Hi, GDC!

Welp, hello San Francisco! I'm at GDC for the week. Will try to update! Meanwhile, if you're reading this and you're at GDC also, be sure to say hi!

Oh, yeah! Follow all Gamasutra's coverage at our special GDC page.

Question Of The Week: What Scares You?

Look, I remembered to do Question of the Week this week!

The horrific Phantasmagoria 2 became available on GoodOldGames.com this week. I haven't played it since I was young (and it's not appropriate for young people, bless my parents) -- but I remember that it scared me worse than nearly any other video game ever to date. I could not even finish it for a good couple years because I was too scared to try things and die over and over. It took me a few years before I was brave enough to print out a walkthrough for the very last section and beat the game.

I have a sneaking suspicion that if I tried it again today, it would be terribly disappointing, possibly even hilariously terrible. But paradoxically -- kid you not -- I'm still too frightened to revisit it.

What game scared you worse than any other in your memory? Do you feel stupid about it now, or does it still scare you?

The Good Ending

How's your PlayStation 3 this morning? Mine is afflicted with the same problem that a lot of others seem to have. I hope it's fixed soon, because I want to play Heavy Rain.

At the same time, is it so terrible that I feel glad to have a reprieve from AAA gaming, a tidy excuse not to move on immediately from the exhausting emotional wringer that is BioShock 2's Rapture? Speaking of which, here is my review of BioShock 2, which I think encompasses the things I think are stronger than the original versus weaker.

I think probably the biggest open issue I have with BioShock 2 is that harvesting Little Sisters feels so irrational that the option to do so seems excessively heavy-handed -- as if it existed to support the game's messages about choice, rather than to contribute to the gameplay. The sheer variety of options BioShock 2 gives you to take out your enemies makes it wholly unnecessary to feel so desperate for ADAM that you harvest Little Sisters.

So does the fact that, as a player, you feel more familiar with Rapture now. It doesn't lose any of its compelling qualities, and its advanced state of decay actually makes it more breathtaking in places (my favorite moments of the game were due entirely to certain arrangements of its scenery). But you don't have that sense of being lost, of being desperate, that you had as Jack in the first game. Not only do you know your way around now, so to speak, but you're wearing a Big Daddy suit.

The effect of being a Big Daddy is twofold: You feel more powerful (and the other Big Daddies feel wonderfully lonesome and tragic, not so scary). But beyond that, you feel more of an attachment to the girls. Big Daddies and Little Sisters were introduced to us via inseparable imagery, and now we're expected to conceive of killing one -- especially within the context of a narrative that asks us to risk everything to get one "back"?

This obviously is not a deal-breaker for me, not by a long shot. Even if the option to do the irrational simply exists as a way for the player to experiment with the game's philosophical framework, rather than to feel immersive and genuine, I'm glad it's there. I'm not sure I'd mind if "Harvest or Rescue" were part of the BioShock framework for future sequels.

Which brings me to something else I've just written! I promised I'd explore the idea of sequelizing games that don't "need" sequels in the context of BioShock 2, and I've done so over at Gamasutra. Check it out!

Finally, I really believe that whether a "flaw" is a deal-breaker for you or not depends on what your motivation is for playing video games. My latest Kotaku feature investigates how different kind of games scratch different itches, and how a certain weakness in one type of game might not be as big a problem in another.

Meanwhile, while I wait for Sony to fix whatever this PS3 problem is, I've been playing Harvest Moon: Sunshine Islands on DS for hours and hours and hours. It's like crack to me. Bonus Material: My original Aberrant Gamer column on gender identity and Harvest Moon marriage.

I feel like I'm not even done talking about BioShock 2 yet. It never fails to amaze me how we as audiences demand increasingly complex and sustaining experiences, and yet every game we get, we bang through as fast as possible so we can get to discussing the next one. Sucks.

Contract Killer

"Yeah, and let's not kid ourselves. If you sell a game that's a first-person shooter, then no matter how many RPG elements you shoe-horn into the game, the shadow that hangs over every character interaction that you have, no matter who they are, is the question in the player's mind of "What happens if I shoot this person?"

And that's our own fault! We've sold the player that; we've made a contract with the player that says it's okay to kill people. Why would we then chastise them for exploring that?"

-- Patrick Redding, narrative designer

Are We Gonna Be Together?

Keeping an eye on our local BioShock sidebar poll here, I'm actually fairly surprised at what an overwhelming percentage of you are Little Sister rescuers. I think the SVGL audience skews more empathetic than the average core gamer, judging by the discussions we have here -- but even still!

I find the results especially surprising because of all the talk I've heard around the Little Sister choice in the games -- people always say it's not really a "choice" since you receive a gameplay benefit in either case, or because it doesn't change much about the story save for the ending; people find them creepy AIs, not cute little people at the crux of a meaningful moral conflict, blah blah. If all that is so, why do so many of you care?

I killed all the Little Sisters in the first BioShock. To me, to do so seemed to suit the narrative better -- I was a faceless stranger in a man-eat-man world. I liked the repellent desperation that made Rapture so lawless, and so amoral was its world I thought I'd play along. Did I feel good about doing it? Not exactly, but to make my decisions based on a hunger for power felt appropriate for the story.

And I've always maintained I had a better experience in the first game because of it. When the things I was led to believe came crashing down, having to face what I'd done made the story's later revelations more of a gutpunch. Arriving at Tennenbaum's safehouse as a Little Sister killer was one of the most memorable gaming experiences I'd had that year. One thing I wish is that the game could have given me the opportunity to redeem myself, to start handling the little sisters as fellow victims instead of as prey once I knew what the real deal was -- but then, that might have violated the game's message of "no real agency".

I am hesitant to say much yet about BioShock 2 because I'm doing a review for Paste, but I'll say that the choice felt much different to me this time. Although the harvest-or-rescue decision is more nuanced and complex from a gameplay perspective, it seems not a decision at all from a narrative standpoint -- in the first BioShock, it felt equally realistic to take either path. In the second, I personally find it implausible to do anything but rescue. But maybe that's just me.

It does bring me to an interesting point: What's your motivation when you play a video game that allows you some agency? Are you writing a story and creating a character? Or are you using the medium of interactivity to express your own self -- and see how the environment responds to you?

What determines your harvest-or-rescue decision, for example -- something inside the game, or something inside of you?

Bonus Content: Header image is this wallpaper.

August 2007, I write my Aberrant Gamer column for GameSetWatch on the original Little Sister choice and what creates emotional impact versus basic cost-benefit analysis.

August 2007, I write a different Aberrant Gamer column on the Little Sisters themselves, and the use of creepy girlchildren in survival horror.

September 2007, Aberrant Gamer deals with one of my favorite things about original BioShock: the character of Sander Cohen.

July 2008, at Kotaku EA boss John Riccitiello tells me that he, too, was a Little Sister killer.

Question Of The Week, February 18

A real life little sister needs adopting, big syringe and lamp-eyes and all. Do you accept?

Could you nurture her out of rooting around in corpses? Would you try to take her to a physician so she could be "rescued" from her gathering urge -- even if doctors would treat your lil' orphan like a freak? Would you adopt her just to harvest her for superpowers?

Serious question. I've also added a sidebar poll that quizzes you on your quintessential playing habits within the BioShock universe. I am playing 2 quite differently from 1, wherein I killed everything.

For some serious thoughts, read Michael Abbott's take on fatherhood in BioShock 2, and then read Chris Dahlen's apparently-opposing take (they are both for-realsies daddies, whereas I'm probably way more Tennenbaum than Lamb). I did not read their columns, because I didn't finish the game yet -- I'm neurotically spoiler-averse with games like BioShock. But you could, if you wanted to.

I'm going to try to make "question of the week" a regular feature here. I said "try." Today I just wanted an excuse to post this Little Sister picture:

AWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWW!!!

[Wallpaper-sized edition of above is here]

No Sleep Til Brooklyn

Have you been playing BioShock 2, the "sequel to a game that didn't need a sequel?" So've I. No, it didn't need a sequel, but I'm glad it got one. I hope it gets several more. It could be the beginning of something awesome.

Don't worry, I'll be explaining at Gamasutra soon. No More Heroes didn't really need a sequel either, but it got one (and I was also glad of that). All I'll say for now is that we ought to get used to sequels to games that "don't need them" -- and that the trend could evolve into something very positive.

I'm busy all the time, especially with my staff at D.I.C.E. I suspect that what people do at D.I.C.E. is play a lot of poker and get supremely drunk. So in other words, it's like my life, except my life lacks poker (which I don't know how to play), and lacks me having to cover people's talks. Props to my colleague, Game Developer EIC Brandon Sheffield, who's already got a couple talks from Vegas up at Gamasutra: Astronaut and new-minted Facebook gaming boss Richard Garriott's sorta-critique of game narratives, and Davids Jaffe and Crane talking about their experiences in the evolution toward casual gaming -- Jaffe says Calling all Cars was "a mistake", thanks to "a casual theme with a hardcore mechanic on a machine people had paid $500 for. Nothing matched up."

Speaking of evolution, remember that whole "virtual worlds" thing, where everyone wanted to interact in browser-based 3D environments with avatars? That lasted like, 12-18 months, didn't it? I feel sorry for the venture capitalists that are still buying that line (and for Sony, which appears to have some very expensive lemons with which it must now make lemonade).

A couple years ago when I was running the inaugural Worlds in Motion Summit, I got up in front of a room of all these starry-eyed venture-funded kiddoes (ignore the awkward pic! I thought we were friends, Zonk!), and -- okay, it was a bit nervy for a journo to do -- demanded that they prove to me why I should believe in their promises of a 3D web, an avatar-based future. I was skeptical that anyone wanted a "3D web" or to "democratize content" or anything like that, and what I saw was a bunch of people who had actually gotten someone to fund their fantasy that Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash could be real.

A little bit thereafter at Austin GDC, where I had less involvement in the Summit, I told FreeToPlay.biz I thought Web 2.0-types should "evaluate their substance" and take more lessons from the gaming biz. Now it sure looks to me like a lot of the buzz and enthusiasm around so-called "virtual worlds" has been transmuted into iPhone and Facebook gaming.

Just look how many game developers have gone into those spaces: The dude who made Klax (read my interview with him!) A couple guys from Rockstar Leeds, who miss the sense of agency that comes with grass-roots bedroom coding. Flippin' Richard Garriott! Sid flippin' Meier is even putting Civ on flippin' Facebook!

This, this I am interested in -- especially when you see publishers like EA plainly state that they depend on success in this small-digital space for their survival.

I used to snicker a bit at dudes saying things like "Facebook is a virtual world." No, Facebook is a social network. Virtual worlds are also social networks, and it turns out that Facebook is a method much simpler and more intuitive for social networking. People just want to be connected to each other in the most accessible way possible. Nobody wants the Web to be a world, a game, an "environment" or a "user-generated content space." They just wanna get shit done.

I was one of the earliest business writers on Web 2.0 -- one of the earliest neutral ones, at least. I remember getting into arguments with other journalists at events: I'd argue that Second Life was only relevant to the people that "lived" in it, and they'd argue back how wrong I was. The argument would soon reveal that they owned a business selling virtual fashions in Second Life, or selling virtual kits that could make their avatars into hermaphrodites or whatever. Not that there's anything wrong with that, but I think a very vocal super-minority made a lot of people feel like this avatar thing was way more important than it is.

I did say that I hoped that a lot of lessons from the virtual-everything gold rush got transmuted wisely into the larger games business, and I think that's happening. Some bubbles pop, some don't, but mostly what happens is a lot of subtle evolution. All of this industry fragmentation is really good both for core games and for social games. It's exciting, and I'm glad I don't have to interview anyone who uses their Second Life picture as a real picture anymore.

Playing Catch-Up, Again

I've been sick. I've been busy. And it's always sooooo much easier to tweet at you guys and reach out to you instantly than it is to write blog posts I don't get paid for. But you love SVGL, and SVGL loves you, and so we are doing science and we're still alive. What game was that again? Tsk, this industry, you know?

Anyway. I'm long overdue in pointing out to you a couple recent articles of mine you may have missed. Lately, I asked Ian Bogost what he thought of the indie scene -- we ask the same question of all IGF finalists over at Gamasutra (check 'em out so far; Bogost's will run soon). His answer was, "You mean the puzzle platformer scene? It's awesome, isn't it?"

Sad but true. It seems that brutally difficult platform games have become the new paradigm for genius. In my latest Gama editorial, I wondered whether there's a new trend going on -- how did "hard" become the new "good"?

You can't have missed my Kotaku feature, right? RIGHT? Well, if you did, you're in for a doozy. I write about Katawa Shoujo, the erotic novel about disabled girls that originated on 4chan. As I like to say, if you hated that I was okay with Bayonetta, you'll hate what I'm okay with now!

What about you guys? Favorite IGF nominees? Currently playing?

Character, Flaw?

Hello, SVGL friends -- long time no see! Busy as always, with some labors of which you'll hopefully see the fruit quite soon; the news pace has been picking up over at Gamasutra, too.

I'm still getting a lot of mileage out of Bayonetta, but Twitter followers know my favorite game in the universe right now is No More Heroes 2. I reviewed it at the AV Club, so those of you who have been waiting for more formalized thoughts from me besides "if you don't love it you probably just shouldn't ever talk to me again" and "no seriously listen this game is fucking brilliant"can read something that's hopefully a little more professional here.

I think that, according to scale, this is the overall highest rating I've ever given any video game that I had to score. No More Heroes had a mindblowing idea with a few weaknesses in its execution; those weaknesses didn't bother me as much as they seemed to bother others, but nonetheless I can appreciate a sequel that provides watertight solutions to previous flaws.

Speaking of which: I passed on Mass Effect 2; it's not the kind of experience that interests me. I don't really care for the "space opera" vein of science fiction, and I'm a little fatigued of dialogue trees. I can praise the first Mass Effect, which I did play at least for a good chunk of time, for how well-done it is, but I can't say I enjoyed it. Fortunately, there is Gamasutra's Chris Remo to offer you some thoughts on the ways Mass Effect 2 aimed to address the weaknesses of the original.

Back to No More Heroes 2. I've heard a lot of people say they feel that the newer, tighter trip to Santa Destroy loses some of the character that the first one had. Over at the Brainy Gamer, Michael Abbott has a thought-provoking articulation of this point of view. The perspective raises a couple questions for me.

I've always praised creative spirit over technical execution, maybe more than a professional reviewer ought. I'd always prefer a risky, high-impact experience with a lot of rough edges to a polished, fluid one that doesn't really shake the paradigm or feel artistic. I like distinctive auteurs, and Grasshopper's Suda51 is on my very short list.

I wonder if we've come to associate creativity with visible flaws? Does something with clumsy bits in it seem scrappier or nobler? Is there really a loss of "character" visible when something's streamlined or polished? Do we need to see the creator's errors to understand their vision and spirit?

One of the reasons I'm such a big fan of Hideo Kojima's is his self-awareness. He knows his cutscenes are too long and that his sense of humor is weird, and he knows how critics feel about it. Yet he won't change -- in fact, much of the time in Metal Gear Solid 4, the elements for which his direction is most often criticized are exaggerated in a way that feels intentional. Therefore, Kojima's work is a dialogue between himself and the players. They have a sense of "knowing" him because they know how he expresses himself in games.

Suda51 also has a distinctive identity, and a pattern of being behind games that are beloved for their concepts but encounter critical difficulty because of execution issues. Did we come to associate those design shortfalls with the "identity" of the creator? Because critics who like his work found themselves having to champion its "character," flaws and all, could it be that in a well-executed No More Heroes game, we no longer recognize the visionary?

When an offbeat independent band suddenly produces an album that's too polished, fans are likely to say they prefer the older, more distinctive material because it had more character. Same principle at work here?

For what it's worth, I am not on the side of the fence that sees any kind of character loss in No More Heroes 2. As I said in the comments on Brainy Gamer, I really think the issue is simply that something can only be new once, and it won't feel the same the second time.

If You Run Out Of Ammo, You Can Have Mine

How many blog posts have I begun by divorcing myself from my status as a "female gamer", instead expressing a preference to be seen as a "human being who may have an alternate perspective in some cases due in part to her gender?"

Those of you who have followed SVGL for ages and ages (and there are a good many of you I know of -- thanks for hangin' around!) know I'm pretty much the biggest diehard Metal Gear Solid fan ever, and that Solid Snake is one of my favorite heroes. I feel like him sometimes; I step up often to handle things that maybe aren't "who I am," because people ask me to do it and because I'm the only one who can, and because it's my job.

You've probably seen my Bayonetta piece by now. My god, do I love Bayonetta. When its release was met with a big round of guilty handwringing and/or judgmental tsk-tsking over how sexy is the titular heroine, I couldn't quite stomach it, and wrote for GamePro about how Bayonetta doesn't need to be sexless to be a positive female portrayal.

I felt pretty good about my stance, too, and then my good friend Kieron Gillen, to whom I've always looked up, took me to task (or my working environment to task, really) gently thus:

That the biggest name in female videogame criticism finds her natural instincts to write apologia for almost anything sexual in games – as brilliant as she is at that – seems an odd warping of the deck. Or, now I think about it some more, perhaps entirely natural. What could be more popular with a generally male readership than a female journalist saying it’s all okay?

I hope he meant "biggest female name in video game criticism", rather than to isolate "female videogame criticism" as a separate field (let's assume he did). Anyway, it's a fair perspective, as is that of the RPS commenter who accuses me of "moving the goalposts when it suits [me]."

Yeah, I do. Sometimes I find something okay, and sometimes I don't. Sometimes what I find okay will not be okay with others. I write subjectively, as should any critic (objectivity is an illusion that plagues our work). I recognize that there is sexism in Grand Theft Auto IV, for example -- but as that game presents a cynical world where both men and women are morally ambiguous if not disgusting humans, I found the game not sexist but the fiction depressingly faithful. I got a lot of mail from people who really hated that I took that position, as if I ought to instead have elected to make of the game an occasion for feminist championship.

Maybe I could have. I know a lot of people hate my writing because I am often defending sexuality; I am accused of pandering to my male readership. Maybe I am. We've all gotta work, right? But I still maintain I don't especially care about gender issues more than any other facet of media criticism. These are simply the articles of mine that get the most traction; this is the use others most commonly have for me. It's not my natural instinct.

My instinct, if any, is simply to react strongly against the tendency many people (or groups) have to distract from creative endeavors by using them as an occasion to highlight or invent victimization for themselves. I find those grievances to be ungrounded more often than not.

Anyway. Read the Bayonetta article. I won reviewer Tae Kim over to my point of view a little bit too: Here's his response. And here's something I'd like to know -- if the article had from it the "I" removed, if it were written by a man asserting that the stylistic content made Bayonetta's looks "acceptable," would you have bought the argument, or did it need to be billed as a "female perspective?"

[Bayonetta and Jeanne picture is from here, although I dunno who drew it. I like it because it is sexy, although messing around at the link will yield you some stuff that is less sexy and more certainly NSFW.]

Diversify

"If you immerse yourself too single-mindedly in your chosen art form, whether it's video games, movies, comics or whatever," he continues, "your work can easily become just a reflection of what others are doing in that field, rather than breaking new ground."

-- Jordan Mechner

(this is what i meant here).

Video Killed The Radio Star

Welcome back, everyone -- hope you had great, healthy and happy holidays! I'm still trying to get my head organized and stuff, so lemme just toss a few things your way quickly, if you don't mind.

I return to the year-end Gamer's Confab at the Brainy Gamer, where we discuss our personal faves of 2009 (guess what mine was). Anyway, listen to the podcast, and keep tuned to Michael Abbott's site for the rest of the year-end confabs, always a treat. I was also on TV to yap about Modern Warfare 2, which was funny/odd.

Over the holiday, Gamasutra presented its Best of 2009 -- from companies and developers to games in every category and industry events. We'd like to think this is your definitive year-end compendium. Or, you could just skip directly to our GOTYs and be done with it. We also presented a top 12 games of the decade, as voted by our readers entirely!

Done? Done! Onto 2010. I'm now putting together at Gamasutra a list of some of the biggest major releases of the coming year; here's a list of the bigger Xbox 360/PS3 releases, and here are the portables. Which ones are you most looking forward to?

I've only just gotten back and I've already got all these links to throw at you, sigh. Pray I get on top of things soon -- happy new year!

Happy Holidays!

See you after the new year. Have fun!

Giving Credit Where It's Due

My Kotaku feature this month highlights a problem I hear of countless times in my conversations with game developers: The industry's problematic crediting practices. At a glance it may seem like an inside-baseball issue -- what difference does a game's credits list make to your experience as a player? -- but I hoped to try to illustrate the psychological and emotional impact these issues have on developers, surely with far-reaching implications on their investment in their work, in the sincerity and artistic generosity of their contributions, and in the future of games as a professional industry for creative people.

Give it a read if you have a chance. Being a game developer is grueling work and I don't envy it.

Gaming Club 2009!

I have not blogged much here about some of my over-arching thoughts (and questions) about the year we're about to leave behind, because I am lucky enough to have the singular opportunity to join Slate's Gaming Club discussion this year -- a feature I've admired from afar since it began in 2007!

Slate's Chris Suellentrop is wrangling me along with Mitch Krpata and Jamin Brophy-Warren for what we hope will be a good discussion. We're not even done yet, and I'm already so excited by all the differing perspectives. Please, please check it out now and in the week to come.

About That Article

I want to talk about this.

Before I do, though, I'd like to preface with a bit of fair business reality. The economics of online journalism and blogging are enormously challenging. Every site faces the challenge of balancing the desire to produce fair and valuable content with the need to drive ad revenue via web traffic. Writing provocative headlines that we online writers hope will entice you to click is part of the job. We aim for the luster of buzzworthiness without compromising our facts and our ethics. Games journalism may have a bit of work to do before it reaches parity with coverage of more established media, and because of that our audiences tend to be very demanding of our quality levels and ethics -- but this is one reality not unique to us.

We all want to publish work we can feel proud of and that you can feel proud to enjoy, but sometimes we have to compromise with, to be frank, the need to earn money. This means sites that would rather offer you something a little richer than litanies of picture-heavy Top 10 lists will offer you the lists because lists get traffic reliably. This means business sites will run sponsored content, where all we can do is ensure it's clearly marked as such and try to keep the company concerned from being unfairly self-laudatory.

This means websites like Kotaku have to publish articles about boobs.

All online websites try to balance the need to make money with the desire to offer audiences content they will enjoy. And often these are managerial decisions; you can blame the writers as much as you want, but these are things they have to do. If you want to blame anyone, blame the legions who click whenever they're promised anime panties after the jump.

Have a little sympathy. Since all of this "business reality" talk is preface to talk about Kotaku, let's just stick with Kotaku: I worked with that team for several months last year and to this day I've never seen folks work harder. The amount of knowledge and passion the entire staff has about video games was constantly intimidating to me. After a year of all their hard work, imagine how it must feel for Brian and his team to realize some of their most "successful" pieces of 2008, in business terms, were about Playboy models and cosplay cleavage shots?

I don't need to imagine. I've written many things at Kotaku I am proud of -- my coverage of EA's bid for Take-Two, or my interviews with the Blizzard team following the Diablo III announcement and ahead of Lich King come to mind. I worked my tail off at E3 as part of their team (and they proved to have far more stamina than I did). I still love the reception my monthly columns get there. Nonetheless, my most-read piece of work for the site remains my interview with Playboy "Cyber Girl of the Year" Jo Garcia.

Just wanted to remind everyone of how things work before people start roasting Kotaku all over the place because of this. As of the moment I hit publish on this blog post, it has over 43,000 views and 777 comments after just a few hours live, better than most of my features perform over their lifetimes.

Hokay. That being said, this article is abysmal to the point of inducing cringe -- but let's focus on the article itself for a while. Lest you think I'm about to pull out the girl card and decry the sexy pics and the porn industry, I'll get right to the point -- this article is more insulting to men than it is to women. Further, it's not even a gender issue in the end; it's insulting because it's a massive backward stride in the evolution of games as a healthy, valuable adult culture.

Is Kotaku actually read by a "healthy, valuable adult culture?" If not, should it aim to be? Good question. But I don't see how promoting destructive stereotypes of gamers playing Unreal Tournament "for 48 hours straight" with pizza and energy drinks within arm's reach is useful to anyone. Many of Kotaku's readers are boys who aren't even men yet -- is it fair to tell them that they ought to resign to the fact they're awkward shut-ins on a Bawls drip who can't talk to girls? Worse, to suggest they embrace it as an identity inextricable from their enjoyment of video games?

It does not necessarily matter that the writer of this article is a porn actress. It may seem very egalitarian to act unsurprised that an attractive woman who has sex on camera for a living is a self-described "huge sci-fi gadget and gaming fan" who spends hours "leveling her World of Warcraft characters", but get real -- it is surprising. I'd even go so far as to say it's interesting.

Or it could be, if she didn't employ her unusual status to condescend to the very gaming culture to which she claims to belong.

In games as anywhere else, a woman can succeed in a male-dominated field with one of two strategies: 1. Prove she's an equal or 2. Use her sex appeal. It's evident what Raven Alexis has chosen. That's an insult to gamers of either gender. And the latent disgust she feels for the "nerds" who buy into it is evident: "Remember your manners, and use a napkin, please," she advises primly, beneath a picture of herself somewhat suggestively cupping a Red Bull can. And if her tips don't help you meet girls, she says coyly, you can always go peruse her body of work and entertain yourself.

Misogyny continues to be an enormous, embarrassing stain on a culture I'm otherwise proud to serve as a writer. I have been able to understand, somewhat, the hostility that young male gamers have had toward women based on the fact that in the past, media messages about "nerds" have taught them that girls are an enemy who will either reject them or try to employ their sexuality to manipulate them.

We are growing out of this. There is more equality and respect in gamer culture with every passing year, and we are passionate about refusing to permit prejudices of race, gender and sexual orientation where we see them. We are coming to understand that for games to thrive and evolve, their audiences and their creators must be diverse.

But the only way to sweep out our lingering dark corners is to lead by example and stop drawing gender lines. That's one of the reasons I have desperately wanted to avoid taking the "GRRL GAMER" tack in my work, even though I know I'm an oddity, even though many women email me with criticism that I won't stand up and "represent" more forcefully. I am a woman; I can't have any other than a woman's perspective, and that's valuable to people sometimes. But more importantly, I'm a person. You're a person. We both like video games, and that's usually all that matters.

Alexis' fifth and most reasonable tip -- just go talk to a girl and try to find some common interests -- is delivered with a sincerity that marks a tonal shift from the rest of her piece. This is what leads me to hope, at least, that the entire thing is intended as a little bit of tongue-in-cheek humor.

If that's indeed the case, I'd be perfectly willing to admit that it's me who's condescending to Kotaku's audience by assuming they won't get the joke. But enough of you guys who follow me on Twitter -- many of whom are game developers and other quite sharp folk -- had a negative reaction that I'm sure I can't be alone in misinterpreting.

Humor or not, based on everything I've worked for and believe in, it still stings me to see such an antiquated representation of gamer culture and the dynamics of male and female gamers represented on a site that I write for, that my friends write for.

I know I sound stodgy, maybe even self-superior. Maybe not everything on a gaming blog has to be top shelf, sincere content all the time. Maybe we shouldn't take things so seriously. Maybe sometimes we do need to confront the fact that a huge portion of the readership is actually comprised of overweight geeks who never go outside and have no real relationships off the computer; maybe we need to make concessions for that, maybe we need to join them on their level sometimes. Maybe we should write not for what we want people to be, but for what they are.

It's just that that's not what I believe in, and the people who lead Kotaku, among others I am lucky to have called mentors, have played integral roles in shaping my beliefs.

I prefaced this post with a reminder of the business realities major blog networks face because I find it hard to believe that Brian, who taught me quite a great deal about going the extra mile on news reporting -- because our audience deserves the whole truth -- would thumbs-up a porn star's "celebrity" advice column unless it were part of a larger and necessary Gawker initiative (I wonder what sister site Jezebel thinks of it). I find it hard to believe that Stephen Totilo, who never settles for anything less than my best work on my monthly features even when "good enough" would be good enough, would not strenuously object.

Their content decisions are their business, and I have no inside knowledge of them nor do I feel I have the right to ask. But I have to assume that these odd celebrity columns lately are not necessarily what they would have chosen for Kotaku.

Either way, rather than get up in arms complaining about blogs, game journalism, Kotaku or anything else, I hope those angered or offended can focus on what we don't like about this article and react simply by continuing to be the best examples we can of the culture we want to have.

Lisztomania!!

Well! I'm certainly busy due to year end-ness, hence the lack of blogging -- I'm working on a few different retrospectives, a feature, an editorial and some reviews. Can 2009 be over yet?

Sincerely, I actually have a lot of fun closing out the year and parsing out the key takeaways, and rest assured you'll see more on this from me soon -- for now, have you been following Gamasutra's Best of 2009? We're doing the same kinds of individual lists that we did last year. Today, Christian Nutt rounds up the year's top business trends -- social games and digital distribution rising, music games declining, and devs getting wiser on how to succeed on iPhone, among others.

Speaking of iPhone, here are the year's top 5 iPhone games as chosen by our mobile editor Danny Cowan. Of the games here, Eliss is actually the only one I've got; I'm such a DS fanatic (whoa, DS beat PS2 in UK, by the way) that I rarely play games on the iPhone. Trism, one of the earliest titles for the platform, is still one of my all-time favorites, and I've gotten my nongamer friends hooked on the colored triangles too.

The only things I play on PC are Flash titles, indie games and interactive fiction -- and on the IF front, the annual IF Comp has chosen its winners, so I know what I'm gonna be doing on my long-awaited holiday break. Fortunately Gamasutra's Chris Remo exists to be our resident PC guru, and he has selected a detailed and well-thought top 10.

From me, the year's top 5 controversies, the news stories that set our tongues wagging the most this year, and that prompted the most discussion and debate. Irony of the year: The commenter who says the controversy over Orson Scott Card's involvement in Shadow Complex doesn't belong on the list -- and then drags out an argument against what he calls the "gay mafia" for some 83 comments. Nope, no controversy there. Silly me!

Incidentally, my pals at the AV Club and I recently assembled a "Top 15 Games of the Decade" list together, by committee. Temporally-congruent installments of my pet franchises -- Metal Gear and Silent Hill -- may be absent, but I think it's a solid list overall. One item with which I'm particularly pleased: I, along with the always-impressive Gus Mastrapa, championed for the inclusion of Vice City as the quintessential Grand Theft Auto, and I explained why:

The Grand Theft Auto series is known for masking clever satires of American culture with gleeful violence, and Vice City, a parody of 1980s Miami, makes the ideal setting for the decadence the series simultaneously idealizes and lampoons. Mafioso in Hawaiian shirts, polyester-clad cocaine lords, and petty moguls form the cast of caricatures the series does so well, populating a world where the excesses of its crime-spree gameplay feel appropriate. GTA’s intelligence is often lost in the hullabaloo over its violence, but Vice City simply asks players to be as absurd as the characters around them, creating a plausible, neon-soaked fiction that’s as funny as it is canny. Rockstar burdened San Andreas with too many disparate activities and rendered GTA IV with inappropriate gravitas, making Vice City the best whole-package showcase of the series’ brilliance.

Anyhow, I've been up to these things and lots more, and hopefully I grab time to keep you guys filled in as it all unfolds. More interesting is the question: Do you really care about year-end lists? Are they fun or annoying?

[header post is the title of a song by Phoenix you can hear here; not coincidentally most music outlets seem to think the 'Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix' album is one of 2009's best.]

The Early Days

A lot of times people want to know 'how I got like this' -- hooked on computers, writing about games, et cetera, et cetera. Answer: these childhood photos my dad just sent me.

Happy Thanksgiving!

To my U.S. SVGL friends, have a lovely holiday and hopefully some off-work time! Take Michael Abbott's advice: Bring the Wii home along with New Super Mario Bros. Wii and play it with your cousins and young ones. You won't be sorry.

SVGL will be on hiatus until next week. If you're bored over the holiday, there's probably some fun stuff to do at SVGL -- revisit the archives, vote in the latest poll, or check results of past polls, too. Use the ShoutMix chat in the right hand sidebar to see who else is hanging around the computer over the holiday and make some new friends or something!

Thanksgiving is a time for quality time with family (here is a post about my family). It's also often a time where people go stir crazy and feel trapped in the family homestead. That's why, two Thanksgivings ago (whoa time flies), I recommended you Guest House, this fantastic, intriguing escape-the-room game -- revisit it or check it out for the first time! When nursing your turkey coma, sneak off and give it a try.

What will you be playing over the weekend? I honestly doubt I'll be playing anything -- you might imagine that some of the time, playing video games is the last thing I want to do with my not-work time!

[Thanksgiving Day Parade Pikachu pic nicked from Giant Bomb.]

Comparisons

"That's what you're going to show to Ebert to convince him videogames are a legitimate art form? You're going to show him the morph bomb and expect him to nod repeatedly, and admit that the story of an extinct bird race and a woman with a bazooka on her arm is just as meaningful as La Dolce Vita? Seriously?"

-- Anthony Burch, Destructoid, 'Why Comparing Metroid Prime to Citizen Kane Is Ludicrous'

"The implication of this being that treating games as the inwards-facing exclusive province of boyish adolescence is perfectly acceptable as long as Mom and Dad aren’t looking; if they are, though, hide the controllers and put on a tie. This inferiority complex runs so deeply in the gamer mindset that we will often swear up and down it does not exist while we continue unbridled our wildly passive-aggressive approach towards the artistic establishment, equal parts brash and defensive, trying to look older and more experienced than our years: the hallmark of youthful insecurity."

-- "Matthew Wasteland", 'He Was Always Trying To Prove Something'

Bonus Material: Here's me earlier this year on why I'm tired of the Citizen Kane thing.

I'll just say it for the record now: I think repeatedly raising Kane is amateurish and useless. It's self-defeating shorthand for what Bogost and Wasteland correctly identify as the real desire: legitimacy for games.

...Legitimacy, in this case, actually meaning 'the approval of others' or 'the ability to fit in,' I suspect.

[dunno where i got header picture. if it's yours and you want credit, comment or mail me.]

Oops?

"We believe that the optics of this hardware cycle have been significantly distorted by the explosive growth of the Wii console."

-- Doug Creutz, Analyst, Cowen Group

Social Behavior

Yesterday, we were talking about social networks on consoles as yet another item of evidence that persistent, connected social experiences are where it's at. But when it comes to game design, it's cool to see that this trend isn't happening only in this much-buzzed social networking space.

Designers of traditional console games are looking at creative new ways to use multiplayer, too. No longer does "multiplayer" simply mean "some kinda group mode on an FPS where you either help each other or kill each other or play capture the flag," and I think we'll see more evolution and creative thinking about connected play as it becomes the norm, not the rule.

For example, look at Demon's Souls. If you saw my Kotaku feature 'In Praise of Hard Games,' you might remember producer Takeshi Kaiji's story of the inspiration for Demon's Souls' multiplayer -- it came from an experience he had of strangers helping strangers when several cars were stranded in the snow. In Demon's Souls, the multiplayer experience doesn't so much allow people to play together as it does allow them to share the same world, collaborating only when circumstances make it valuable and interesting.

In that way, the multiplayer enhances a solo experience, rather than acts as a separate "mode." And the fact that your interactions with other players are always anonymous -- you'll never know who left you that helpful message, or who that phantom was that helped you beat the boss -- it works with the lonely, ghostly feel of the game rather than clutter it with the presence of too many "others," which is often a turn-off for people who like games to be private experiences (me, me).

Over at Gamasutra, my colleague Christian Nutt recently talked to the producer of Monster Hunter Tri about (among many things) how the game's converging two popular design trends and using them to enhance each other. On one hand, it's becoming more and more fashionable to take elements required for the designer to communicate with the player -- say, HUDs and gauges and numbers -- and minimize them, or better yet, make them a seamless part of the environment, to aid immersion.

RPGs and strategy titles, however, rely heavily on statistical information, making this trend a bit more challenging to implement. With Monster Hunter Tri, the team focused a lot on making the monsters behave in lifelike ways -- that way, players could gather information about the monsters and about the environment through observing behavior and not by reading data screens.

The team also decided not to show monsters' health. It would seem like this would be the sort of concession to realism that would be enormously frustrating for players -- but on the other hand, in a game that relies on its multiplayer components, it was a deliberate choice aimed at encouraging social behavior. When certain information is withheld from the player, it encourages groups to talk among themselves and collaborate, learning the location of enemy weak spots, sharing monster strategies, and things like that.

Demon's Souls allows you to earn your body back if you die, but your "soul form" is weaker than your physical form, which is slightly counter-intuitive -- why make a game harder the more players fail at it? Kaiji has said that choice was intended to encourage players to work together using the phantom system, by which ghosts can aid other players and vice versa.

Withholding information or cranking the challenge level to force players to use multiplayer seems slightly risky from a design standpoint -- until you think about it some. Remember an earlier generation, when half the fun of gaming was all about "secrets"?

How did you learn how to get the whistles in Super Mario Bros. 3? How did you learn which walls were breakable in Symphony of the Night? How did you get infinite lives in Contra? You didn't look it up on the internet back in those days -- you heard it from a friend who heard it from a friend who heard it from a friend. Someone told you. Someone showed you. One day, you had a pal over, and you had the controller in your hand when he told you where you were supposed to stand to get something neat to happen.

You knew about the ins and outs of video game worlds because people told you, and then next time, it'd be your turn to be the cool kid who knew where a hidden room was. The way that you interacted with friends had the ability to enrich your relationship with a game (as I discussed in my July Escapist feature about how our childhood imaginations made simple games more exciting). Gaming also developed an entire mythos of urban legends, "secrets" that were way more rumor than fact (see the "Video Game Lies" wiki!). That was fun, wasn't it?

That's true social gaming, much more interesting than headshotting strangers and calling them names into your microphone. Now that gaming is working together better with a broader definition of "connectivity" -- one that integrates with real-world social behavior and is less game-specific -- hopefully we'll see more examples like these!

Blockbuster 2.0

"Video games" used to refer solely to one type of product; if you wanted to get granular, you could say there were "video games" and "computer games" (the phrase "video games" encompassing both home consoles and arcades).

Fast forward to now, and games have diversified so much by platform, specific genre and target audience that the word often feels inappropriate -- Farmville is nothing like Modern Warfare 2 which is nothing like World of Warcraft which is nothing like Wii Play, for example. We can embrace that there are loosely different sub-spaces, or vertices, of the game industry that have entirely disparate audiences and means of delivery, and therefore often completely separate design goals.

Which is why it's kind of nice when you start to see spaces converge, with design lessons from, say, Facebook gaming employed on Xbox Live. Have you tried Facebook on your Xbox 360 yet* (or will you try it on your PS3)? I'm actually skeptical that anyone will make their console a primary means of engaging with Facebook; Facebook works so well because on a computer, it integrates so easily and so thoughtlessly with the device on which users spend a significant share of their working or student lives.

Rather than accessing Facebook via console instead of on a computer, it's pretty clear that users will simply be able to augment their Facebook use -- if video game activity is a part of their lives, they'll now be able to reflect that on their social networking profile.

Which is why the Facebook integration is an even bigger value-add for video game platform holders -- and for gaming itself -- than it is for its users. Think about how many of your non-gaming friends and family will be able to see, at a glance, how much fun you're having unlocking achievements and earning trophies; it's like built-in social outreach not only for the fact you own a console, but for every single game you play.

Developers will also be able to work with their own ideas for Facebook integration and what kind of updates their games send. There could be some fun design implementations for this, don't you think? Taking the the socialization around games outside of the game itself and into the real world could create some cool game mechanics if you got creative.

Major facebook games like Pet Society and Farmville have millions of users because of the viral principle -- your friends see you playing it, and these days, those kinds of games are so pervasive that it no longer takes them sending you an invite for you to join them; you know whether or not you're interested because you're observing friends' activity.

Facebook integration with game consoles means major titles have the potential to tap into some of that "virality" (no, that's not a real world, but two-point-oh marketing types think it is). That's huge for traditional gaming. You might ask why Xbox Live needs access to a social network when it is a social network -- this is why.

During my coverage of Microsoft's E3 presentation, I said the biggest game-changer of E3 would be the one that received the least gamer buzz, and I stand by it!

*Note that if you're a Silver member, Microsoft's gonna let you try Facebook and Twitter, among other things, for free this weekend.

The Number Crunch

When I meet people and the "what do you do for a living" question comes up*, my new acquaintances tend to jump to the conclusion that I somehow fund my lifestyle by playing video games all day long, or they assume I simply do nothing but write reviews (for the record, I'm happy I don't!)

Although many of you who visit me here at Sexy Videogameland are probably more familiar with my consumer writing -- you might've found your way here because of my editorials, or my Kotaku columns, Escapist features or reviews, for example -- I make my living as a business reporter at Gamasutra, as you regular SVGLers know.

If there is a lull in SVGL posts, as has happened often lately, and you want to know what I've been doing with myself**, just search Google News for my byline and you'll see all my daily

Gamasutra pieces (and probably some occasional results about other people named Leigh Alexander, some of them criminals). Or better yet, just read Gamasutra, because I'm not too shy to say I think the news and features writing my coworkers do under the supervision of maestro Simon Carless is pretty top-shelf.

Anyway, the majority of my time is spent writing business news. And it's ironic that folks I meet out in the real, non-internet world tend to have trouble wrapping their head around games-as-business, because now more than ever, that's what it is, first and foremost. If it weren't for the prolific indie scene, the growth of alternative business models and social gaming, we'd have a worrying Hollywood-ization on our hands here.

The core games industry cares about investors, who care about Metacritic scores; the fates of our favorite titles and studios are determined by numbers, and success is measured in fiscal quarters, unit sales and revenue dollars. So while we as gamers might not give a rat's ass about the monthly NPD, about Nintendo's profit forecast or EA's restructuring, stories like this are a

crucial barometer of How We're Doing, and this has been a particularly tricky year for industry numbers.

Slump, Slump, Slump

You may or may not have noticed that the games industry has "declined" all throughout the summer months of 2009, which means that when we compare each month's sales dollars to the same month in 2008, we're not measuring up. Why should you care? Well, because how much money the industry is making affects everything from game budgets to publisher slates for next year, it determines how many gambles publishers can take on new IP, it determines how confident investors feel in buying into game companies, and overall, it spells whether or not we are a healthy, growing industry or a struggling one.

We had nothing short of a stellar year in 2008 -- the biz's Best Year Ever, by many estimations, in terms of both the quality and diversity of the title slate and the strength of those titles' performance. Remember how happy we were to be "recession-proof?" Unfortunately, that's all coming back to bite us now.

See, for NPD numbers to show continual growth, we always have to do better in any given month than we did in the same month last year; a really strong 2008 just sets the bar much higher for 2009. You may see the phrase "tough comparisons" all over the place -- that's what analysts and game execs alike have fallen back on to explain the declines. There's nothing wrong with the games biz, they've asserted: it's just we did too well last year. Well, you sure don't hear anyone saying "recession-proof" anymore.

Ahead Into The Unknown

Even Nintendo, basically the most successful company of the current generation, is taking a beating from analysts in the U.S. and Japan over a Wii that appears to be "tanking" -- only in a world where comparisons mean everything can a console that's sold over 56 million units be under the microscope. No wonder Nintendo's Satoru Iwata and NOA's Reggie Fils-Aime come across so defensive in current interviews.

To be fair, Nintendo brought this on itself -- by boasting that it carried the entire industry's growth on its shoulders last year (largely, it did), it set itself up to have everyone point fingers at it when Nintendo's declines drag down the rest of the biz.

It's true that part of what looks like a weakening games business is due to tough comparisons; some people also think the poor consumer economy has finally begun to catch up with Wall Street's golden sector. Maybe it's also that this year's games aren't as good as last year's -- while we're on the Nintendo example, the company admits that it hasn't had the same powerhouse software lineup this year that whipped up Wii sales throughout last year.

Analysts are currently divided on whether the game industry has a shot of ultimately posting annual growth this year -- most are pessimistic, actually, but it's all down to how things go this holiday season, the proving ground that'll demonstrate whether it's weakened software lineups or cash-strapped consumers that are slowing the biz down.

What You Guys Said

This is why I polled you guys recently on how your belts and wallets feel going into the holidays; 289 of you replied, and unfortunately, the largest share of you, at 35 percent, said you feel cash-strapped and plan to spend less money on games this year.

But the next-largest segment of you, at a healthy 28 percent, say you don't plan on doing anything differently, and will spend about the same; 14 percent of you might reduce your wish list by, say, one game, and 13 percent of you are so psyched by the bounty of holiday wishes on offer that you plan to spend more. The remainder, or 7 percent, say you don't usually spend on games for yourself and are hoping for gifts.

So if 28 percent of you will spend just as much as you did last year, and 13 percent of you will spend more, and let's say even a few of you gift-hopers get a game or two from Santa, the picture actually looks pretty good for a healthy holiday, don't you think? The ESA also did a poll that was a bit bigger than mine, and found 42 percent of 1,001 U.S. consumers it surveyed either plan to give or hope to get a video game this holiday. Who's up for some cautious optimism?

Have I gotten you all psyched about INDUSTRY NUMBERS yet? If you're into that kind of thing, you should know that we run a monthly feature by the excellent Gamasutra analyst Matt Matthews, who looks at the major trends and facts to emerge from the NPD numbers. Here's October, for example, and you'll find one on our site every month, usually the Monday after the numbers come out (which is most often the second Thursday of the month).

Plus, the shrewd crew at NeoGAF makes a monthly thread to dissect Matthews' work, so if you enjoy number crunching and chatting stats, you can always find one like this to get in on. C'mon, everybody's doin' the numbers dance, you know you wanna!

*Bonus Info 1: For more on dealing with the "what do you do" question, pseudonymous designer Spitfire once commiserated with me at length on trying to talk about working in video games with average folks.

Bonus Info 2: I stole this picture of a Pac-Man Christmas tree from here, where you can also see video of it!

**Bonus Info 3: You can also follow me on Twitter, join the SVGL Facebook group, or check out the "latest stuff of note" in SVGL's sidebar, or leave me a hello-note in the ShoutMix chat box, also in the sidebar. I miss you guys when I'm unable to keep up the blog ;_;