what does it mean to "feel like Spider-Man"? after all, that's the refrain we heard time and time again upon the release of Spider-Man for the PS4, and it's the question that I couldn't get out of my head every time I thought about this game.
looking at the mechanics of the game doesn't really answer that question for me, mostly because a shocking amount of the experience of this game is simply lifted wholesale from the Batman Arkham games with precious little alteration. the combat, the surprisingly present stealth sections that involve isolating a group of enemies with a chronic neck injury that prevents them from looking even slightly Up, "detective" segments that entirely involve looking for a yellow line to follow, even an omnipresent voice in your ear feeding you constant info, it's all as it was all the way back in 2009's Arkham Asylum, mostly unaltered. indeed, these games themselves were lauded at the time for "making you feel like Batman" but not nearly to the same hyperbolic memetic extent as marvel's sony's kevin feige's ike perlmutter's spider-man does for the ultimate arachnid-boy. generally speaking I would not consider Spider-Man and Batman to be characters that share an enormous deal in common outside of the very basic concept of fighting criminals in an urban environment, and in many ways there is an argument to be made that spider-man is batman's antithesis. and yet, somehow, essentially the same mechanics that created an experience that made you Feel Like Batman has made a great many people Feel Like Spider-Man.
the one meaningful mechanic which differentiates this from Arkham (though, maybe not as much as it perhaps should given the zip-to-point mechanic is again lifted completely wholesale from Arkham City) is the web-swinging, and it's a useful point in elucidating what the mechanical experience of this game does. web-swinging in this game is pleasing, stunningly well-animated, highly responsive, and also completely effortless. it's a struggle to even call it a mechanic: it is almost completely on auto-pilot, with nothing more involved than successive presses of R2 seeing Miles swing, leap, run on walls, the navigational experience of Spider-Man swinging through a painfully detailed recreation of Manhattan reduced to a single button. much like Assassin's Creed's automated free-running that clearly inspired the rhythms of play here, web swinging in this game looks fantastic - especially on a twitter clip captured with the patented SonyTM PlayStationTM ShareTM ButtonTM - but mechanically vacuous to the point of non-existence.
comparisons to Spider-Man 2's (the 2004 game, not this, the second instalment of the Marvel's Spider-Man franchise, nor the upcoming Marvel's Spider-Man 2, the third game in the Marvel's Spider-Man franchise) much lauded web swinging are passé, I know, but indulge me for just a moment: web-swinging in that game was beloved because it was a system. It had depth, it had a skill ceiling, it had moves that were difficult to pull off and a learning curve that required familiarity with the mechanic. it was enough to make a game in and of itself, and indeed it largely did because the rest of Spider-Man 2 ranges from unremarkable to poor. i don't know if i would go as far to say that this system "made me feel like spider-man" but it was, at the very least, a systemisation of this aspect of the character in such a way that it made for a compelling gameplay experience.
spider-man PS4 has none of this. it's mechanics are intentionally stripped down to the point that essentially the entire game is about pressing buttons at the right time in response to on-screen stimuli, and I know all video games can be boiled down to that, but Marvel's Spider-Man comes pre-boiled: the illusion it creates is so wafer thin that even a minute of thought reveals the 4K smoke and mirrors for what they really are. contrary to the appeals to the fraught concept of immersion the phrase "makes you feel like spider-man" evokes, I've scarcely felt more painfully aware that I am a person sitting on a sofa, holding a controller, than when playing this. when your entire game is frictionless, there's nothing to hang onto, either.
there is one sense in which the gameplay experience of Marvel's Miles Morales succeeds in capturing the spirit of the character, and that's in how his new powers frequently dissolve tension in the gameplay, with his invisibility offering you a fast charging get-out-of-jail-free card if you mess up the stealth (if being the operative word here) and the way almost every fight will end with an overpowered Venom Blast.
indeed, Marvel's Spider-Man: Miles Morales often does feel like a Spider-Man comic, but rarely in ways I enjoy. After tremendous backlash from vocal fans at the time to "The Night Gwen Stacy Died" issue of Spider-Man, Stan Lee (who at this point was increasingly disconnected from the actual goings-on of the universe he helped create to the point that he only knew Gwen was dead when someone at a con asked if she would come back to life) decreed that Marvel Comics should avoid meaningful change, change that might alienate longtime fans or, more importantly, those who wished to turn marvel characters into lunchboxes and action figures and cartoons and movies, and instead only offer the illusion of change. while the obvious response to this is that Peter Parker could only be replaced by his clone, Ben Reily, for a short period of time before the gravity of the status quo would pull Peter Parker back into the starring role, it also had something of a side-effect, which is that as a universe where meaningful change is resisted and avoided, Marvel Comics as a whole has a reactionary and conservative worldview that gravitates towards it's baked-in assumptions and the presumed goodness of those assumptions.
in 2004's Civil War, Marvel Comics sided with the PATRIOT act. In 2008's Secret Invasion, Marvel Comics used evil religious extremist shapeshifting Skrulls who hide among us and could be friends, co-workers, countrymen plotting the destruction of earth as an analogy for islamic terrorism. In 2012's Avengers VS X-Men, five heroes empowered by a cosmic force change the world for the better, curing diseases, ending world hunger, only to have those changes be rejected as unnatural, and eventually are consumed by said cosmic power. In 2019's House of X/Powers of X, the X-Men founded a nationalistic ethnostate for mutants that is an explicit parallel for the apartheid state of Israel and sees this as a good thing.
Whatever form it may take, whatever illusions of change may, however briefly, be affected, Marvel Comics are bound to a reflection of our status quo that is essentially desirable, and a huge amount of Superhero comics are about reinforcing their own status quos as well as our own, with high-profile stories such as DC's Doomsday Clock ultimately being nothing more than desperate appeals to the supposed self-evident relevance and importance of the unchanging status of these characters. All of this does not even mention the aggressive copaganda of the Marvel Cinematic Universe films, to the point where Captain Marvel was reproduced unaltered as propaganda for the US Air Force. Mainstream superheroes are always enforcers of the status quo, for good or for ill, but it's when the enforcement of that status quo comes up against depictions and discussions of the injustices of the real world that this becomes most uncomfortable.
There's a bit in this game, once you finish a side quest, where the camera pans up to a Black Lives Matter mural painted on the side of a building, and lingers there for just long enough to feel awkward. I don't object to the presence of this mural at all, but the direction decision here smacks as performative. It's not enough that the building is placed very prominently to ensure you can't miss it, but the game cranes itself to show you the image again, and the feeling of this can only really be described as the cinematography equivalent of "You know, I would have voted for Obama a third time if I could." It's desperate to demonstrate that it knows, it supports Black Lives Matter, but the functional reality of the rest of the game is aggressively at odds with what that movement is materially about.
I knew that the original 2018 Marvel's Spider-Man was in love with The Police but I can't describe how unprepared I still was for how aggressively conservative this game is. The story revolves around Miles Morales, while Peter Parker is on holiday to Generic Eastern Europeaistan, fighting against The Tinkerer and their evil plot to...destroy a product of an Evil Corporation that is giving people cancer. While at the eleventh hour they do contrive a reason why The Tinkerer's plan is #GoingTooFar, for most of the game there's actually no material reason for her to be in the wrong, and Miles Morales - and by extension, the game - is completely incapable of coming up with a single argument against her plan, simply resorting to "it's wrong! blowing things up is against the law!" or the classic "it's too risky! if even one person gets hurt that is too much!" said while Miles gives a Goon a severe concussion.
When I think of what Spider-Man means to me, what it is About, I think I'd describe it as the struggle to live up to an ideal of being our best selves, of always doing the right thing, in a world that makes that incredibly difficult to actually achieve, with our own personal failings and our endless conflicting responsibilities. In that sense, the Tinkerer, instrumentalized into meaningful action against an evil corporation by the death of a loved one, and struggling with how that affects her personal life and the relationships she has, is far more of a Spider-Man than Miles Morales in this game could ever be, given that his job is one of endless praise and assumed goodness facilitated by a hilarious uncritical depiction of the gig economy that sees the responsibility of Spider-Man morphed into a Deliveroo hustle grindset that always makes sure to respect Our Boys In Blue. How can something that loves the Police and hates direct action this much possibly claim to believe that Black Lives Matter?
In attempting to provide an "All-New, All-Different" up-to-date Spider-Man without making any effort to change the underlying assumptions it has about the world in which it lives, all this game does is expose how out of touch and outdated this whole concept is when the illusion of change fades away. Everything about this game is completely surface-level, all a well-presented illusion of Being Spider-Man that breaks the instant you think about it in any way, and you find yourself sitting your sofa, with your expensive toy for privileged people, pressing buttons to make the copaganda continue to play out in front of you.
I finished Marvel's Spider-Man: Miles Morales. I had a perfectly ok time. I was rarely frustrated and occasionally found it charming and visually enthralling. I liked stuff with Miles' uncle. It also made me feel like everything about this style of game and this type of story had hit an evolutionary dead-end and had nowhere to go but running on the same treadmill, forever.
So, yes. It made me feel like Spider-ManTM.
looking at the mechanics of the game doesn't really answer that question for me, mostly because a shocking amount of the experience of this game is simply lifted wholesale from the Batman Arkham games with precious little alteration. the combat, the surprisingly present stealth sections that involve isolating a group of enemies with a chronic neck injury that prevents them from looking even slightly Up, "detective" segments that entirely involve looking for a yellow line to follow, even an omnipresent voice in your ear feeding you constant info, it's all as it was all the way back in 2009's Arkham Asylum, mostly unaltered. indeed, these games themselves were lauded at the time for "making you feel like Batman" but not nearly to the same hyperbolic memetic extent as marvel's sony's kevin feige's ike perlmutter's spider-man does for the ultimate arachnid-boy. generally speaking I would not consider Spider-Man and Batman to be characters that share an enormous deal in common outside of the very basic concept of fighting criminals in an urban environment, and in many ways there is an argument to be made that spider-man is batman's antithesis. and yet, somehow, essentially the same mechanics that created an experience that made you Feel Like Batman has made a great many people Feel Like Spider-Man.
the one meaningful mechanic which differentiates this from Arkham (though, maybe not as much as it perhaps should given the zip-to-point mechanic is again lifted completely wholesale from Arkham City) is the web-swinging, and it's a useful point in elucidating what the mechanical experience of this game does. web-swinging in this game is pleasing, stunningly well-animated, highly responsive, and also completely effortless. it's a struggle to even call it a mechanic: it is almost completely on auto-pilot, with nothing more involved than successive presses of R2 seeing Miles swing, leap, run on walls, the navigational experience of Spider-Man swinging through a painfully detailed recreation of Manhattan reduced to a single button. much like Assassin's Creed's automated free-running that clearly inspired the rhythms of play here, web swinging in this game looks fantastic - especially on a twitter clip captured with the patented SonyTM PlayStationTM ShareTM ButtonTM - but mechanically vacuous to the point of non-existence.
comparisons to Spider-Man 2's (the 2004 game, not this, the second instalment of the Marvel's Spider-Man franchise, nor the upcoming Marvel's Spider-Man 2, the third game in the Marvel's Spider-Man franchise) much lauded web swinging are passé, I know, but indulge me for just a moment: web-swinging in that game was beloved because it was a system. It had depth, it had a skill ceiling, it had moves that were difficult to pull off and a learning curve that required familiarity with the mechanic. it was enough to make a game in and of itself, and indeed it largely did because the rest of Spider-Man 2 ranges from unremarkable to poor. i don't know if i would go as far to say that this system "made me feel like spider-man" but it was, at the very least, a systemisation of this aspect of the character in such a way that it made for a compelling gameplay experience.
spider-man PS4 has none of this. it's mechanics are intentionally stripped down to the point that essentially the entire game is about pressing buttons at the right time in response to on-screen stimuli, and I know all video games can be boiled down to that, but Marvel's Spider-Man comes pre-boiled: the illusion it creates is so wafer thin that even a minute of thought reveals the 4K smoke and mirrors for what they really are. contrary to the appeals to the fraught concept of immersion the phrase "makes you feel like spider-man" evokes, I've scarcely felt more painfully aware that I am a person sitting on a sofa, holding a controller, than when playing this. when your entire game is frictionless, there's nothing to hang onto, either.
there is one sense in which the gameplay experience of Marvel's Miles Morales succeeds in capturing the spirit of the character, and that's in how his new powers frequently dissolve tension in the gameplay, with his invisibility offering you a fast charging get-out-of-jail-free card if you mess up the stealth (if being the operative word here) and the way almost every fight will end with an overpowered Venom Blast.
indeed, Marvel's Spider-Man: Miles Morales often does feel like a Spider-Man comic, but rarely in ways I enjoy. After tremendous backlash from vocal fans at the time to "The Night Gwen Stacy Died" issue of Spider-Man, Stan Lee (who at this point was increasingly disconnected from the actual goings-on of the universe he helped create to the point that he only knew Gwen was dead when someone at a con asked if she would come back to life) decreed that Marvel Comics should avoid meaningful change, change that might alienate longtime fans or, more importantly, those who wished to turn marvel characters into lunchboxes and action figures and cartoons and movies, and instead only offer the illusion of change. while the obvious response to this is that Peter Parker could only be replaced by his clone, Ben Reily, for a short period of time before the gravity of the status quo would pull Peter Parker back into the starring role, it also had something of a side-effect, which is that as a universe where meaningful change is resisted and avoided, Marvel Comics as a whole has a reactionary and conservative worldview that gravitates towards it's baked-in assumptions and the presumed goodness of those assumptions.
in 2004's Civil War, Marvel Comics sided with the PATRIOT act. In 2008's Secret Invasion, Marvel Comics used evil religious extremist shapeshifting Skrulls who hide among us and could be friends, co-workers, countrymen plotting the destruction of earth as an analogy for islamic terrorism. In 2012's Avengers VS X-Men, five heroes empowered by a cosmic force change the world for the better, curing diseases, ending world hunger, only to have those changes be rejected as unnatural, and eventually are consumed by said cosmic power. In 2019's House of X/Powers of X, the X-Men founded a nationalistic ethnostate for mutants that is an explicit parallel for the apartheid state of Israel and sees this as a good thing.
Whatever form it may take, whatever illusions of change may, however briefly, be affected, Marvel Comics are bound to a reflection of our status quo that is essentially desirable, and a huge amount of Superhero comics are about reinforcing their own status quos as well as our own, with high-profile stories such as DC's Doomsday Clock ultimately being nothing more than desperate appeals to the supposed self-evident relevance and importance of the unchanging status of these characters. All of this does not even mention the aggressive copaganda of the Marvel Cinematic Universe films, to the point where Captain Marvel was reproduced unaltered as propaganda for the US Air Force. Mainstream superheroes are always enforcers of the status quo, for good or for ill, but it's when the enforcement of that status quo comes up against depictions and discussions of the injustices of the real world that this becomes most uncomfortable.
There's a bit in this game, once you finish a side quest, where the camera pans up to a Black Lives Matter mural painted on the side of a building, and lingers there for just long enough to feel awkward. I don't object to the presence of this mural at all, but the direction decision here smacks as performative. It's not enough that the building is placed very prominently to ensure you can't miss it, but the game cranes itself to show you the image again, and the feeling of this can only really be described as the cinematography equivalent of "You know, I would have voted for Obama a third time if I could." It's desperate to demonstrate that it knows, it supports Black Lives Matter, but the functional reality of the rest of the game is aggressively at odds with what that movement is materially about.
I knew that the original 2018 Marvel's Spider-Man was in love with The Police but I can't describe how unprepared I still was for how aggressively conservative this game is. The story revolves around Miles Morales, while Peter Parker is on holiday to Generic Eastern Europeaistan, fighting against The Tinkerer and their evil plot to...destroy a product of an Evil Corporation that is giving people cancer. While at the eleventh hour they do contrive a reason why The Tinkerer's plan is #GoingTooFar, for most of the game there's actually no material reason for her to be in the wrong, and Miles Morales - and by extension, the game - is completely incapable of coming up with a single argument against her plan, simply resorting to "it's wrong! blowing things up is against the law!" or the classic "it's too risky! if even one person gets hurt that is too much!" said while Miles gives a Goon a severe concussion.
When I think of what Spider-Man means to me, what it is About, I think I'd describe it as the struggle to live up to an ideal of being our best selves, of always doing the right thing, in a world that makes that incredibly difficult to actually achieve, with our own personal failings and our endless conflicting responsibilities. In that sense, the Tinkerer, instrumentalized into meaningful action against an evil corporation by the death of a loved one, and struggling with how that affects her personal life and the relationships she has, is far more of a Spider-Man than Miles Morales in this game could ever be, given that his job is one of endless praise and assumed goodness facilitated by a hilarious uncritical depiction of the gig economy that sees the responsibility of Spider-Man morphed into a Deliveroo hustle grindset that always makes sure to respect Our Boys In Blue. How can something that loves the Police and hates direct action this much possibly claim to believe that Black Lives Matter?
In attempting to provide an "All-New, All-Different" up-to-date Spider-Man without making any effort to change the underlying assumptions it has about the world in which it lives, all this game does is expose how out of touch and outdated this whole concept is when the illusion of change fades away. Everything about this game is completely surface-level, all a well-presented illusion of Being Spider-Man that breaks the instant you think about it in any way, and you find yourself sitting your sofa, with your expensive toy for privileged people, pressing buttons to make the copaganda continue to play out in front of you.
I finished Marvel's Spider-Man: Miles Morales. I had a perfectly ok time. I was rarely frustrated and occasionally found it charming and visually enthralling. I liked stuff with Miles' uncle. It also made me feel like everything about this style of game and this type of story had hit an evolutionary dead-end and had nowhere to go but running on the same treadmill, forever.
So, yes. It made me feel like Spider-ManTM.
6 Comments
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further reading: marvel's unhinged guidelines to sony for how spider-man must be presented.pdf)
really good writeup…. it’s been interesting seeing The Cult of Spider-Man develop since they brought him back for the marvel movies
your section on the traversal mechanics suddenly made me realize this game virtually scrubbed all challenge from web-slinging in comparison to the first. that one at least had crushingly hard challenges that required actual comprehension of the traversal system, but as far as I'm aware they removed them here because of fan backlash. also glad to see other people talking about the absolutely insufferable and frankly embarassing politics of this game
Great review. The web swinging in these games does seem to be an extremely "modern AAA" version of what this mechanic ought to be, not to mention lacking in much of an actual feeling of physics based momentum, and I feel super alienated from games media when they herald stuff like this and GoW as having such fantastic gameplay. Just sanded down until there's hardly anything left. Story is just... yeah. I liked most of Insomniac's first Spidey game in terms of story while despising the copaganda element, where with this game, it feels like that has weirdly taken an even larger spotlight. Something about the way they keep giving all of this lip service to the "neighborhood" aspect of Spider-Man, both in Insomniac's games and the recent Marvel movies, feels so insidious and disingenuous to me when the stories themselves feel entirely at odds with that.
The part where you write about all the comic books felt like metal gear.
MeowPewterMeow
2 years ago