Game in Mind

What if Mario were a Jew?

(Eerily humanized Mario pic courtesy Notcot.org)

Both Assassin's Creed titles open with a message from the design team:

This work of fiction was designed, developed and produced by a multi cultural team of various religious faiths and beliefs.

It's a very nice, safe message from UBISoft... and until recently, I never realized why it bothered me.  Religion isn't really a major factor in either game.  This, despite repeated mention of the "Templars," Altair's (and protagonist Desmond Miles') possible Muslim heritage, and the first game's setting in the Holy Land.  (Actually, at the time of playing the first game, I did wonder why there seemed to be so few Jews in Jerusalem, but I digress....)

Religion may not be the point of Assassin's Creed, but certainly it's inherent in the setting, the context.  Why the lack of attention?  Is the development team really walking on eggshells, or is this symptomatic of a larger phenomenon in video games?

One can very reasonably argue that religion does not play a role in most video games (other than those which are "edutainment" or pointedly religious to the point of proselytizing, ala the Left Behind series) for the same reason that many cultural and ethnic factors do not:  It's just not part of what we look for in an avatar.  You don't really see a "Buddhist" slider in the Elder Scrolls character creation screen, after all.

But is that really the case?  That games remain pleasantly ignorant of religion and ethnic culture because we will them to do so?  The Grand Theft Auto series, for all its problems, has done a stunning job of playing with our expectations of character and narrative based on stereotypes.  Between Niko's unlikely friendship with homosexual Russian Florian "Bernie Crane" Cravic and Lost and the Damned's Jewish protagonist Johnny Klebitz, there's a great deal of room for subtlety, yes, but at least Rockstar is trying to texture its characters with all the personal dimensions that come with being part of a melting pot culture.  Why?  Probably because Rockstar realizes, as we all most likely do when paying attention, that compelling fiction--even the interactive sort--borrows from, and contributes to, our sense of self.

I'm not arguing for cultural sensitivity here; rather, an increased attention to culture's religious dimensions.  I ask the question in the title of this post, not to be incendiary, but rather to truly posit, "What if the character that billions of children and adults all over the world identify with happened to be a Jew?"

Growing up Jewish in the Baptist Belt of America, I often wished as a child that there were more Jewish heroes with whom I could identify.  Comics got it right occasionally (e.g., X-Men's Kitty Pryde), but video games certainly missed out.  I'm sure Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus and other members of religious minorities in the Western world must feel the same way.  And I'm not excluding a lack of religion, either:  There's plenty of room for atheist heroes.  But why dump one's head in the sand altogether?

I think the misconception, perhaps for all fiction, is that when an author refers offhandedly to a character's faith or ethnicity, it has to be supported with substantial reasoning that is made crystal clear for the reader/viewer/player.  For example, if Altair had been made pointedly Muslim, it would have had to have been for a pretty damn good reason, what, in this age of anti-Muslim sentiment and wars in the Middle East.

I do not believe that is true.  I think people, in general, just happen to come from a beautiful range of backgrounds... and religion just happens to be one of the colors in that spectrum.  Why don't we treat our characters the same way?  Sure, if the game happens to justify its inclusion of religion with a meaningful and substantial treatment of the topic, more power to it.  If it doesn't end up being integral to the plot or gameplay, fine.  By no means should it be a requirement.

It is true that invoking religion--just as it has been so with gender and race--opens the door to stereotyping.  No one wants to see, let's say, hook-nosed villain Izzy Shlomowitz as a star in an Aryan Brotherhood-designed platformer for the PC.  Not any more than homosexual men and women probably want to see the kind of gay-smearing, prissy stereotyping that comes out of some Japanese RPGs.

But that's life.  Life opens the door to unimaginable evils.  Better to face it than to pretend we're not part of the conversation.  And for better or worse, video gaming has acheived the level of cultural penetration to the point that it is completely inextricable from that conversation.

So what if Mario were a Jewish-Italian plumber?  Well, he'd still be Mario.  Only Jewish. 

I kind of like that.

P.S. Yes, I'm aware of the irony of the whole "Jewish Mario/coin collecting" thing.  I do have a sense of humor, after all.

Tilt

(Image courtesy Slamitpinball.com)

Confession: I'm a pinball nerd.  Even worse, I'm also a video pinball nerd.

My new obsession is Technetium's painstakingly detailed pinball simulator, SlamIt Pinball: Big Score (shown above and available via Steam for a mere $5).  The re-release of the Williams collection on PS3 and 360 was terrific.  Zen's releases on those systems have been quite stellar as well.  But they ain't no Big Score.

What Big Score lacks in variety (it is only one table, after all) it more than makes up for in authenticity.  It isn't based on a real table, but it might as well be.  Everything about the game oozes real pinball, and the team at Technetium has nailed pinball physics in a way that no other simulation has.  The ball has a real heft to it; it is neither unnecessarily fast (I'm looking at you, FX Pinball) nor floaty (I'm looking at you, pretty much every PC pinball game in the '90s).  And rendered in glorious 1680x1050 resolution, the table looks like you can practically reach out and smear the glass.

My fascination with Big Score has launched me into a pinball frenzy as of late, and I'm enjoying just about every pinball video game I can get my hands on... even Dream Pinball 3D for the PC and DS (not as bad as you'd think).  I've been playing marathon sessions of the Gottlieb collection for the PSP and Metroid Prime Pinball for the DS.  And I've been doing just a little too much reminiscing about Galactic Pinball for that poor Nintendo Virtual Boy system I sold so very long ago.

I've even hunted down Atari Lynx emulation just for another chance to play Pinball Jam's recreation of the classic Elvira and the Party Monsters table.

Of course, this video pinball-mania makes me more than just a tad nostalgic about my experiences with real tables.  Dr. Who.  The Adam's Family.  Last Action Hero.  T2: Judgment Day.  I was certainly a product of the early '90s, a time when names like Bally, Data East, and Stern were still relevant to the arcade... and arcades themselves were not quite dead.  As an adolescent, these were the times I was most drawn to the arcade, not simply for the seeming miracle of Konami's outrageous 4-screen X-Men arcade cabinet, but for those glowing, clanking curiosities in the darkest recesses of the arcade.

I'm not sure what it is about pinball that has let it survive as a gameplay experience since the late 19th century (not counting its Bagatelle predecessor, whose origins can be tracked some several hundred years before).  In many ways, pinball is the first mechanical game, but it has at its core only the "mechanics" of gravity and the titular ball and pins. 

What I do know is that in the last thirty years pinball has become something entirely other than simple... a mad-scientist contraption not unlike a fully-formed board of Mouse Trap.  With their myriad ramps, drop-slots, blinding lights, and electric cacophony of noises, the best pinball tables are the ones that make the player feel like a child opening a brand new chem set.  Pinball is an act of curious chance, of experimentation, of exploration.

It is also an act of competition.  Star Fire (1979), a shameless ripoff of Star Wars, was the first arcade game to allow for personalized high scores.  I am unsure whether any electronic pinball table beat that game to the punch, but modern tables and simulations have certainly taken scoring to the next level.  In particular, simulations on the PC and consoles allow for internet-wide sharing of scores.  The aforementioned Big Score tracks high scores globally, posting the top five from around the world (complete with country of origin) on its website.

The local arcade has become global.  But I'm still just that awkward adolescent boy, clanking away on the pinball machine in its darkest corner.  A certain visceral quality to the machines has been lost in the translation to pixels and polygons, but Big Score represents a stark and sometimes shocking move into a new generation of simulation.

Consider me tilted.

Required Reading: Bob Mackey's "Learning Through Play"

1UP is currently featuring instructor Bob Mackey's self-reflective survey of using gaming in college classrooms.  Like me, Mackey is an instructor of composition (among other things; he also mentions a class in popular culture), and I, too, have recently experimented in bringing video games into the classroom.

Mackey admits that not all aspects of his endeavor are successful, but I admire the seeming joy with which he attempts to channel students' natural disposition towards play and tangential learning.

The thoughtful article also pointed me towards Boom Culture, a blog which I have now put in the Blogroll (to the right).  A shame I had never picked up on this quite eloquent and insightful blog until now!  It, too, is worth a read, if not a decisively firm addition to your rss reader of choice.