The Binding of Isac part two - who are you anyway?

As previously discussed, the moral choice system is hidden in Binding of Isaac, which is the best place for a moral choice system to be.  If the game presents you with a good and bad option, and literally tells you which one is which, then that's not really a moral choice.  That is, none of you in your daily lives experience flagged good and bad options, deciding to take the one that has been labelled bad. No, you're more likely to take the Isaac route of taking what you want, and thinking that there are zero consequences, even when there are.

But there's another aspect to this game that was brought to my attention, and I'd like to talk about it today.  That aspect is the change in appearance that you undergo as you go deeper into the basement.  But before we can talk about that, we need to talk about the enemies of the game.

The game starts, and in the early levels, you are mainly pursued by things that are variations of your standard body type.  For example, this is you:

Naked, weeping, but not altogether aesthetically unappealing.  Now, compare this character model to the enemies from the first few levels, and you'll start to see something interesting happen.  

Yes, there are a lot of bugs, spiders, flies, demons from Hell, all that as enemies, but a lot (maybe not most, but a significant proportion) of the enemies are just mutations of your character model.  Now, this by itself doesn't really say much, but hold on, because there's more to talk about.

As you go deeper into the basement, you have item rooms crop up, and these item rooms, and the items in them, are the major means through which you can upgrade your stats.  All the items you pick up from the item rooms are there to upgrade your speed, your tears, or to give you new abilities, like

flight, explosive shots, and so on.  But unlike  a great many other games, the items that you pick up are represented physically on your character model.  Some of them are fine, and don't affect things too much.  Pageant boy, spelunker helmet, heck, even number one all make you look fine.  But as you progress and unlock more items, then you'll begin to see more and more changes to your model. In fact, by the end of the game, you're almost always unrecognizable from how you were at the beginning.

So what?  Well, this tells you something about the enemies you're fighting.  The enemies you're fighting are corrupted versions of someone like you.  Perhaps brothers and sisters who have also escaped into the basement, and have picked up powerups themselves.  Their abilities, to generate flies, to spit tears or blood, mirror those of your abilities, and their deformities mirror your own.  There is no upgrade that comes without a physical cost, and these mutated enemies tend to show up at the beginning when they're still more deformed than you. But as you go deeper, the enemies devolve more and more into creatures from nightmares, and you sort of forget about the things that looked sort of like you but a little bit off.  Until you get to the final boss,

When you encounter the boss of the game, something strange happens.  It's you.  Isaac is the final boss.  But not strange, messed up deformed Isaac, regular Isaac.  Contrast the random hodge-podge

that you have become next to the real genuine pristine Isaac you encounter at the end of the game.  Worlds apart.  For a second, you appreciate that in this situation, the deformed, malformed, mutuated monster in this situation is you.  You turned into that through your time progressing through the basement.  You grabbed the powerups that you figured would give you success, or a better chance to survive, and when you get to the end, not only do you realize how far you've come, but also that maybe the basement is full of other people who were making the same decisions.

It's a lot like Bioshock in that regard.  In Bioshock, you're the protagonist by virtue of being the player character, but you're on the same core level as the rest of the enemies you're fighting.  They're all splicers, and from very early on in the game, you are too.  You spend a generous amount of time

splicing, recombining your genetic code, which is the core problem that everyone else in rapture was dealing with too.  They're no different from you, though you think you're all special and different and unique.  And this is where the ambiguity kicks in.  In neither of those two games are you out for a noble task, not really.  You're into it for self-preservation, to survive and to progress.  But the deeper you go, the more you turn into the monsters that you're fighting.  As you splice in Bioshock, or pick up items in Isaac, they change you.  All of a sudden, in Bioshock, you have charred flesh, or hornets all over your skin, or ice breaking through your knuckles, and it all seems normal, because it's what you have to do to survive.  And it's what everyone else is doing to survive, too.  Isaac, same deal.  You can pick up powerups that will let you manipulate the flies, the spiders, vomit blood, fly, weep faster, and all those powerups mimic what you see in the enemies around you.  They're twisted, and so are you.

If you pause and think about how video games work, you play the part of the hero, but why are you the hero?  You certainly cause a bigger bodycount than anyone else.  The number of things you break is huge, the bodies are stacked up like cordwood, there are explosions all over the place, and an awful lot of families have lost their dads.  You're as spliced up and despoiled as the enemies you're facing.  So what makes you the hero?  

The fact  that you're the character that you control.

This is the source of a lot of problems, and one that the Bible really does work hard to bust your chops on.  You are the main character of your own story, and it's easy to see the rest of humanity as essentially being either disposible or at worst adversarial, mainly due to the fact that they're not you. This is how we work out who the heroes and villains are in our own lives, by viewing other people and asking if they're standing in the way of what we want to do or not.  That's pretty much it.  If you've ever wondered how it is that people can be engaged in terrible evil, can be involved with murder, rape, molestation, and so on, and all think they're good people?  It's because like Booker Dewitt, like Isaac, heck, like Comstock, we are all the stars of our own show.  And the people who are around us who stand in our way, they are our enemies.

But the first and greatest lesson of the Christian faith is to look at yourself, genuinely, and ask who you are.  Ask if you're doing what you think people should be doing.  Are you behaving in the way you sincerely believe other people should behave? If not, why not? It's the lesson that John the Baptist taught before the ministry of Jesus even began.  It's the lesson that the prophet Nathan delivered to David, telling him that he was the one who was behaving in a way that he himself found to be abominable and deserving of death.  In other words, when you get to the end of the binding of Isaac, and you find that you're corrupted, that you're not looking overly heroic anymore, you have a moment to pause for thought, and ask yourself what it is that makes you the hero.

For Christians, the only thing that we can cling to is Jesus, who offers us a chance to reset.  To be forgiven.  To look at our decisions, to look at how corrupted we are, and to fall on the one who has promised that he can restore us to the way things should be. Restore us back to where we knew people were always supposed to be.  In the most roundabout way of explaining things, the only way out is to reset.  To go back.

The deeper into the dungeon you go, the more corrupted you get, or you don't survive.  Just like real life, the longer you're around, the more corrupted you get, the worse your decisions, until you come face to face with the realization that you are a long way away from how you believe people should live.  So you have a choice.  Pretend that you're doing well, and that everyone else is corrupt, or to fall on the mercies of Christ, who will protect, restore and renew you, washing away all those things you picked up, and returning you back to how you were at the beginning.

The Binding of Isaac - Moral choices.

This one's a strange one.  They're all strange ones, but this one is particularly strange.  It's strange from the top down.  I'll try to describe it.

Imagine the dungeon parts of the Legend of Zelda, top-down with Link fighting monsters, moving through the dungeon until the boss battle at the end.  There's weak walls that can be blown up, there are secrets to find, enemies to fight, and upgrades to get.  All that sounds fine so far, but the breakdown happens with who you are as a character, and who your prime adversary is.

You're a child, a naked, frightened child, who is running away from your mother.  The end boss is your mother (for most of the game, we'll get into that in a bit), and she is trying to kill you.  This is a bizarre setup for a bizarre game.  Your only weapon is your tears, which you cry at the enemies who surround you.  And your enemies?  Equally bizarre, (un)fortunately.  You will find deformed siblings, flies, spiders, giant flies, giant spiders, demons, monsters, and everything else you can possibly imagine.

The game is a roguelike game, through and through.  What does this mean? It means infinite, or at least near-infinite replay value, as the dungeons that you move through are randomized.  The layout changes every time you play.  And when you die, you die.  That's it.  That particular run is over.  There's no continue button, no extra lives (outside of very specific items), and no rerolling.  If you get dealt bunk items, it's a real tough journey to try to get rid of them.  But it's not just the layout that changes, because the upgrades also change every playthrough.  The real pleasure of the game ends up as seeing how the various upgrades and items interact with each other.

And a lot of these items and upgrades have distinctly Christian, or Biblical themes attached to them.  You can end up with the Bible, the book of Revelation, the book of belial, the dead sea scrolls, the nail, a prayer card, and a crown of thorns.  It's absolutely laced through with Biblical items.  How do you get items? Well, this is where the moral choice aspect comes into it.

Most games that have a moral choice system attached to them will present you with a pretty stark, obvious moral choice.  If you harvest the little sister, then she dies, and you KNOW that's a bad thing to do.  Atlas, Dr. Tennembaum, they'll all tell you that you probably ought not to be killing these girls.  It won't stop you from playing the game, or from passing the game, but you know you're getting a bad ending when you finish the game.  But the Binding of Isaac doesn't have multiple endings based on your moral choices.  If you can get to the end of the game and beat the final boss, you win.  That's it. 

But there are choices to make.  And these choices are in the form of beggars, really. 

This is a beggar. He is obviously holding up a sign asking you for your pennies.  If you give him up to four pennies, he will spit out an item.  That's nice of him.  Sometimes the items will be good, sometimes they'll be less helpful.  Sometimes it'll be just what you were hoping for, frequently it'll be something you already have a lot of.  But here's the juice, in addition to giving the beggar money until he spits out items, you may decide that you want some of that money back.  And there is nothing NOTHING stopping you from dropping a bomb next to him, and taking a few steps back.  The bomb will blow up the beggar, dropping coins, hearts, bombs, keys, whatever.  And you can take it all back.  And there are, on the surface, no penalties to doing this.  And you can do this exact same trick in the many arcades scattered around the game as well. 

 

 

As I say, on the surface, you suffer no penalties for doing this.  The beggar will blow up, drop items, and you won't have to deal with new enemies, harder enemies, it doesn't make future beggars less likely to show up, it only changes one thing;  There's a way to get really good items in the game, but that way will cost you. After completing a level, after getting to the end and beating a boss, there's a chance that a devil room will appear.  And that's where the good items are.  And you can choose them, they're out on display.  There's only one problem with them, which is that it will cost you heart containers.  That's right, the best items you can get will make it more likely that you'll die.  Power comes at a cost.  Why am I mentioning this?  Because if you kill a beggar, or detonate an arcade, it makes it 35% more likely that a devil room will show up.  And here's where the very subtle moral choice comes into it, because it's actually a choice.

 

Ordinarily, in video games, the moral choice is obvious.  Here, it isn't.  Most of us probably discovered that you could blow up the beggar by accident, and after having spent all our money on trying for good items, it feels sort of good to blow the beggar up, and recoup some of that money.  And then yes, the devil rooms will appear, and again, what's the problem with that?  The items are good, and if you take them, sure your health will go down a bit, but if you can afford it, why not? 

 

 

 

Well, there's one more aspect to the moral choice system that we haven't discussed yet, one more surprise that will play on your mind whenever you're tempted to take a deal with the devil.  If a devil room appears and you don't make any of the deals, there's a 50% chance that you will get another option the next time a devil room is slated to appear.  There's a 50% chance that an Angel room will appear. 

 

In these angel rooms, you get better items.  That's not really a matter of opinion, the options are by definition better.  Everything from giving soul hearts to giving eternal hearts, all the way to granting flight, increasing all stats, and all that.  They're better.  They're absolutely better.  And unlike the Devil Room, they're free.  There is no heart cost to gain these items.  And the only way to get to the Angel room is to see a situation in which you're prompted to make a sacrifice, and then walk past it, to get the richer blessings to follow. 

 

 

 

Other games have tried to do this, and have failed, because at their core they still want to give you a good guy or bad guy narrative.  Isaac doesn't have that.  When you play through it, the narrative that you get is shaped by your hundreds of little tiny decisions over the course of your gameplay.  It's not a straight up good guy vs bad guy narrative, driven by scripted events, but it does have a story there.  It's the story that you make yourself.  Would you step over other people to get yourself ahead, or would you hold off, and partake in the potentially richer rewards to come?

 

A moral choice system that is a lot more like real life.  No script, but plenty of consequences.  

Mafia 2 - It's very boring.

Mafia 2 starts out with a bang.  It's a third person Grand Theft Auto clone at its core, and starting it out, well, it starts differently than it ends.  Here's the deal.  You start the game as Vito Scoletti, and you get into trouble with the law back in Little Italy.  The Little Italy in Empire Bay, the New York

knockoff in all but name (they don't name their version of the Brooklyn Bridge, but there it is, large as life).  As a young tough who gets into scrapes with the law, has no respect for authority, etc, the cops feel as though it's their duty to instead of giving you jail time, to put you in the army and send you to the real Italy to kill Italians in world war 2.  Not sure if that was a real sentencing policy, but there we go. 

Anyhow, the game starts you off with you in Italy shooting Italians, which warms you up for the rest of the game of shooting Italians, and after the first campaign mission in Italy, the game sends you right back to Empire Bay, where you engage in the usual petty criminality that marks this sort of thing.  But hold on, because there's a twist.

In the Grand Theft Auto universes, the criminal world is made to seem awfully fun.  In fact, a great many people who play the Grand Theft Auto games (hereby to be abbreviated as GTA), tend to immediately pick up a car, start running people over, and see how long they can last.  But there are a ton of side things to do in the GTA universe, which really make it seem as though you could enjoy a lucrative crime life.  The police, if they do catch you, are a momentary inconvenience, and easily avoided.  As long as you're not committing homicide right in front of them, they typically don't bother you too much.  And as you amass loot, you're free to spend it on whatever savory or unsavory thing you might want, and there are tons of those things.  New outfits, new cars, new furniture.  And if you get tired of just running around, you can deliver pizza, fight fires, fight crime as a vigilate or as a cop, take people to the hospital, or just explore an alive and vibrant city.  As you drive around, there are lots of things to do, and the only way to do more is to be a bigger criminal.

But Mafia 2, well, this is a horse of a different colour.  Remember my review of Spec Ops: The Line?  That game wasn't fun either, and the lack of fun of it made the story better.  Shooting soldiers and civilians in that game wasn't fun, but you had to do it to progress.  Similarly, the gameplay in Mafia 2 isn't fun either.  Oh sure, it's the standard shoot 'em up style firefights where you hide behid stuff and pop out, returning behind cover to get your health back, but it's what happens between those firefights that is really interesting, in that it's boring.

Between firefights, at the beginning, end, and through most of the middle of missions, you drive through the city.  And the city is huge.  It's huge, and there's nothing to do except drive through it to your next destination.  That's it.  Even if you kill civilians, they don't drop any money, if you kill the police, they just send more police.  That wouldn't be so bad if the distance was smaller, and THAT wouldnt' be so bad if the police in Mafia weren't super-attuned to the slightest fender bender.  Yes, you can get busted for driving over the speed limit in a car from the 1930s, which is barely faster than walking.  No jokes.  

This mechanic of having a dull commute at the start of the mission, and then right back home at the end of the mission, with nothing to do afterwards, really hammers home the notion that maybe being in the Mafia wasn't such a great thing after all.  Oh sure, it seems fun, because the only parts we ever get to see are the fun parts, the parties, the money, the power, all that stuff.  And that's the Mafia that gets presented to you.  In Mafia 2, you mess up a job delivering illegal gas ration stamps, and then go to jail for seven years.  And no, it doesn't just cut away and say '...seven years later' with you getting out, no no no.  You go to jail and have to walk around in jail for what seems like, well, seven years.  You have to do laundry, you walk very slowly around the jail, the guards rough you up, and that's what happens.  In all the GTA clones or equivalents, if you get arrested, it's a momentary blip where the cops might take your guns away if they're feeling overly sassy.  In Mafia 2, they take your time away.  Just like real jail.

Why is this so important?  Because of the point the game is making.  Unlike GTA, not only does crime not pay, it isn't even fun.  As soon as you seem to get rewards going on, as soon as you get a house with a pool and pink flamingoes (seriously) in it, it gets burned down by a rival gang.  Because all your property is stolen, you have no real claim to it.  Ultimately, the real take home lesson is something that you might find jammed right in the middle of the book of proverbs - The righteous have enough to satisfy their appetite, but the belly of the wicked is empty.  There's a great passage in Proverbs 9, which says 

The foolish woman is loud

she is ignorant and knows nothing.

She sits at the door of her house,

on a seat at the high places of the town

calling to those who pass by,

who are going straight on their way,

'you who are simple, turn in here!'

And to those without sense, she says 

'Stolen water is sweet,

and bread eaten in secret is pleasant.'

But they do not know that the dead are there,

that her guests are in the depths of Sheol.'

Proverbs 9:13-18

Do you ever wonder how actual gangs get recruits?  Mainly because that seductive element is there, and real people go for it.  That's what happened in this game, and I went for it.  I thought I'd be Al Capone, or at least Joe Pesci from Goodfellas, and you know who I ended up being?  A low level scrub, just like all the other low level scrubs.  No jokes.  I fell for it, in the same way as anyone else might.  Folly was there, whispering to me, saying 'you know what would be fun?  Joining the Mafia, wearing a fedora, and shooting the place up.'  And you know what happened?  I got to commute very slowly around Empire Bay, driving actually important people around, and those important people eventually tried to kill me.  Hooray.  

This is what actually happens when you just indulge your appetites for crime and violence.  Do you know what happens?  It's probably really boring.  It seems fun, but ultimately, it's the same old grind.  Maybe the rules that God left us were there for a reason.  Maybe murder and adultery and especially coveting were forbidden by him for a good reason - because they make us worse.  Famously, it is said that Jesus came that we might have life, and have it abundantly.  This is something that I keep on trying to make clear to the youth group, confirmation classes, and so on, who come up through the church - that the Ten Commandments aren't there to bust you up, they're there to give you a better life.   God knows how you ought to live, how we all ought to live, and he has given us a way to get there.  And if we ignore it, well, we are welcome to do so, but then we get the conseuqences of our actions.  At the best, it's a long, boring commute.  At worst, jail or death, both of which happen in this game.

What's great about Mafia 2?  That it's boring.  That seems like strange praise, but there we go.  Games can make points in all sorts of ways, and this one makes points by being dull.  And it's a good point to make.  

If they just accidentally made the game boring thinking they were making it fun, then I will withdraw any praise I may have given it.

Coming up next time:  Probably the Binding of Isaac.  Probably.