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natureWelcome to the new issue of Five out of Ten! In our greenest ever issue (literally, although digital magazines are kind to the environment) we’ve got more fantastic writing: how Zone of the Enders approaches cyborgs, the camaraderie of Mass Effect 2, the modding scene beyond Baldur’s Gate, the unusual virtual odyssey of Enslaved, and the civilians of Command and Conquer. Plus, five more essays on nature on everything from the evolu-tion of Pokémon to the environmental messages of Chrono Cross, and the second issue from our friends at ME&R. Thank you for supporting the best in independent writing – enjoy the magazine!

Alan WilliamsonEditor-in-Chief – this month, he convinced a room of vide-ogame fans of the virtues of heavy metal. If you too want to be converted, check out his new podcast, Cast Iron.

#14: NatureEditor-in-Chief: Alan Williamson Managing Editor: Lindsey Joyce Design Editor: Craig Wilson Copy Editor: Robbie Pickles Tech Wizard: Marko Jung Special Thanks: Lisa Thompson, our Patreon backers editor@fiveoutoftenmagazine.com fiveoutoftenmag fiveoutoften

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Lindsey JoyceManaging Editor – contributor to Critical Distance, First Person Scholar, and Kill Screen. She once stood on a dead whale in the middle of the Atlantic. It was gross.

Craig WilsonDesign Editor – responsible for at least half of the design, especially the good looking bits. He is the other co-founder of Split Screen: he likes creating insightful infographics and recording his own music.

Robbie PicklesCopy Editor – a History and Politics graduate whose pop culture references dry up around 1997. His previous works include a comment on the Guardian website and a terse quote in his high school magazine.

contributors

Nate Ewert-KrockerWriter and Montessori teacher who lives in Atlanta. His writing about games has appeared at Kill Screen, Paste Magazine, and others. His first novel, The Silence, is currently available in paperback and ebook.

Mark R JohnsonPostdoctoral fellow in game studies at the University of York, the developer of a massive roguelike about semiotics and historiography, a retired professional gamer, and a danmaku world champion.

Oscar StrikLinguist from the Netherlands who plays at studying games in his spare time. He is an editor at The Ontological Geek and does alternative music podcasts at Evening of Light.

Cover images: Alan Williamson © 2015 Five out of Ten. All rights reserved. Reproduction in whole or in part without explicit permission is prohibited. Products named in these pages are trade names, or trademarks, of their respective companies.

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Stephen BeirneGame critic specializing in little moments of beauty and intrigue. He also makes a series of videos under the banner Two Minute Game Crit, and sometimes he draws. You can find more of him on normallyrascal.com.

Lindsay RobertsonMedia Manager and Freelance Writer. Her work has featured in Retro Collect, The Void, gamesTM and several remote corners of the internet. She’s lived in London for years but hasn’t lost her Scottish accent.

contentsThe Dirty Dozen 5

In Mass Effect 2, you must work hard to gain the loyalty of your squad, but only the suicide mission can determine if you deserve it.

A Virtual Odyssey 13Enslaved: Odyssey to the West delicately break the fourth wall to make us reconsider what we want from games and what they mean to us.

Civilian Targets 21Used as a game mechanic, the killing of civilians in Command and Conquer are more than a diversion, they are the means by which the player succeeds or fails.

Beyond Baldur’s Gate 28Devoted fan communities, like those of Baldur’s Gate, will go to great lengths to expand the worlds they love.

Man and Machine 35Rather than producing more transhuman fetishism, Zone of the Enders 2 shows us a way to overcome it.

ME&R #2: Discovery 42Natural Designs 66

What is and isn’t “natural” is often challenged by design, whether it be divine, garden, or game design.

Skill, Wit, and Magic 71Through its magical framework, Folklore helps map the essence of Ireland.

El Nido, El Niño 78Chrono Cross asks us to consider what happens when saving humanity and saving the world aren’t the same thing.

Seeing Green 84When the fall into dystopia is slow, both nature and people adapt, but not necessarily in harmony.

The Unnatural Evolution of Pokémon 94Pokémon were inspired by the natural world of their creator, but their evolution across games shows both technological and natural change.

great writing is in our natureThis is just a sample of what’s in

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In Mass Effect 2, you must work hard to gain the loyalty of your squad, but only the suicide mission can determine if you deserve it.

The Dirty Dozen

The Dirty DozenLindsay Robertson

It’s the mid-22nd century. Human colonies are being abducted by a

mysterious alien race known as the Collectors and taken beyond the Omega-4 Relay, a place from which no ship has ever returned. It’s up to Commander Shepard to assemble a team brave, or crazy, enough to infiltrate the Collector Base.

Who are the members of this motley crew? They’re thieves, vigilantes, contract killers and genetically engineered super soldiers. They’re the good, the bad and the ugly. They are the suicide squad of the Normandy SR-2… and it’s your job to turn them into a team.

“If this is a war, I’ll need an army. Or a really good team.” - Shepard

Lieutenant Commander Shepard The Leader

As Commander, you choose who to recruit and how to interact with them. Picking favourites is only natural – it’s up to you whether you let this affect your judgement.

In the beginning, most of the individuals who come to make up your team are shrouded in mystery. Where did they come from? How do they justify their legally dubious lifestyles? Why have they accepted a mission that they may well not survive? Over time, however, each squadmate’s backstory is revealed through oodles of dialogue options. As you talk with the characters, they gradually begin to feel like comrades, friends, or even family.

What the game is really doing, though, is setting you up for a punch in the soul. Tough calls must be made, people will live and die under your command and – thanks to the ability to import save

files – your decisions haunt you throughout the series. So, no pressure!

Mass Effect 2 culminates in a complex mission where anyone can be killed, including Shepard. To buy the greatest chance of survival, you’ll have to sign up as many specialists as you can, earn their loyalty, and occasionally stop them trying to kill each other. Even then, getting out alive is not guaranteed.

Assembling the team isn’t even half the battle. Once assembled, their loyalty must be earned. To gain their trust, you must help each squadmate address some unfinished  business. Loyal squad-mates become more focussed on the mission and battle harder. In the final phase, this can easily mean the difference between life and death.

miranda lawsonThe Offi ficerFi

“They tell me it’s a suicide mission. I intend to prove them wrong.”

- Shepard

Enslaved: Odyssey to the West delicately break the fourth wall to make us reconsider what we want from games and what they mean to us.

A Virtual Odyssey

The main menu of Ninja Theory’s Enslaved: Odyssey to the West has you peering over the shoulder of Trip, the

game’s female lead, as she examines a holographic projec-tion in front of her. You see all the choices you might expect from a game’s menu: NEW GAME, CONTINUE, EXTRAS, OPTIONS. On the left part of the display, a reflection of Trip’s face, her freckled nose, her eyes scanning the display. On the extreme left, you see Trip herself; not her reflec-tion, but the curve of her cheek, her eyelashes, a strand of her hair. It’s curiously intimate; to get this perspective of a person in real life, you’d almost have to be resting your chin on their shoulder.

These two representations are important. We see Trip twice, from the front and side, one real and the other a reflection, an illusion.

Except, of course, they’re both virtual. Neither is real.

A Virtual OdysseyNate Ewert-Krocker

Enslaved is full of feints like this, imagery that prods at the wall between the real and the imaginary. It constructs a

beautiful, detailed world, but wants to remind you that this world, though occasionally familiar, is not real. It does this not by ham-fistedly breaking the fourth wall, but in subtler ways. Its true message is much more ambiguous than it might appear at first glance.

Enslaved takes its subtitle, geographical direction, and a handful of character cues from the classic Chinese tale Journey to the West, but the story quickly establishes its setting as America. In the first chapter the protagonist and player char-acter, Monkey, makes his escape from an airborne ‘slave ship’, pursuing the woman whom players will recognize from the main menu. In Trip’s hasty getaway from the slavers who’ve captured her, she blows a hole in the ship’s hull and things quickly start to fall apart. As the ship collapses and Monkey scram-bles  to the escape pods, he finds himself on the ship’s exte-rior. We see a verdant, post-apocalyptic cityscape - familiar, but not immediately identifi-able. Until the ship’s wing clips the Statue of Liberty’s torch, it’s barely recognis-able as New York.

Further Reading

Eric Swain - Enslaved: Odyssey to the West’s Thematic Failure, Pop Matters http://www.thegamecritique.com/recent-posts/enslaveds-to-the-wests-thematic-failure/2848/

Anthony John Agnello - To the Bitter End: Happiness in Slavery, The Gameological Society http://gameological.com/2012/07/to-the-bitter-end-enslaved/

G. Christopher Williams - The Politics of Submission: The Romance of ‘Enslaved’, The Game Critique http://www.popmatters.com/post/135493-the-politics-of-submission-the-romance-of-enslaved/

Monkey and Trip jettison themselves from the ship before it crashes, their escape pod landing in the ruins of Grand Central Station, surrounded by decaying American flags. These recognizable objects and locations communicate to the player that this is our world, but, also, not our world. This is one of the game’s constant reminders: it’s Amer-ica, but not as we know it. Further complicating the issue are the photographs all over the walls of the ruins: we encounter what look like miss-ing persons boards that sometimes go up during catastrophes, but the people in the photos appear to be the game’s developers. Perhaps intended as an Easter egg, they nevertheless slip through the fourth wall, an artifact of the real world in this artificial world based on the real one.

When Monkey awakens, he finds a ‘Slave Crown’ on his head – he is now Trip’s captive. She needs his muscle to get back to her home upstate, and she’s taken measures to ensure he complies: if Monkey disobeys her commands, strays too far from her, or allows her to come to harm, the Slave Crown will kill him.

What little critical attention Enslaved has received thus far has focused on this relationship between the two leads: Monkey’s enslavement to Trip can be read as an allegory for the player’s lack of agen-cy at the behest of the game’s narrative. Writing for PopMatters, G. Christopher Williams suggests

Used as a game mechanic, the killing of civilians in Command and Conquer are more than a diversion, they are the means by which the player succeeds or fails.

Civilian TargetsCivilian Targets

Mark R Johnson

Command and Conquer presents an interesting understanding of agency. The players –  the

commanders who issue orders to their forces, whether human or AI – have absolute agency to construct their bases and move their forces. They are the only fully realised actors in these games: individual units obey the commander’s orders perfectly at all times, unless they are pathfinding

– in which case their precise route is calculated, not enforced by the player – or pursing an enemy spotted while set to “guard.” Agency is focused on the commanders, not the soldiers, despite the fact that the soldiers are the ones who physically affect the world; the commander can only make their will felt through the attack, move, heal, destroy, and repair orders issued to units. The commander’s agency is, therefore, constrained within the abili-ties of the soldiers, and their own ability to use those soldiers sensibly.

Yet civilians — the innocent bystanders — cannot be commanded. 1995’s Command and Conquer (also later known as Tiberian Dawn) ran a controversial marketing campaign before release, highlighting that civilians would be present in the game. The campaign took the form of a poster, which used the concept of the

“high score” and applied it to a range of historical mass killers (for the most part), explicitly denoting the killing of vast quantities of primarily innocent people as the metric for a attaining a high score. While the actual game uses two entirely fictional international factions rather than specific nations, this poster suggested the use of civilians would be relevant to the game. The actual civilians in the final product, however, were somewhat different than advertised - as we shall see, a player does not achieve a score through the killing of civilians, but civilians instead oscillate between being mere background on the one hand, and having distinct instrumental value to the player on the other.

Devoted fan communities, like those of Baldur’s Gate, will go to great lengths to expand the worlds they love.

Beyond Baldur’s Gate

“Nestled atop the cliffs that rise from the Sword Coast…”

These are words that still trigger a rush of positive emotion after seventeen years. My love for Baldur’s Gate is, in part, nostal-

gia for my teenage years. But it’s not just nostalgia: Baldur’s Gate, and its sequel Baldur’s Gate II: Shadows of Amn, are undisputed classics of the ‘platinum age’ of computer roleplaying games.

It’s no exaggeration to say that key contemporary features of narrative RPGs were influenced by

the Baldur’s Gate series: for example, it’s hard to imagine the romances and friendships that are part and parcel of many games these days coming into being without the pioneering character writ-ing of Baldur’s Gate II. The series, developed by BioWare, laid the groundwork for beloved fran-chises like Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, Dragon Age, and Mass Effect. While the legacy of the games is certainly impressive, aside from their status as classics and the release of remastered Enhanced Editions, the BG series has continued to thrive in a vibrant modding community.

Shortly after the release of the original game, the “TeamBG” modding group was founded in December 1998. They created tools to explore and edit the game’s files and assets, with the aim of being able to edit characters and savegames. The modding community also developed their own patches to fix bugs and tweak the game, long after BioWare had moved on to new projects. 

However, sights were aimed higher than fixing glitches, and work soon began on a substantial fan-made expansion entitled Dark Side of the Sword Coast. Ken Henderson, the project’s coor-dinator, explains:

When I first joined the modding community of TeamBG, the group mainly consisted of people who were digging into the code, and people modding items, creating new weapons, armor, spells, etc. Once I had gotten the hang of creating new items and new NPCs I really got excited at the prospect of creating new adventures. I was not content with just adding items to the game, I wanted to tell new stories that existed within the game and allow others to enjoy those stories and adventures. As I recruited individu-als to help with the project, its scale began to grow.

Rather than producing more transhuman fetishism, Zone of the Enders 2 shows us a way to overcome it.

Man and Ma-chine

As Dingo Egret awoke one morning from uneasy dreams, he found himself trans-

formed in his bed into a gigantic mech. While his outer form remained, his organs had been replaced by the machinery of a twenty-storey tall bipedal weapon of war, the consequence of an incident some months prior in which they had been expelled, rather unfortunately, by his murder. As he lay dying, an entrepreneur seized the chance to recover his body and install it in the pilot seat of Jehuty to double as our hero’s life support system and extended bodily existence.

So our hero is conscripted into an interstellar conflict ranging from the moons of Jupiter to the planes of Mars in a bid to free the colonies of space from their Earth-based oppressors. As a former soldier, Dingo’s less than happy to be dragged back into yet another ruthless war and, worse, to associate with the side that has twice left him for dead. His first instinct on awakening is defiance: he opens the cockpit door and stands upright, beyond its bounds, to prove his independ-ence. Five heartbeats later he cradles his chest in a ball on the cockpit floor. Dingo is now a cyborg,

unable to exist as man or machine alone.

Some background. Zone of the Enders takes place in 2172 when the people of a ravaged,

depleted Earth have long grown dependant on their outer colonies. The miraculous fuel source known as Metatron has been discovered on Jupiter, causing oppressive Earth governments to tighten their control over the suddenly prospec-tive ‘Ender’ outposts. Without self-governance, the fight for freedom in space formed around the resistance of Martian paramilitary BAHRAM, as lead by Nohman, against the Earth United Space Force. 

Ostensibly BAHRAM fights for the people, but in reality, the procurement and use of Metatron is their motive. The thirst for power through tech-nology is so compulsive, it bleeds out from the organisation and corrupts the behaviour of individ-uals acting seemingly of their own volition. When Dingo’s former commander Nohman shoots him and leaves him for dead, it is the allure of Jehuty that ropes Dingo back into military life. And when Dingo reawakens as a cyborg in Jehuty’s body,

it is Ken’s need for a capable pilot that delivers him onto the trajectory of her mission. When the BAHRAM fortress Aumaan is revealed as a univer-sally-scaled doomsday machine, it is the “Will of Metatron” Nohman cites as the provocateur of his technological determinism.

Technological determinism is the belief that a soci-ety’s historic and cultural progression is driven by its technologies. According to media theorist Marshall McLuhan, for example, the invention and spread of the printing press raised literacy levels in the general population, stimulating national iden-tity and leading to the societal rise of the nation state. In a broad sense, the discovery of increas-ingly efficient and sustainable energy sources has defined the progression of humanity throughout history. Wars are fought and millions of lives wast-ed and displaced to seize dwindling resources or maximize a country’s output within contemporary technological limits.

nature

What is and isn’t “natural” is often challenged by design, whether it be divine, garden, or game design.

Natural Designs

Natural DesignsOscar Strik

I’m not sure what ‘nature’ or ‘natural’ is, and I have a nagging suspicion that most people aren’t sure

either. To be more precise: it’s quite difficult to say where to draw the line between nature and… whatever nature is not. We have a feeling that nature is somewhere out there, away from where humans tend to gather. A wooded mountainside, a snake in the desert: those are definitely nature. Manhattan isn’t (anymore). But what about your local park? The forest right outside of town? Or what about the large parts of my country, the Netherlands, which have literally been created by keeping the sea at bay?

There is definitely the sense that nature contrasts with things created or influenced by humans. We have a nice word for the latter as well: ‘artificial’. Still, I’m fairly sure most of you will agree that your backyard is more nature-y than your house, and a park more nature-y still, despite being planned and created by people. This suggests that there is such a thing as artificial nature, too. It’s at this point that we arrive at the topic of games.

At the bar were a stack of straws: red for singletons, black for the attached or uninterested.

Even when set in what we’d call a natural envi-ronment, game spaces are typically designed spaces: any resemblance to real nature is modu-lated by the demands of the game’s design. A more apt resemblance is that of a theme park, as Espen Aarseth puts forward in his analysis of the “worldliness” of Azeroth in World of Warcraft. Rather than verisimilar depictions of landscape and climate, zones in WoW are themed according to the effect they are supposed to evoke in the player, and thus play into both natural and fantasy-racial clichés. In other words, it’s a multi-themed space where snow-covered areas sit snugly side by side with hot wastelands, with only a thin, convenient mountain range to separate the two. Here, nature is mostly a context for culture, a set-dressing for a virtual playground.

Through its magical framework, Folklore helps map the essence of Ireland.

Skill, Wit, and Magic

Skill, Wit, and MagicStephen Beirne

The Piebald Prince is a tragic figure of legend, a just and honest ruler twice cursed by the

bad luck of his birth. Based within Robin Hobb’s Elderling  fantasy universe spanning over two dozen books, this hand-me-down tale tells the story of two opposing magics: Wit and Skill. In this story, Wit is an animalistic magic while Skill is a magic of the mind. The Wit keys into empathy while the Skill relies on manipulation. The Wit is common while the Skill is rare. Wit is the magic used by the Piebald Prince, he who stood in the way of his cousin’s ascension to the throne. Manic with ambition, his Skill-using usurpers proceeded to scandalize the Prince, spurring rumours that he courting animals and disdaining civilization. Following his assassination, the Wit evolves into a social blight, while the Skill, its royal magical coun-terpart, became the dominating magic passed down through regal inheritance. The dualism of the magics was especially useful for the monar-

chy, who used it to maintain authority and impress an “us and them” class system. 

Though Hobb’s story focuses on the fall of the Wit at the hands of the Skill, the two were not always in opposition. Before Skilled raiders erected forts on the land’s coasts and flooded inward, before the hearts of innumerous Witted communities were devastated by the oppression of their very way of life, the Skill and the Wit existed in unity. Moreover, in their combination lay a metaphysical truth about the cosmic essence of humanity, how humans exist as beings made of the same fabric as the universe itself. This truth, however, was lost when some great and ancient spiritual cataclysm caused a fragmentation in the magics of humanity, which evolved over time into the fabled conduit for the Skilled aristocracy to prop up systemic oppression.

Chrono Cross asks us to consider what happens when saving humanity and saving the world aren’t the same thing.

El Nido, El Niño

El Nido, El NiñoNate Ewert-Krocker

An apocalypse in microcosm lies tucked away in the corner of Chrono Cross’s El Nido Archi-

pelago. Shrouded in fog, trapped mid-implosion amidst waves literally frozen in time, is a city from the future. As your band of adventurers walks across water to reach the heart of the haunted place, you can examine artifacts from this unfor-tunate cataclysm: discarded robots, broken high-ways, and half-working computer systems that hint at the nature of the world’s end.

When you finally arrive at the center of the ruins, you meet a very conveniently-placed storyteller, who explains that this curious region, called “the Dead Sea,” is an alternate future – an apocalypse averted – that was, through an unknown process, preserved. It was condensed into a tiny inlet of a minor island chain and sealed away. He calls it

“Time Crash Ground Zero.”

This armageddon was prevented, he explains, by a group of adventurers who traveled through time to rewrite the history books. The remnants of the bleak future they averted, the apocalypse they canceled, have gathered in the Dead Sea.

And then he says this, a line which needles me harder each time I encounter it:

“They realized they could not turn their backs on our planet, even if its death would not be anywhere near their lifetimes.”

It has always felt like an accusation. Was I holding myself to this lofty standard? Though its death would not be anywhere near my lifetime, could I turn my back on our planet?

When the fall into dystopia is slow, both nature and people adapt, but not necessarily in harmony.

Seeing Green

Seeing GreenMark R Johnson

Tiberium

The original Command and Conquer – released in 1995, and arguably the birth of the real-time

strategy (RTS) genre– is an unusual game. Set a few years in the “future” when released, its technology is generally realistic, except in one regard. Much of the game’s plot is focused around the introduction of Tiberium, an extraterrestrial substance brought to Earth via a meteor, which crashed near the Tiber river in Italy. Tiberium is not kind to the fragile Earth ecosystem: it “leeches vital minerals from the soil” and starts to spread rapidly across the globe, pushing up strange green crys-tals from the ground. It mutates and warps ordinary trees into pustular “blossom trees” which spew out airborne Tiberium particles. These particles are deadly to humans, and one particularly memo-rable cutscene relates the staggering worldwide figures for Tiberium-related illnesses and deaths: one and a half million reproductive ailments, two and a half million respiratory ailments, four million Tiberium-related deaths, and over fifteen million immune system infections.

However, this narrative element emphasizing the dangers of Tiberium is integrally tied to one of the game’s core gameplay mechanics: Tiberium is incredibly rich in minerals. And so, the same substance which is deadly to troops and –as implied

–is beginning to damage global ecology, is also the source of the player’s income. It is an obvious double-edged sword: it brings the world new-found wealth, but yields physiological and ecological catastrophe, whilst simultaneously being the cata-lyst for the conflict between the Global Defence Initiative – think the real-world US and the UN combined – and the Brotherhood of Nod – a quasi-religious decentralized militia – both of whom seek to exploit this newfound source of wealth. At the game’s conclusion it remains unclear what the long-term effects of Tiberium are: the world, when the player completes the final mission, is akin in many ways to the one we live in now. Current geopolitical boundaries matter, asymmetric warfare is used to contest the world’s resources, and buildings and units remain within the realistic domains of real-world tanks and soldiers, but the world also has this unknown “alien” element in the mix.

Pokémon were inspired by the natural world of their creator, but their evolution across games shows both technological and natural change.

The Unnatu-ral Evolution of Pokémon

The UnnaturalEvolution of Pokémon

Lindsay Robertson

“Places to catch insects are rare because of urbanisations. Kids play inside their homes now, and a lot had forgotten about catching insects.

So had I. When I was making games, something clicked and I decided to make a game with that

concept.” – Satoshi Tajiri, creator of Pokémon

It was a simple idea that took the world by storm: a videogame that put children (and adults) in search

of weird and wonderful creatures. We caught them, we raised them, and above all, we loved them. Even the non-gaming world couldn’t ignore its appeal, as Pokémon quickly became a worldwide craze.

While the series has embraced advancements in handheld technology, it has remained faithful to the original narrative and format. Or, perhaps

more cynically, Game Freak have successfully sold us the same story over and over again for nearly two decades.

During this time, however, several aspects of the series have undoubtedly changed - and not necessarily for the better. With each new genera-tion comes the derision that the Pokémon games are “not what they used to be” and that the new creature designs just plain suck. Perhaps too, the childlike wonders of exploring and hunting in the natural world have gradually been abandoned in favour of new gimmicks in an effort to keep the franchise alive.

Has Pokémon strayed too far from its roots? Or are we just grouchy old farts looking at the past with rose-tinted spectacles? To answer this, we should look back at what inspired Pokémon’s creator.

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