Warhammer 40000 sessions and Sunday afternoon sports, repetitive action and interaction generally don't pose an image problem. After all, who's going to get their nose out of joint over a lightsaber duel (no blood, please), a butt stomp, a defeated orc (again, ixnay on the ood-blay) or a 360-degree windmill jam? It's when developers transgress beyond those boundaries--when they aspire to the stuff of "Aliens," "Black Hawk Down," "Saving Private Ryan," "Goodfellas," "Night of the Living Dead" or, in the case of Manhunt and Manhunt 2, "8 MM" and…well, let's say a cross between "Memento" and "American Psycho"--that they run into more and more trouble with citizen's groups, ratings boards, censors and even some gamers and some of their peers in the industry.

The fact alone that developers would dare to tackle this subject matter is enough for the rejectionists to take umbrage. But their ire is compounded by the fact that the action, reaction and interaction that they're objecting to is repeated over and over and over again. Moreover, this is where they can convince even fans of the abovementioned movies that games based on similar subject matter are beyond the pale: the sheer amount of repetition required to make a game, well, a game, translates into an experience that is quantitatively far more violent than a similarly-themed movie -- and if that weren't offensive enough to their sensibilities, said violence takes place over a longer "running time."

If for example, you were to quadruple the five battle scenes in "Saving Private Ryan"; turn them into playable missions of 15-30 minutes apiece; and strip the narrative of all psychology and subtext, reducing it to premise, tone and attitude; you would have Electronic Arts' "Medal of Honor: Frontline." Do the same thing with the escape-and-retribution-focused last 30 minutes of "Hostel" or "Hostel: Part Two"--movies that were approved both in the U.S. (with an R rating) and in the U.K. (with an 18 certificate), and which "Manhunt" and "Manhunt 2" superficially resemble--and you have, well, just ask Rockstar and Take-Two.

So when you ask me about my reading(s) of "Fight Club" and whether I may have a similar reading of "Manhunt," all I can say is that there really isn't much there for me to read. Again, videogames are not a narrative medium. What I praised the first "Manhunt" for in part was the depth of its formal qualities, not the depth of its content; the content of a game being the actions that you undertake. This lack of depth makes games that deal with taboo subject matter--or more accurately, deal with typical gameplay mechanics in taboo ways--difficult to explain or defend. It's hard to argue that games have anything approaching the depth of theater, novels, movies or television given the medium's newness; its requirement of repetitive action, reaction and interaction to maintain the player's interest; the thinness of its characters; the perfunctoriness of its plots; the lack of complex or even complicated psychology. It would be like arguing that an activity--a mountain hike, laps in a pool or a game of chess--is profound.

Any meaning ascribed to an activity comes from two places: the doing and the context. For games--unlike other narrative media--the story is merely the context, the backdrop and the stage upon which the poor players strut and fret, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. Would "Macbeth" have been as deep had it been a "Manhunt"-like action-adventure? (Sneak into the chambers of rivals like King Duncan and Macduff and murder them, while being urged on by the whispers of Lady Macbeth over your headset!) A "Grand Theft Auto"-ish open world game? (Rise from lowly squire to King of Scotland!) Or an "Oblivion"-esque role-playing game? (Carry out quests for the three witches! Solve their riddles! Battle the enchanted trees of Birnam Wood!) I'll let you imagine what "Super Paper Macbeth" and "The Legend of Lady Macbeth: Twilight Queen" might have been.

Let's return to my sports analogy--or is that your sports analogy? If I'm having trouble explaining my experience in critical or aesthetic terms, could that be because I'm trying to take an activity and contemplate it as if I had somehow been outside that experience, like a critic of movies, TV, theater or books? Maybe I'm more like one of those basketball players or coaches you see interviewed at halftime who speaks only in clichés--"We've got to control the tempo," "They're going to come out with a lot of energy," "We have to get stops," "This is a game of runs,"--because how else can you describe a fundamentally repetitive activity when you're the player? (Ever interviewed an actor about his or her "process"? It's pretty much the same thing: cliché-ridden.) Or as Pauline Kael wrote, perhaps more presciently than even she realized, in her 1962 essay "Is There a Cure for Film Criticism?":

Art is the greatest game, the supreme entertainment, because you discover the game as you play it. There is only one rule, as we learned in "Orphee": Astonish us! In all art we look and listen for what we have not experienced quite that way before. We want to see, to feel, to understand, to respond a new way. Why should pedants be allowed to spoil the game?

That's what "Manhunt" did. It astonished me. Or, to paraphrase myself paraphrasing my friend, screenwriter and journalist Cheo Hodari Coker, it made me shake my ass.

You're right to wonder why more of us aren't freaking out over our chosen form of entertainment--and by extension, more of the developers who create these videogames and the publishers who distribute them--but isn't the answer by now self-evident? We can't. The very fabric of videogames--their repetitive action, reaction and interaction--is the original sin for which censorious organizations like the BBFC, the IFCO, and, ultimately, Nintendo, Sony and Microsoft, would have us either a) repent, then go forth and sin no more; or b) confine our blasphemy to acceptable form and content. But as Kael wrote, "Why should pedants be allowed to spoil the game?"

I am a man: I hold that nothing human is alien to me.
--Publius Terentius Afer, the Roman comic playwright

So now, at long last, my throat being well and fully cleared, it's time for me to tackle "Manhunt 2."

You asked me what I thought of the first mission, which centers on escaping from the mental hospital. I'm going to hold off on answering that question for now. Because if you skipped the Execution Tutorial, which I'm guessing is exclusive to the Wii (kudos, Reggie!) for reasons that will quickly become clear, you missed another sick joke from the boys at Rockstar. Since gamers are still getting accustomed to the Wii's gestural controls, many titles include modes that let you calibrate the controller and/or practice the required moves. Rockstar Toronto, the makers of the Wii version, use their "Manhunt" Tutorial to cycle through a series of icons displayed in the upper left hand corner of the darkened screen indicating which gestures I was supposed to perform. As I did so, I heard the sound effects of the various weapons, the sounds of my victims, and saw blood splatter against the black screen and slowly run down its surface, backed by an ominous electronica score. But I didn't see my victims, nor did I see my weapons. For that, I would have to play the game proper.

The first mission was well-designed, as you pointed out. I understand why you would feel that the craft in the second game is superior to the first, especially with changes like the flickering film filter applied to the floating health packs; it's very much in keeping with the sequels sanity-or-insanity themes. And I get why you'd prefer the comparatively more subtle opening of "Manhunt 2," with fellow patient Leo Kasper urging your former family man Danny Lamb through the now-overrun mental hospital, to the blunt-force introduction to "Manhunt," with Brian Cox's malevolent voice urging your death row convict James Earl Cash to, as the spray painted sign on the wall says, "Kill this f---ing guy." But I think you're wrong.

We've learned that after "Manhunt," Rockstar wanted to tell a more complex story in "Manhunt 2." James Earl Cash just wants to stay alive, escape from Carcer City, and maybe get some payback against the Designer--I mean, the Director--while he's at it. By contrast, Danny Lamb is trying to solve the mystery of how he ended up in the mental hospital, what happened to his family and what experiments were performed on him. "Manhunt" is told straightforwardly, from beginning to end, in one straight shot; we never find out why Cash was sentenced to death. "Manhunt 2" uses flashback missions to reveal Danny's backstory and provide clues to his current predicament. The Director is the voice inside your ear, but Leo Kasper is the voice inside your head. So far, so good…

…but for the fact that, as I've said time and time again, videogames aren't very good at telling stories. It's hard for a videogame to get me to care--really care--about who a character is. But it's not very hard for a game to get me to care about what a character does. Even though "Manhunt 2" has a more sophisticated structure than "Manhunt," it comes at the expense of the single-minded focus that gave the original its power. You accused the first game's opening of lacking subtlety; it reminds me of what one critic said when one of his peers leveled similar charges at Oliver Stone: "Subtlety is just a choice. It's not inherently good or bad."

The same is true of what I would ordinarily praise fulsomely: the fact that players have more choice in "Manhunt 2" than they did in original. In "Manhunt," you couldn't complete certain missions until you accomplished a specific goal set by the Director: kill everyone in the level; complete a certain number Level 2 or Level 3 kills; etc. For "Manhunt 2," we were told that you don't have to kill everyone; you can try to sneak past them instead. That's great…in theory. In practice, it doesn't hold a candle to the rigid structure of original, which, when married to the context of the Director's orders and Cox's unctuous, pitch-perfect voice acting--a performance that was in and of itself as precise and evocative as a well-crafted radio play--delivered an experience that I haven't had before or since.

All of this comes with the following caveat: the circumstances under which I've been playing "Manhunt 2" are entirely different from the first. I'm under the gun, because I'll have only had Friday and Monday to play the game, rather than experiencing it at my leisure over a few weeks. I didn't get to experience the introductory level for the first time all by myself, because Rockstar chose to demo it for us before our play session could begin. After I got kicked out of Rockstar's plush demo room with the big screen TV and the 5.1 sound system so that they could show "Grand Theft Auto IV" to some unspecified VIPs (c'mon, Devin; hook a brotha up!), we had to take turns playing on a single machine in their conference room. And we were playing it on the Wii, which, as you know, is not my console of choice, and as a veteran of the Dual Shock 2 controller, I didn't find the Wii controller a more immersive substitute, simply because it's not yet second nature to me. Particularly during the stealth kills, the Simon Says-like gesture matching meant that I was always conscious that I was playing a game, whereas the thoroughly familiar Dual Shock 2 would often feel like an extension of my thoughts. (So much for the BBFC's claims that there's exceptionally little distancing.)

I have some ideas about how Rockstar could have improved the executions on the Wii, though I suspect the company would get a Seniors Only rating were it to adopt them. I've yet to explain my other thoughts on how Rockstar should have expanded its formal critique of videogame violence in "Manhunt," and how it could have embedded its premise of sanity vs. insanity into the gameplay of "Manhunt 2." But we've only played a third of the game, and hopefully we'll get to play some more later today, so perhaps I'll find that they've anticipated my improvements.

And with that, I bid you good night.

Cheers,
N.

N'Gai Croal from Newsweek and I used to talk for hours on the phone about video games. Then we decided to make those exchanges public, in e-mail form, and call them Vs. Mode. In May we discussed "Halo 3" in three parts. In March we more vigorously debated "God of War II." Those exchanges -- as well as this new one -- were also published at N'Gai's Newsweek blog, "Level Up."As I explain below, we've intended to do our next Vs. Mode about "Manhunt 2" before last week's ratings controversy. That only made things more interesting.

What follows and will continue over the next few days is a spirited and -- I'll warn you now -- lengthy discussion of the game and the issues that surround it by two reporters who have, as of this writing, played through the game's first six of 16 levels. I lead it off:

To: N'Gai Croal
Fr: Stephen Totilo
Date: June 23, 2007
Re: We Got Static

N'Gai

I guess you and I have some explaining to do for those who follow these e-mail exchanges of ours. We're doing something unusual by writing about "Manhunt 2."

We're writing about a game that isn't out. We're writing about a game that, in its current form, will never appear on store shelves and has been put on hold by its publisher, even though the game is done. We're writing about the first game in a decade deemed unfit for any rating by the official board that rates games in the U.K. We're writing about a game that, in the U.S., currently has an 18-and-older Adults Only rating, a label issued by the Entertainment Software Ratings Board to just 23 porn and gambling titles, a few adventure games that have sex scenes in them, and one hyper-violent game called "Thrill Kill." (The ESRB website lists more than 1,000 titles as "M," which is for gamers 17 and up; more than 8,400 listings for games rated "E" for Everyone).

We're writing about the controversial "Manhunt 2," and in keeping with Vs. Mode tradition, we're only writing about it because we played it and played it extensively. Now how'd we do that?

You were the one who kept telling me in 2003 to play the first "Manhunt," the one released for PlayStation 2 and Xbox. I was leery. It was a stealth game. I find stealth games frustrating, because they ask you to skulk around for minutes and suddenly pounce on a bad guy and then sneak some more, usually with a high penalty for failure that forces you to re-play levels many times. But you said this one was a stand-out. I believed you could be right. The first "Manhunt" was made by Rockstar North, fresh off their groundbreaking work on "Grand Theft Auto III" and "Grand Theft Auto: Vice City."

You said they did some special things with audio. As death row inmate James Earl Cash, the player wasn't just sneaking around, killing wretched-looking gangsters. He was doing this because he was taking orders from a sick-sounding voice in the headset he wore on his ear. A gamer could wear a PS2 or Xbox headset of their own, and hear the wretched glee of the Director as he pushed the player from one kill to the next and celebrated the player's skill at bludgeoning heads and inserting shards of glass into soft tissue. During tense moments, the headset's microphone could pick up a gamer's anxious breathing and send enemies to investigate a rapid exhale. That all seemed like an interesting use of sound technology, but the game didn't sound like something I would enjoy – or that I would want to be caught enjoying. I was slow to pick it up. When I did, I didn't have the patience to sneak around. I quit after level four.

Somewhere in my ongoing quest to get you to sit down and play through a "Zelda" game I decided I'd have to throw you a bone. So when "Manhunt 2" popped up on the PS2 release schedule for the summer – and then also, shockingly, got slated for the family-friendly Nintendo Wii – I decided we could do a Vs. Mode exchange on the game. That way you'd owe me.

We pitched Rockstar a month or so ago, asking if they'd let us play the game early so that we could be done and ready to discuss it by the time it came out in early July. We got some signs of interest, but I was skeptical. Rockstar's company philosophy is to let games speak for themselves. They don't brag about their games very often. And they defend their often-controversial content even less. Then they got the AO and the U.K. rejection and I was certain our drive had failed. Somehow we got the green light.

I don't really need to tell you any of this, though. You were there. We played "Manhunt 2" for a full afternoon at Rockstar's headquarters on Friday. I think we need to talk about that.

You're the "Manhunt" expert. Do you think we got a genuine experience of the game? The first game opened with a screen that offered a few tips:

"To best experience Manhunt you should…
"Turn off the lights…
"Close the drapes…
"Lock the door…
"Then get ready to kill!"

They don't mention it, but I think it would also have been good to play it alone. The experience of the game – and I would assume, its sequel -- is designed to instill panic in the player. You play the game for tension punctuated with rushes of action, to some extent the same reason people ride roller-coasters.

We played "Manhunt 2" in an office. For much of our session we sat in the same room and swapped the controller back forth between levels. I had a cup of Reese's Pieces at my side.

I wonder how the people rating the game played it. I wonder if their room was well lit or if they locked the door. I wonder if that matters. For that matter, I wonder how the people who made the game played it. What were all those people thinking? Did they absorb what it would be like to be an average "Manhunt 2" gamer? Does it make a difference?

I have a lot of thoughts about the game that I want share with you, I hardly know where to begin. The thing you know the least about my "Manhunt 2" session is how I experienced the first level, because it's the only one I played when you were in a different room.

The first level of ‘Manhunt 2" is the only one that matches the description most reporters – including myself – have used to explain the game: it has the player controlling Daniel Lamb, escaping an insane asylum where something has gone horribly wrong, the helpful voice of a guy names Leo accompanying him with each step. We'll talk more about this level later, I'm sure, but rest easy knowing I experienced its highs and lows. I got Daniel urinated on by one angry inmate still behind bars. I discovered another who had hung himself. I performed my first stealth kill – with a syringe – and watched Daniel vomit because of his quick-passing guilt. I learned to sneak around and figured out how to get past some characters without killing them. I learned the motion controls and swiped the Wii's movement-sensitive remote sharply one way then another to knock a man's head off with an axe. I made my escape. I played the part of a crazy man.

It was dark. It was brutal. It was horrific. It implicated me as a role-player in some vile actions. It was all exacerbated by something that may have been intentional or may have been a programming bug or been intentional, I don't know. The Wii remote has a speaker, and about halfway into my progress in the level, the remote started emitting crackling static. The pattern of the static kept switching. It didn't seem to relate to any particular action on the screen, and it bothered me. It made me uncomfortable, physically, because it was annoying. It was as if I played half the level while sitting on a thumbtack. The interactivity and design of the level kept me engaged and wanting to know what I was going to have to do next. Some would say that qualified the level as being "fun." But my innate discomfort because of the static – to say nothing of other elements in the level – prevented me from getting any joy from the level. Instead, I played it… perturbed. It made me feel a little crazy, like an asylum inmate.

I wonder if that was a good thing, for a game designed to put you in control of a crazy man. It gives you some of the feeling of going crazy. It reminded me of a building that scientist built in the virtual online world "Second Life" that uses that world's video-game-like technology to let people virtually walk through a series of rooms that contain sights and sounds that patients suffering schizophrenia say they experience. It's an interesting bit of role play that may or may not have been aided by the static buzz: buy "Manhunt 2," if you want to feel crazy. (Which is cheaper than going to acting school and hoping to land a part in the next "Rain Man" or "Silence of the Lambs."). Then again, the speaker crackle may have been a programming fluke.

We played five more levels of the game's 16 total together. We need to talk about the Wii gestures that make you pantomime some brutal acts. We need to talk about the idea of horror in a video game, and what to make of a game that asks you to kill without suggesting as in, say, "Super Mario Brothers," that killing is clean. I want to know what you made of things.

But there's one thing I don't want to talk about, and that's the ratings. At heart I'm still a reporter, and I don't have the facts about the content of the final two thirds of "Manhunt 2," nor do I know what content made the ESRB apply that "AO." I won't debate that, though we certainly can compare the content in this game to others, including the first "Manhunt."
OK. Have at it.

-Stephen

To: Stephen Totilo
Fr: N'Gai Croal
Date: June 23, 2007
Re: The Miseducation of N'Gai Croal

Stephen,

Thanks for your recap of how we came to be embroiled in what I've affectionately dubbed "The Satanic Versus."

Where to begin, indeed? I suspect that we're going to spill a lot of pixels on this one, so I hope that you and the readers will show me some forbearance as I use a big chunk of this post to clear my throat. Because with the AO rating bestowed upon "Manhunt 2"--which means the de facto banning of the game in the United States, because Sony and Nintendo do not permit AO-rated titles to be released on any of their systems--along with the de jure banning of the game in other countries like the U.K. and Ireland--Rockstar Games has vaulted into the rarified territory occupied by the likes of D.H. Lawrence, Stanley Kubrick, Vladimir Nabokov, Bernardo Bertolucci, Bret Easton Ellis, Larry Clark, Clive Barker and others who have seen their work banned, dropped, declared obscene or given the most restrictive ratings possible. Since this rarely so happens with games, Rockstar's own Hot Coffee controversy notwithstanding, I think it's important to look at other media to help understand what's going on here. And with film being the medium that I'm most familiar with, I'll focus on that.

The comparative media aspect of this debate is interesting to me because as a student of film during my college days, I was (and am still, somewhat) very interested in material that pushed viewers' buttons and their limits. This wasn't always the case. I didn't see a lot of movies growing up, because in addition to not having a console in the house, we also weren't much of a movie-going family. As a result, I came late not just to movies, but challenging movies in particular. I saw "Taxi Driver" for the first time the summer before I left for college. It was on TV late one night, I watched it, and being completely unprepared for what I saw, I hated it. I'd never seen anything like it, and its insinuating portrayal of one man's desperately isolated psychosis was far too much for my young mind to process--I felt like I wanted to take a bath afterwards and wash the mental grime of Travis Bickle from my memory.

When I got to Stanford, one of the campus rituals was rounding up the dorm and heading over to Memorial Auditorium to watch Sunday Flicks, the student-run film series. It was there that I saw "The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover" and "Wild at Heart." I watched "Henry and June," the first film to receive the then-newly conceived NC-17 rating, at an off-campus. I saw "A Clockwork Orange" during Friday night movie rentals in my freshman dorm. For a kid who'd had a light-on-movies childhood, my mind was blown, and while I didn't fully understand or appreciate everything that I saw, it opened my tastes up to a wide range of cinematic experiences, which was only reinforced by studying film from my sophomore year on. So when I subsequently watched "Taxi Driver" again, I realized that my initial hatred for the film had in fact been a mélange of confusion, repulsion and attraction to the material. It had indeed been insinuating, for it had lodged itself in the recesses of my mind like a dormant virus, and having spent a year being exposed to enough other challenging cinematic experiences, I could finally grasp what Martin Scorsese and screenwriter Paul Schrader were trying to accomplish with "Taxi Driver," and loved it. To this day, it's one of just a few candidates for my favorite film ever made. I had gone from despising challenging movies to embracing them; in fact, my decision to start reviewing movies for the student paper is what led to me to become a journalist in the first place.

During my senior year, I was hired to run the Sunday Flicks series. And while Flicks was primarily intended to entertain and make money, I wanted to bring back some of the provocative spirit of the kinds of movies that I'd seen at Flicks during my freshman year. So among the many Hollywood movies designed to put butts in seats, I sprinkled in Mike Leigh's "Naked" and Remy Belvaux, Andre Bonzel, and Benoit Poolverde's disturbing satirical mockumentary of a serial killer, "Man Bites Dog." The former provoked a number of walkouts; the latter prompted a half-exodus--along with complaints, letters to the editor of the student paper, and an attempt by my bosses at the student union to fire me. Rockstar, c'est moi! (I refused step down, it turned out that they couldn't fire me without a warning, and I served out my term.) The most interesting response the night I screened "Man Bites Dog" was from a couple that walked by me on the way out. When I asked them why they were leaving, they politely answered that they'd seen enough to know that it wasn't for them, but that they'd be back next week. In other words, they'd made a decision that was right for them, but they had no interest in trying to impose their tastes upon others, a live-and-let-live mentality for which I could only have the utmost respect, and is especially relevant to those parts of the world where "Manhunt 2" has been de jure banned.

I haven't written about movies much since college, but I continued to go to the theaters, and I continued to favor challenging movies upon their release in theaters. I enjoyed "Natural Born Killers," mostly for the way Oliver Stone does violence to the viewer as much with the film's editing and score as he does with its content, to say nothing of the demented sitcom flashback with Rodney Dangerfield as the twisted patriarch. I liked Larry Clark's "Kids" and "Bully," not in spite of his pruriently vampiric fascination with the bodies and behavior of teenagers, but because of the way he mines that fascination to capture the amoral confusion of wayward teens. I'm a huge Lars von Trier fan--regardless of what the critical establishment has to say, I maintain that "Manderlay" was the best film I saw last year, by a country mile. I still have problems with "Se7en"--there's still something too high-concept about its "seven deadly sins" depiction of the villainous John Doe, as compared to, say, the more straightforward cannibalism and skinning in "The Silence of the Lambs"--but I have grown to appreciate the virtues of the way the filmmakers carefully place Morgan Freeman's wise, patient, despairing and ultimately renewed Detective William Somerset at the center of the story.

Even having gone through my earlier conversion with "Taxi Driver," I still struggle sometimes to absorb a movie that legitimately challenges me. I hated "Raging Bull" when I first saw it during my sophomore year. (It's now one of my favorites, too.) Ditto for "Fight Club," which I absolutely despised when I watched it at a screening before its release. On my first viewing, I found it thoroughly fascistic, because I thought that the filmmakers' sympathies lay completely with Tyler Durden's creed before trying to absolve Ed Norton's narrator with the film's last act. But as with "Taxi Driver" and "Raging Bull" before it, something about "Fight Club" stayed with me. I watched it again a few weeks later, and upon a second viewing, I was now completely on the filmmakers' wavelength. I could finally see its carefully calibrated satirical elements; how the titular Fight Club, upon the shooting death of Meat Loaf's Robert Paulsen, becomes one of the self-help groups that the film had mocked during its earlier scenes; and that while the Fight Club had been necessary to snap the narrator out of his torpor, the film's ultimate message was that he needed to grow the hell up. (Add another movie to My Favorites.)

My point--yes, dear readers, I do have one--is that I'm extremely comfortable with material that is at or beyond the outer limits of what a mass audience will embrace. One of the enthusiast magazine editors I respect the most, and whose opinion I value, very much disliked the original "Manhunt." Not in a "this game should be banned kind of way," but in a "this isn't my bag kind of way." It just wasn't for him. And when I recommended it to you, I was concerned that it might not be for you either. But I recommended it to you nonetheless, because as I've said to you and others many times, the original "Manhunt" was one of the most memorable experiences I've had from the previous generation of consoles.

Why? Two reasons. First of all, Manhunt delivered on a purely visceral level. As you and I have discussed ad nauseum, Rockstar is practically without peer when it comes to establishing mood and tone. That's because a) they're really good at it, and b) the mood and tone of their games are radically different from just about anyone else working in this still-nascent medium today. The premise, nicked from the famous 1924 Richard Connell short story "The Most Dangerous Game," isn't really that different from, say "Impossible Mission." But the decaying, rust belt locations; the subtly spooky, largely ambient soundscape that rarely tells you how to feel about what's going on; the freakish assortment of gangs, racists, survivalists, cops and SWAT teams that are out to get you; the grainy security camera filter applied to the brutal killings you carry out--it all added up to something I'd never experienced before, and, like "Taxi Driver," "Raging Bull" and "Fight Club," I've found it unshakeable. Despite the broad-brush similarities in their mechanics, when it comes to stealth games, "Splinter Cell" is far more like "Metal Gear Solid" than either is like "Manhunt;" and when it comes to survival-horror games, "Silent Hill" is far more like "Resident Evil" than either is like "Manhunt." It is singular.

The second reason I was so taken with "Manhunt" is because of what you mentioned in your opener: the man who has rescued you from execution and brought you to the abandoned town of Carcer City, where you must kill or be killed, all for his amusement. And as you point out, he gives you orders through your earpiece. He tells you where to go. He tells you what to do. He tells you what minimum level of violence he'll accept in the surveillance camera-meets-snuff film killings that you must commit for his pleasure before he will open the doors or gates that will let you proceed to the next area. He sounds awfully familiar, doesn't he? His name? The Designer--I mean, the Director. Yes, at the heart of "Manhunt" is a brilliantly twisted joke. Rockstar grabs the translucent veil of mildly disreputable innocuousness in which most action titles cloak themselves, tears it open and exposes the sinister truth that lies just beneath the surface: in an awful lot of videogames, the developer and the publisher are asking you to virtually kill an awful lot of virtual enemies, over and over and over again. "Manhunt" is just more honest about this than most, and cleverly, brutally so to boot.

This, like many of the movies I enjoy watching, is clearly at the outer limits of what a mass audience will sign up for. And that's a dangerous place for any artist to operate, because when some official body (private or public) or group determines that an artist has crossed a line, said artist is unlikely to find many defenders--even among their fellow creatives. We saw that earlier this year with "Super Columbine Massacre RPG!" And we're seeing it again with "Manhunt 2," where it's unlikely that many publishers or developers will rush to Rockstar's side. Heck, Paul Jackson, the director general of the U.K.'s Entertainment and Leisure Software Publishers Association--the trade organization whose purpose is to represent publishers such as Rockstar and its parent company Take-Two-- backed the BBFC's decision, stating, "A decision from the BBFC such as this demonstrates that we have a games ratings system in the UK that is effective. It shows it works and works well." (He later added, "I would say that I was surprised at some of the language the BBFC used when they reported on the matter, but we'll be talking to them about that separately.")

The situation here in the United States differs from that in the U.K. and Ireland. As I stated earlier, the British Board of Film Classification and the Irish Film Censor's Office have banned "Manhunt 2" from being released in its current form, and based on both the language in their respective rulings and the six missions we played on Friday, it's hard to see how Rockstar could make any changes that would satisfy those organizations without completely gutting the game, pun intended. Here's what each had to say:

British Board of Film Classification: Rejecting a work is a very serious action and one which we do not take lightly. Where possible we try to consider cuts or, in the case of games, modifications which remove the material which contravenes the Board's published Guidelines. In the case of "Manhunt 2" this has not been possible. "Manhunt 2" is distinguishable from recent high-end video games by its unremitting bleakness and callousness of tone in an overall game context which constantly encourages visceral killing with exceptionally little alleviation or distancing. There is sustained and cumulative casual sadism in the way in which these killings are committed, and encouraged, in the game.

Although the difference should not be exaggerated the fact of the game's unrelenting focus on stalking and brutal slaying and the sheer lack of alternative pleasures on offer to the gamer, together with the different overall narrative context, contribute towards differentiating this submission from the original Manhunt game. That work was classified '18' in 2003, before the BBFC's recent games research had been undertaken, but was already at the very top end of what the Board judged to be acceptable at that category.

Against this background, the Board's carefully considered view is that to issue a certificate to "Manhunt 2," on either platform, would involve a range of unjustifiable harm risks, to both adults and minors, within the terms of the Video Recordings Act, and accordingly that its availability, even if statutorily confined to adults, would be unacceptable to the public.

Irish Film Censor's Office: A prohibition order has been made by IFCO in relation to the video game "Manhunt 2." The order was made on 18 June 2007 under Sec 7 (1) (b) of the Video Recordings Act 1989 which refers to 'acts of gross violence or cruelty including mutilation and torture.'

IFCO recognizes that in certain films, DVDs and video games, strong graphic violence may be a justifiable element within the overall context of the work.

However, in the case of "Manhunt 2," IFCO believes that there is no such context, and the level of gross, unrelenting and gratuitous violence is unacceptable.
The thing is, while I can quibble with the BBFC and the IFCO's descriptions of the game, for the most part, I can't really disagree with them.

Yes, there is a "bleakness and callousness of tone," though it's certainly not "unremitting," as evidenced by that one darkly comic sequence during our joint play session that prompted us to first drop our jaws to the floor before laughing out loud. (Since you were wielding the Wiimote and nunchuk during that scene, I'll give you the honor of describing it to our dear readers.)

Yes, the overall game context "constantly encourages visceral killing with exceptionally little alleviation or distancing," though as you point out, the protagonist is sufficiently horrified by his first kill that he drops to his knees and vomits.

Yes, there indeed "is sustained and cumulative casual sadism in the way in which these killings are committed, and encouraged."

Yes, the game does have an "unrelenting focus on stalking and brutal slaying," and there is a "sheer lack of alternative pleasures on offer to the gamer."

And yes, the game does include "acts of gross violence or cruelty including mutilation and torture."

My response to all of that is, so what? What does that have to do with adults like you, or me, or the aforementioned magazine editor making our own decisions as whether or not we want to play this game? What does that have to do with the countless number of adults in the U.K. or Ireland for whom the BBFC and the IFCO have decided to play nanny, wag their respective index fingers, and say, "We know better than you, and we in our infinite wisdom have decided that you can't play this game"? Unless they have good reason to believe that this game is an imminent threat to the public order, or that it will in and of itself incite adults to violence, their decision seems to me to be based on taste, and I will never believe in substituting anyone else's tastes for my own.

In the U.S., where many retailers would likely refuse to stock an AO-rated title, the game hasn't been banned. But that doesn't mean that gamers will ever be able to play it in the form that you and I are experiencing. Here, it's ultimately Nintendo and Sony's whose judgment is being substituted for ours, because they, along with Microsoft, don't allow AO-rated games to be published on their systems. I find this more than a little strange, because both the PSP and the Wii both have built-in parental controls--as do the PS3 and the Xbox 360--which would prevent minors from playing "Manhunt 2" on a properly configured Wii or PSP. (The PS2, however, does not have parental controls for games, just DVDs.) I'm somewhat sympathetic to the fact that unlike with other forms of disc-based media like CDs or DVDs, the platform holders themselves a) approve all of the games for release on their respective systems at various stages of the development process, ranging from initial concepts to gold masters; and b) handle all of the disc replication for games made for their individual machines. By being that hands-on, they're more vulnerable to external criticism than a DVD manufacturer like Samsung which has nothing to do with the movies released by, say, Vivid Entertainment. But sympathetic doesn't mean approval; I don't accept their judgment over what entertainment I should consume anymore than I do the IFCO's or the BBFC's.

Their refusal to approve AO-rated games for their systems illustrates one of the useful benefits of an industry ratings system: plausible deniability when it comes to material that walks the line. If people like Jack Thompson or Hillary Clinton get upset over an M-rated game, Sony, Microsoft, Nintendo, retailers and publishers can point at the ESRB. If Take-Two and Rockstar get upset over the effective ban that ensues from an AO rating, Sony, Microsoft, Nintendo and retailers can point at the ESRB. There's no need for genuine discussion or debate--there's too much money to be made to risk upsetting the apple cart; besides, it's just those arrogant, secretive so-and-so's over at Rockstar, anyway--so they'll just issue terse statements and leave the hullabaloo to people like us. Meanwhile, the infantilization of the medium continues, unabated.

You've said that you don't want to get into the ratings process, which I understand. But I suspect that we'll find ourselves drawn into doing so as we continue our discussion, because of a couple of statements that ESRB president Patricia Vance made to Kotaku in an email interview. The first exchange that I found particularly germane concerned the Wii:

Kotaku: With the Wii, developers can now make games that allow gamers to physically act out violent acts and see them occur in a game. Games such as "Godfather," "Scarface" and "Manhunt 2" all do this. Do such controls have an impact on a game's rating? If so do you think that supports the argument that a game's interactive nature makes it more dangerous than more passive experiences like watching a movie, listening to music or reading a book?

Patricia Vance: We've always been very clear about the fact that the degree of player control is one of several elements that the ESRB considers in the assignment of ratings, including the content itself, it's frequency, intensity and realism, context within which it is presented, and the reward system. The interactive nature of games certainly differentiates them from more passive forms of media like films and televisions, which is why the ESRB system takes these other unique characteristics into consideration.

The second exchange address the fact that the first "Manhunt" was rated M by the ESRB (it was also approved for sale in both the U.K. and Ireland):

Kotaku: Rockstar has said that they feel that "Manhunt 2" is very similar to the orignal "Manhunt" in the level and type of violence depicted. If that is the case why did one receive a Mature rating and the other appears to be on the verge of an Adults Only rating?

Patricia Vance: Obviously, "Manhunt 2" is a different product from the original "Manhunt." The raters evaluated the submission for "Manhunt 2" and determined that the AO rating was the appropriate rating assignment. Per our statement from 6/20, it would be inappropriate to comment further at this time.

We've played five missions into the Wii version, so there's a lot that we can say in future posts about how its gestural controls impact the experience. And since I've played the first "Manhunt" in its entirety (imagine that, a game that I've finished and you haven't) I'll be able to expand on some thoughts that I'm already forming--some obvious, some less so--about why the various ratings bodies may have decided to be tougher on "Manhunt 2" than they were on the original. And finally, as has been the case with our earlier Vs. Modes on "God of War II" and the "Halo 3" multiplayer beta, I've got some ideas about what Rockstar could have done to make both "Manhunt" games even better than they already.

But I've said enough. (No, no, really, I have.) So I'll stop here for now.

Cheers,

N'Gai