Merry Christmas, Everyone!

SVGL will be back after the holidays.

Thank you very much for everything <3

Holiday Listening, Brainy Style

Oh, I am so excited for a holiday break -- which means I'm trying to cover a few last bases work-wise and doing a horrible job of paying attention (email me about typos and I'll bite your face). I hadn't yet noted that I was invited to participate in the Brainy Gamer's year-end podcast series, where I was asked to talk about one of my top picks for the year, PixelJunk Eden.

Nope, it's not my individual numero uno game of the year, but it's up there, so I was happy to chat about it, especially among such good company. I'm not big on podcasts at all, but Michael Abbott's is one of my favorites. He has this soothing radio-quality voice that I wholly maintain we need to promote professionally -- and he worked pretty hard on rounding us crew up for the year-end series, so I highly recommend giving it a listen.

My fantasy Christmas party involves all of these people coming over for egg nog and Rock Band -- wait, I'm tired of Rock Band for now. Oh well, hopefully we'd all drink so much coquito that we don't know what it is we're playing anymore.

We would also listen to 8-Bit Jesus, which my friend Noah, karaoke buddy extraordinaire, reminded me to recommend.

One More Look In The Mirror

Somehow I emerged as an advocate for Mirror's Edge, while I stress I haven't played it other than a few minutes at E3, not enough to form an opinion. What drew my attention was the discussion around the game, the vocabulary with which it was being reviewed, and the audience response -- I didn't need to play the game to notice the conflict players had with it. I also re-published here what I was told by a designer regarding the game because I thought those discussing it in the comments here would find it interesting.

I'm not in the habit, to say the least, of going to bat either on attack or in defense of games I haven't played; even when people I almost always agree with praise or criticize something, I'm not comfortable noting a title as a success or failure unless I have had experience with it (although I'm obviously capable of rounding up critical reception or noting sales figures and the relationship those measures may or may not have to each other).

So I said I wasn't going to talk about Mirror's Edge anymore, and I won't -- but I would like to point you to Ian Bogost's feature in Gamasutra today, because I think it's an interesting way of looking at the game.

Bogost writes:

Video games are software, but they are not meant to serve the same function as spreadsheets. They are not tools that provide a specific and solitary end, but experiences that spark ideas and proffer sensations. Sure, video games have interfaces, like toasters have browning levers, like sweaters have cuffs, like word processors have font menus.

But too often we mistake the demands of these interfaces (and the in-game actions they facilitate) with the actions of tools. We gripe when a game doesn't do what we expect, rather than asking what such an unexpected demand means in the context of the game.

The reason I questioned Mirror's Edge's reception is because I'm aware of this same tendency on our parts, both as players and as reviewers. It's part of the reason I take issue with the mass shunning of MGS4, a game you all well know I feel is worth several good looks and quite a bit of praise, flaws aside.

Nonetheless, the mixed reception is one of the reasons I'm highly doubting Mirror's Edge will make my playlist anytime soon -- like Assassin's Creed last year, it's fast becoming one of those "I meant to take a close look at it, but I just never got to it." But I like the way that Bogost, one of the most intelligent designers I've the privilege of knowing, approaches the game, so I recommend you check it out if you're interested in new modes of analysis.

My New Year's Resolution will probably be to embrace variant approaches more -- at least professionally. My personal New Year's resolutions are, of course, to lose weight and quit smoking, the same as they are every year.

Was It Really A Bleh Year?

My Gamasutra colleagues and I (because it's the holidays and I'm sappy I'll say it's an honor to be on that staff) have decided among ourselves on our Top 10 Games of the Year.

I hear a lot of people -- gamers, friends, fellow writers -- say that in the end, the packed 2008 release year was ultimately fairly bleh.

Remember last year, how excited we were for all of the advances that 2008 would bring? We'd seen such vaunted industry growth that we all practically went headfirst into the champagne bowl, and with breaths bated, we couldn't wait to forge ahead.

But we took a lot of dings since then. A badly-timed E3 surrounded by ESA controversy failed to ring the knell of holiday eagerness the way it normally does. The Fall-Holiday release schedule was so stunningly saturated it felt like fighting one's way out under a plastic-sealed mountain of overwhelm and marketing spend -- and then, of course, there are economic factors, as the recession abruptly brought companies' deep-nested problems rushing to the surface.

Even if we'd had many year-end breakthroughs, it'd be a bit hard to feel good about them while Sony struggles to compete, EA stumbles hard, Take-Two's prospects are so-so, NPD numbers start taking minor climbs instead of the leaps and bounds we're used to, Midway enters critical condition, Gamecock gets bought, and Brash collapses. Those latter two didn't really surprise anyone, but those companies had deals with smaller studios like Factor 5 and Cyan, who now struggle to stay alive. We see layoffs at Funcom, Gearbox, Aspyr, Turbine, Silicon Knights, NCsoft -- too many to list.

In other words, there's a bad vibe in the air. Last year we celebrated; this year, we're worrying.

But aside from that, were this year's games really less exciting than last year's? Maybe. I've already said how last year, I had lots of round-ups related to stirring moments in games, interesting characters and captivating relationships -- this year I can only remember being excited by a few, and there've been very few new characters all year that I really feel are worthy of mindshare.

I've talked to lots of reviewers who, like me, are making their year-end lists, and almost all of them seem to agree it's been a challenge to create and sort a list this year, to put games in ascending order of superiority. Ultimately, we're all choosing our personal favorites subjectively, which still feels like a sin in reviewing.

But maybe the diversity and the complexity of the release slate, the difficulty in arriving at a single "correct" opinion, is a heartening sign among all of the dismal flags that, finally, games might be succeeding as individualized experiences.

Rather than titles being "good" or "bad," it seems we're finding them detailed palettes of factors, with different notes of appeal for different audiences. Check out my Variety editor Ben Fritz's convo with Chris Dahlen on why one of them is a "Fable II person" and the other is a "Fallout 3 person," for example.

We might not know how to interpret these differences. Games have never been a medium known for subtlety, and if you just watch the Spike VGAs, they're still not. We're not used to it. But it's pretty clear that opinions are split all across the spectrum on the year's biggest releases, and no one, neither reviewers nor gamers nor forum fans seems to be universally decided. That just might mean that games are finally achieving the level of complexity we've hoped they would -- not that they're bleh because we had no breakout "hits."

Next year: The era where we accept that a game review is well-informed and well-written subjectivity and that a score is shorthand for the opinion, not the decisive end-all? We can only hope.

If You Only Read One More Toplist...

You are inundated with toplists, I know. But I've spent all year advocating for the recognition of innovation, for good writing, for play guides aimed at (gasp) bright folks, and I'd be remiss not to all but force you guys to read Boing Boing Offworld's Top 20 independent and overlooked titles.

I love this stuff, man -- and not just because Offworld's run by my friends and mentors. I'd just like you guys to check this out, because I guarantee you it's different and more thought provoking than the million other lists you'll read that shuffle the placement of Fallout 3 and LBP here and there (yeah, yeah, mea culpa, et cetera).

Frankly, there's not that much out there that makes me feel that little pang of envy, that little twinge in my ribs that goes, don't you wish you could come up with this stuff? It happens, though, and when it does I want to pay it big ups. I really want to see this roundup make a major splash, so I am enlisting the SVGL Army to properly Digg the Offworld 20 so that it can get the eyeballs it deserves. Do me proud!

Always A Chie, Never A Yukiko

Quick note -- thanks a million to longtime SVGLer Scypher for the new banner. It's exactly what I've been wanting, so I think he read my mind.

Art source is here. You want this for your wallpaper, don'tcha?

The Year's 10 Biggest Controversies

"So, you basically get to play video games all day?"

That's what people tend to say to me when I'm having the "what do you do" conversation. I try to smile thinly and explain that, no, what I do all day mostly involves writing news articles, listening to conference calls, looking at stocks and interviewing people.

It's the big stories that really make it fun, though, and over at Gamasutra this morning I've rounded up the ten biggest controversies of the year, most of which I enjoyed (sometimes perversely) covering so much that I'd almost have rather been doing that than playing. Almost!

Anyway, check it out -- it's probably the only time I'll ever get to type "Senior Super Douche" in a Gamasutra piece. Then, what do you say we reflect a little bit in the comments? What news items provoked the most reaction from you this year, and what do you think they'll mean for next year?

Also, do keep an eye on Ben Fritz's Cut Scene blog over at Variety. Ben asked me and my fellow Variety reviewers, Tom Chick and Chris Dahlen -- who also happen to be two of my most-favorite game critics full-stop -- to join him in rounding up our personal top 10 games of the year, and note which we considered the most disappointing and the most overrated, too. Our tenth-bests are already up, and it looks like Cut Scene will be counting our lists down over time, so stay tuned!

The Reviews Symposium, Part I

Some of you know I've been participating in a "reviews symposium" led by Shawn Elliott, John Davison and N'Gai Croal, and consisting of a number of venerated writers from various facets of reviewing and game criticism among whom I'm flattered to be invited.

I'll be honest, because I've said as much to my fellow participants -- I'm kind of not so sure what the ultimate aim of the symposium is or what end, exactly, it's intended to serve, but it is an interesting discussion among us about the issues that concern the work we do. And again, honestly, I don't see that we have discussed much about our issues that hasn't already been talked about at length and in a circular fashion by both ourselves and our audience, and it remains to be seen whether some of our shared questions can be answered definitively -- but the symposium's just getting started, and I'm excited to see where we'll all go together.

There looks to be a long process ahead of us, but I know it's the first time in my limited experience that I've had the chance to put heads together with long-lead critics, traditional print reviewers, and cross-disciplinary writers, like myself, Stephen Totilo and others included.

We've just concluded the first section on review scores, and we touch on the perils of exclusive reviews, too. Shawn's just posted the entirety of the symposium's first section on his blog now for everyone to share. Warning: There is quite a lot of text, but if you're interested in the subject, I suppose this is your definitive resource.

I actually sort of dislike the sound of my own voice on the subject. In the latter part of this year, somewhat frustrated and burnt out of the workload I'd taken on, I vented my spleen here at SVGL probably with more vigor than I'd like against the fashion in which others review games. I still think our critical vocabulary is insufficient and our approach to evaluating games is both too limited and too antiquated, in general -- but I feel as if I should have responded to that by doing my own best work, and not by complaining about the work of others.

I actually almost declined to participate in the symposium because I felt as if I was sick of hearing myself talk about these issues at all, but it was such great company among which to be invited that I couldn't refuse! Discussing with peers is better than whining into a vacuum, after all, and ultimately, I'm glad to be on board with these folks, appreciate their experience and insight, and am interested in the audience's reception. Let us know your thoughts.

Choices, Choices

[The other self]

So, the cement is drying on my annual top ten; I've just submitted my personal picks to my editor at Variety, and discussed one of my top fives with Michael Abbott and friends for an upcoming Brainy Gamer podcast. You should be seeing both fairly soon, and I expect to be taking a heap of your shit for them thereafter (well, maybe not you guys', but someone's).

As I've said, it was a lot harder to make choices this year than it was last year, when the biggest task was selecting between BioShock and Portal (at Gamasutra, we chose Portal). I won't spoil just yet, and we are doing a team top ten at Gama, as I've said -- but all I can say is that my personal top five are all titles that made an impression on me, they're titles that I still regularly discuss, admire and think about, and are titles that I either still play (a rarity) or, now that I've beaten them (also a rarity) would play again.

Mostly, they're titles that I think represent the potential of what games can do and be. When it comes to each of them, even if they weren't perfect in any respect (in fact, I'd argue two out of five of my tops can fairly be called "deeply flawed"), I fell in love with them for their intelligence, the multiple ways in which they can be interpreted, and the ways that they give credit to the player's mental and emotional flexibility.

Wow, I'm starting the expansive justification process already! Probably because I'm getting my gloves on to defend something else I love -- the long, drawn-out exposition of Persona 4 (a game that does indeed make my year-end list).

The only complaint I hear about P4 is that there's literally two hours of gameplay before you take any kind of meaningful control over your protagonist, and three -- more, if you're a slow reader -- before you enter your first dungeon.

I know, I know, any significant kind of non-interactivity is a horrendous no-no in the world of game design. They've done studies that show that the longer the player has to sit there, the less engaged they are with the play, with the caveat that certain types of cutscenes, for example, can actually drive player engagement.

But the thing I'd like to know is this: Why in the world would you ever finish a game that offers at minimum 80 hours of mechanically-identical gameplay throughout; that requires an enormous amount of repetition and patience; that can at times be brutally frustrating (see instant-death attacks that can banish hours of progress) -- if you're not being motivated by emotional investment?

I find the old refrain "I want to play games, not watch them," to be slightly oversimplified. And indeed, I love PixelJunk Eden (it makes The List) because all there is to do is play; one of my favorite all-time games is Castlevania: Symphony of the Night because I just want to kill things and complete maps. That's one way of enjoying video games. But entire genres have cropped up around the idea of immersion and depth; there are just as many games that try to satisfy the player's desire for a long-term experience as there are ones that offer quicker-hit risk and reward.

Persona 4 is absolutely not a quick-hit title. It requires you to make an enormous investment in what you're doing, it requires you to own that silent protagonist and act on an interest in the themes of the game world. It requires you to be interested enough in its story and its subtext to keep driving it to unfurl. And not everyone's going to find it sufficiently interesting, of course -- but along with all the toplists I've made lately comes the thematic refrain that I'm going to carry with me as my major takeaway of the year: Engagement is a choice -- at least in part.

Persona 4's exposition is a highly-detailed slow-burn. Delicately-paced pauses offer you the opportunity to tap into the sense of alienation that a city boy feels when he moves to a sonorously rainy countryside painted with all the visual touchstones of rural Japan. Making tons of menu selections between things like "thank you," "I don't want this" and "..." can seem rote and meaningless at a glance, especially when you note that your answer has little or no effect on the gameplay.

But in a game that is, hauntingly and in no uncertain terms, about "the masks you wear to face life's hardships," the empty buzz of a classroom full of strangers or the sight of your young relative uncomplainingly feeding herself in her father's absence can have additional meaning, especially as you choose what "face" to put on for them.

It's all there if you want to look. Of course, the preference for games that will very quickly respond and reward your input in mechanics-driven, visible ways is wholly natural. Most people like video games because they like that when they press an input button, something quantifiably responds.

But I don't like the easy dismissal of games that are structured so that when you put thought in, you can get emotion back. Maybe on some level games are responsible for engaging and satisfying the player, but I don't care to invalidate the idea that a game is a framework within which a player can elect to engage with themselves. The game won't do it all for you, and you can play your own role in what you yourself take away from it.

Caveat: This doesn't always work. Sometimes a cut scene is just a slog, and sometimes all the elective engagement in the world can't compensate for grueling game mechanics (someone asked why I hate Xenosaga, didn't they?)

But if you haven't played Persona 4 yet, I advise really making time for it. Please don't rush through the opening. If there's something else you need to be doing, or if you just feel like killing things right off, don't sit down with it (you can save numerous times throughout the exposition). If you're interested in reading a book, would you skip the first five chapters because you're impatient? Carve out some time to see what the exposition has to offer you, and allow it to build for you a foundation for your relationship with the game. Decide to invest in the story, and you won't even mind its cliche moments.

Even though I say this, it is admittedly hard for me to sit still and just look and listen a lot of the time, but I found it a very rewarding exercise.

This is a narrative that asks you to believe in "the other self", one that appears inside of a TV, no less -- and then it brilliantly gives you the opportunity to create exactly that. It doesn't grab you by the hand, but holds out its own, palm-up, and asks you to take it.

Also, one of the coolest moments I've seen in a video game all year came early: You, the player, watching on your TV screen as this representation of yourself watches his own reflection in a TV screen, dark enough that you can see your own reflection superimposed on his. Don't X-button through something like that.

Pointing The Finger

[can't stop what's comin' up]

You may have noticed that I've been questioning the Wii a bit often lately, wondering how many purchasers still use theirs and what your relationship to the lil' white angel is (see the poll in the right-hand sidebar for the current stats). This is not, contrary to some assertions, evidence of any bias on my part against either Nintendo or its console. For the record, I love my Wii, although I haven't been excited about any of its games lately and no longer use it with the same frequency that I did in the first year.

My curiosity's prompted by nothing more and nothing less than the Wii phenom, and by association, the Wii Fit sensation, which currently seems to be the largest driver of the console's mass-market sales. When a console sells 2 million units in a recession month that's not December, one would be remiss in not raising one's eyebrows just a little bit.

So I've been paying a bit of extra attention to advertising, attitudes and communication surrounding Wii both within the "gamer community" and outside of it -- and I noticed something distinct.

It's nothing more earth-shattering than the way people pronounce the game title "Wii Fit."

Yeah. I find that people who feel that Wii Fit is a bizarre, possibly hostile mainstream fad put the emphasis on the word "Wii" -- Wiiiiiii-fit, they say, as if levying the "blame" on the platform for allowing a video game console to be treated as an "exercise product" quickly purchased and more quickly neglected.

Heartened and less jaded consumers, however, emphasize the word "Fit" -- wii-FIT, they declare enthusiastically, as if determining their aims for the purchase.

My scientific study reveals -- well, pretty much nothing. But it raises the question: How do you pronounce Wii Fit?

Unsure Whether To Be Horrified Or Jealous That I Wasn't There

Did you watch the Spike VGAs over the weekend? Quite a spectacle -- Jack Black in his underwear wielding a flamethrower, Tim-Freaking-Schafer making an entrance in a carriage, and various women painted entirely silver and fashioned like bizarre robot angels.

"The Spike VGAs are embarrassing" is not a new refrain, of course. And to be fair, the display debacle makes a little bit of sense. Games are still young. We need the special effects, the shenanigans and the scantily-clad broads (and comedians), presumably to draw attention to the space and maintain user interest. MTV's Video Music Awards are another example of this tactic -- after all, everyone knows nobody really watches, anymore, what few videos are actually still extant. People tune into that show to see Britney disasters or find out which chicks are going to kiss.

And I'm often accused of taking myself too seriously, so I'm not sure if I have my head up my ass here, but the entire thing was pretty horrifying. Those who follow my work know I have never in my life taken the "I'm A Woman And I Play Video Games" stance, nor do I ever want to. So if I feel that the show was distastefully exclusionary and -- okay, okay, I'm finally going to say it -- misogynist, there's probably something grievously wrong with it.

And, you know, I tend to only call sexism when something is offensive to women while glorifying men -- but all the show really glorified was that it's awesome to be a chubby nerd in your underwear. How do you guys feel about being portrayed that way?

The opening musical features Jack Black warring on videogames' behalf against the demons of reading, exercise and romance. Wait, don't we live in an age where we'd like to believe that those things are not mutually exclusive? Oh, I see, that was supposed to be the point of the performance (I felt a wash of sympathy for Black, actually). You learn things from games, Wii Fit helps you play actively, and Xbox Live is a wholly viable avenue for modern social interaction. Hey, screw the concept of games being only one entertainment component of a balanced, healthy life. Let's just allow them to account for all our basic functions!

[I'm sure it's not his fault that these monkey statues are so ugly]

Still, head-out-of-ass, that all would have been fine if not for the assertion (and I'm paraphrasing) that you should just "make" your girlfriend play on Live with you if she wants your attention, and that the ancillary merit of Wii Fit is that it can make your girlfriend look like Wii Fit Girl, who did indeed, at the appropriate point in the performance, make a stripe-bottomed, butt-swiveling appearance (though, not being especially a connoisseur of Wii Fit Girl, I can't say whether it was truly her or a dancer styled in her image).

I'm going to say something a little difficult here: I don't think that highlighting female sex appeal -- okay, wait, no, I'm just gonna come out and say it -- I don't think that objectifying women is always sexist. Kim Kardashian is consciously and electively working her brand image when she emerges with cleavage abundant to say, of Dante's Inferno, "It is based on a book. Hee!"

The female body is practically an art object, so I didn't even mind the trotting-out of vacant Marisa Miller or the gyrating argentine archangels (who may or may not have been Argentines). Like the subject heading says, I wasn't sure whether to be horrified at the gaudy display, or jealous that I wasn't there. Everyone looked wonderfully drunk, which might have been a fun way to block out the pain and be less anxious about all the aggressively hot women.

What horrified me was not so much the tackiness of these individual moments. I mean, let's be ostentatious, let's have fun, let's throw a grand flame-throwing fucking spectacle -- but it's the fact that they seemed to be representative of a prevailing 1997 kind of attitude that I thought we were way, way over. And allowing these attitudes to be a visible TV representative of who we are isn't just backward, it's probably destructive.

As I've been saying to friends, I feel we're at least ten years away from the day when we can have a respectable, Versace-gowned and Golden Globes-ish presentation on the worthiest artists and dignitaries among us. And who knows? That day may never come (but if it does, I call dibs on the Valentino). At the very least, the majority of the industry and its fans has widely accepted that the stereotypes of our past are applicable only to a tiny minority. We've relinquished that crap because it holds us back.

We've rejected it because it alienates people -- so why drag it out again at an event whose cranked hyperbole is geared at broadening awareness and increasing appeal? Who in the world still thinks they speak for all of us? Why does the industry participate in this?

...And as a footnote, GTA IV? Seriously?

Oh, and as a second footnote, David Jaffe wants you to know that those God Of War III sneak peeks looked like crap compared to what he's seen, due to the inadequate resolution of the VGA's screen.

I Love To Be Wrong

Last week I rang a bit of the doom bells for Electronic Arts. "Well, that's it," I thought, hearing them say things like "risk reduction" and "hit potential," and immediately concluded that the company would take its heartening portfolio diversity and creative strategy out behind the barn and kill it for Christmas dinner.

Then EA picked up Brutal Legend (are we expected to type umlauts all year?) and it just confirmed Dante's Inferno, too (that one appears to have bad-ass potential, no?). The Grasshopper game looks to be still on, too. Okay, so I maybe spoke too soon.

Y'know, it happens -- I can be a pessimist! From now on, failing evidence to the contrary, I promise to keep my hopeful outlook. And speaking of surprises, we're continuing our year-end retrospective at Gamasutra, and today I kicked in the top five most surprising news stories of the year. Please check it out!

If you haven't been keeping up, we've already rounded up 2008's top disappointments, downloadable titles, overlooked games, gameplay mechanics and indie games.

This weekend I at last played a lot of Persona 4 and I watched the Spike VGAs. More on that later.

Meat Bun Is For Fashion

"Gamer shirts" tend to be a crappy proposition. A gigantic oversize Unreal Tournament T-shirt or one of those baby doll tees featuring a 1UP mushroom might be a good way to be sure that your fellow gamers can easily pick you out in a crowd -- but it isn't exactly a way to look hot.

Fortunately, my friend (and cohort during my time at Kotaku) Mike McWhertor and his partner Scott have created game-inspired shirts that actually look good even to nongamers. If you haven't yet heard of their company, Meat Bun, you should definitely check it out. It's like, game clothes for fashionable grownups.

Yes, I look like a giant child flaunting this particular design, which might be my favorite for reasons clear to anyone who reads my work, but other people will probably look fashionable. I think this Ikaruga/Screaming For Vengeance crossover is actually the coolest. I also own this 1942 shirt with Cammy doing pinup duty on it. Love-love-love it.

Anyway, if you'd like to represent while still being subtle, here's your solution. I pride SVGL on having a readership that wants to elevate discourse around games, so you guys prolly want to elevate fashion around games, too. YEAH!

Are You So Over It?

[where did i get this pic? stole it from google image search. yeah, you heard me.]

Nintendo claims it accounts for 198 percent of the industry's year-over-year revenue growth as of this November, and seeing as it moved 2 million Wiis this month, that's not too hard to believe. Wii Play came out in the U.S. in February 2007, and it's the third-best selling title in November, right behind the month's current blockbusters, Gears 2 and Call of Duty 5.

Props to Mitch Krpata, who suggested I ask Nintendo about Wii Play's life-to-date sales; it's 7.9 million in the U.S. alone.

So, right, we've got it, a surprising megaton of people buy Wii consoles and their family-friendly games. But how many people really use them?

Ben Popken at Consumerist says the Wii is the purchase he absolutely regrets most this year, and a quick glance at his commenters seems to find a consensus. Do you think the Wii's really analogous to, say, an exercise machine -- something that the average consumer (the one driving Wii sales) buys around Christmastime because it's a trend, because they feel vaguely pressured to have one, and then gets only a little bit of use out of it?

If that's the case among the mainstream audience, then it tends to contradict what analysts are saying about why game consoles are still selling so well in a recession. The common wisdom holds that games are making money because of their value proposition -- i.e, in tough times people would rather drop $200 on something they can use forever, than spend $20 on one single trip to the movies. But if people are finding the Wii to be a guilt-inducing fad purchase, it sort of deflates that argument, doesn't it?

I was just telling friends* how waggle-fatigued I am, and I've tended to have an especially hard time these days sticking with games that don't use the Classic controller or a basic pointer-and-nunchuk scheme (Super Mario Galaxy and No More Heroes are the only times I've really enjoyed it). Hell, I'm even slightly tired of scribbling on the DS, and am playing Chrono Trigger in Classic mode. So yeah. I'm a bit over it -- but I also know I don't account for the almighty "mainstream consumer," and neither do you.

Still, I've added a little poll in the right-hand sidebar -- report in on your Wii usage, please! And feel free to elaborate in the comments. Is there any merit to the idea that the Wii is a fad product, versus a high-end console that can have as much as a decade's lifespan of regular use?


[1. "telling friends" = shouting drunkenly to N'Gai and various new pals wearing supersexy Meat Bun T-shirts at Fünde Razor on Wednesday, and I do still play Virtual Console a considerable amount]

Yes Wii Can

We are in a recession, and yet two million people just bought a video game console. Can you guess which one?

The strength of November's just-released NPD numbers is really nothing short of shocking when you consider the extenuating circumstances. Somehow, the video game industry is still experiencing steady growth, and those who assumed that the core market gamer would continue to spend on games while the mainstream consumer dialed spending back are thus far not correct, it seems -- just look at Wii Play still high on the chart at number 3, and Wii Music managing to make the top 10. In fact, this might be the most "mainstream" NPD result I've ever seen!

The results shock me in part because I have recently been acting as if the fact that this consumer exists is a revelation, as I wonder how better I can address them -- how humbling to realize the extent to which this mainstream consumer is carrying the industry.

And anyway, we're not "recession-proof," of course, as I keep saying, but resistance might be more apt a term -- oh, yeah, and Resistance 2 charted in the top 10. Other than that, Sony got pretty creamed, although it continues to grow against its own metrics.

Okay. Nintendo is prolly recession-proof. Holy geez.

[i blame kyle]

Stop Making Sense

[faith plummets]

Alternate title: Disappointment, continued.

I ultimately followed Electronic Arts more closely than any other company this year. Part of this is due to their media strategy -- most publishers of their tier don't tend to do biz interviews with the games press as often. It's also because I was personally interested in the story there, as I think a lot of people were this year -- this publisher we were so accustomed to villainizing seemed, to all appearances, to be not only gaining a soul, but to be aiming to make amends.

Obviously, business is business, and I am imposing a "personal narrative," as CEO John Riccitiello said people liked to do around the EA-Take-Two saga, which I also covered quite closely.

Still, as we watched EA this year make what appeared to be a genuine attempt to raise its quality bar, diversify its portfolio with what Riccitiello called "creative risks" and talk a lot about investing in new ideas and new IP at the expense of short-term profitability, it was a heartening narrative for anyone who's a fan of games, especially alongside comments from EA's peer companies about eliminating "franchises that don’t have the potential to be exploited every year across every platform."

"I can't believe EA is actually the one to be doing things right," one of my colleagues said to me at some point during this year, probably around the time the company scored a partnership with Goichi Suda and his renowned Grasshopper Manufacture, a move that surprised everyone -- and delighted many.

"Whoever simultaneously publishes id and Valve games has my vote," a Kotaku commenter wrote on my E3 interview with Riccitiello. "EA's definitely won me back over," agreed another.

I think that everyone agrees that even if Mirror's Edge, for example, was not executed well, the effort itself was appreciated, and surprising from EA. All in all, it's a happy narrative for the company this year -- the problem is, it didn't work.

You probably already heard yesterday's news -- EA said its holiday portfolio just didn't sell as well as it needed to, and that coupled with other economic factors, like cautious retailers keeping smaller inventories, the company won't make its numbers. Analysts came down on it hard.

A kinder, more creative EA does not make money.

Now, to get profitability back up, it'll have to cull some of those creative risks from its portfolio next year and focus more on maximizing the proven hits. They plan to move further into online business models, like subscriptions and microtransactions, too, which will of course prompt the internet community to harsh on them.

There's no "close but no cigar" award in enterprise; investors don't buy stock for any other reason besides profitability, and a company is a business entity, not an identity with a moral mandate, although most, including EA, are successful at marketing themselves that way.

What's disappointing to me is that I agreed with my colleague -- DRM scandals aside, EA did seem to be doing everything "right," according to the things that gamers as a community say they value. The company's goals were inspiring, and whether or not you liked its games this year, whether or not they had design problems and whether or not they were reviewed well, that in and of itself was respectable.

And it's perplexing to me that the things we respect are not the things we reward with purchases. Of course, that's been the story of the games business for many years. We've seen excellent games go unrewarded, we've seen talented studios go bankrupt, and we've seen beloved online games close because the numbers just weren't there.

"You don't make games profitable on purpose," Riccitiello told me this year. "You make great games first, and then they are profitable."

"I think that trips up a lot of companies... even EA, at different times, when a company is seeking to make purely a profitable game. Frankly, even when EA was at its peak at the last cycle, we didn't talk a lot about profitability as a goal," Riccitiello said. Apparently, EA is going to need to start talking about it again.

However, the moral of this narrative, one supposes, is that effort doesn't always translate into excellence -- perhaps, despite its most earnest endeavors and its healthiest attitude, EA's games genuinely weren't good?

Yet how do you explain the quantifiable measure that Riccitiello offered yesterday as evidence that indeed, most of them are? 17 of the company's titles scored 80 or above on Metacritic this year, as opposed to 7 of the same last year. To be fair, EA did release more games this year than last (I'm unsure off the top of my head how many more), but nonetheless -- 17 titles score over 80, and you can't score strong sales? Do we not want the things we say we want?

This means that either Metacritic is useless as a measure of quality and product desirability (if so, then what's it for?), or that consumers don't care as much about quality as EA thought they did. Theoretically, the consumer that doesn't demand technical excellence would buy on innovation instead -- but if that consumer was dominant in the market, Mirror's Edge would have done just fine.

Either way, the failure of EA's portfolio this year doesn't make a good deal of sense at face value, and what EA learns from its road back from this stumble will be educational to all of us, I'm sure. The pessimist can predict the lesson that the rest of the industry will take from this is that "new IP doesn't sell" and "gamers don't want innovation," but I hope that's not the case.

As a journalist I obviously don't professionally prefer one company over another. But as someone who loves video games, I just wish this personal narrative had come to a happy ending.



[Incidentally, those of you who leave comments on Gamasutra or anywhere else like "OWNED!" "haw haw EA" and things to that effect, please recall that, regardless of how you feel about a company, people who never did anything to you get fired when things like this happen. Grow up and show some class.]

The Year's Top 5 Disappointments

It's December already? It really doesn't seem like that long ago since we did our Best of 2007 at Gamasutra, but somehow, a year has passed, which means it's time to start reflecting again.

As you may know, each of us handles our own top fives on various topics -- events, issues, people, and different sub-sections of games. When it comes to the games themselves, we tend to do it by committee, especially our top 10, which is decided as a group. While time passes quickly, it's a bit too early yet to talk about "Game of the Year" even still -- in case you're wondering, though, no, I haven't decided yet. There are a few titles that I still want to play first, and in the end it'll be much more difficult this year than just picking between Portal and BioShock.

My individual contribution this morning was a roundup of the year's top five biggest disappointments. In my position I get to wear many hats -- blogger, critic, reviewer, industry reporter -- and I aimed here to incorporate the issues that I felt most frustrated about, and that I felt most frustrated the industry, during the year. Check it out!

Speaking of time passing before you know it, I hadn't realized how long it's been since I updated the little sidebar I use to link my favorite stuff from outside of SVGL. You may or may not have seen the big two-parter I did on the piracy issue at Gamasutra, and I've added a little poll today to try and suss out your attitudes on piracy, too. The more writing I do on the issue, the more I realize what an overwhelmingly complex issue it is, so it's probably no surprise that one of the things that disappointed me this year is that there aren't more answers and more solutions.

If you keep up with SVGL, you probably have a good idea of the things I found most disheartening this year, but please see the full list for a couple that may surprise you!

On some of our game lists, we tend to elect "honorable mentions," titles that weren't sorted into the top five but that we found worthy of note anyway (see our Top 5 Downloadables for an example). "Honorable mention" seems like a funny thing to include in a list of disappointments, but there were a couple things I declined to mention because of them being largely personal, too subjective, and probably not useful.

Last year, I wrote a list of what I found the most poignant moments in the year's titles for the Aberrant Gamer. I also wrote a list of the year's best characters. This year, I wouldn't even know where to start with such a list. I'm not sure if nothing really stuck with me because my focus in writing began to shift to industry writing and I was thinking about it less, or because I really couldn't find anything of note -- but either way, that's disappointing.

Well, actually, that's only half-true. If I decline to write a poignant moments list, it's probably because at least three of them would probably be from MGS4. You know how I am! I just haven't got the energy to justify my subjectivity or deal with backlash. If I tried writing a best characters list, it might end up wholly dominated by No More Heroes, and that's probably a little unfair, too. So I'll pass on it this year.

In other words, the range of game elements that truly moved me to write this year was far narrower, and whatever the reason (I'd very much like to know the reason), I'm kind of wistful over that.

Memory

[city of love]

When my longtime boyfriend and I split, the PS2 was really the only one of the consoles that was categorically his, so he kept it. I bought a new PS2 just before I moved and took it with me to my new place, but I hadn't unpacked it until now -- tonight, when I finally made the glorious feat of carving out time to dig into Persona 4.

First of all, the size of the slim PS2 is so negligible as to be stunning. Of course, I knew the new ones are smaller, but this thing is like a library book. It's so light, in fact, that the first time I pulled the controller toward me, I nearly pulled the console off of the TV stand.

Then, I start up the game and am reminded that I need a memory card. It hadn't even occurred to me. How soon we forget!

Need to go and buy one before I can start playing. Sigh.

Many of you may recall I covered Persona 3 extensively last year. Although I was once very much invested in the Japanese RPG genre, and wrote often about the ways I think it can grow, I think I've since embraced the idea that there's nothing wrong with a conventional genre, if the fans like those conventions -- cynically, you could say I've given up on, say, the idea that any Final Fantasy will be radically different in its key respects from the others, or that any Tales series item will ever break the mold.

But the Persona series almost single-handedly maintains my interest in the genre, and I've been saving P4 for when I have enough time to really think on it the way I want to. And I know I'm not the only one who's interested -- many of you have been writing me since July, practically, eager for think-pieces on P4 alike to those I wrote on P3, and yet I'm only just now getting to it.

Although I'd never repudiate the success I've been lucky enough to have in my career, it makes me busy enough now that I could never feel free to cover only one game for an entire month. Sometimes that makes me a little bit sad, in the same way the PS2's loading screen chime makes me nostalgic (I'm only half kidding).

So, I'll quote another one of my favorite games -- "Sorry to keep you waiting" -- and beg your patience just a little bit more while I go out and buy the memory card I bizarrely had no memory of needing.

Blipfest Was Amazing

[low-gain @ blipfest 08]

It was a fantastic weekend here in Brooklyn thanks to the 2008 Blip Festival, four whole nights of chiptune music from the form's major artists. If you're unfamiliar, these musicians use the sound chips from old game hardware (NES, GameBoy, C64 and stuff) and create wholly original music from the sounds.

So it's not like they're playing video game songs -- in fact, many chip musicians would really prefer not to be associated with Super Mario nostalgia -- and yet for those of us who grew up playing games on that hardware, it's still oddly comforting (and sometimes mind-bending) to hear.

To be honest, while I've always appreciated chip music -- I interviewed Nullsleep for Paste Magazine last year -- I never really found it casually listenable. But getting to see it live, complete with visuals and virtuosos wailing on videogame machines inside a crush of other fans was really a pretty singular experience. My personal faves from the show, if I had to pick, were Bubblyfish and Glomag, but I hugely recommend checking out and supporting some of these artists if it sounds like your thing!

I took more photos, but holding up an iPhone in a dancing crowd when you're as short as I am, tottering on heels, and in the sauce is not so much a good method for capturing events. Thankfully, Giz and the NYT have coverage, and I'm sure plenty of other folks do too.

What My Parents Taught Me About Video Games

[My Mom and Dad]

Part of the reason I ended up doing game journalism is, I think, because of my Dad. He was a tech journo when I was a kid, which meant we had everything in the house worth playing for a good chunk of my lucky, lucky youth, and it means he's still pretty up on things today.

Whenever I wonder about the Wii's new audience, I just picture my early-fifties Mom holding the Wii Remote and declaring, ecstatically, a revelation to my father: "Michael! I'm really doing it!" That was a pretty promising day, I thought, because up until then the only involvement Mom had with video game consoles was to passive-aggressively vaccuum over the controller cords while I was trying to play.

So when my parents drove me back to New York City after I spent Thanksgiving in Massachusetts with them, I decided to show my parents some more new stuff, educate them about the miracle of new technology and the richness of present-day player experiences. I think I ended up learning more than they did, though.

My Dad Is Sony's Ideal Audience

This time, my Dad wanted to know about the PlayStation 3. Jack Tretton would thrill if he could hear Dad tell Mom all about how the PS3 is worth its price for the Blu-ray player alone -- and plus, said Dad, the PS3 has Tourist Trophy. Vehicle games are a major selling point to my motorcycle hobbyist father.

To gamers, the much-touted PS3 Blu-ray drive justifies the console's decidedly uncompetitive price just about as much as Nintendo still makes "hardcore" games -- which is to say it's a hilarious idea. First, we all saw how angling the PS3 as anything other than a video game console came to bite Sony -- and how fast they backpedaled as publishers showed signs of skittishness. Now, everyone who'd like to see the platform succeed knows that it needs to be cheaper, and hangs the blame on the Blu-ray decision.

When Kaz Hirai introduced the PS3 by enthusing about Blu-ray, and became upset that no one was interested in Ridge Racer, we all wondered who Hirai thought he was talking to. Guess it was my Dad -- turns out that Blu-ray drive is a significant factor to someone after all.

Dad wanted to check out a game with cars, though, and I had the excellent Midnight Club: Los Angeles for the Xbox 360 on hand. Knowing him, I had to hurry to skip the introductory cut scenes in order to get to the gameplay. After all, this was one of my rare opportunities to share my hobby (and my career) with my parents hands-on -- they tend to glaze over during my articles -- and I knew that if Dad had to sit through dialogue he'd lose interest.

MCLA held Dad's attention for about five minutes. He liked accelerating, but complained that he hates playing an analog stick with his left hand (he's right handed). He tried flipping the controller upside down to reverse the situation, but, of course, that reverses the controls, too. After about 30 seconds of playing the 360 controller in his lap with his hands crossed, he had enough.

If You've Got A Gun, It's A Shooter

I decided to see what my parents thought of Fallout 3, expecting them to be floored by just how far games had come since I was a brat mashing buttons on their living room floor. I loaded up a save that I had just outside Vault 101, where the nuclear wasteland was breathtaking and ready to explore.

"What is this?" Mom asks. "Where are you supposed to be?"

"It's post-apocalyptic Washington," I tell her. "It's really, really cool."

"It doesn't look like Washington," says Mom. "It just looks like... I don't know what." She is not impressed. "How is this Washington?" she keeps wanting to know.

"So this is a first-person shooter, huh?" Dad says.

"No," I insist. "It's more like an RPG, where --"

"Well then, what's that?" Dad points at the screen, where my big pistol is filling up the corner of the first-person view. "Why do you have a gun if it's not a shooter? It sure looks like a shooter to me." He does this partly because he knows he's oversimplifying and thinks it's funny that I'm getting irritated (and now you know where my contrarian nature comes from).

I have to admit, though, he really does have a point.

I start explaining to my parents all about action RPGs, and how FO3 isn't really an FPS, and I'm trying to talk about "actions affect the gameworld" and "death of the American dream" and "environmental storytelling," and suddenly it sounds ridiculous to me.

For just a minute, I see the game as my parents see it -- a guy with a gun trundling across a wasteland. The end.

What Are You?

Instead, I decide to start thinking of the things Mom would enjoy about a game console. She loves casual games, and she pretends to be a technophobe, but if she actually has a chance to acclimate to social media-type things, she tends to get hooked. So I explain to her about small downloadables, indie games, online casual titles and leaderboards, and the only thing I have on hand as an example is PixelJunk Eden. It's no Zuma or anything, but I feel pretty convinced that my parents will find it more relatable than FO3.

It's kind of an art game, I explain, I talk a lot about music and color and flowers growing, and then I put it on.

"This isn't colorful," says Mom, wondering if she's missed something. "I just see blue."

"Well, the colors change when you get these things... you have to pop all these flowers --"

"What flowers?"

It's a little more understandable to them after I play for a minute or two, pollinate a few seeds and keep climbing, but Mom needs to know, "What are you? Is that, like, a scorpion?"

The question of what are you has always seemed highly irrelevant to me when playing PixelJunk Eden -- but, honestly, my best friend, who's a much more acclimated gamer, frequently gets hung up on the same issue.

"Nah," says Mom, after some assessment. "I don't think I would like this."

"Mom wouldn't like this," Dad agrees.

Still, my parents might get a PS3. But the real takeaway of their test drive, for me, was their perspective on this little capsule of my everyday living room experience.

And, you know, my parents aren't totally clueless.

"Your writing isn't as good as you think it is, you know," said my Dad to me earlier on the road trip. "Your articles are too long. You need to at least break things up with subheads, or add some pictures, or something. If nobody gets to the bottom of your article, you're wasting time."

My Dad definitely knows a thing or two about this stuff.

Things We Don't Know

So hey! Sexy Videogame Developerland, the little scrapbook project I started to offer audiences a quick glance at the human side of the games biz, is starting to take off! You might notice that there are many new profiles, and I'm so pleased at how awesome the contributions are that I've started asking friends and colleagues for ways to make the site a more compelling visit -- after all, as I've said, the site will thrive only on how many people are interested in checking it out and contributing to it.

MTV Multiplayer's Stephen Totilo suggested that I add to the submission field a line asking devs to share "One thing you don't know about my game", as a way to add interesting extra content that will keep people checking back. I loved that idea, and Bethesda's Fred Zeleny was kind enough to be my guinea pig. Check out the neat little Fallout 3 personal touch that we added to his profile.

Fred actually submitted a bunch of his favorite little FO3 things, and while I just picked one for his profile for the sake of universal brevity on Sexy Videogame Developerland, I just had to share the full list:

One of my favorite things about a huge game like Fallout 3 is that everyone in the company had a chance to tuck little details into their work, and add a lot of love to the many dark corners of the world. A few of my favorite little touches I added to Fallout 3 (some of which may include minor spoilers):

* The Mechanist's pseudo-heroic line: "The scaly claw of tyranny must be destroyed by the cold, unfeeling pincers of justice!"

* Really, all of Moira's lines, from worrying about "those poor little Mole Ratties" to the many nasty ways the player can vent their frustrations at her, to the 20-years-later epilogue that she gives at the back of the game's special edition strategy guide.

* The Summer Release Schedule in the basement of Hubris Comics, where I got to come up with titles like "Drake Tungsten, Chrono-Cowboy" and "Grognak the Barbarian: An Axe For All Ages." I also got in touch with my inner fanboy with the furious Letter to the Editor, which refers to the Grognak's original, genius author, "Mr Moorellis" - a mashup of two of my own favorites.

* And finally, the most obscure reference I put in the game, the nearly impossible-to-find unique version of the Alien Blaster called "Firelance" - a reference to the Martian Firelances in the fake plot-text in the paragraph book for the original Wasteland.

If you've already submitted your SVGDL profile, it's up to you whether you want to add an additional line to it about your favorite little-known item about something you worked on. I'll edit any profiles that choose to update, and I've incorporated Stephen's suggestion into the guidelines for SVGDL.

And Stephen also found his own way to get inside game devs' heads. Over at MTV Multiplayer, he's published a really intriguing look inside the video-gamey dreams of Mirror's Edge producer Tom Farrer, Lionhead's Peter Molyneux, and more. Check it out!

Anyway, I think Fred's contribution demonstrates how neat it is to remember in such a tangible way that a game can be, in many respects, a collection of personal creative ideas, and that there's probably a little story behind everything you see and do when you play. If you like the idea behind Sexy Videogame Developerland, I humbly plead your continued support with submissions, links from your sites, y'know, stuff like that.