Scattershot On My Way Out

Well, well! I've typed the words "Mirror's Edge" so many times this week I can almost pretend that I played it. But no! As I look forward desperately eagerly to my Thanksgiving break, I plan to indulge in my favorite activity: Playing a game I have played a billion times already.

Really, I'm exhausted of new games. I really am. And I refuse to rush through Fallout 3, for example, just because of all the people saying, with proper shock and outrage, "you're not done with Fallout 3 yet? When are you ever going to play [insert title of two week old game here]?!" So my vacation gift to myself is the luxury of doing one thing only, guilt-free -- yes, Chrono Trigger DS, the time for you is now, and let us give thanks.

Two more things about Mirror's Edge, though, and then I'll shut up about it until I actually put hands on it.

One, I received a really interesting letter from a designer pal of mine who is a little bit fatigued of hearing arguments that hinge on the flaws in the game mechanics. In fact, he says, the mechanics themselves are perfect, the controls work precisely how they're supposed to, and if players are finding the game frustrating, it's not because of that. It's the level design.

If players miss jumps, it's not because Faith isn't responding correctly, it's because the level design has made it difficult to gauge distances, and if the gameplay isn't flowing how it seems to intended to, it's because objectives are unclear, is what he tells me. The "trial and error" feel of it? Also level design. Again, I didn't play it, so I can't opine -- I'm just the messenger! -- but trust a designer, one supposes, to point out where the "blame," if you will, should be placed.

His explanation also highlighted what is perhaps a bigger issue: he feels reviewers often don't even understand enough about game design to attribute frustrations we encounter to the proper source, and what we call out as "the problem" sometimes isn't. When something isn't working, or isn't fun, we sometimes criticize the incorrect element.

"In fact, I find half my job as a designer is listening to what people don't find fun about the game and then figuring out what is REALLY not fun about the game (because it is almost never the thing they latched onto) so that I can fix it," he says.

Two, Stephen Totilo got a response from EA DICE about the fan-shopped Faith that motivated my column last month at Kotaku. They say they intended to move away from "the typical portrayal" of women in games, that proper Faith is meant to be "approachable and far more real," and the rendition of her as a "12 year old with a boob job" was "depressing." Check MTV Multiplayer for the whole comment.

I actually played Castlevania: Judgment with a friend last night. Alas, it is not well-executed at all. In a good fighting game, you should able to get by and still have a bit of fun through good old button mashing, and really rock it if you learn timing and techniques. Judgment doesn't let you do any mashing -- enemies will chain you mercilessly in a fashion that feels frustratingly cheap -- and yet the techniques don't seem to come together predictably either.

Granted, I spent much of my time with it using the Classic Controller hookup -- which all Wii games these days seem to require for me to have any patience at all for 'em. I am so, so over waggle, man. If it uses the Wii Remote any more than, say, Mario Galaxy does, count me out. I understand that this game mechanic is responsible for making a whole raft of controller-phobes into happy players, but man, I was raised on a D-pad, and I just have no patience for swinging those things around anymore. I am not gonna play a fighting game by flailing.

Okay, but while fighting games live and die on how playable they are and how well their systems work, I'm a major longtime fan of the Castlevania universe, and I disagree with the periphery I've heard saying that Judgment was a bad idea. It was a fantastic idea -- I think it's just amazing to see the characters this way, and hopefully I'll get a little time to explain in more detail when I get back from Thanksgiving break.

And! Tying up my loose ends before I take off on my Chrono Trigger, family and turkey binge, Variety's Ben Fritz also responded to N'Gai's post yesterday with a really awesome perspective -- innovation and mechanics are not different things.

Please have a happy Thanksgiving, and thanks to all of you for being here!

Mon Petit Pont Faible, Obscurci Dans Le Brouillard

I'll be the first to confess that when I get passionate on a topic, I tend to obscure my own points. No issue exists in a walled garden, of course, and I tend to eagerly dredge all the trails around an idea and lace all around peripheral or overlapping issues, which sometimes doesn't serve my argument.

So given that Newsweek's N'Gai Croal has returned to the blogging stage at Level Up in order to join the discussion that reviewers like myself and Variety's Ben Fritz have been having around the challenging relationship between art and mechanics within the critical process, I think it's worthwhile, and probably necessary, to clarify my points a little.

When I observed -- okay, complained -- that reviews are arbitrarily critical of mechanical issues while downplaying the role of creative innovation in the perceived success or failure of a game, I most certainly never intended to imply that games that aren't fun should receive high scores simply because they tried something different.

Nor did I ever intend to suggest -- though I'll cop, again, to obfuscating my own arguments sometimes, as is the tendency of the excessively verbose -- that game mechanics, the backbone of an experiential medium, are themselves "minutiae."

Many of you raised this point aptly yesterday in the comments of my post about the Guardian's Keith Stuart's article; commenter juv3nal said:

No one is knocking Mirror's Edge (or, for that matter, failing to give Mirror's Edge credit) for its innovation. It's getting dinged for its failures in execution. As a consumer, I'm all for innovation; there isn't some automatic reaction that new or different = bad. It's just that poor execution is not excused by being new or different.

And Toups pointed out:

If anything, for future creators to learn the right lessons from the game, we would do well to have critics pointing out exactly where it fails.

And one would have to be quite dense to disagree, just as one would be hard-pressed to take issue with Croal's assertion that "mechanics matter... [and] mechanics are also improvable." Indeed, one could argue that we reviewers have a duty to be strict about flaws, as Toups says, because with the way our industry works, the Metacritic scores we contribute have a concrete economic and strategic impact on future creations.

But the primary function of a review is not to educate its creator; it is not a report card, although the rise of Metacritic scores as a barometer of industry behavior creates that side-effect. Nor is a review a control mechanism by which a few writers can influence the trends of the industry by elevating some traits and diminishing others according to their personal taste. Perhaps obviously, the purpose of a review is to try and tell consumers whether or not they would enjoy a game.

And as I illustrated at Kotaku yesterday, the large majority of game consumers do not currently read reviews because they don't find them useful or relatable. The disconnect between the consumer who reads reviews and the one who doesn't is just a precursor to the rampant disconnect between those tasked with communicating about games and those who enjoy playing games.

This particular chasm, I feel, is one of the largest obstacles to games attaining widespread cultural value beyond that of a plaything. And it's also one of the most addressable.

When I lament the lack of attention to innovation in game reviews -- and, by association, in our enthusiast culture -- I am not, as Croal suggests, insisting that creativity should receive "primacy" over effective design. We cannot award "A for effort"s. Although Ben Fritz's standpoints were tightly associated with mine in Croal's blog post, I think it's salient to note that he and I actually initially disagreed on one thing: He noted in his original response to me that he often finds that games often seem over-rated based on hype about their innovations -- and I concede he's right.

Either extreme is undesirable. I am, instead, hoping to engender an acceptance of a broader-lens view of games as experiences; I am rejecting the assertion that a medium with the power to be so subjectively affecting must be reduced to the sum of its parts; I take issue with the idea that there is a single mechanical checklist against which all games can be evaluated.

Most of all, I wholly repudiate the suggestion that "is this game fun?" has a yes-or-no answer applicable to all members of our increasingly vast audience. It's my belief that only in ditching that can we span the chasm.

Again, I didn't play Mirror's Edge, so obviously I am not speaking specifically in its defense. But interestingly, I've heard in conversations and emails with friends a raft of approval for the title that comes uniquely from people who rarely play video games. They think it's fun, they think it's different, and they feel it was worth their money, while those who frequently do play games -- and those whose work entails critiquing games -- sing quite a different tune. It'd be patently asinine to imply that one group is correct while the other is not, and perhaps in my vehement eagerness to encourage a more sophisticated, broad-ranging critical vocabulary for games, I allowed myself to appear as if I was making statements on which standpoints are valid and which are not.

That wasn't my aim, of course. It's never my intention to act as if I'm some voice that can assign correct or incorrect in such a broad, emerging field, which is part of why I almost always avoid calling out individuals. But the idea that the laws of game mechanics alone must determine a single accurate evaluation of a title that is universally true? I think that's wrong -- I'll say that plain.

In yesterday's discussion, commenter Dante said:

When we talk of 'classic' games we're nearly always talking of flawed but abitious ones, Deus Ex, Fallout etc. They're all attempts to do something extra-ordinarily different that stumble somewhere...

...Take the BioWare games, for instance; they've always had bugs and flaws, but they've always been narratively excellent. But while Baldur's Gate and KOTOR were numbered amongst the best of their time, Mass Effect was swept under the carpet, despite massive strides forward in presentation and combat.

On a slightly different note, we all enjoyed dragging out old review quotes about Silent Hill 2 that called it, basically, staid and unwieldy, while today it enjoys a seat on the short list of gaming's greatest survival horror titles -- if not greatest titles, period.

Incidentally, those poor reviews for SH2 equated to high 7s and 8s on the scoresheet back in the day, which often makes me wonder if reviewers these days feel obligated to pick out extra criticisms to avoid the old accusation of the "three point curve."

Dante is correct in observing that many of the games that history adores are overtly flawed, and that we adored them in spite of those flaws. We remember a favorite older title as an overall experience, and not as the sum of its "pros" column held up against its "cons."

I do believe that, since gaming is such a new medium, back then many of us were younger and not inclined to criticize so closely as players. The critical press, concurrently, developed a handy system that worked fairly well (remember the ranked categories in GamePro?) in an era when games were simpler and had fewer variables.

But in today's environment, the variables are too numerous to consistently evaluate systematically, and to add an additional knot, development is in a growth and experimentation phase in which it's actively trying to add more variables. At the same time, a wave of new audiences are are approaching -- or rediscovering -- gaming. They know nothing of our systems. They don't know what "ludonarrative dissonance" means, and they wouldn't notice it. Hell, maybe we ourselves would be unbothered by certain issues unless we'd had them pointed out for us and been told inside the internet echo chamber that they ought to ruin our experience.

Which is not at all to imply we need to "lower our standards" or fail to mention problems just because the median user would not be bothered by them. In fact, I'd wager we have almost an embarrassing amount to learn from the average consumer about appreciating a game as a holistic creation -- neither "art piece" nor "product," neither "mechanics" or "innovation." What I stumbled to convey by employing the word "minutiae" is the fact that we hardcore these days often have our nose pressed up so tight against the glass that we can't see out the window.

Ultimately, my original idea -- doubtless because I expressed it poorly, was assigned a "Red Light" by Level Up: "Reviewers aren't perfect, but attempting to police the discourse by insisting on the primacy of innovation over execution is not the answer," says Croal.

If I criticize or levy opinion on the process of reviewing, and the impact of the Metacritic score, it's because as a reviewer who contributes such scores, I feel it's necessary to engage my community in these kinds of discussions on what the focus of our work can be. Aside from the issue of whether placing "red lights" in the roadmap of discussions among reviewers is in itself "policing the discourse," I hope I've clarified, in the fashion of more words than was probably necessary, that "insisting on the primacy of innovation over execution" was never my intention.

Finally, I say this all the time, but it never seems often enough -- thanks to the commenters who contribute their thoughts here, those quoted in this post as well as all the others.

[Wholly unrelated note -- I don't usually link things like this, but since I'm responding to N'Gai Croal, I thought it'd be okay to do a petit homage: EGO... trip!]

We Built Another World

The Guardian article I cited earlier today doesn't just highlight the fact that innovation is penalized in game reviews. As most of you said, a game shouldn't "get a pass" on poor technical execution just because it tried to be creative.

It may be that we could be a little more forgiving toward new endeavors because, as the Guardian said, something being done for the first time is far more likely to be sloppy than an old-hat formula that everyone's had over a decade to iterate on.

But that aside, a main reason that this obsession on hardcore mechanical issues bothers me is also that it illustrates the massive divide between "us" -- the sort of folk that play a lot of games, immerse ourselves in the culture around games, and read blogs like Sexy Videogameland -- and your average consumer, who when playing Mirror's Edge would probably be unlikely to notice the same things you do, and who may actually (gasp) be more interested in something different than something perfect. The IGN review of Mirror's Edge, for example, would not only be impenetrable to the average gamer, but it would also not necessarily predict his or her experience.

Anyway, my Kotaku feature for this month is up today, and it continues the discussion on the difference between the average gamer and the fanatical culturist. No, not the difference between "casual" and "hardcore," but the often disorienting fact that what we think of as a "gamer" actually represents a very small subsection of the vast community of real-world folks that enjoy video games.

I used music and music journalism as a parallel -- bonus points, by the way, to Kotaku commenter Dan who knew I was talking about Wolf Parade's At Mount Zoomer. Thanks Dan, and of course it's no Apologies to the Queen Mary (and if Spencer Krug wasn't already married or at least I think he is, I'd want to marry him almost as much as I want to marry Paul Banks, okay, geekout over).

So yeah, article. Check it out, please!

This Headline Will Not Pun On 'Faith'

When I came out swinging in defense of Silent Hill: Homecoming and reacted a bit strongly (okay, flipped my lid) on my fellow reviewers, it wasn't really that I felt anyone was necessarily wrong in their criticisms of the game. I didn't expect to convert the un-convertable; I was either preaching to the choir, or I was the annoying Jehovah's Witness ringing the bell of a staunch atheist.

My point -- and please indulge me in quoting myself -- was this:

"When a title attempts to explore uncharted areas, it risks stumbling into areas that have been neglected for a good reason -- because they don't work as well. But when we fault them for trying, without recognizing that the game might have done a few new things well, or when we treat creativity or an attempt at inventiveness as a design flaw, we're sending the industry some problematic mixed messages. We demand innovation and invention, and then we crucify any attempts in that direction."

The Guardian, which tends to do freaking excellent writing about games from time to time, has a new article up to a similar effect. This time, the lynchpin is Mirror's Edge. I have not yet played it; haven't even seen it since E3, since I've decided to combat my seasonal overwhelm and burnout by focusing on just a couple titles and leaving the rest for the desert from February until July.

Nonetheless, I've been aware of Mirror's Edge's critical reception, and the Guardian's Keith Stuart's reaction to it reminds me strikingly of my own response to Homecoming's. He notes "a general compulsion to counter the sequences of innovative genius with niggling doubts about core mechanics," in game reviews, which he finds "frustrating" and "depressing," and writes:

For example, no-one complains that, say, Pan's Labyrinth or Eraser Head lack the formal, easily recognisable narrative structure of a conventional movie. Their aspirations exempt them from that requirement. So should we really be marking Mirror's Edge down for control issues – a game that aspires to re-interpret the very interface between player, screen and character? Yes, I know, it's a clumsy comparison, but the underlying point is – should reviewers just accept that sometimes incredibly new experiences will lack some of the formal substance we expect from traditional games? That's what innovation is, it's leaping out into the unknown.

Before you get all on him for drawing the film-game comparison, he does admit it's imperfect, but faults IGN's review for looking forward to the inevitable sequel to see if it "fixes" the problems, instead of valuing the first installment, a mentality that would be unheard-of in any other entertainment medium:

What are we really saying about innovation when we require a sequel to prove the concept was valid in the first place? What are we saying about the artistry of games? And ultimately, what does it mean for games criticism, if we can't appreciate visionary moments, because of these weird little checklists of gameplay qualities, constructed and adhered to with near-autistic fervour?

It's a point I myself feel strongly about, and it outlines one key issue: Reviewers know how to evaluate games against the systems with which they're familiar, and not how to evaluate games that break the mold.

And the reviewer's stance is startlingly aligned with that of the consumer, either incidentally or by influence, which suggests a truly depressing possibility: We don't really want games to innovate, we just want them to perfect and repeat the formulae we already know.

And hey, even I plan to forsake all others for Chrono Trigger DS this week. I like games I've already played, I admit.

SVGDL Is Live!

Thanks to nine brave pioneers, I was able to launch my crazy idea, Sexy Videogame Developerland, just a moment ago. I suppose you could say the site's "in beta," because obviously it requires interest from the community and participation from devs to continue going -- but my heartiest thanks to the early adopters who supported the concept enough to take a stab at it.

Tell your friends, blog it, linklog it, do your thing, knowledge is power!

Check it out so far, and leave comments with what you think! Hopefully, readers will get a kick out of getting even a small peek at the human side of the biz -- and hopefully, the broad spectrum of folks we've got participating will help encourage more industry people to send those submissions in. Finally, the site has a FAQ for the purpose of question-answering and submission guidelines.

Seen Offworld Yet?

Am feeling kinda sick today, so I am going to curl up in a ball for a bit, but before I go, I wanted to note the launch of an awesome new Boing Boing site called Offworld -- headed up by my uncannily creative and savvy former boss Brandon Boyer.

I'm really excited by what Brandon's doing over there so far -- eclectic, artsy, thinking-person, grown-up stuff, which lord knows we could always use a little bit more of. Anyway, I've already slotted it into my daily reading, and I recommend you guys check it out!

More on Sexy Videogamedeveloperland

I've received a few submissions for my crazy idea, and I also received a lot of ideas/suggestions from readers, so I thought I'd post a few more specific guidelines on the "SVGDL" thinger that I've been kicking around.

To be clear, the aspiration here is not at all to create some kind of extensive MobyGames sort of database -- that'd be a mammoth undertaking. And while of course the goal is to create a place where readers can see the human beings behind the games they play, I'm definitely not going for some super-earnest, stirring career profile of anyone. Instead, I'm envisioning something more Yearbook-like, with photos and quick personality glimpses. It's intended to be fun/funny.

So with that in mind, if you're considering submitting yourself or a friend, here is the "form," if you will:

Name. This can be first and last, or just first, or just a nickname/alias.
Job Title: This can be your literal title -- "Multiplayer Designer," for example -- or something funny/personal that you use to refer to yourself.
Company: Where you're currently employed -- wholly optional. You can leave it out completely if you prefer. If you like, you can list your past employers, too.
Projects: A few of the titles you've worked on. I need at least one -- otherwise anyone could just send in their pic and pretend to be in development, but if you are going after a little bit of anonymity, you don't have to include your whole list. "Unannounced" or "Top Secret" is okay too.
Why I Am A Game Industry Rockstar: Don't take yourself too seriously. Just describe what makes you awesome and have fun with it. These blurbs need to be brief, say 500 words max.

I got some questions about who is "eligible" -- the answer is pretty much everyone. The only requirement is that you need to have worked on one shipped title, where "shipped" can also mean you published it online. Indies absolutely welcome, and please provide a link to your game.

If you sent me a submission that is wildly not aligned with the format, feel free to resubmit -- but also know that if, say, you sent me a two-page bio, I'll just extract the neatest paragraph for your profile.

Programming Note

I know many of you come to SVGL because you're interested in games, and less the games biz -- nonetheless, wanted to point you to an article I did today at Gamasutra that I think is fairly important.

My Latest Crazy Idea: Sexy Developerland

I've written a bit in the past about the industry's dearth of "stars," and echoed Cliff Bleszinski's widely-noted comment that the industry lacks visionaries -- not that we haven't got a healthy population of gifted people doing great things, it's that either the culture of our industry or the nature of our business doesn't recognize them.

I note a high incidence of our "household names" being pedigreed veterans who come out to events and speak regularly, despite the fact that they haven't made a game in sometimes as much as a decade. And that's absolutely not to imply that contributions of our past (and because games are young, 10 years is a very recent past) should not continue to be recognized -- but how about some stars for today?

Obviously, the way we recognize and promote talent in the industry is an enormously complex issue tied up in things like business strategy, cultural environment, audience attitude and tons of other factors, and to engender any kind of significant shift across these areas is too large a feat for one person to undertake, not to mention the amount of time it takes to see evolution.

But I had a fun-slash-crazy idea. What if I started a separate sister site to SVGL -- a "Sexy Developerland," if you will, and encouraged industry folk in all areas to submit photos of themselves with a few fun or funny facts? Each day, or whenever I got a submission, we could feature a pic and blurb on a different person, their role, and a short blurb explaining why that person should be a star.

Of course, this would be more tongue-in-cheek funny than serious -- I don't expect anyone's going to legitimately write themselves glowing promotions, firstly, and some people have work policies in place prohibiting them from publicizing themselves alongside their employer's name or the project they're on.

But even a fun pic and a blurb on, say, what someone had for breakfast, or their hyperbolic version of why they are the industry's proper cultural hero ("I am really talented with frozen foods") would be cute, I think. And I could definitely see colleagues friendly-pranking one another by sending in a pic and bio on their coworkers -- like, with the story of how they got their nickname, or something (hopefully they know one another well enough to do something like that, and I'd pull any postings that make people upset).

The end result would hopefully be a blog that people can visit to scroll through faces and names of the people who make the games they love. It won't legitimately make anyone famous, but I think that so often many people forget that there are human beings behind the games -- especially when they're ranting and raving about this or that stylistic change, design decision and whatnot. And hopefully everyone has a lot of fun with it, and it promotes the overall message that our industry is full of possible stars.

Of course, this wouldn't work unless there was a real interest in the development community in contributing to and enjoying such a site -- and for all I know, most industry folk are too terrified of their employers to send even innocuous semi-professional info to someone like me (perhaps rightly, as I do run stories like this). Maybe everyone reading this thinks this is stupid!

But, tell you what -- if you're an industry person and you're reading this and you think this would be fun, write leighalexander1 at gmail dot com, send me a photo, your job title and funny blurb about yourself or about a friend (with permission or appropriate trust)! If you'd like to leave out your specific company or project, just say so. If I get a certain number of submissions, I'll start the new site. And if I don't, I'll just dispose of whatever you sent me and won't show it to anyone.

Either way, visionaries! Yeah!

(Note: I also had the "brilliant" idea to eat an entire decorative gingerbread house -- and nothing but the gingerbread house -- in one week over the holidays, and blog it daily, to try and raise money for children's charities. Then I realized my hind end is getting big enough already. I donated to Child's Play instead, and so should you!)

[UPDATE: I have already received a few submissions, so those of you afraid to be either the first or the only needn't fear!]

[UPDATE 2: I defined guidelines a little better.]

A Tendency For Violence

So I finally resolved my decision paralysis crisis in Fallout 3 -- to which, incidentally, I hear it's preferable to refer as FO3, and not "F3," to avoid associations with this.

Truly, the first moment of emergence from Vault 101 gave me the chills. We travel through a lot of ruined wastelands in games -- abandoned labs, haunted tunnels, destitute villages, the headquarters of various nefarious parties. But when the game environment manages to retain such a grim and telling imprint of what life in the place must have once been like, and when it just begs you to ask, "what happened?" I just go all jelly in the knees, I do. I've got a real post-apocalypse fetish.

I felt this way about BioShock's underwater once-paradise; I felt this way about Fatal Frame's cursed mansions, and I felt this way about Alex's house in Silent Hill: Homecoming, to name just a few, and I feel this way about Springvale and Megaton. It's strangely satisfying to be able to see, either traced in the dust of wreckage or subtly, in the lines of social structures, the long and lonely road back from a tragedy.

Which is why what I'm enjoying most about Fallout 3 is the permanent after-image of innocence. My colleague Chris Dahlen's review at Variety says the game's vision of Washington D.C "didn't just wreck the buildings, it twisted the American Dream itself." And maybe I'm a closet patriot -- or, at least, patriotic in the fashion of the American subconscious -- but this touches me, deeply.

I was struck by something as simple as the idealistic, propaganda-style pop art pastel of a family apparently playing football in a park. It sometimes appears during interim screens, but poignantly, it's one of the last things you see as you flee your room in Vault 101 for the last time.

I stepped out into the sun and to the irradiated dust, and I really, really did get chills.

Then I wanted to shoot some things. A lot of things.

My first thought, on seeing my first live humans for several stretches, was not, "hey! How are you holding up? What's your story?" No, it was actually, "I wonder what will happen if I kill them?"

MTV Multiplayer's Tracey John and I have joked that we Twitter to one another so often that we feel that we know each other better than we actually do -- I wrote that I wondered why I felt so tempted to shoot the salesman's two-headed pack-cow. Aren't I supposed to be feeling... exploratory? Moved? Anything but gleefully murderous?

"Dude," Tracey wrote back. "I totally killed that two-headed cow. Had to put it out of its misery."

But I didn't just want to cap the cow, I wanted to try and take down the chick standing guard over the cow, execute the guy with the cowboy hat, start a bar brawl. I haven't done any of these things -- because mostly I'm a little bit guilty, and largely I don't want to go all trigger-happy without an answer to my question: Why is it that such a stirringly nostalgic playground, framed in the cultural touchstones of one of my own nation's most painful-charming eras, just makes me want to kill?

Then again, how would you feel if you saw such absolute destruction of the American Dream?

Anyway, I think what I'm loving most about Fallout 3 is how aptly it blends the idealistic with the sinister -- which probably makes it even more of a thought process when you're deciding which of these your character responds to more.

Decision Paralysis, Or Why I Can't Get Out Of Vault 101

I finally began playing Fallout 3 last night. Boy, have I been excited for this one. I played for about two and a half hours -- and I never made it out of Vault 101.

"What's wrong with you, Leigh?" You exclaim, chagrined. Perhaps you gloat like a local bully at my clumsiness, my plodding. "What's taking you so long," you cry? We game writers are supposed to be extra-good at video games, aren't we? Am I living a lie?

Well, for one thing, it took me twenty minutes to decide whether to be a boy or a girl.

This is no exaggeration. Gazing at my father's indistinct face through the blur of new life and amnion, I wrung my hands. I put the controller down and picked up my laptop. I pondered Googling for spoilers, for hand-holding, because before I was locked in I just had to know, just had to decide what elements of play my gender would influence. When I'm choosing "boy" or "girl," what am I really choosing, from a gameplay perspective? And even if it's mechanically irrelevant, are there plot elements that I'd rather appreciate from the standpoint of one or the other?

In certain titles, I'd rather be something close to myself, with all the associated parts, and in others, I feel it's more appropriate from a narrative standpoint -- even when we're just talking my own, imaginary, invented narrative -- to be a male.

"Do you want spoilers?" Said my friend on GChat, who I was "courteously" keeping updated on my first experience with the game.

"No, no," I typed back, I knuckle-bit, wondering things like if I woke up tomorrow morning underground amid a nuclear winter and went into the bathroom, would I want to sit down or stand up?

"It doesn't really affect anything," my friend reassured.

Not really?

At last, though, I decided to be a man -- only to find myself in the throes of paralysis once again when I had to name him. I pushed through, forcing myself to pick quick, and going with "Severin" because I had a Velvet Underground song about sadomasochism stuck in my head. My soft-voiced Dad was so proud at my birth, and here I was feeling like a perv. I resisted the urge to reset.

You can imagine that I put the controller down only a few minutes later when asked to make my first dialog choice -- I don't want to be a wuss, man, but how do you expect me to tell my little friends and family, of humble means, that they threw me a lame birthday party?

The "early childhood" phase of Fallout 3 is so poignant and appealing, if you want it to be, that you are really, really hard pressed to try and "game" it. I want my character to be a bad-ass -- but looking in the eyes of a sweet old lady, guilt-addled and terrified of the later consequences of my actions, hearing my Dad and his friends gently call me "pal," I can't do anything but suck it up and be a sweetie.

"Just be yourself," my friend advised.

But, but, I don't play video games to be myself. I want to be a tough guy, and maybe insulting this lady's gift of a birthday poem is the way to do it -- but how can I, when she's looking at me like that, so hopeful that I will like it?

When taking the exam that would sort me into my ideal career track in the Vault, I received the role of "Shift Supervisor." Because I'm upstanding and responsible?

"Wuss," typed same friend when I told him of my outcome.

So I could tell you that I played Fallout 3 last night, but I spent most of my playtime not playing Fallout 3, and instead being dizzied by the apparent array of options. I wanted to resist thinking of behavioral consequences strictly as game mechanics; I struggled to objectify my character into something "cool," or even "different from myself," even while those around me had the sort of subjective responses toward "me" that made it impossible. I had no problem being a dick in BioShock (although believe you me, I stared breathless at that first Little Sister for a long, long while, too), but these are human beings. The quaint, touching, innocence-evoking '50s nostalgia vibe was not helping, either.

I have written more articles than I can count about the much-lauded "choice in games," but you know? I kind of hate it.

I jest, mostly -- I'm canceling various social plans just to be home with Fallout 3 tonight. That's right, you heard me. But there really does seem to me to be a prevailing conflict taking shape now between characterization and immersion. Game design wants us to believe deeply in our circumstances and the characters in them -- but how can you become anything other than your plain old self when you're confronted with such empathetic, borderline-lifelike people and places?

"A bunch of us got Fallout 3 the first night, and the next day, only two hadn't made it out of the Vault," my friend warned me today.

He added, "We still make fun of 'em."

[Note: Thanks to Stephan and Wolf_Dog who were so sick of the meganekko SVGL banner that they sent me a new one. Sick of SVGL banners? Send me nice ones at leighalexander1 at gmail dot com.]

My Millionth Drive Through A Warzone

You are riding in a vehicle through a warzone. Your local man on the ground casually fills you in on just how bad things have gotten here as you rumble roughshod over areas that, despite being torn and savage, are beautiful in their own next-gen way. As you drive, you look around you at all the signs of degeneration; you hear distant explosions, perhaps catch the foxfire glow of a nearby inferno.

Now, quick -- which video game are you playing?

If you're unsure, you're not alone. The illuminating car ride has apparently become the exposition-of-choice for war shooters, from Metal Gear 4 and Call of Duty to Far Cry 2, and perhaps it makes sense; as an arriving mercenary, you've got to get to the conflict somehow, and your view from the passenger side is simultaneously the most effective and the most realistic way for a game to introduce the player to the story environment.

So I can't knock Far Cry 2 for hauling it out yet again, even as the intro, despite how innovative and tight-knit the game itself is in many respects, gave me distinct deja vu. I can't think of a single more appropriate way for the game to open -- and yet it brought me into the game feeling slightly cynical, like there's nothing new under the sun, and oh, sigh, here comes yet another shooter again.

In other words, Far Cry 2 was begging a penalty for making the most appropriate design choice, just because several other titles have already arrived at the same conclusion. Which begs, to me, an interesting question: If what we're after is realism and intuitiveness, there has to be a "best practice" for just about any element of a story you can produce -- so what happens when more and more games stumble on the most design-appropriate formula for their genre?

Several of our "best moments in gaming" are so designated because they created a deceptively simple circumstance that was so reminiscent of real life that we found it touching; being able to watch a movie with Jenny in The Darkness comes to mind. But what happens to that moment when other games have the exact same one, simply because bonding on the couch over a flick is something that coupled characters are naturally quite likely to do? Is BioShock now the only game that's allowed to begin with a plane crashing into the ocean?

I'm definitely considering whether our quest for game design efficiently streamlined for realism will harm our parallel objectives for innovation. What do you guys think?

Incidentally, Far Cry 2 is a decent shooter, the fire stuff is about as awesome as you've heard it is, but it is still a shooter, and therefore holds little for those who aren't into shooters. Ever since I bucked my trend of eschewing anything remotely FPS-like in order to try BioShock, I've been willing to check out just about any title that contains interesting peripheral elements. But as my colleague Chris Dahlen notes, FC2 lacks mission variety, so once you get tired of gawking at the savannah in the first hour or two, you'll get tired of the game soon after.

I did appreciate the open-worldness, though. There's nothing more liberating than being tersely instructed to rescue a hostage -- and then promptly ignoring your instructions to drive twenty minutes in the other direction in order to burn grass instead.

One more current item on war games and warzones; you may have seen over the weekend that Infinity Ward's Robert Bowling thinks that Activision senior producer Noah Heller, who's been doing the talk circuit to promote Call of Duty 5, is a "senior super douche" who needs to quit the negative comparisons to CoD4. That little conflict blew up on the blogs over the weekend, just as Heller gets done telling Gamasutra about how cross-competition results in a better game. I suppose it's easy to have that opinion when you're the one with the newer title coming out. I always find it illuminating when the contentious relationship between publisher-side producers and studio folks makes it into the headlines, because I'm often made aware of how annoying it is to developers for a producer to be the one who enjoys primary name association with a project in the headlines.

I wonder if Bowling still has a job today? To say the industry rewards people for outspokenness would be an unfortunate fallacy.

Still Alive

I don't think I have ever gone an entire week in the history of Sexy Videogameland without posting, but here we are! Thank you for your emails, but no, I am neither sick nor dead -- I just took a couple days off of work in order to move and am still catching up. I am stealing wireless from my next-door neighbor until I can get set up in the new spot, the connection is horrendous (which is why this post has no picture), and am confronting a backlog of unplayed titles and stuff I missed.

Since then, we've been busy at Gamasutra, too; Activision is doing fairly well, and promises to keep doing well by monetizing everything it can and by bleeding franchises to death; paradoxically, Bobby Kotick seems to think development talent will not be attracted to the company unless they can work only on low-risk licenses and sequels and sequels and sequels. THQ, unfortunately, is not doing quite as well, analysts feel deceived and the company's instituting a turnaround plan.

EA did not do as well on the quarter as it wanted to, as its losses widened and it laid off about 600 people across, I think, pretty much all of its studios globally. But Riccitiello says it took a hunk out of what would have been its profits in order to put $150 million toward investments in newer business models like online games and digital distro, given that he (and other gaming execs and analysts) are noticing consumer behavior at retail taking a little bit of a bruising thanks to the crap economy.

It also restructured its casual business -- instead of having Pogo, EA Casual, its Hasbro-licensed stuff and The Sims in separate arenas, it seems to be moving toward consolidating them all under The Sims umbrella; at least, it's integrating Hasbro and EA Casual into that group, citing the fact that they all enjoy the same target audience. Makes sense, I guess. It also put the founder of that chick TV channel, Oxygen Media, on its board, probably to help focus the casual biz a little.

Most game companies are taking losses right now, though it remains to be seen whether there'll be any long-term damage. NPD results for the last month, when they arrive, should be pretty telling; until now, we've only been able to speculate on whether the downturn is affecting game buying, but most analysts have said that the next round of NPD should show for sure.

So with all this fancylike bizness reportin', almost all my new games -- Fable II, Fallout 3 and FarCry 2, mainly -- remain in seal. I am patiently chipping away at Order of Ecclesia as I ride the subways around to check out my new Brooklyn neighborhood, but you can expect me to start digging into October's Big Three soon. By the time I have anything substantial to say, everyone will already be all about Gears 2, Mirror's Edge and, of course, Left 4 Dead. Then, of course, Persona 4 is coming out, which I have already pre-ordered because it looks awesome-awesome-awesome. Even still, I trust the readers of the noble state of SVGL to have an attention span a bit longer than a hamster's. Right?

Oh, about Ecclesia -- I really wish it had a sprite gallery so that you could watch the animations in slow motion (maybe it does, and I haven't unlocked it yet). They're so beautifully done that I keep trying to pause the game and look at them, which of course takes me straight to the menu screen.

Also, how cool would a Castlevania game be if it had a sprite editor? Maybe even a map editor, like as an alternate mode? As the undisputed emperor of 2D joygasm, Iga and his team should really consider it.

One more thing about Ecclesia -- I am guessing that Konami.jp has awesome wallpaper art up for it just like they did with Portrait of Ruin, which has spawned some of my favorite game pics of all time, but I am Japanese-dumb and cannot navigate the site (and internet, yeah). Has anyone seen/heard of these, and if so, have you got a link? [Edit: Nevermind, I found it -- still, if there's a Rapidshare of artbook scans or something, that'd still be awesome.]

But anyway, if you've sent email and I haven't answered, now you know why! And speaking of Still Alive, Gamasutra republished Game Developer's fab Portal postmortem, which I loved reading.

You guys are the best; thanks for your patience.