COLUMN: Bell, Game, and Candle - 'In Defense of Marc Ecko’s Getting Up: Contents Under Pressure'
August 16, 2008 8:00 AM |
['Bell, Game, and Candle' is a regular GameSetWatch column by game commentator Alex Litel, discussing stuff that happens in the game business. This time - he ponders about seeming arbitrariness of adulation.]
In a clip from the preschooler-targeted television series Dora the Explorer, a map hops out of the backpack of a girl named Dora and rolls out to show a rolled-up map inside the map affirming fifteen or so times in song that "I'm the Map." The map follows his cantillation with an exclamation that Dora and her monkey Boots need to get to the big piñata, and he knows the way to the big piñata. (From what I understand, Dora's royalties are stored in the big piñata, and the map is demanding a cut of the royalties in exchange for his expertise.)
Elsewhere, in the Middle East of 2014, wheeling and dealing of protracted, ham-fisted exposition is going on at the 41st Annual International Chain Smokers Summit—the number of assertions that "war has changed" because of a move towards "war economy" because of "PMCs" employing "nanomachines," with the linguistic gait of Dan Quayle channeling Irwin Corey, would put the map's re-affirmative tendencies to shame.
Elsewhere, in contemporary metropolitan mimicry, an Eastern European immigrant with an immaculate command of English bursts on the scene where he attempts to avoid getting burst in an adventure filled to the brink with trite, ham-fisted exposition: "the American Dream is great," "the American Dream is not what I imagined," "am I losing myself?" and "shit, the American Dream is incompatible with my set in stone world-weariness."
I have a hunch if Penthouse and Pynchon was associated with or if the Bee's Knees of NYC emblem adorned the cover of Getting Up: Contents Under Pressure instead of Marc Ecko's name, reaction would have been less insolent and more praiseworthy. Sure, Ecko could have been a little more artful in his statements, but this column is about his game that the ostensible hardcore had decided against prior to Ecko's comments, not Ecko himself. (Also, not playing a game and complaining about it is no different than someone else doing the same.)
Rise, resist, revolt
Mark Ecko's Getting Up: Contents Under Pressure depicts the coming-of-age of young graffiti artist Coltrane Crowley (aka Trane) on his journey for respect in New Radius. However, the journey for respect becomes a crusade for revolution against the recently elected mayor who has decided clamping down on free speech is essential to "cleaning up" his city, and graffiti artists are public enemy number one.
Gaming cognoscente Ian Bogost described Getting Up as "critically underappreciated," and notes that the "game about graffiti" features an equally important "critique of an autocratic police state" in a May 2007 piece. Bogost's words bring me to an impression that was instantaneous—and apparently unique, according to Google—Getting Up's closest contemporary is not the kinetic kitsch of Jet Set Radio, but the French fantasia of Beyond Good & Evil.
Michel Ancel's Beyond Good & Evil follows Jade—a girl who is an orphanage co-operator turned freelance photographer turned muckraking photojournalist with viridescent headband, emerald eyes, green lipstick, olive jacket, virescent pants and an exposed midriff, which apparently makes her the Sarah Vowell of game characters—with her half-human/half-pig uncle Pey'j and this dude Double-H as they go through plot twist after plot twist after plot twist after plot twist uncover the sinister truth and save their planet Hillys.
Of course, there are the cursory comparisons such as the lack of commercial success and backwards compatibility support on Xbox 360, and both were intended to be the first entry in a trilogy. Not to mention that both have all the moral ambiguity of Sylvester Stallone's filmography for the last decade: BG&E shows that beyond good and evil lies rigidly defined good and evil, and Getting Up is not brimming with cognizant dubiety.
Contents under influence
Ecko described New Radius as aesthetically being an amalgamation of 1980s New York and a densely populated place like Kowloon; something that is immediately apparently within a few minutes of playing the game. In GameSpot video interview, Ancel states "We did a lot of researches on realistic places—we did researches on Venice—and we went to, for example, [something] or even New York because we got big buildings. We wanted to collect these realistic informations and translate them into a fantasy world."
I thought about this statement for a second, "New York" and "big buildings," where is this in Ancel's game? I can understand him merely researching New York by watching The Fifth Element (Ubi PR informs Ubi Pictures' technology was not all that cutting-edge) and confusing "buildings" for "cars," as I saw a number of vehicles reminiscent of that film.
Oh, Ancel also says "…the inspirations are coming from the reality because we wanted to not have cartoon or pure fantasy world, but to have modification of reality in the future." Then he started babbling about war in his French lilt.
Unfortunately for Ancel, BG&E is Orwell via Disney; the game is nothing but cartoony and fantastical. To the discerning gamer, this approach severely diminishes the efficacy of the game's attempts to present issues of gravity. Getting Up successfully mirrors the history of graffiti aesthetically and narratively throughout the course of the game; but in BG&E, there is such a vague and clichéd detachment from topicality and normative journalism that their implementation seems entirely based on hearsay from a single conversation—becoming perfunctory elements in an already bush-league, paint-by-number narrative.
No bush-league, paint-by-number narrative would be complete without miscellaneous stereotypes like the easygoing Jamaican mechanic rhinos, rugged Caucasian bartender bull, and sage Asian shopkeeper walrus. Lest we not forgot characters (and much else) seemingly plagiarized from Lucas and the Wachowski brothers—Jade is Luke Skywalker/Neo, Double-H is C-3PO, and Pey'j is Obi-Wan. All of this wrapped in a world when the only personal flaws are amongst the bad folk because they are, you know, bad.
On the contrary, Trane retains a streak of self-centeredness throughout his journey; even as liberator, he never seems entirely selfless in actions. There's a complexity to Trane that seems to be autobiographical of Ecko—the writer of Getting Up—that is nonexistent in Ancel's game: Trane makes some terrible decisions and does not deal with them. The rest of the characters are archetypal, but with a bit more of a twist than the caricatures of BG&E
Despite it being just decent and it not being any grand artwork, BG&E is quite fun—a gallimaufry of photography, fighting, stealth, racing and shooting. While Getting Up is slightly more focused medley of fighting, stealth, acrobatics and tagging. Both games are good examples of not excelling in any of their individual parts, but the sum of those parts is quite the enjoyable experience.
Did you know that Getting Up features the work of renowned culture-jammer Banksy? Did you know the game's score was done by RJD2 and amongst the artists on the soundtrack are DJ Vadim, Nina Simone, and Del tha Funk Homosapien? Did you know it features the voicework of RZA, George Hamilton, Diddy, George Hamilton, Rosario Dawson, and Adam West? Somehow, I think you do not because you probably never really paid attention to Getting Up.
If merely good aggregation as Beyond Good & Evil can be ballyhooed as one of gaming's cult classics, there is no reason why the superior Marc Ecko's Getting Up: Contents Under Pressure cannot have the same fate, even if it requires being avuncular to an outsider who happens to primarily be a fashion designer.
[Alex Litel can be reached at alexlitel@gmail.com and occasionally found at alexlitel.blogspot.com.]
Categories: Column: Bell Game And Candle
9 Comments
A few things you didn't mention:
- BG&E and Gettin Up have nearly nothing in common, mechanically, thematically, or otherwise
- The game Gettin Up does most resemble is Prince of Persia Sands of Time, from which it stole every mechanic, leaving time-reversal (and any sense of fun or soul) behind
- The tagging is boring, repetitive, and uninspired (a black mark against a game about tagging)
- The setting is the most generic kind of police state, and the dialogue, characters, plot etc. are all awful
- Gettin Up doesn't deserve even an article as silly and pointless as this one written about it
stephe | August 16, 2008 10:38 AM
This was kind of a confusing piece, it tells me little to nothing about the game I think it's trying to pump (Contents Under Pressure?), but at least it's refreshing to hear something critical about BG&E that doesn't just spout on about how wonderful it is.
doctorfrog | August 16, 2008 10:42 AM
I actually played Getting Up before judging it - which required piracy, as the game was banned in Australia - and I'm happy to provide a counterpoint: Getting Up takes its premise as a given, that graffiti = culture and free speech, no matter how irrelevant and meaningless it is. The game does an excellent job of setting up the culture surrounding graffiti, at least in the real world, but what they player actually does is scrawl 'Trane' on every available surface (except in one memorable instance in an early level, where you modify an existing piece of graffiti to mock the artists). They're very fancy renditions of the word Trane, but it's damn hard to see it as contributing much to the city's culture. The game takes as a given that players will engage with the graffiti culture, and so spends very little effort giving you any reasons to care what happens to Trane or what he's doing - hell, it does a better job setting up why Trane shouldn't be a graffiti artist, with the first level showing Trane as a petulant, unsympathetic teenager ignoring his parents (or is it grandparents'?) demands that he stop with the graffiti and focus at school. Beyond Good and Evil, at least, throws the reasons in your face - cute orphans, basic good v. evil subplot. I respect the fact that the game has street cred and the creators involved know their stuff, but at least BG&E managed to make me care about what was going on after three hours of play.
Funnily enough, The World Ends With You lays out a better case for graffiti as culture, as a tangent to its main plot, than a game that's entirely about graffiti culture.
But the chief problem, and the reason why I ended up resorting to cheat codes to see if there was anything more to the game (slightly new mechanics and the main plot, which sure sounds like it would have rubbed me up the wrong way except that Trane's gone from defacing public property to culture jamming), is that the game's just not that balanced. BG&E is fairly rough in places, but it whips by quick enough, not quite hard enough to stop people in their tracks, and it delights in throwing you into spectacular set pieces and large, non-linear maps, particularly in the early stages. Sadly, Getting Up is basically linear, and contains a few show-stopper challenges like the trains at the start of the second act. This is when the problems with the plot return to the fore - because players who didn't come into the game appreciating graffiti culture aren't engaged by the game's plot, by the third or so time Trane meets his mechanical namesake players are fairly likely to just switch off than push past to see what happens next.
The structure of the game is also problematic - considering that both Getting Up and BG&E have plots that involve the player interacting with the game's society (Getting Up has its graffiti, while BG&E has the reports) BG&E is the only one to leave a truly permanent record of the player's actions. Getting Up has a linear structure, so you never get to go past your old graffiti and see it there as part of the fabric of the city. BG&E's reports integrate somewhat with the world - the photos you take during the game's missions turn up in several places, as if others are sharing them around. The hub-world structure makes it easy for players to appreciate how their actions are affecting the world.
The annoying thing is that they had all the pieces to make a coherent argument for why graffiti is important, but they didn't. As mentioned, the later levels see Trane culture jamming (enabled by the guy who did the Obey Giant campaign, who makes a cameo appearance) and the argument is right there that the annoying little flies that scrawl their name on bus seats can grow up to actually express something, but it's made (if it's made at all, and not just assumed as what you're doing in the next level) far later than anyone cares.
Merus | August 16, 2008 10:55 AM
I enjoyed this game. I'd say the gameplay is above average. The story is decent. The music, music cues, and cutscenes are much better then most games. Makes me think Silent Hill:Homecoming may turn out good.
Corey Holcomb-Hockin | August 16, 2008 5:57 PM
Nice post, Merus.
I did find this game interesting when it came out due to the involvement of real life graffiti artists and the soundtrack work (particularly RJD2) but it was so soundly panned across the board that I didn't bother. Maybe I'll give it a chance sometime.
Anonymous | August 16, 2008 9:24 PM
When I criticized Getting Up in OPM (after playing it, thank you), my complaints with the game were very similar to Merus', but there was one more turnoff for me that he didn't mention. In BG&E, the armored thugs may not have been very subtle villains, but at least they were very clearly the bad guys. For most of the early game in Getting Up, you're asked to pummel into unconsciousness regular city workers whose only transgression against the player is that it's their job to clean up the paint he's leaving all over the city. I found I was much more on their side than Trane's.
Nich | August 16, 2008 11:27 PM
What really differentiated the two games for me is that BG&E was fun and playable, allowing me to effortlessly fall into its colorful world and story (no matter how shallow).
Getting Up left me feeling bored with its repetitive and confusing fighting and tagging systems and I ultimately got tired and gave up even though I was honestly excited about its release.
You can't expect a player to mesh with your world and the story you're trying to tell if every step of the way you slap them to the ground.
dionisio | August 17, 2008 4:13 PM
I know *I* choose my videogames by their soundtracks. Or maybe that paragraph should be removed posthaste.
Hypocee | August 24, 2008 3:08 PM
To me, it seems blatant that this is not intended to be game analysis; it is a subversion of the format. Games criticism, games analysis or whatever you want to call it is chiefly focused on now, now, and now - it is a driven by watercooler fodder rather than artistic appreciation: we are dissecting recently released Braid, but no longer about the almost-a-year-old Portal (except for namedropping in dissections of Braid), but we don’t analyze something like Turning Point (which has a rather interesting criticism of present-day America unseen in America since Freedom Fighters) because it was not praised from Manitoba to Sydney - a decision to only analyze the acclaimed will stunt the establishment of games criticism as legitimate. The author intentionally chooses the two indisputably most heralded and publicized (and dissected) releases of this year's first half (and likely all time) - Grand Theft Auto 4 and Metal Gear Solid 4 - the author doesn't name them specifically, but they play an obvious and a crucial part of this piece. "Penthouse and Pynchon" being a partially reference to the Heaven-17 album Penthouse and Pavement," but more specifically, the Penthouse half of the album which includes some more blatant exploration of militarism in tunes like "Let's All Make a Bomb" and "Height of the Fighting"; Pynchon of course is a reference to the verbose, long-winded postmodern author Thomas Pynchon - brilliantly laying the case that Kojima produces long-winded blatancy in THREE WORDS. Less impressive, but still impressive, is his criticism of the Rockstar brand putting style over substance with "Bee's Knees of NYC" - a label likely derived from reading profiles and features on the Rockstar honchos, the Houser brothers. In the previous two paragraphs, the author lays out the case of the two's games repetition and utter lack of subtlety (despite being acclaimed for such) using repetitive diction and summarization (which recurs throughout the rest of the piece); the author expects the readers to figure out that they are comparing these games (throwing out three examples, but never explaining that they are actually connected) with a scene from a children's TV show that is the epitome is blatancy - absolutely bulldozering the artistic legitimacy of the two games. The author also chooses an argument that has not been argued (and does not get argued in this piece) and a title - Getting Up - that has not been spoken of really in the two-and-a-half years since its release; they even indicate that they don't think the apparent focus of the piece is anything more than above-average; also choosing the game to make a point about the blatant predispositions of the gaming community en masse.
The author also uses the supposed defense for the not-above-average game as a frame for deconstructing and destroying the claim of artistic legitimacy for another a title canonized as exemplary of art and quality - BG&E. Jade, the protagonist of BG&E, is mentioned as exemplary of a strong female game character; the author reduces her by mentioning the descriptive moniker, a description, and a mention of her EXPOSED MIDRIFF - bulldozering the notion that she is a shining example of ludological feminism (while namedropping a This American Life contributor, which the author does in all of their columns, I wish that the author compared Jade to Sarah Palin to make this the point that depth does not come from bellicosity a little more immediate, but some things are not so) and lamenting it to an embarrassment to a medium that a shallow cardboard character is feministic in comparison to other characters. The author also explains the utter discord between anything that Ancel says and what is actually in the game. There is no striking comment on war; there is nothing profound to be found. It is a cliched, unoriginal cardboard work filled with cardboard, cliched, derivative (although one Star Wars comparison doesn't work, it is obvious that is not original nonetheless) and stereotypical characters (animal form doesn't excuse this, would we praise Gears of War if it were populated with all sorts of animals?), and scenarios. The author professes a sincere puzzlement that any sort of journalist or follower of current events could throw this middling fantasy accolades; why would they with such a blatant discord?
A staggering work of genius.
Gregory | September 7, 2008 5:49 PM