Nerd Crush

My friend works at a restaurant where I had a little thing with the bartender. "I beat the campaign of Modern Warfare 2 in three hours," he announces when I come in to visit her one day after work.

"Stop," I tell him immediately. I decline to greet by hugging, I frown stiffly, and I can hear a worn, thin tone snappish in my voice. "I don't want to talk about work," I tell him. I immediately feel bad for being bitchy. He's a nice kid, and he's told me before that bringing up "game stuff" is an easy way for him to start conversation with me, and he's just so enthusiastic he can't help it, no matter how many times I try to change the subject.

A lot of guys I meet feel the same way, whether they want to date me or not. Such a novelty is it for them to discover a neighborhood gal who presumably "plays video games all day" that they seem over the moon to find a girl they can talk about games with. This should make me feel cool. It makes me annoyed.

Yeah, of course I have played [insert new title here]. It's my job. And yes, of course you may come over and play [game that isn't out yet] with me. Just bring me a bottle of gin and have something else to talk about, please. My house is not an arcade. Sometimes when I'm off the clock video games are the last thing I want to look at, think about or talk about.

Does this sound really unfair of me? Am I sometimes over-sensitive to people who are just trying to be nice or share an interest in my field? Probably, but try to understand it really sucks for men to continually make of me a novelty. I don't want to be a novelty. I am not my job.

And I imagine any gal who's an avid gamer even for a hobby, not for a living, has to deal with the same thing, endless barrages of breathless shock from guys that can't believe you exist. And maybe gals for whom it's just a hobby find this flattering. I don't.

You wouldn't ask your friend who's a lawyer for free legal advice every time you see him. You wouldn't ask your friend who's a tax preparer to share his expertise gratis. You wouldn't bug your psychologist friend about your traumatic childhood every time she simply wants to have coffee with you. You pay people for that stuff.

Maybe I should charge people to play video games with me. Maybe I should refuse to talk about them unless I'm being paid. Maybe I should only allow guys at the bar to ask me if God of War III is any good ("yes, awesome." Like, what else can I reply?) after they've bought me a drink.

...Of course I'm not serious. I wouldn't do this if I didn't love it, and while I definitely get impatient at being pigeonholed as some kind of nerd goddess who's about nothing else but video games, I understand I'm a rarity and I hope I can contribute something useful in my perspectives because of that. It does help me bond with new people, since there aren't too many of us gamers out there who "get it".

But I bring it up because so many of you wrote me asking what I think about GameCrush.com, wherein gamers pay for "PlayDates" with real live females. As I said on Twitter, do you really need a girl to tell you it's demeaning and insulting for you to believe it?

It's stupid, but y'know, I get it. In Japan, girls get compensated for any number of things, from chaste dates to having lunch with salarymen while dressed up as maids with rabbit ears. Part of me feels like it's hard enough to be a female gamer in a culture where -- well, where men would pay women to play games with them -- that they might as well make some money at it. I dunno that any amount of money would be worth the heavy breathing the girl's gonna have to sit through when she's playing MW2 with the kind of guy who'd pay women to play games with him.

What if I auctioned off the opportunity to play and discuss the Metal Gear Solid or Silent Hill Series with me at my house? Would you bid on that, let's say, if it were for charity? Would your opinion change if I for some reason needed the money to keep this blog up? What if I just wanted the money for myself? I am quite sure some of you would, because I am quite sure some of you are here because I am a girl generally determined by others to be pretty. Judging by some of the emails and comments I sometimes receive and promptly delete, a few of you are here only for that.

There's a really ugly reality to our landscape, and while I firmly believe it will evolve and improve, I am also pessimistic that that ugly underbelly can ever fully go away. The way I see it, it was only a matter of time before someone found a way to capitalize on it. I'm not, like, full of outrage. It's just dumb, and I didn't even think it really needed addressing.

I will say I can't wait to interview the girls about what it's like, though!

Post-GDC Mega Catch-Up, Yeah!

Well, I've been home for a few days from GDC -- every year it's an amazing, inspiring and invigorating time. I got to see Jason Rohrer discuss his new DS game, Diamond Trust of London (but Brandon Boyer's writeup of Rohrer's Sleep is Death is far more interesting than my article); he was talking alongside Molleindustria's Paolo Pedercini, whom you know I adore.

I saw some truly impressive Unreal Engine tech demos and received reassurance on the future of AAA gaming from Epic's Mark Rein (despite the concerted attempts of social gaming venture capitalists to discourage me) ; I heard wonderfully wacky Metroid and Wario Ware visionary Yoshio Sakamoto discussing his creative strategy, and I was refreshed to learn that at ThatGameCompany, development process actually comprehends that game developers are human beings and not design robots that produce when crunched upon.

It's amazing what happy people who work well together can create, isn't it? One of the highlights of my GDC was meeting many of the members of the team at Naughty Dog, who swept the Game Developers' Choice awards (which I also attended, enjoying the hosting talents of Kyle Gabler and Erin Robinson). Friend and awesome person Andy Schatz won the IGF with Monaco!

To be quite honest, I have never been a big fan of the Uncharted games; when people ask me what I think of Uncharted 2, I use words like "impressive" "an achievement" "a beautiful game" and "very well done." I mean all those words, of course, but when I'm writing criticism I tend to prize other traits. And I always like to root for underdogs; while I knew there was no chance whatsoever that Demon's Souls would beat Uncharted 2 as Game of the Year at the Choice awards, I selfishly wanted to see it happen! I also would have preferred to see Brutal Legend recognized for writing, but hey.

However, having met a handful of the team's senior members during GDC, I've gotta say I've never met a nicer or more humble group of game developers, and can't help but feel that nobody deserves the recognition more. They are the kind of people who, when you ask them what they do while chatting at the bar, are humble to the max --you have to push to even get them to admit they made the Game of the Year, and they all seem thrilled and bewildered by the recognition.

(Leaders on a certain couple of 2009's other major game successes often do not deign to socialize with us commonfolk, and if they did they would come in all popped collars, snakeskin boots and chest pounding over what they developed.)

The Dogs told me they feel like a family and love working together. I think that makes a difference. I would love it if more publishers got the idea that the way to get developers to make excellent games is to allow them to work according to their own internal culture (provided it's a positive one).

These are the kinds of people and ideas that inspire me most when I am at GDC, although the indies tend to be my very most favorite. The Los Angeles Times has just run an article by me on the constituency of the Experimental Gameplay Project, many of whom I got to say hello to at the event this year. While at GDC I also heard 2DBoy's Ron Carmel explain how a group of indie "angels" hopes to support independent designers in self-publishing.

I spoke on a panel, too. Mia Consalvo, Manveer Heir, Jamin Brophy-Warren and I discussed issues of diversity and race both within video games and on the development side. My friend Michael Abbott of Brainy Gamer fame (who is so warm and nice I cannot quite believe he is From The Internet, and who as usual I did not get to see enough of!) did an excellent write-up of our discussion. There seemed to be a great response to the discussion in general, and Cliff Bleszinski said it gave him ideas and "white man's guilt"!!

Friend and fellow Kotaku columnist Tim Rogers completed a speaker evaluation of my panel that indicates he would not recommend it to others out of the desire to "keep it as a secret weapon," that all speakers received zeroes except for I who received a rare "heart" ranking, and that "Bikini" is required to improve the panel. This was my favorite GDC Souvenir:

(courtesy of Tim, the high-res version of his speaker evaluation is here.)

The combination of hard work and hard drinking killed many of my brain cells, I'm sure -- it was a whirlwind time and I'm glad to be back bumming around in Brooklyn with my snobby cat and not-snobby friends, but there's nothing like GDC. I had a wonderful time, and to those of you who did come up and say hello to me, it was nice to meet you!

Don't forget, you can find all of my GDC coverage, as well as the fine and excellent work of my colleagues, at Gamasutra's designated GDC 2010 landing page.

Hi, GDC!

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

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

Question Of The Week: What Scares You?

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

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

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

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

The Good Ending

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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