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five out of ten thought beyond play preview t reload ‘Thought beyond play.’ That is our new motto, and this is our new look. After the release of Five out of Ten #3, we went back to the drawing board to create a publication that is easier to navigate and better to read. Once again, we’ve sourced the best independent vide- ogame criticism on subjects no one else is covering. How can videogames help us understand what it’s like to feel disguised in day-to-day life? What if ultraviolence is part of your day job? How would we know if we were dreaming within a game? Why are so many games set on islands? Does anyone care about Superman these days? How do games tell better stories than other media, and where do they fall short? The future of play is not a new generation of consoles: it is a closer examination of games, in a place where experience meets investigation and fact meets fiction. It is our thoughts that go beyond play. One thing is for certain, though... the greatest stories are yet to be told. Alan Williamson Editor-in-Chief of Five out of Ten. This month, he’s been reading Agatha Christie novels and enjoying the unusu- ally pleasant British summer. He’s still Irish, honest. #4: Storytellers Editor-in-Chief: Alan Williamson five Design Ninja: Craig Wilson Tech Wizard: Marko Jung out of The FooT Soldiers: Robbie Pickles, Joanna Stoneham Email: [email protected] ten Twitter, Facebook: @fiveoutoftenmag wwww contributors Samantha Allen PhD student in Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies at Emory University writing a dissertation on sexual fetishism. She writes regularly for The Border House and has contrib- uted to Kotaku, Medium Difficulty and First Person Scholar. Ed Smith Journalist and writer working for International Business Times UK. His work has also appeared on The Escapist, Gamasutra, Medium Difficulty and Play magazine. When not getting fed up with how rubbish videogames are, he sleeps. Oscar Strik A historical linguist who plays at being a game critic in his spare time. He blogs about music on Evening of Light, and about everything else on Sub Specie. Julian Williams By day a retail slave, by night he writes about video games and fantasy novels with the hope of one day becoming a ‘real’ writer. He can be found on RTS Guru, where he talks about League of Legends and god games too much. Cover image: Final Fantasy Tactics A2: Grimoire of the Rift, 2007, Square Enix © 2013 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. http://www.fiveoutoftenmagazine.com 4-ST-03r contents Going Stealth 5 Hitman: Blood Money and Gender Passing. When life becomes a game of stealth. Isolation 11 When you open your eyes, you are near the shore... Awakening 18 Who is dreaming in Link’s Awakening: the character, or the player? Man of Silicon 24 Why does the world’s greatest hero appear in the world’s worst games? Killing is Charmless 32 How L.A. Noire makes violence boring. Storytellers Nier Death Experience 42 A game where the ending changes every time you play. Rand’s Rapture 51 What happens if we play Bioshock from the perspective of Objectivism? Go Tell The World 58 The best game stories don’t describe characters; they describe worlds. The Breaking of the Bat 64 The Arkham series are great Batman games, but are they great Batman stories? Worlds Apart 69 Silent Hill gives insight into the different worlds our lives can occupy. She’s reading me Going Stealth Hitman: Blood Money and Gender Passing. When life becomes a game of stealth. Going Stealth Hitman: Blood Money and Gender Passing Samantha Allen he mirror seems to scream my artifice. I can I know how she feels. When I enter a restroom, I Tsee every telling detail: the small outcropping immediately take stock of the situation. Is there a of flesh-coloured lace beneath the hairline of my queue? I don’t like to stand around; it gives people wig, the tiny spot on my chin that I didn’t shave more time to examine me. Are there parents with perfectly, the peculiar prominence of my brow line. kids in here? Mothers are often the most insistent police. The whole affair feels sadly, uncannily like I look down at the sink and try to focus on the a stealth game. frothy lather that’s building in my hands, but I can feel her staring at me. She’s washing her hands, The affinities between stealth games and too, but she’s stopped all of a sudden. I steal a transgender experience run deep. In the transgen- sideways glance through the mirror and notice der community, we even use the phrase ‘going her eyes moving up and down with a character- stealth’ to describe living full-time without most istic rapidity and intensity. She’s reading me. She people being aware of our transgender status or knows I’m transgender. our identities prior to transition. We also talk about ‘passing’, a term we use to describe successfully “You shouldn’t be in here,” she insists forcefully interacting with others without being ‘read’ as and, when I protest, she threatens to call security. transgender. Or maybe she starts to hit me with her purse. Or maybe her overzealous boyfriend is in the men’s For trans* folks though, the consequences of room. I’ve had nightmares about this scenario; it failure are more dire than a Game Over screen. plays in my head every time I walk through a door If the wrong people catch us we can be humili- that says ‘Women’. It will happen to me someday, ated, detained, beaten, or murdered. A stream but up to this point, I’ve been lucky. of heart-breaking headlines threatens to erode our already fragile foundations. For us, visibility In her game dys4ia, Anna Anthropy wrote, “I feel all too often means violence. Not everyone can like a spy whenever I use the women’s bathroom.” pass successfully; not everyone wants to. nglish has two words for the same thing: isle To see an island as a symbol of separation is Eand island. The first derives from the Latin understandable enough, since it’s not always insula while the second comes from the Old easy to cross a body of water to get there. For Germanic agwjō- (water) and landa (land). They this reason, islands occupy a special place in the both mean a bit of land surrounded by water, a history of human thought as locations where not feature of the Earth that has been important to all of the regular rules apply. The word isolation, people for a long time. then, means to be made into an island; to isolate something or someone means to separate from While islands have been key locations for human the rest of the world. settlement and trade, for as long as we’ve been able to build boats, they are symbolic for separa- The Secret of Monkey Island, Myst, Dead Island, tion as well as connection. In Latin, īnsula means Far Cry and more: islands are long popular in not only ‘island’ but also an apartment block of videogames. To uncover what makes islands lower class citizens- as if islands of plebs exist in such compelling locations, we’re going to have a sea of ‘proper’ citizens. to visit them. Isolation Isolation Oscar Strik When you open your eyes, you are near the shore... reams are where the Dsurreal meets the familiar, blanketed through a thick fog of obscurity we numbly accept. In one, I’m at high school, Awakeninginexplicably naked, surrounded by everyone, without a thought Who is dreamingor in Link’sa care Awakening as to: how in the the character, orworld the player? I got there. Quite simply, in a dream, there is no ‘how’ or ‘why,’ there is simply the now. Awakening Julian Williams n another dream, I was Link from The Zelda game – ‘Gather Eight Magical MacGuf- I Legend of Zelda. I crept through a dingy fins’ is the series’ modus operandi – yet, on blue-green dungeon, looking for a way out, second glance, it’s total nonsense. How did completely alone. Behind me, a gigantic we get from defeating Ganon by collecting leathery hand phased out of the wall – these the Triforce in the first game to waking a giant are the Wallmasters, which grab you and winged sea creature from a giant egg with whisk you back to the dungeon entrance. eight instruments? Yet, I never questioned it. But instead of grabbing me, a knife was in its hand. There was a slash, I fell to the ground, Link’s Awakening was released for the Game and I woke up, heart racing. Boy in 1993, then remastered for the Game Boy Color in 1998. It seems like a regular When Link is first marooned in Link’s Awak- entry in the Zelda franchise when a ship- ening, an owl swoops in and tells him that he wrecked Link lands on Koholint Island, found must wake the Wind Fish residing in a giant by a young girl called Malon. The hidden egg to escape Koholint Island. This requires truth is that this is all a dream world and Link him to gather eight instruments from shrines is actually unconscious. Koholint Island has and defeat the Nightmares within. When you been conjured by his sleeping mind.