Idle Thumbs 153: Blondie, Freckles, and Glasses

[Jake]

Idle Thumbs 153:

 

 

Blondie, Freckles, and Glasses

It is the future. Robots have rolled their way into our office, taken our faces for their own, bested us at our own mobile phone games and declared victory. Mankind's only recourse, its one hope, is to sit together with some microphones and discuss video games for two hours. Enjoy our latest podcast, robots.

 

Things Discussed: Luftrausers, Monument Valley, Shadow of the Colossus, Broken Age, BioShock Infinite: Burial At Sea Episodes 1 and 2, Doge 2048, Threes (Robot Edition)

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[Bjorn]

Shadow of the Colossus?  That's unexpected.  Great list of games to talk about all the way around though. 

[zerofiftyone]

 

I can only assume Jake was taken by robots before he had time to complete the thread title, but he was at least able to hit the "Submit" button in a final defiant act against the machines.

 

Godspeed Jake.

[Jake]

leaving the thread title like this now

[CaptainFish]

The Luftrausers discussion was intriguing. Unlike you guys, I don't think the Nazi imagery was lost on me. There was an internal debate about whether it was WWI era  or WWII era Germany being aped, but both definitely came to mind. The Red Baron-esque man in the Steam equivalent of box art probably pushed me more towards WWI. The thing I still can't reconcile is the Winston Churchill look-alike in the blimp destruction cutscene, something I saw before I bought it in the Giant Bomb Quick Look.

 

I posted about it in the last podcast thread. Obviously the point that I think it was well considered is not agreed upon, but perhaps the idea about their emotional space rings true. I still feel like the anger and aggressiveness Rami talks about lead to you being the 'bad guy' rather than the opposite, or the game just not having any of that stuff at all.  I definitely see the issue of having this design that uses specific imagery, and to have it described in such vague terms. I do feel like some of that vagueness does come across in the game, and that's what lead to some people not seeing Nazis until they are told. Although that could be impacted by how the game just pushes that stuff to the very periphery while making the player focus on 'mashing up to replay' like Chris said.

 

This stuff is honestly disappointing to me, because visually Luftrausers is very striking and holistic, but it seems like that asethetic doesn't really point to the 'thesis' of a game about superweapons, like they wanted it to.

 

I would be really interested in reading more reactions to the Vlambeer blog by those who presented the initial issue, or any responses at all, if you guys have links.

[tegan]

So I'm only partway through the Luftrausers talk right now, but I thought this would be a good thing to bring up:

 

One of the Guild01 games on the 3DS, Keiji Inafune's Bugs vs. Tanks, has Nazis as the protagonists. Like, not pastiches of Nazis or use of Nazi-inspired imagery, but actual Nazis who have been shrunk down to bug size, with the implication that they will go back to murdering millions and millions of people once it's all over. It is the specific reason as to why I have never played it and why I might never play Luftrausers. It also really soured my picture of Keiji Inafune, whose work I otherwise love. How fucking weird is it that this is a thing that even exists?

 

[MixedUpzombies]

I feel Remo's pain. Not enough people have finished it.

I didn't think the ending plot wise was good but I enjoyed it as I enjoy the ending of Brazil.

[Coods]

Loving the long episodes. Reminds me of when the last 5 episodes of The Idle Thumbs Podcast always had Sean and were always really great and 2 hours long. Keep them coming

[Faegbeard]

People being upset about the imagery in Luftrausers is flying completely over my head. I just assumed Vlambeer thought 40's-60's Germany had some stylish aesthetics. Which it did.

 

Also Vlambeer's response to all the hubbub seems to imply that they wanted those aesthetics to exist in a vacuum without being tied to Nazi ideology.

[Chris]

People being upset about the imagery in Luftrausers is flying completely over my head. I just assumed Vlambeer thought 40's-60's Germany had some stylish aesthetics. Which it did.

 

Also Vlambeer's response to all the hubbub seems to imply that they wanted those aesthetics to exist in a vacuum without being tied to Nazi ideology.

You're presumably right about both of those things. And that's what people are upset about: the notion that it's possible to use those aesthetics for purely stylistic means without exploiting one of history's great tragedies and acts of evil. I'm not saying you have to agree with that, but it should be possible to understand why some people take issue with it regardless of your own feelings.

[Faegbeard]

Oh, I understand why people could be upset about it, I just don't feel the same at all and don't have any emotional response to it.

 

"Going over my head" is probably not the best turn of phrase for that, that was poor communication on my part.

[isyourguy]

(I want to preface this post by stating I'm not trying to derail or nullify anyone's position on this issue or the issue as a whole. I hope I don't come across that way.)

 

Is the issue that Luftrausers appropriates the imagery of history's 'bad guys' and makes them playable? It's hardly the first game to do this, right? It seems like a really weird game to finally tip the scales too, especially since it's such an over-the-top caricature of Nazi Germany. To top it off it has little to no bearing on your actions in the game, you're just shooting planes and boats. You'd be shooting planes and boats if you were playing as jolly old tea-and-crumpets or the star-spangled turbo eagle factions. Do games like Dear Leader and Papers Please exploit the horrific actions of nations throughout history as a justification of their mechanics or to tell their stories? If so, it seems like it's only okay to reference horrible events in history if you've got a poignant message to get across that ultimately condemns those actions. Then there's Red Alert 1, where the Soviet campaign has you playing as Stalin's ultra-war-commander dude. I'm pretty sure one of the first missions involves you actually slaughtering unarmed civilians.

 

Okay I've totally forgotten what I was talking about. That Red Alert thing is really fucked up. Am I actually remembering that correctly? They run and try to hide in their houses at which point you just blow those up and a bunch of tiny flaming bodies come streaming out. Jesus Christ. That's messed up...

[Chuck]

Everyone missed the point of Luftrausers. I get its imagery might be upsetting, presented the wrong way, taken the wrong way, blah blah blah. Let me break down what matters here. 

 

Luftrausers takes places on VENUS

 

Look at this baby.

 

 

Aww yeah, majesty and all that noise. 

 

What about the surface you may ask. Well looky here.  

 

 

Hmm, interesting. Amazing, even. But look closely at that sky...

 

remind you of anything!?

 

 

...damn son. 

 

Maybe now you're saying "Hey Chuck, it's just yellow because it's yellow. Why's it gotta be venus." 

 

Nice try, bub! But let's look at what Vlambeer said about the inspiration for their work. 

 

 

...

 

 

...

 

 

So yes. Luftrausers takes place on Venus. ...what were we talking about again? 

[bkbroiler]

I haven't played Luftrausers either, but my thing is the gameplay itself is so abstract I have a hard time connecting it to anything horrible like Nazi Germany. The in-between stuff is a little more direct, but, yeah. I guess I'm kind of throwing a non-opinion into a heated debate I have little investment in. Also I'm a middle-class white male with no real distinct ethnicity, so I can't really identify with where these people are coming from either. Hurrah! Enjoyed the episode.

[Cyborg771]

The discussion of crossover stories and interwoven narratives got me thinking about a story structure I've been increasingly aware of lately but which doesn't seem to get a lot of discussion. For the sake of conversation I'm gonna call it "Narrative as Clockwork". It's the kind of story where the draw isn't necessarily the characters or emotions but unravelling the complex tapestry that the creators have set out for you. This was part of the appeal of things like Lost and Heroes although both of those fell apart due to poor planning. More successful examples include things like Primer and Problem Sleuth. It's not to say that these stories can't contain aspects of good traditional storytelling, just that they are an alternate flavour and are perfectly valid in and of themselves. They're almost like adventure games, trying to piece together clues to get the "whole story", or even just to understand the presented story. I really love these kinds of things, does anyone else have any thoughts?

[Kashkin]

The discussion of crossover stories and interwoven narratives got me thinking about a story structure I've been increasingly aware of lately but which doesn't seem to get a lot of discussion. For the sake of conversation I'm gonna call it "Narrative as Clockwork". It's the kind of story where the draw isn't necessarily the characters or emotions but unravelling the complex tapestry that the creators have set out for you. This was part of the appeal of things like Lost and Heroes although both of those fell apart due to poor planning. More successful examples include things like Primer and Problem Sleuth. It's not to say that these stories can't contain aspects of good traditional storytelling, just that they are an alternate flavour and are perfectly valid in and of themselves. They're almost like adventure games, trying to piece together clues to get the "whole story", or even just to understand the presented story. I really love these kinds of things, does anyone else have any thoughts?

 

That reminds me of trying to figure out the plot / world / anything of Dark Souls, which I'll admit I'm pretty fond of.

I think hiding world-building through subtext and inference can be quite satisfying to the reader/player, when properly contextualised. BioShock is an explicitly narrative text (by which I mean, one of its main goals is story-telling), so an over-reliance on "Narrative as Clockwork" detracts from the "main" story.

Dark Souls, on the other hand, is about who-the-fuck-knows-what, so any snippets of fiction that you can piece together don't have to fit into a complex plot.

That's my two-cents.

 

 

Luftrausers takes places on VENUS

 

From xkcd what if #30:

"...physics calculations give us an idea of what flight there [on Venus] would be like. The upshot is: Your plane would fly pretty well, except it would be on fire the whole time, and then it would stop flying, and then stop being a plane.

 

That actually sounds a lot like my experience with Luftrausers.

[Stuart]

 

...

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Cool stuff Chuck, thanks for sharing.

[Gormongous]

(I want to preface this post by stating I'm not trying to derail or nullify anyone's position on this issue or the issue as a whole. I hope I don't come across that way.)

 

Is the issue that Luftrausers appropriates the imagery of history's 'bad guys' and makes them playable? It's hardly the first game to do this, right? It seems like a really weird game to finally tip the scales too, especially since it's such an over-the-top caricature of Nazi Germany. To top it off it has little to no bearing on your actions in the game, you're just shooting planes and boats. You'd be shooting planes and boats if you were playing as jolly old tea-and-crumpets or the star-spangled turbo eagle factions. Do games like Dear Leader and Papers Please exploit the horrific actions of nations throughout history as a justification of their mechanics or to tell their stories? If so, it seems like it's only okay to reference horrible events in history if you've got a poignant message to get across that ultimately condemns those actions. Then there's Red Alert 1, where the Soviet campaign has you playing as Stalin's ultra-war-commander dude. I'm pretty sure one of the first missions involves you actually slaughtering unarmed civilians.

 

Okay I've totally forgotten what I was talking about. That Red Alert thing is really fucked up. Am I actually remembering that correctly? They run and try to hide in their houses at which point you just blow those up and a bunch of tiny flaming bodies come streaming out. Jesus Christ. That's messed up...

 

I'm glad you decided to make such a great first post, isyourguy. It's close to the same one I wanted to post. I don't really understand why Papers Please and Dear Leader escape mention, just because their mechanics force you to act out the reprehensible ideology that their aesthetics evoke. Would Luftrausers be getting less guff if you were bombing villages and strafing refugees in Spain and Eastern Europe? I doubt it, because you'd still be playing a Nazi, which was why many people disliked Brenda Romero's Train on principle. Why does the Red Alert series get a pass for evoking Soviet aesthetics without having mechanics that own up to the equally horrific mass killings under Stalin? Probably because Soviet symbology is seen as quaint and even goofy, although probably not to the Poles and Hungarians and Ukrainians who suffered under it, while Nazi symbology is seen as menacing, with good reason.

 

To me, it just feels like the taboo attached to fascism for being defeated and annihilated in the Second World War rearing its ugly head. If an intelligent and sensitive person who happens to be Jewish can play Luftrausers — which has a very strong 1890-1945 Austro-Germano-Prussian aesthetic but no specifically Nazi symbols, I imagine quite deliberately so — and be made justifiably uncomfortable, it says to me that we haven't really digested it as a culture, like we have communism. Maybe fighting a war over it has made it a bit harder to swallow, to the point of being even more so than a fifty-year cold war with a much higher death toll? I just worry how we're supposed to have any living memory of, let alone discourse on, Nazism and its victims if people call reverent games like Train unfun and irreverent games like Luftrausers dishonest. I had a hard enough time getting my kids even to read Mein Kampf in class last week in order to understand how Hitler came to power (and how others like him could). I wish the discussion didn't also have to stigmatize everything evocative of early to mid-twentieth-century German militarism, which was a significant cultural and historical force before Hitler was even born.

 

Of course, I don't think people are wrong for having a problem with the aesthetics of Luftrausers. Even beyond their fundamental right to feel anything about anything without having to justify themselves, the game does have a sense of whimsy that's out of sync with its apparent context, albeit probably on purpose. Just to be clear, the Nazis were evil and I'm not really invested in reclaiming them as a legitimate aesthetic choice. It's just frustrating for me to see Nazism singled out as the wicker man for a tolerant society, to the point that any aesthetic associated with it is invariably under debate, when a game from last year gets critical acclaim for setting the player up as a low-level bureaucrat totally complicit in another genocide. Not that Papers Please isn't a great game for me as well, but nary a peep!

 

 

I also wanted to work in the calls on the internet to deny Miyazaki the Oscar for The Wind Rises because it contained no apology for the Rape of Nanking, but I couldn't find a place. Anyway, only the losers of World War 2 have to apologize.

[Cyborg771]

I think the fundamental difference between something like Luftrausers and something like Papers Please is that in the latter the aesthetic is used for a narrative purpose, to tell a story that wouldn't work the same way with a different aesthetic. The perceived danger (I don't necessarily know where I fall on the issue yet) is that by CASUALLY adopting the aesthetic you risk weakening the cultural sentiment somehow, or it seems like you're disregarding the horrible things it's associated with.

[Gormongous]

I think the fundamental difference between something like Luftrausers and something like Papers Please is that in the latter the aesthetic is used for a narrative purpose, to tell a story that wouldn't work the same way with a different aesthetic. The perceived danger (I don't necessarily know where I fall on the issue yet) is that by CASUALLY adopting the aesthetic you risk weakening the cultural sentiment somehow, or it seems like you're disregarding the horrible things it's associated with.

 

Yeah, those are mostly my thoughts too, but would it really be better then to have a game where you're a low-level military officer doing logistics for the Final Solution in 1940? A lot of people hated Trains for not elucidating to their satisfaction the conscious guilt of the people packing Jews into boxcars headed for Dachau and Auschwitz. I think my point is maybe that Nazis are such a taboo in Western culture, for a variety of often correct reasons, that it's impossible for a game not to be perceived as disregarding the horrible things they're associated with.

 

Actually, I'm going to go further than that. No one really complained that you could play comical bear-wielding Soviets in the Red Alert series. No one really complained that you could play as Stalin, enslave millions of people, and then build the UN in Civilization IV. Both those things are awful and very much weaken the cultural sentiment surrounding the multiple Soviet genocides of the twentieth century, but they aren't Nazis, so... I don't know. I don't know where I'm going with this. Like I said, I think "cool" Nazis are an understandable but sometimes incongruous sticking point when games love so many other equally problematic historical aesthetics. Luftrausers seems an even odder place to draw the line when you have genocide-free Nazis shooting at Americans in Company of Heroes and then at Commies in Company of Heroes 2.

 

I really want to unpack this more. Are we having the conversation now because it's a great indie company making the game? I wish Vlambeer's response hadn't been so... nothing. Well, I'm glad the conversation (and the education accompanying it) is happening anyway, even without good input from them.

[Cyborg771]

Nazis do seem to have reached cartoonishly evil levels in the public consciousness.

[melmer]

Nazi chat. I caught the end of this documentary series last night. I scientist guy is going around tracking down the DNA of dead famous people and.... i don't really get the point, was Elvis' swagger in his genes? Anyway last nights episode and the final episode in the series was about Hitler. Like i said i only caught the last ten minutes where it sounded like the whole thing was a waste of time as after testing the hair and bone fragments they had acquired throughout the programme they couldn't have been Hitlers. But, they did get some hair of Eva Braun supposedly from a hair brush she owned, and if this hair was truly hers, well, after testing they found she was of Jewish decent going back four generation. 

 

Hitler, what a dick

[sorakasumi]

Personally I dislike the wholesale tarring of anything vaguely German as "Nazi". The National Socialist German Workers' Party was, as the name indicates, a political party. Just like having a republican president wouldn't instantly make every citizen a republican, not everything German was Nazi. Its easy to demonise the 'bad guys' but Germany is a country of millions of people. The GI's in media yelling about killing Nazi's are often wrong and are more likely fighting conscripted Germans.

 

At the time Germany was consistently producing incredible engineering work. Their weapons, equipment and vehicles were often steps ahead of anyone else. Even down to the smallest details like the jerrycan which were regularly stolen and used by the British troops. If we rejected every technological advance simply because it was created in the same country as Hitler we would be loosing an incredible amount. The Volkswagen Beetle was specifically designed in collaboration with Hitler but is clearly not associated with anti-semitism.

 

Obviously I am in no way discounting or disavowing the infinitely terrible things done under the banner of Nazi rule, I just wonder about where the line should be. Can we not appreciate the contributions to technology, culture or even aesthetics made by the Germans without slipping into glorifying the Nazis and their ideals? Surely the lesson should be that many good people can be made to do bad things through 'evil' leadership and not that an entire country became evil overnight.

 

While Luftrausers is clearly a pastiche of that period and aesthetic, it doesn't glorify anything about the Nazi's that made them uniquely terrible. As is mentioned in the episode, if the art style was more American nothing would have been said. Should a different cap badge, hair colour or font choice really change the entire moral core of a piece? Personally I find Killzone's Hellgast to be a much stronger use of Nazi allusion and wonder what is different about Luftrausers that seemed to create this spark.

[isyourguy]

I think the fundamental difference between something like Luftrausers and something like Papers Please is that in the latter the aesthetic is used for a narrative purpose, to tell a story that wouldn't work the same way with a different aesthetic. The perceived danger (I don't necessarily know where I fall on the issue yet) is that by CASUALLY adopting the aesthetic you risk weakening the cultural sentiment somehow, or it seems like you're disregarding the horrible things it's associated with.

 

I totally agree, but that just leaves me with more questions. It's easy to see Luftrausers taking a pretty cavalier approach to Nazism when they adopt the imagery and use it as a wrapper for a fun plane-shooty-boom game, but could you not say a similar thing for Papers Please? Doesn't reducing ANY issue down to a series of video game mechanics invariably leave you with something that could be perceived as insensitive by people with a much more intimate relationship with the issue? Are we giving these sort of games a pass because they're 'art games' and we're looking at them through the lense of video games instead of the lense of media in general? Am I turning too many of my thoughts into questions?

 

 

I'm glad you decided to make such a great first post, isyourguy. It's close to the same one I wanted to post. I don't really understand why Papers Please and Dear Leader escape mention, just because their mechanics force you to act out the reprehensible ideology that their aesthetics evoke. Would Luftrausers be getting less guff if you were bombing villages and strafing refugees in Spain and Eastern Europe? I doubt it, because you'd still be playing a Nazi, which was why many people disliked Brenda Romero's Train on principle. Why does the Red Alert series get a pass for evoking Soviet aesthetics without having mechanics that own up to the equally horrific mass killings under Stalin? Probably because Soviet symbology is seen as quaint and even goofy, although probably not to the Poles and Hungarians and Ukrainians who suffered under it, while Nazi symbology is seen as menacing, with good reason.

 

...

 

Thanks! I'm glad you decided to follow it up with such awesome posts! It's definitely a weird issue and seems to be applied totally unevenly. I can't really speak to the curriculum of other countries, but the atrocities in Russia didn't really get much of a look in here. If so, that might have something to do with the general lack of furore over things like Red Alert, Dear Leader, etc. I totally agree with you about the perception of Soviet symbology by the way! People have no qualms with wearing clothes or paraphernalia adorned with Soviet markings. I can't imagine anyone feeling the same way about Swastikas.

I don't know. It's a weird, ambiguous and huge issue that hurts my head to think about. In the end I don't quite get how people can so easily level these accusations at Luftrausers with one hand and heap praise upon Papers Please with the other.

Going a little off topic, but there's a TV series I've been meaning to watch and this thread reminded me of it. It's called Generation War and has been described as the "German Band of Brothers". Naturally the reception has been mixed.

[Gormongous]

Personally I dislike the wholesale tarring of anything vaguely German as "Nazi". The National Socialist German Workers' Party was, as the name indicates, a political party. Just like having a republican president wouldn't instantly make every citizen a republican, not everything German was Nazi. Its easy to demonise the 'bad guys' but Germany is a country of millions of people. The GI's in media yelling about killing Nazi's are often wrong and are more likely fighting conscripted Germans.

 

At the time Germany was consistently producing incredible engineering work. Their weapons, equipment and vehicles were often steps ahead of anyone else. Even down to the smallest details like the jerrycan which were regularly stolen and used by the British troops. If we rejected every technological advance simply because it was created in the same country as Hitler we would be loosing an incredible amount. The Volkswagen Beetle was specifically designed in collaboration with Hitler but is clearly not associated with anti-semitism.

 

Obviously I am in no way discounting or disavowing the infinitely terrible things done under the banner of Nazi rule, I just wonder about where the line should be. Can we not appreciate the contributions to technology, culture or even aesthetics made by the Germans without slipping into glorifying the Nazis and their ideals? Surely the lesson should be that many good people can be made to do bad things through 'evil' leadership and not that an entire country became evil overnight.

 

While Luftrausers is clearly a pastiche of that period and aesthetic, it doesn't glorify anything about the Nazi's that made them uniquely terrible. As is mentioned in the episode, if the art style was more American nothing would have been said. Should a different cap badge, hair colour or font choice really change the entire moral core of a piece? Personally I find Killzone's Hellgast to be a much stronger use of Nazi allusion and wonder what is different about Luftrausers that seemed to create this spark.

 

Interestingly, the answer that the postwar American government gave to the "fruits" of Nazi science was that it wasn't worth the moral compromise, although they didn't have a problem hiring ex-Nazi scientists after the fact to keep them out of Soviet hands. Good point with Killzone, though. There's not even an attempt to evoke the aesthetics of a given historical period with the Hellgast, it's just to make them look evil and killable. I wonder if the people who'd have a problem with that just don't play Killzone. I certainly never have.

 

Thanks! I'm glad you decided to follow it up with such awesome posts! It's definitely a weird issue and seems to be applied totally unevenly. I can't really speak to the curriculum of other countries, but the atrocities in Russia didn't really get much of a look in here. If so, that might have something to do with the general lack of furore over things like Red Alert, Dear Leader, etc. I totally agree with you about the perception of Soviet symbology by the way! People have no qualms with wearing clothes or paraphernalia adorned with Soviet markings. I can't imagine anyone feeling the same way about Swastikas.

I don't know. It's a weird, ambiguous and huge issue that hurts my head to think about. In the end I don't quite get how people can so easily level these accusations at Luftrausers with one hand and heap praise upon Papers Please with the other.

 

The Cold War still isn't done as well as it should be in school. The professor with whom I work covers it reasonably well, but her colleague doesn't, because he assumes the students know all about it, even though none of them were alive at the same time as the USSR was around. I think the Cold War's only really beginning to be thought of as something distinct from our historical "now", which is part of what's giving us great new period films like Tinker, Tailor, so maybe I'm revising my initial statement to be that communism hasn't been digested that well either? There has to be a difference between two roughly similar ideologies of evil to account for their different places in our mental landscape, though. Maybe it is just that we fought a war with one and not the other? It can't be that simple, no.

 

As for symbols, I remember seeing one guy comment on the CCCP codec pack forums with a request that they change their logo to be anything but a hammer and sickle, which represented to him the government that killed his grandfather. He was laughed off the forum, of course. Internet! Meanwhile, a streak of swastika-related vandalism on my undergrad campus shut it down for thirty-six hours while the police investigated. You're right, it's all so big and complicated that I don't know we'll ever be able to have any sort of satisfactory resolution until everyone who ever spoke to anyone who was there is dead, and only then because there won't be enough people left to keep the discourse going. I'm glad a small part of it is happening now. We're reading Goebbels, Comintern, and NSC-68 in my class on Friday, I hope it can happen there, too.