Batman: Arkham Asylum

When I attended New York City Comic Con earlier this year, I saw a panel with some of the people behind the Gears of War series. An audience member asked a question about one of the more absurd elements of the game, although I can't recall if it was the weight of the weapons, the auto-healing, the amount of ammo the characters carry, or what. The developer onstage responded, "If Cliff were here, he'd say, 'gamism,' and that's what I say to you. Gamism."

It shouldn't surprise me that Cliff Bleszinski, a man who has held dominion over a staggering amount of my leisure time with the Unreal series and Gears of War games, had a perfect and succinct term for the parts of games that are necessary for the user experience but demand suspension of disbelief. Why are there so many ammo crates lying around before major battles? Gamism. Why do none of your wounds turn septic? Gamism. And cetera.

Gamism has analogs in every medium, really. In the first five minutes of The Hurt Locker, the audience sees what actually happens when you are in the kill radius of a large explosion. As I watched the character's face explode all over the faceplate of his EOD suite (MSRP: $16,985), my mind stacked images of Stephen Segal, Indiana Jones, Mssrs. Skywalker, and various Jameses Bond flying through the air against an angry orange and yellow backdrops. Dead, dead, dead, dead, dead. I thought. It doesn't ruin the movie for most audience members, though. In fact, it's probably an unpleasant shock for men raised on action movies to discover that when they are in the presence of an IED or other explosive device in the real Iraq or Afghanistan, they cannot save themselves by running toward the camera and leaping forward with their arms outsplayed.

I’m not a lone voice screaming in the wilderness. In a recent interview at Kotaku, Assassin’s Creed designer Patrice Desilets discussed the design decisions the AC team made to immerse the player fully in the experience… and the concessions to gamism made during the development of Assassin’s Creed 2 in order to avoid losing the player.

Games, unlike movies or books, are burdened with the need to entertain the player at every step. Being frustrated by an interface or being clueless as to what to do next or being bored with repetitious tasks is not entertaining, so

All this is to say that I know why all the stupid Riddler puzzles are scattered around Arkham Asylum, but I can’t help but cringe every time I see a fucking green trophy shimmering behind a grate. I’m Bruce fucking Wayne, haunted eternally by the specter of my parents’ murder. I don’t sleep. I have split personality disorder, as the game points out during the brilliant Scarecrow toxin sequences. I am the Dark fucking Knight. So why am I taking time away from my mission to put the Joker in his place so I can see where the Riddler hid a question mark I can only see in my “detective vision”? Gamism.

As gaming has matured, the presentation of the material has raced down and up the Uncanny Valley, and the effect is to subconsciously elicit greater expectations in at least one surly gamer. The Joker and Batman are rendered gorgeously, and Arkham looks like a place you might be able to visit. The whole effect is compromised with every damned Riddler puzzle thrown in—let’s face it—to give the gamer something else to do. But that last bit is the entire ticket: if you didn’t get to hunt down more Riddler puzzles, you would feel cheated out of a complete gaming experience, and there would be precious seconds or minutes when you might not have something else to do!

On top of all that, Paul Dini was NOT the main talent behind Batman: The Animated Series. That seems to have been Bruce Timm, if Dini’s subsequent work in the comics is any indication. The Arkham Asylum script is a mess despite top-notch performances from Kevin Conroy and Luke Skywalker. No one should ever be allowed to write Batman except Jeph Loeb. (Incidentally, Loeb should never be allowed to write anything except Batman).

I’ve rarely hated and loved a game as much as I did Batman: Arkham Asylum. By the end I was foaming over the shoddy script and the pissy concessions to an ADD-addled marketplace. When the stealth and fighting elements are good enough to inspire active leaderboards, do you really need anything other than combat and stealth set pieces strung together? I submit you don’t. Rent it. You’ll enjoy it. I’m going to punch a wall now.