Yes. This.

This fantastic piece by Heather Chaplin says pretty much everything I've wanted to say about the gamification 'movement' and all of the entrepreneurs that are driving it. Enjoy your venture capital bucks, guys -- I'm gonna stay with the real world and just play video games for fun, okay?

Music Was Great

...y'know, back then. [via icorules]

Friends Friends Friends Friends Friends

The FFVII Letters between Kirk Hamilton and I are continuing over at Paste Magazine. Right now, we're talking about camp and immersion, and how there's so much silly stuff going on in FFVII -- weird minigames, timing challenges, and parade marching. In modern games we'd complain this kind of thing "breaks immersion," but we don't seem to be bothered by it in FFVII. We wonder why?

It's been a lot of fun for us to be reflecting on simpler times in an era of being inundated by next-gen this and social that. The social media climate in particular, where there's an app for everything and you're supposed to share it with everyone, is a bit overwhelming. Sometimes it even looks silly.

When I wrote 'How I Became A Social Media Millionaire in One Week' at Thought Catalog last Fall, it was a satire of this business culture that trades investment dollars on ideas and in trends, not products or actual market savvy. This hilarious fake 'pitch deck' I found yesterday (via Ian Bogost, naturally) also makes note of the silly sameness inherent in the social media biz (get your fake social media company name here).

And this SUPREMELY HILARIOUS YouTube vid I saw yesterday (also via Ian) satirizes the app developer market really brilliantly: Check out the Brother IntelliFax 2800 App Store. They want developers to be fapping all the time.

All of these apps and all of this sharing. Facebook! Twitter! Ever feel like it's ruining the meaning of the word 'friend?' I certainly do, especially when I realize I have all these virtual strangers 'friended' on Facebook. I wanna delete some of them. You do too, right? THEN I HAVE WRITTEN YOU AN ARTICLE: It's entitled "The Top 5 People You Should Unfriend From Facebook,"and hopefully it will help you out.

I do have some people who are actual friends. Someone on Twitter dug up this old 'podcast' -- I think it's from 2009? that Gillen and I did while becoming progressively more drunk on my kitchen floor at my old apartment in Bed-Stuy. Recommend listening at your own risk as we ramble, at times borderline-offensively, on abstraction and immersion -- but mostly about hentai games and Japanese fetishes. When I get to the part about how maids aren't hot in real life because of an extremely non-PC and wince-inducing reason (which I later clarify, but still!), you can hear Gillen 'helpfully' refilling my glass again. Good times. Embarrassing, but mostly good.

Introducing The FFVII Letters!

I really dislike the idea that in order to be knowledgeable on games, you must have played every game. There are certainly gaps in my lexicon, and I keep quiet about them because there's nothing more I loathe than someone agape, demanding of me, "you never played [that]?! How are you a game journalist" and blah blah blah.

I never thought I'd pull that one on someone else, but when I found out my friend, talented fellow writer Kirk Hamilton, had never played Final Fantasy VII I was pretty much like dude wtf is yr prob fix this now bro (yes, that's kind of how we talk to each other).

Fortunately, rather than tell me to step the eff off, Kirk agreed to launch into a letter series with me which he's running over at Paste Magazine, where he is games editor. In part one, we discuss initial perceptions from his fresh perspective, and in part two, we discuss a bit about the characters and why abstraction makes the world feel real [edit: part 3 is also up] -- follow official index here!)

I know it's tempting to think of FFVII as something that's "been done", but it's fascinating to see an adult gamer discover it for the first time, independent of the climate in which it was originally released, divorced from the fanboyism. I also think everyone who was an FFVII teen should endeavor to replay the game as an adult, as I'm doing -- ideas on who we are now and where we came from help illuminate why a game where everyone had giant hair made a genuine emotional impact on an entire generation.

And for both of us it's making us consider the state of RPGs in 2011, what Westernization has done, and what we might have lost in the march toward streamlined design and better graphics.

Chains Of Meaning

Post-GDC, it takes forever to get back to normal. Like, weeks! I'm still working on it! But here are a few fun things I've been working on in the meantime.

If you couldn't tell, I'm a big fan of Jason Rohrer (remember when I got to play Sleep is Death with him last year?) This GDC, he participated in Eric Zimmerman's annual game design challenge, where a panel of sharp designers are tasked with creating a concept based on a certain theme. This year's was religion, and you can read about how Rohrer won the challenge in my coverage here.

I did an interview with Rohrer on his new game, Inside a Star-Filled Sky. He's a fascinating person to talk to, and despite the whole "art game" thing that canopies much of his work, he's terribly pragmatic and upbeat (that contrast between his heavy death themes and his approachable personality is one of the things I asked him about).

Anyway, Rohrer's challenge-winning Chain World design is now at the center of something of an interesting controversy. If you haven't heard about it, catch up here. The most interesting thing about the debate is that even though it seems that Rohrer's intentions for Chain World are being "subverted" (depending on whom you ask), this very sort of discussion and debate -- what defines "good", what is the fate of the "holy object", who can participate, should money be involved and what principles are most important -- is inherent to religion.

I haven't asked Rohrer about this but I have to think he was aware of the possibility that people would disobey his "rules" for Chain World, or that it would mutate in some fashion beyond his foreseeing. But that we're still discussing the "chain of meaning" behind that little USB key is even more proof that his design was a success, I think.

Other than that, I've launched into an analysis of the narrative of pretty much my favorite album, Joanna Newsom's Have One On Me, speaking of meaning. It's a very personal album to me. Probably only people who are curious about music or who like the record would be interested, but I did it one disc at a time: Part One, Part Two, Part Three.

Special thanks/blame for the Joanna series goes to friend/hero Kieron Gillen, whose idea it was. By the way, Gillen just got married this past weekend, and I regard him more highly than most people I know, so feel free to spam his inbox with congratulatory notes, because he isn't busy CONTROLLING THE FUCKING X-MEN or anything.



Today's Good Song: "I'm Losing Myself", Robin Pecknold (Fleet Foxes) feat. Ed Droste (Grizzly Bear) [via Said The Gramophone]