So here's my news report on Elite, the subscription service for Call of Duty. If you manage to read all the facts about it before you come to an opinion, you're better off than most, as the word 'subscription' is for backward reasons a dirty word in gaming, let alone when it's attached to Bobby Kotick.
But I think it's an awesome idea. I starkly do not enjoy playing Call of Duty. I will probably never be pumped to join a clan and shoot stuff no matter how social they make it. But the largest video game franchise extant is getting this entire nifty interface around it, and that interface does things way beyond what we've gotten with the online platforms we have, Xbox Live and PlayStation 3.
"It's just a social network" doesn't really do it justice. The sheer variety of data points you can measure about yourself and others, and the connection with existing social networks so you can find people to join up with based on common interests seem quite cool to me. And visually it's very pretty, very current.
Of course, the people I personally know that play Call of Duty are my neighbor's children (who are about ten years old), my friends who are stoners, and every dude I see shopping at GameStop around here. The franchise enjoys an enormous population, but how many of them will be interested in or able to use these high-level data points, these Twitter-like hashtag groups?
Not that Activision really needs more than 10 percent of its current userbase to subscribe in order to be very, very profitable off this thing. But anyway, the reason I like it so much is that when I look at it, I see the Call of Duty franchise as programming, as on television. Elite seems to hint at the end of discrete, solitary box products and promise something socially persistent, pervasive. I picture people buying T-shirts with pictures of their clan logo on it, or something.
Not that have a favorite TV show right now, but you know when you get really into a series? What if for five more dollars a month you could have access to all this additional content, info, find viewing buddies, et cetera? I know loads of people who'd pony up if we were talking about Mad Men or the Wire or something.
The Elite framework helps illustrate games as something of cultural permanence, that are legitimate desire objects to their audience, that can have a visual language just like sports do. I kind of hope it's the beginning of a trend. We'll see what happens.
A few months back I asked you guys what you thought of this: A press release from self-styled "virtual worlds pioneer" Jon "NEVERDIE" Jacobs about the showy online game world he'd made as a tribute to his late fiancée, Tina. Neverdie was a figure from the online world of Entropia Universe (which they apparently call Planet Calypso, now), and he was always putting out press releases full of dollar signs and the world "first."
As such, he was apparently a little bit of a controversial figure to the Entropia players -- a spokesperson and a figurehead known as something of a loose cannon, drawing attention as much for his showboating as for his genuine pioneership, his futurist's view of virtual reality and the concept of the self in a game world.
You might be able to tell that I didn't really know how to think about it, since I kind of just tossed up that press release for you to discuss. My coverage of Entropia for Worlds in Motion, back when I ran that site and its GDC summit a few years ago (it now exists as the 'social and online' section of Gamasutra) was fairly business-oriented, wherein I explored the game as a product in a sea of virtual worlds, which if you recall was the big bubble before mobile and social gaming descended on us all.
Finally, the article I wished I could have written if I'd had the ability back then; hell, the one I wished anyone could have written so that I could read it! Stephen Totilo found the press release here at SVGL and, in what's probably the best piece of games-related journalism I've read all year, he spends time with Neverdie, talks to him about how his intense approach to virtually memorializing his fiancée after her death from illness -- along with his bold stunts -- brought him into conflict with his fellow players, and, most interestingly, provokes thought on the concepts of virtual self and virtual life through the views of a very unique individual.
It's a fair portrayal of an interesting cast of characters and a fascinating must-read. Long, but worth your time.
Blogging's kind of like a long, long video game for me. And you know when you get to a new area and you put the game down and for some reason you don't get back to it for a while, it gets harder and harder to pick it up with each passing day? That's how I get with blogging -- even when I don't post here, the world of video games marches on, and so does my work all over the place, and the catch-up mandate opens up like some beast-maw of procrastination.
So in the interest of getting caught up quickly, I hope you don't mind if I just post a list of links to the things I have done since last time I posted here. Sorry; I don't like doing this, but I hope you like the articles!
Kotaku: Blip Festival 2011 coverage, with video I shot myself and photos by my friends. Nullsleep tweeted it, so it must be okay!
-Looking Forward To The Rapture --Amid a lot of snickering about Harold Camping's Rapture, I thought about how it was actually a piquantly horrible, or beautiful idea, depending on how intense your apocalypse fantasies are. -Social Media Is Ruining Everything -- My fairly controversial piece on the stress of information overload and the ability to have more social interaction than the human mind is made to handle. You can tell which commenters' parents are currently paying for them to spend four years majoring in new media studies.
-On Crying -- It's not just for sad people anymore!
I've really been super busy -- and in a week or two I hope to be able to surprise you with a couple of other things I've been working on. Somewhere in there I even hope to find time to link you to all the great things my friends are writing, too. Meanwhile, please accept the following miscellany I found interesting lately:
"Genuinely loving games isn't even enough. You have to love the idea of loving games. You have to listen to music about games and tell jokes about games and dress like characters from games. You must completely obsess over games until you forget how to relate to people in any other way. It's kind of like being an Evangelical or, worse, a Boston sports fan."
Today a conversation with a friend of mine prompted me to recall this song from Akira Yamaoka's Silent Hill 3 soundtrack, 'Letter From The Lost Days.' It's a wistful track, in which a person writes a letter to her future self, wondering about what the passing of time will do with her relationship to her family, friends and her happiness in life.
The song did particularly well in the context of Silent Hill 3, which at its core is about a teen girl exploring her origins and her relationship with her father once the extent of her disassociation with those things become clear. Even though the lyrics of the song don't literally translate to events of the game, the abstract association is very effective.
Coincidentally, I've been watching shows I've already seen before when I'm on a treadmill or elliptical at the gym (they have these internet-enabled screens there so I can Hulu or watch streaming television! The future!) I generally choose to watch things I've seen before -- consuming new media often requires more concentration than I can allocate when I'm working out, so favorite shows are just engaging enough.
I had the bright idea a few days ago to stream the Cowboy Bebop episode 'Speak Like A Child', which sees rambler-gambler Faye Valentine accidentally stumble on a cassette that she recorded for herself as a little girl (before being injured in a space gate accident that left her frozen in cryogenic stasis for years and waking up with no memory, but anyway).
It's one of the most poignant scenes in a long, highly episodic series which assembles its presiding character arcs through occasional vignettes, so it's natural that I found myself climbing an elliptical machine trying not to get choked up about anime in front of other people at the gym. These are powerful ideas -- who you used to be, who you will become, these discrete temporal editions of yourself that are deeply you, yet somehow are still strangers.
Video games have this weird power of permanence. Maybe it's because they're often abstract and allow us to project ourselves into them, as Kirk and I have been talking about in The FFVII Letters. But whenever we tend to think about our most favorite games, we tend to remember less about the game itself and more about where, when and who we were when we were playing them. That impact, that power of instant recollection, is more pervasive than the capsule experience of the play experience, which is generally finite.
This month at Kotaku I wrote about games' power to influence the way we think about the world and our lives, so you can tell I've been thinking about this a lot lately. Related: this Kotaku feature I wrote last year about how much my gaming experiences have been about who I shared them with at the time. When I hear 'Letter From The Lost Days,' I most miss with whom I played Silent Hill 3, who beat all the too-scary parts for me.
We're coming to the end of The FFVII Letters -- just one exchange left. I wanted to begin the letter series to examine whether FFVII really was a Great Video Game, or whether my relationship to it over the years has been more about who I was as a high schooler. We've talked a lot about what makes the game special along our way, but the letter series and the re-play I engaged in has ultimately been a letter to my past self, from the me I am now to the me who loved FFVII as a teen. I think it's amazing that games can form a bridge like that.
You've seen me recently express overwhelm at social media and a world where, when a significant global event occurs as it did this week, none of us can avoid being steeped in the noisy tide of others' emotions and opinions (and fake Martin Luther King quotes). Maybe that's why it's been such a comfort to think about escapism; when headlines about PSN hackers rapidly propel us into a seductive world of future-fiction (I just wrote 'Why We Love Hackers'), it's tempting to miss your past self, to want things to be simpler.
I've wistfully retreated into the sweet, perma-youth simplicity of Pokemon games, and I thought it might be kind of fun to watch Pokemon cartoons at the gym and I wondered about how weird that would seem, a woman my age working out to Pokemon battles. I felt kind of bad that that's a thing I should have to worry about; I wrote 'I Am An Adult Pokemon Fan' at Thought Catalog too, your consideration of which I would appreciate.
The world can be an ugly, noisy place quite often. And people talk a lot about video games as 'power fantasies,' testosterone-fueled grindfests geared at making us feel superhuman. But so many games can help us form meaningful retreats from the obligation to be empowered, from the scariness that, thanks to the magic of the internet, is often shouting chaotically directly into our faces.
I would hazard that while we like games that make us feel cool and powerful, we better like those that give us a place to belong -- where your present self can go back and visit your past self whenever the future-self seems an unknown beast shrouded far ahead in the mists.
