Sexy Videogameland

Baby's First Game Review

2012-01-23T16:14:00.008-05:00

When I was a kid I didn't necessarily aspire to be a video game journalist; primarily I wanted to be an actress, and then occasionally I had designs on becoming a surgeon, until my third grade teacher told me I'd have to buckle down and get better at mathematics if I hoped to make it through medical school. Fuck math, man.

I wanted to become a surgeon because of a computer game, though. Sometimes I don't fully realize how omnipresent games were throughout my life until I look back on my childhood journals and papers and stuff from this sheaf of old junk rescued from my parents' house (where I found my classic Phantasy Star II 'novelization'!).

Anyway, last night I happened to find one of my earliest "game reviews". Judging by the rest of the content of the journal I found it in, I must have been about six when I wrote it:

Fun fact: Donald Duck's Playground for the Commodore 64 was made by Al Lowe, creator of the Leisure Suit Larry series. Believe it or not, I also played those games when young. My parents probably should not have let me. I got a real kick out of being able to interview Lowe a few years ago.

Don't believe the review, either. I wrote it while frustrated. Donald Duck's Playground wasn't weird, it flippin' rocked and I played the shit out of it.

It's Raining

2012-01-23T15:28:00.003-05:00

Continuing with my commitment to revisit the Metal Gear Solid franchise alongside the HD re-release, I've finally written a fairly lavish tribute to what I consider to be overall the finest entry: MGS3, with particular attention to the fight against The End. That's just one of the elements I think make the game such a standout; I re-finished the game at the weekend for the first time in a few years, and I still got all teary at the end.

There's so much more I could say about it, too. The Boss as one of gaming's best female characters ever-ever, the strange palate cleanser of that "ladder scene", the impeccable use of Cold War anxiety elements, blah blah blah. Suffice to say I actually think MGS3 is a perfect video game, and I don't say "perfect" often if ever.

If you missed any bit of my past month's self-indulgent MGSism, here's a blog post on MGS1, and a Kotaku feature about the authorial intent of MGS4. I'm never satisfied that I've said exactly what I want to say about these games, but once in a while, I should probably try writing about other things, eh?

Oh, I have done, a bit. I caught up with 5th Cell to see what it's been like launching their first new IP since Scribblenauts (on iOS, no less!) -- and moving into self publishing. They're also working on an uncharacteristic 3D shooter for XBLA, and Jeremiah Slaczka tells me why it's so important for the studio to continually try new things.

I also talked to Sulake, which makes Habbo, about this intriguing strategy the company is attempting to increase user retention by adding iPhone apps that integrate achievements with what players do in the main game world. What's interesting is they aren't Habbo apps; they're stand-alone games that allow players to showcase their achievements and stuff in the Habbo world. Just about everyone is going multiple platforms in order to compete and engage users in the tricky online space, and it has interesting implications for the rest of gaming, I think.

GDC will be here before we know it, and with it, the most wonderful time of the year: The Independent Games Festival! I've got a bunch of interviews in the works with the finalists of the IGF that you'll be seeing in the coming weeks. If you've got a newsstand near you, check out the December/January issue of NYLON Guys for an in-depth interview with Phil Fish about Fez, and in February/March, I feature Alexander "Demruth" Bruce about Antichamber.

In other news, Indie Game: The Movie showed at Sundance, and I hear via the Twitter that HBO is considering doing some kind of series about the experience of indie game designers based on it. I'm excited that the wider world is starting to understand that these people are some of the modern age's most important artists.

I've been super busy; then again, aren't I always? For some reason lately a high volume of you have sent me articles, blog posts, etc. asking for editing, advice, feedback, thoughts and whatnot, and I just haven't been able to get to any of it. I'm really really sorry! I'll get back to you if I can, but please don't be too mad at me if I just don't have the bandwidth right now.

It continues raining/snowing here in New York. Via thisismyjam.com, here is Broken Water's Kamilche House, a good song for days indoors.

Scoring Sentimentality

2012-01-16T12:53:00.004-05:00

When it comes to entertainment media, I generally think objectivity is a ridiculous notion. We can accept this in most kinds of art -- i.e, "I don't like this" is not thought to be analogous to "this isn't good." We can like things that are bad, and we can feel alienated or repelled by things that are well-crafted if they're not our taste.

It seems more difficult for gamers to accept this, and by "gamers" I mean the kind that are "hardcore" enough to be overly invested in what other people think of something they like. I maintain that probably the biggest reason people read reviews is not "to find out if a game is good," but to help them crystallize their own opinion -- or to make them feel validated in that opinion.

But there's still the assumption that a review can be generally correct or not, vs. something one agrees or disagrees with; certainly it doesn't help that as a technology product there are aspects of a game that are governed by quality rules, that have a right and a wrong way they can be executed.

I hate that. I think for the most part the most interesting work in gaming culture gets done when we let go of this distant idea of games as only product; they are so personal, so subjective, so experiential.

There are people out there who think that Ocarina of Time is the greatest video game ever made. It isn't[*], but I know why a lot of people think so. Read the latest of my Edge columns to come online and see what I mean.

Speaking of products and reviews and stuff, I had a thought-provoking question posed to me the other day, and it spawned an entire editorial: Why doesn't the games press review Facebook games? Would having them on Metacritic or something offer a useful baseline for the space so that it can actually evolve?

All I'm doing right now is replaying MGS 3 in HD. Yep, still my favorite video game.

*"Ocarina of Time is the greatest ocarina-themed videogame of all time." -- Ian Bogost

Take Care Of Each Other

2012-01-13T13:49:00.008-05:00

So given that there are still so many patently horrible people in the world, it continues to be important to emphasize what we all can do to contribute to a civilized, mature and inclusive culture around video games, which often seem to be a little slower to it than other entertainment industries and business segments.

How I feel about women in media -- and some of my personal experiences being one -- was the focus of the talk I gave last month in Toronto at TIFF Nexus, and the video of my keynote is finally online for you to watch! Bear with me: I was incredibly intimidated by the amazing honor of having been invited to speak, and I don't speak so fast nor drop so many 'um's during the talk as I do in the first ten minutes, ha.

During the talk I namecheck Harmonix's Matt Boch, since I was so struck by what he said at NYU's PRACTICE event about gender as performance in Dance Central. Although unfortunately I didn't get that quote down in my initial coverage of his lecture then, ultimately I followed up with him for a larger interview on what exactly that means, and that's now up at Gamasutra, too -- his perspective is fascinating and I highly urge you to read it.

UPDATE! Kirk Hamilton responds at Kotaku, with 'On Playing Dance Central 2 while male.'

Those Harmonix folks are seriously cool people, by the way, as I had the fortune to observe when I was invited in to do an in-depth studio profile that ran in OXM back in the summer. Check it out if you missed it the first go 'round.

Also, toward the end of the talk I paraphrase a Seth Killian quote from PRACTICE regarding misogyny in the Street Fighter community, and the actual quote plus context in Stephen Totilo's coverage over at Kotaku.

On the subject of cool people, my friend Denis Farr writes a follow-up at Kotaku about some of his thoughts since the time he first spoke out on the site as a gay gamer who has experienced homophobia (trigger warnings for such, natch), using this Blizzcon incident as a launching point. He is brave and honest and both of his articles are worth your time.

I have absolutely no time for nor interest in the kind of people to whom these voices and perspectives are somehow unwanted (I mean, I'll forgive you if you don't sit through my whole keynote, but you get what I mean). Games are for fun, we can play, etc., but as in all things we should all aim to be the kind of people who care about where one another are coming from and who are willing to listen.

That seems really, really basic to me.

[Today's Good Song (via thisismyjam.com, use it!): An unexpectedly awesome cover of Neil Young's 'Down By The River' by the Dutch Rhythm & Steel Show Band)]

Performance

2012-01-12T18:51:00.001-05:00

"It's sad to me to think that we're the entertainment industry, and we're the most technologically advanced of all the entertainment industries, and yet we seem to be lacking in a social progressivism that matches our technological progressivism."

-- Harmonix's Matt Boch, Dance Central project director

Gone Baby Gone

2012-01-10T16:26:00.004-05:00

I saved Skyward Sword for after the holidays, despite the fact new Zelda games are currently a sort of Christmas-to-New Year's kind of ritual for many people.

I'm really liking it so far, inasmuch as I can like a new Zelda. To a certain extent my enthusiasm for the brand has diminished with each installment; might just be some formula fatigue, like I got with Pokemon and Harvest Moon despite the fact that games in those series have probably collected hundreds of my hours over the years.

A Link To The Past has this distinctly alien, mysterious quality that I think the brand has lost over the years in favor of a prettier sort of magic. Zelda games are so ritualized now, so tautly Nintendo (not a negative adjective by any measure) that they start to feel like Disney rides or something.

Never stops me from finding things to love about almost every one, though. This time it's Zelda herself, and I think she's indirectly brought something new and special to Skyward Sword I've explained in my newest Gamasutra editorial, if you'd like to have a look.

Also new at Gamasutra: A look from inside Prototype 2's dev team, with its nifty design director -- even if you're not that into Prototype, he's uncommonly candid about some of the twists and turns these internal processes take. What's the value of a Masters of Fine Arts in game design? NYU's resident smart cookie Frank Lantz explains.

Finally, Microsoft has tapped Arkadium to explore cross-platform social gaming; Microsoft Games Studios, to be precise. If you don't really know what that means or you think it sounds irrelevant, you should probably read my new Kotaku column on the biggest new ideas in the games space that you should fully expect to start invading your familiar world in the months to come.

Lastly, I jump on the "Shit ____s Say" bandwagon (if you haven't seen Shit Girls Say, Shit Black Girls Say or Shit Girls Say to Gay Guys, to name a few, git yr azz up ons) by writing Stuff Gamers Say over at Thought Catalog. They are all composites, and one of them is me.

Yes, I know Katawa Shoujo is out, although I appreciate all nine thousand of your mails and tweets. If you don't know what I mean, please read this article I did at Kotaku on the development of this Japanese-style dating game about disabled girls, and the niche internet communities that birthed it.

Yes, I'm going to play and review the final game and you will be the first to know about it when it runs. Properly playing visual novels takes time.

How y'all doing? What're you playing? If I made you forums, would you use them?

Happy New Year!

2012-01-03T14:24:00.003-05:00

Happy new year, everyone! Hope you've all had a good holiday. I spent several solid days being drunk and playing Skyward Sword, which I hadn't gotten to until now. I suppose I'll have some kind of formalized "thoughts" or whatnot on it soon, but for now I've gotta focus on catching up from some prolonged nightmare flu and an intense holiday period.

I wrote about the peculiar comfort in being ill over at Thought Catalog, plus the uncommonly silent limbo of spending a holiday in New York City if you're not particularly Christmas-oriented.

Okay, so one article about being sick, one article about a holiday, and here, one sort-of serious satire about my struggles to get my work done on time and well. Believe it or not, there were some people out there who thought this piece was real advice. I disclaim all liability for what will happen to you if you're that oblique!

Right, but somehow I still did get some stuff done: An editorial on Skyrim. All right, trolls: I think Skyrim is completely rubbish. I have no interest in playing it any more. I have no idea who designed the combat system, looked at that swordplay and went "HEY IT WORKS IT'S PERFECT." Like, really? The game also combines a lot of things I'm just not interested in: high fantasy setting, open world, and loads of lore.

However (who am I kidding, half of you will not read the 'however' and have already begun typing me nerd rage death threats) -- HOWEVER, I totally get why people love it. Totally get it; I wrote a bit about that at Gamasutra.

People like feeling like they're an influential part of something larger than themselves; they like games that give them things to explore and share together. That's the principle with which Jesse Schell is working with his company's new Puzzle Clubhouse, an intriguing new idea for crowdsourced game design. Check the interview.

And it wouldn't be a new year at Gamasutra without our usual exhaustive year-end roundups; I contributed Top 5 Controversies a bit ago, and now I add Top 5 Surprises.

As usual we round up all our year-end material -- including our overall top ten games -- into one big feature for your reading pleasure. This year, our individual contributions to the game of the year list were bylined, so you'll be able to see which titles I vouched the hardest for. Give it a read!

Lots of you have asked what I think of the big changes going down at Kotaku. I've worked with the staff there for some years, including both Brian and Joel, and I wish them tons of the best in their new endeavors, Brian in particular after years of service to -- come on, face it -- our space's most relevant consumer gaming site.

But I'm also incredibly thrilled to see what Stephen and the new guard (including my real good bro Kirk Hamilton) will accomplish over at the big K. Stephen in particular is a fantastic editor who's done a lot for me, and I think his role as Kotaku EIC spells amazing things.

For those that mailed/IMed/Tweeted whatever, as far as I know I'll continue my monthly column as normal, as I've done for I think nearly three years now!

Sucks

2011-12-16T09:55:00.002-05:00

"One of the biggest failings of the videogame industry is that very few people are famous for making games."

-- Gus Mastrapa, Hating on the VGAs is Boring

It's The Most Wonderful Time

2011-12-16T09:07:00.005-05:00

Things've been crazy since my trip to Toronto. I'd never been, and I absolutely loved it. What impressed me most was the fact that the art and tech community there seems to exist on a spectrum, with many people creating from multiple points of focus and collaboratively with other disciplines to interesting results -- I found the worlds of play study, child development, hardware hackers, academia and game design often merged.

TIFF Nexus' Women in Film, Games and New Media event was a huge success. The response to my keynote was overwhelmingly positive (I was TRENDING in Toronto on Twitter! Whoa!), and I hope to have some video or something online for you guys soon. If you're an Edge subscriber, a column distilling some of the key points on which I spoke will appear in an upcoming issue. Meanwhile, at Gamasutra I wrote about the results of the Difference Engine Initiative, the local Hand Eye Society's incubator which focuses on inviting and encouraging women to game development where they may not have considered it before. Amazing stuff I'd be pleased for you to check out.

As usual, I've been up to a whole bunch of other things; here's an editorial I've done on signs of life in the maturing social games space. You can make fun of Facebook games all you want, but you can't ignore them, because the lessons from the social space will start pollinating other platforms.

Across the Atlantic from me, veterans of the UK gaming space including Kuju's Ian Baverstock and Jonathan Newth have formed a brand-new consultancy aimed at assisting game developers in navigating this rapidly-changing cross-platform environment. PopCap, which is unequivocally one of the coolest and smartest game companies there is, is ahead of the curve as it takes another step toward seamless multiplatform play for Bejeweled with an interesting new iOS decision. So yeah, get used to this stuff.

I'm excited that once again Gamasutra is doing its year-end top lists, counting down to our games of the year by rounding up the year's most notable industry events; business trends, anticipated games of 2011, and top indie games of 2011.

I chip in with the year's top five biggest controversies, as I'd know from controversy, natch. Our Mike Rose was kind enough to find a pic of Cole Phelps standing nonchalantly while destruction occurs behind his back. There'll be more top lists, of course, so watch our space.

I wrote a tongue-in-cheek Thought Catalog piece about how Facebook is changing the way we talk about our romantic crush behavior. Sappy shit. I'm amazed at how many of the commenters are taking it seriously. Their relationships must be super unfun. Possibly they are replicants.

Is that it? Yeah, I think that's it for now. Man, I hate this time of year. It puts all our brains through a pulper. Of course, Skyrim does that to me too, and yet it doesn't seem to stop me playing it.

Oh yeah, I need to keep on top of recommending you guys music so that you stop asking me if I've ever heard of, I dunno, Wilco or something, and stop calling "indie" a genre. I'm just playin', ladies, you know I love you. Besides, we're all going to blow our brains out if we hear one more pop Christmas song cover right?

Today's Good Song: The People's Temple - Led as One (Si vis pacem, para bellum)

Love On The Battlefield

2011-12-05T13:40:00.005-05:00

The big lie of war in video games is that it's something you can win. -- Robert Yang

This week, my Metal Gear Solid retrospective heads to Kotaku for a second. When I found myself thinking over the things I love most about the series, it's that one director's vision is clearly expressing itself with very personal correlation points in his games.

That thought process led me to feel quite strongly I'd prefer for sentimental reasons for there to be no MGS5, or at least for Hideo Kojima to at last get his apparent wish not to be heavily involved. Read all about it here. Surprisingly the biggest trigger of nerd rage for this particular column was my offhanded claim that I'm 'pretty much the biggest Metal Gear Solid fan there is.' How dare I!

Changing gears a little, I've done a new editorial at Gamasutra about the changing shape of the social gaming space, and why so many core developers are capitalizing on new opportunities there. Whether or not you play or make them I'd appreciate you giving it a read, because I think there are a lot of prejudices (some admittedly earned, and yet) and misinformation about the social sector out there.

I'm also excited to go to Toronto this week. I have the honor of giving the keynote for TIFF Bell Lightbox's women in film, games and new media day. I have never been to Toronto (or anywhere in Canada, for that matter), but I know enough awesome folks there that I fully expect to love it. And Mathew Kumar has promised to take me for poutine so I'm completely thrilled. Expect coverage and thoughts on the experience in the coming days.

One of the things I love about MGS, besides the stealth gameplay, is its nuanced examination of what war means to different people. In that vein, here's an editorial I highly recommend. I've written a lot about how "realistic" war games make me kind of uneasy. Mostly I just find them spiritually off-putting, aside from the fact I just don't really enjoy playing first-person shooters as a matter of taste. I don't consider myself particularly pacifistic, even; I just find the relationship between war games and the reality of our modern climate a little bit uncomfortable for reasons I struggle to articulate sometimes (see my piece from last year, 'Who Cheers For War?')

And I struggle to articulate the reason because every time I try, a legion of enraged young men rises up to tell me to shut up and get back in the kitchen, which in itself is disturbing. Anything for which maladjusted people are tempted to scream at the top of their lungs in defense would appear to have a red flag upon it, I think.

Big Ups

2011-11-28T12:31:00.004-05:00

Happy belated Thanksgiving, Americans. I stayed at my family's place in Massachusetts for the holiday, and now that I'm back in New York I am fighting to catch up amid the whirlwind of work that December always is. We'll be continuing with our Metal Gear Solid marathon soon! For the moment, though, just some things to catch you up on!

At Thought Catalog, I wrote about the time I adopted a baby robot dinosaur. During the FFVII Letters that Kirk Hamilton and I wrote at Paste, we talked about the broad sketches digital worlds can draw that let us attach our imaginations to things. That sense of attachment is even stranger and more intense when it comes to things that resemble living creatures. And sad. And primal.

There's a new augmented reality game for iOS called Dimensions, and it's very, very neat. It uses the audio in your environment and responds to your movement and activity level to create the sense that you travel among realms of sound. It's easier to experience than to describe, but in this interview at Gamasutra, the developer talks to me about augmented reality and the nuance of making the world around you, subtly, into a magical experience.

There are social games where you click on farm animals and there are real games where you pull triggers and shoot dudes, right? Not anymore. The lines between these platforms are becoming more elastic, and the multiplatform social space and the core gaming space are beginning to borrow from each other more and more. Chris Archer used to work at Activision, but at his new studio, U4ia, he told me he wants to make "first person social" games that bring together the social and FPS spaces.

Of particular interest, he believes that amid all of our networking activities and social media platforms, it's actually harder these days to have a meaningful gaming experience with your actual friends than it was in the ol' LAN party days. What do you think?

I spend a lot of time in the change games space, talking to folks who want to make games that motivate people to support charitable causes or to better understand global issues. One shortfall that's plagued this promising sector for some time is that they've gotten good at raising awareness, but ways to get people to actually do things -- give money, spread the word -- are still under consideration.

A new game from Sojo Studios called Wetopia has found a really promising way to take all of the sharing and visiting and resource management inherent to Facebook games and use it to support major nonprofits. Ellen DeGeneres said she likes it! Check out my interview (with Sojo Studios' Lincoln Brown, not with Ellen, sadly).

Finally, I've gotten to chat to the studio head of IO Interactive about what's next for them. They get to work on a new IP and a new Hitman game once they ship Absolution. In my full interview you can read all about it.

By the way, here are my five most favorite albums from 2011, if you are looking for something new to listen to:

1. Widowspeak (s/t)

2. Parallax (Atlas Sound)

3. Staring at the X (Forest Fire)

4. D (White Denim)

5. Helplessness Blues (Fleet Foxes)

Metal Gear Solid And The Uncommon In The Common

2011-11-21T18:27:00.014-05:00

I'm going to send you a love letter, my dear. Do you know what that is? It's a bullet straight from my gun to your heart." -- Sniper Wolf

I just published this Edge column about how I think it's important for designers and writers to remember to consider audiences who don't think the way they do. A lot of times people tell me they don't get why the MGS series is my favorite, so I'm finally going to try to tell you.

It's so important to my work in games writing to stay relevant and current. Oh well! Today, I want to talk about the original Metal Gear Solid.

I find it unfortunately impossible to replay these days, as it falls into the weird, choppy adolescence of the PlayStation era. I can't reconcile the precision of the gameplay with the rough look, and certain methods of moving and aiming that became more streamlined in later iterations are no longer intuitive to me. I love old games -- in fact, I often prefer them -- and I am obsessed with the tech driving new ones, but things that fall in between tend to displace me, no matter how much I liked them when they were current.

(Sidenote: I had a similar experience when I got Resident Evil: Code Veronica from Xbox Live Arcade -- as it's far and away my favorite Resident Evil, I was psyched to revisit it, only to wonder how the hell I ever managed to navigate that game with a character that controls like a tank).

Unfortunately, the excellent Twin Snakes remake is only on GameCube and I don't have one

anymore. But between Twin Snakes and original MGS1, I've played the game enough times to have indelible memories, which are only reinforced by the fact the characters, scenes and themes of MGS1 scaffold the rest of the series to come, and reflect themselves in every installment.

Actually, to a certain extent it was 1987's original Metal Gear that established certain key conventions: The unarmed infiltration mission where equipment needs to be procured on site; the necessity of rescuing a scientist; warring factions, and war weaponry so powerful it could destabilize the world.

By the time the series reaches its fourth game, it becomes so strange, a lattice of decades (Snake's first outing was actually in 1987, in the original Metal Gear). By MGS4, it's as much a game about video games as it is about Snake, his clone brothers and the morality of war. Hopefully in the coming days I'll get to explain what I mean by that bit in a way that finally satisfies me.

But the original Metal Gear Solid doesn't really indicate that degree of ambition. It seems, on its face, to be a sort of dewy-eyed homage to the sort of action and espionage films Kojima is known to admire, and owes a lot of its tone and style to them. Solid Snake's character design appears to owe more than a small debt to such stuff; he has the look of Kurt Russell's Snake Plissken from Escape from New York (the eyepatch comes later).

Recall that MGS1 released into a time when cutscenes, particularly FMV, were very much in vogue. This was when people my age used to bring friends home from school just to show them opening cinematics. It was exciting -- "it's just like a movie," was a common refrain, and at the time that wasn't a negative. We felt awed.

The idea at the time was that if only technology caught up a little bit, games could become great works of spectacle, capable of the same kind of emotional impact and thrill that our favorite films could provide. So a game that aimed more toward filmic narrative, with lots of dialogue and character, plentiful cinematics and scenes of dramatic, playable showdowns was very much in keeping with the appetites of the time.

Except even then, MGS was ambitious. To some extent, the series always reached beyond what players expected -- even beyond what they necessarily wanted. The most important convention established by the original Metal Gear is the idea that those who employ you, those who you trust for leadership, may turn out to be your greatest enemy.

Pulling that off relied on a pretty basic video game concept: All gamers know that a "boss" is "that guy you fight at the end". But it'd been a long time since we asked, boss of whom?

In Metal Gear, you learn that your boss --who gives you orders in the game -- is your final enemy, your Big Boss. Big Boss is his name and none will ever know otherwise for years to come.

Not an especially creative naming convention. In fact, it's straight up weird and it stays that way: The bad guys of Metal Gear 2: Solid Snake include Big Boss, Running Man, Black Color, Red Blaster and Ultra Box. That's only marginally less blunt than a Mega Man. And, I mean, I haven't even made fun of the name "Solid Snake" yet.

What's weird is that those naming conventions, relics of the late 80s, persisted with the launch of MGS1 nearly ten years later. As credits roll over MGS1s' cinematic intro and Colonel Campbell describes Snake's elaborate counter-terrorism mission, it's a funny note: FOXHOUND's demands include the remains of someone whose name is apparently still Big Boss.

It's as if despite Kojima's excitement about taking advantage of new technology to bring his strange film-hybrid gaming vision one step closer to life, there were some old school concepts he clung to -- and one would be hard-pressed to blame a lack of creativity, as we'll see later. Was it that he couldn't be bothered to reinvent those concepts, or that he had a use for them?

One would have to guess the latter. MGS1 became better known for its bosses than for the particulars of its plot; probably that game's slate of unusual major confrontations remains its defining trait. The succession of Decoy Octopus, Vulcan Raven, Sniper Wolf and Psycho Mantis demonstrates precious little more innovation on the naming side; just like most MGS characters, they get a basic title (the adjective-animal conjunction is particular to members of the FOXHOUND unit). They don't sound very interesting, and yet they are.

When Kirk Hamilton and I did The FFVII Letters, we discussed how simple abstractions can become extremely affecting in context, because they leave us room to fill in our imaginations. Generally we do learn about the personal histories of Snake's enemies and their motivations as we guide him to engage with each -- but one of the singularly interesting things about the MGS games is that the gameplay itself is always an abstraction of the story.

The battle with Sniper Wolf, for example, thematically reflects who the woman is. We learn she became a sniper so that she could exact her revenge for the traumas she suffered in the center of a warzone. The battle of marksmen against her is staged in an open snowfield, where distance and precision are paramount and cover is scarce. The player feels vulnerable, and and the tenuous balance between stalking Wolf to becoming her one-bullet prey is anxious. Most people who play that scene fall silent, breath held.

It's not just cerebral, unusual boss design for its time. The quiet tension of the fight, the footfalls crunched into the snow, the distance from rarely-glimpsed Sniper Wolf herself, and the eerie, lonesome howls of the wolves with which she keeps company are an excellent reflection of her spirit. She is being characterized by the player's gun combat against her, quite rare in games about war. It doesn't really matter what her name is. She's illustrated through the player's experience.

But of course, even people I've met who dislike Metal Gear games remember Psycho Mantis. The most sinister of the FOXHOUNDs, the spectre of his influence haunts the player throughout the game -- a black-clad telekinetic who wears a mask to keep out the thoughts of others, and to veil his face from the burns he sustained after his fear of his father woke his aggression and he incinerated his hometown.

The character is creepy enough, but in another breach with what's perceived to be his obsession with imitating movies, Kojima used Psycho Mantis to famously break the fourth wall between the game and the player. The fight with Mantis is designed so that the player genuinely feels like his game hardware is on the fritz; Mantis can even "read" data from games on other memory cards and report back to the player on what he or she appears to like. Ultimately Mantis can "cause" Snake to defy the player's controller inputs -- to beat him, you have to become "invisible" to him by plugging your controller into the second port.

It's a fun trick now, good for old-school anecdotes; many would consider having experienced it once to be crucial to a well-curated gaming background. But back then, it was revelatory. As with the rest of MGS's boss design, Psycho Mantis' ability to pass through Snake and "invade" the player's space used design to illustrate the character.

In that respect MGS could be said to hold onto some of the primitive traditions of earlier games just so that it could subvert them. Since when did the sprite with a life bar and the word BOSS and little else to recommend him get to express himself through game design in the way that Wolf, Raven and Mantis get to do?

That approach to designing all of the interactions in Metal Gear Solid games -- making them innovative from the design side in a way that gave those moments expressivity from the character side -- is one of the things that especially sets the series apart, and it was MGS1 that defined it.

Best of all, those boss fights characterize Snake, too -- or, they let the player characterize Snake. Who is this ultimate soldier? His world is full of people who think they know, allies and enemies alike, and no one ever seems to be right. Or they all are, to some degree, with the deciding vote cast by the player's concept and play style. Vulcan Raven predicts that Snake will never get respite from war, always haunted by the spirits of his enemies. He'll be shown right a decade later.

That common complaint about the cutscenes, like the director is divorced from the value of interactivity? I advise anyone who thinks that to consider MGS1 more closely.

Throughout MGS, every character and boss reveals to you the ways their childhood and their relationships with family or lack thereof shaped their lens on war and informed their actions. At the end of the game, Snake learns where he himself comes from: He, like his rival, Liquid, are "sons" -- direct copies, more like -- of Big Boss. Isn't it interesting to think of your ultimate rival as your original progenitor, an ending that's a beginning?

Hang onto that idea of begin and end. The series comes right back round to it. Meta. I love meta.

More soon.

Revisiting My Favorites

2011-11-21T03:38:00.004-05:00

How's everyone been? I could talk about how many brand new video games I have over here; I could talk about Skyward Sword or Skyrim or something like that. But I won't, actually -- there are a lot of places you can read that stuff, and since I so rarely get time to update SVGL, I figured I'd talk about something different, though hopefully no less timely.

The Metal Gear Solid HD collection is out, and it looks shockingly good. I think it's a pretty well-known fact that I'm a huge, sentimental fan of the franchise. To be quite honest, it's one of those few I love enough that I don't know where my personal reaction begins and my critical lens -- you know, the distanced thought I try to give games so that I can talk to you guys about them independently of my own taste -- ends.

Okay, I'm a huge fan. But then, even in my work I'm known to prefer games with voice and character. In MGS, that voice and character often veers into the arena of self-indulgence, and jeopardizes things like mass appeal or conventional design wisdom, and even still I prefer it to games that are cleaner and much better crafted.

MGS demands a lot from its players in terms of investment and patience. Its story is not accessible, and it turns over and over on itself like a coiling snake in its attempts to make its numerous meta-meta-plot loops connect. Yes, you have to sit through a lot of dialogue and cut scenes that are nakedly imitative of film. Some people argue that Hideo Kojima, who is director of the series and thus assumedly responsible for its tone and character, is plainly resentful of his audience and of the industry in which he works (I agree). Plenty don't like that.

But to me, a work of creative storytelling needs to reflect the creator. I want to be able to talk about what he or she wants to say, and what their work says about them. I always have something to say about MGS. The media I know I really love will put the hair up on my arms no matter how much time passes, and no matter how many times I experience it (sidenote: I feel this way about Neutral Milk Hotel's song 'Naomi,' one of my favorite songs ever).

My dear game industry: I rarely write scored reviews, but if I had, I would put an eight and higher on everything you have released this fall and winter. You have done well, you have done so, so well. Congratulations. It's one of the highest-quality crops of games I've ever seen. But I will not remember them in ten years. I am sorry.

I've never met a working game designer that thinks MGS is great. I spoke to one lately who said that Tetris is perfect and MGS is not, end of story -- but the thing I think the games industry fails to understand about its audience is that we care a lot less about perfection than it thinks. So for the people who always are asking me what's the big deal about MGS for me, even that'd suffice as an answer: Because it's interesting and I want to talk about it.

I've started sort of replaying all of them since the HD collection came out. My friend Sarah is my copilot, having read in Tom Bissell's lovely book's appendix about the time when he spent a few hours playing MGS4 with me and listening to me chatter about how I feel it's a metaphor for the things Kojima wants to say about the 21st century games industry. No, I'm serious.

People ask me a lot if I have written much about my thoughts on MGS, which I've mostly shared through conversations with others and on Twitter and stuff. Writing it out formally has always seemed too fangirlish. But in the next couple weeks I'm going to try to do it, like, to some extent. Hope you guys join in.

Meanwhile, here's some of what I have done over the last few weeks that I haven't linked yet:

Zach Gage Tackles A Genre He Hates With SpellTower
Microsoft's Tynes Helps Kids Kinect With Project Columbia Prototypes
Toys For Bob's Rewarding Skylanders Flight
Naughty Dog's Lemarchand Defines Uncharted's Heritage
Alice In Wondermind's Trip To The Tate
Empire Avenue's Sentimental Currency In The Social Age

Also, I was on NPR with Ian Bogost in a segment that was based on my recent Kotaku piece on his Cow Clicker game. Cool!

Tough Act

2011-11-11T16:55:00.004-05:00

"As game creators, we put up too much front in our creations and we don't make ourselves nearly vulnerable enough. I think our audience senses this, and they emotionally withdraw from our games."

-- Richard Lemarchand, Naughty Dog lead designer

Thank You

2011-10-31T21:44:00.005-04:00

My latest Kotaku column is an expression of some of my anger, fatigue and frustration at the "woman in games" role I have adopted, at times uneasily and at other times poorly, throughout my career. It's stirring up a lot of controversy, which naturally I predicted, so I wanted to share a couple more thoughts.

When I say I'm tired of always being identified as a "female games journalist," I absolutely don't mean to entirely diminish the relevance of being an outspoken woman in a male-dominated space. My perspectives in my writing come from my identity and my life experience, and being a woman is a part of that I absolutely don't intend to reject.

For example, I was happy to be photographed by Gay Gamer and called a "fabulous femme fatale". Some of my earliest writing was on sex games, and I don't know if that would have gone over so well if I'd been a man (I still write about sex games-- just last week I published a new Escapist column about Anna Anthropy's unusual text-based sex adventure). As everyone always points out, yes, my blog is called Sexy Videogameland and there are pretty girls on it. Everyone knows I think Big Boss is hot. I'm proud to be a strong woman, and sometimes I'm happy to be a silly girly-girly-girl. I am who I am.

It's not that I've suddenly decided I no longer want to be a voice for women, or to speak from a female perspective -- how can I possibly do anything but? I'm just frustrated at the role I'm often asked to take in the constant wars that go on in gaming culture.

I write on a daily basis about things that have zero to do with my gender. I'm a survival horror aficionado. I'm obsessed with experimental storytelling. I love indie games; I love game development and technology. I love all kinds of culture and media. I'm not just here to fill the "lady quota."

Some of the feedback I received so far concerns the hostility in the tone of the piece -- yeah, I was angry. I'm not sorry for that. But there's one thing I need to make clear: For all the anger I felt toward the people I told to grow up else crawl back to forums where they can argue about review scores? That's how grateful I am for an equal number of you right now.

Thank you so much to my colleagues and friends, my longtime readers and my Twitter followers who've stuck with me and watched me publicly fumble as I try to figure all this out. I've had a lot of growing up to do, and I still do, and I've been doing it openly and messily in front of all of you. When I was younger I was one of those people who believed that if I didn't speak about my gender then no one would make a big deal out of it. Not only did that attitude ignore all the women who wanted to look to me for an example, but it also didn't work. I'm unhappy that it took me attaining a larger public profile and a painful degree of attack from the wider core community for me to start listening, learning and taking responsibility for being able to help change things.

These days I tweet about my crazy parties, I tweet snippy things about music, I tweet mean things from bars about the outfits of people who push me. I drink, I can be flippant, I can be arrogant, I can be confrontational. Sometimes I hardly tweet about video games at all, which is the reason you're here, I know.

But there are so many of you who support me anyway, because you share my hopes and dreams about video games and because you believe in my work.

I couldn't get through all the comments on the Kotaku piece. And I got all kinds of those emails that you think are just stereotypes, the "get back in the kitchen" and "quit attention-whoring" and all of that. I've heard it all before and it's lost its ability to hurt me, but it can be disheartening.

I heard from so many of you on Twitter telling me you're behind me, that you read the piece and you support me, and that you, like me, believe that nobody has to tolerate an environment of closed minds and cruel comments in video game culture. I often go around saying I don't care what people think of me or if they find me controversial -- that I'm going to focus on my work, on games and the people who make them, and do the writing I want to do anyway, and that's true to an extent.

Yet it's wonderful to know that so many of the folks who matter to me will stand with me and speak up, too. It makes me feel supported, but it also gives me hope that we can do this, you know? We -- writers, players, creators -- can have a wonderful, healthy culture in video games with discourse, debate, respect and equality. We can all keep helping each other learn and grow together. I'm really lucky to have you with me.

NOW GO GET DRUNK IT'S HALLOWEEN ~ !!

PRACTICE Makes Perfect

2011-10-31T18:08:00.005-04:00

I had a whole Silent Hill tribute post planned for Halloween, but I've been too busy. I went to GDC Online with Gamasutra -- and I also spoke at the Game Narrative Summit with friends Chris Dahlen, Kirk Hamilton, N'Gai Croal, John Davison and Ben Fritz (Kirk wrote about our panel and shared his slides).

Right back from GDC Online, I had my gigantic 1990s-themed birthday party (feat. Ava Luna, Radical Dads, EULA, Ovlov and Casiorossi, check 'em!) Then it was CMJ week, and then the Halloween parties began.

I went as Laura Palmer -- what about you? Also over this past weekend was the fascinating inaugural PRACTICE game design conference at New York University's Game Center. Eric Zimmerman and Frank Lantz explain what it's all about here, and I attended some great talks as well!

PopCap's Scott Jon Siegel spoke about the need for more prototyping specifically in the arena of social games. In a recent column of mine that EDGE published (in the print edition; it won't be online until later), I compared the design methods used by popular Zynga games -- and the player behavior they incite -- to the methodology of drug pushers and the behavior of the addicted. I also wrote not too long ago about how disappointed I was to see some of these methodologies adopted by The Sims Social.

Scott told me on Twitter he was disappointed that folks like me seem to be throwing out his entire industry with the bathwater, but while I've gone after specific examples, design forms and business models with my fists up, I actually do believe there's potential to do special things with this new frontier and don't wish to dismiss that.

Last week I talked to online game veteran Raph Koster, who said that while he feels a sense of loss as games evolve into the social mainstream, he's also excited by the unprecedented opportunity to reach so many people with our love for games. I share Raph's feeling of loss, but I also share his enthusiasm for the possibilities the social space can doubtless attain when the right people are working in it for the right reasons.

Long story short, Scott Jon Siegel is one of those good guys, and he believes that more prototyping -- the experimental rapid sort that is core to process in traditional design -- can help address a lot of the risk aversion and idea-cloning that slows genre emergence and innovation in the social space, and that's a great idea!

Speaking of game design, Harmonix's Matt Boch took us inside Dance Central's prototyping process. The part I wish I'd written down verbatim was when he mentioned the way the game doesn't legislate gender in dance performance ("gender is performance," he said), and showed a video of how a man and a woman could interpret the same feminine, sexy song in their own ways and still succeed in the game.

In other good talks, we had Steve Gaynor on how the design of progression gates can lead to both better storytelling and more interesting use of space, and there was a fascinating, rapid-fire debate among Manveer Heir, Chris Hecker and Nick Fortugno about the extent to which the ability to program is -- or isn't -- essential to the game designer's role.

PRACTICE was such a good time, and is heartening evidence of the fact that we're starting to collect a cohesive, diverse and wonderful game design hub in New York City! I mean, look at this awesome segment on games as art that was shot by PBS -- everyone in it is a New Yorker (I'm in it, too)!

Kotaku's Stephen Totilo was also at PRACTICE, and he wrote about the surprising and interesting discussion that emerged when Seth Killian and Arturo Sanchez were asked about sexism in the Street Fighter community.

I also wrote about sexism at Kotaku today, but I'm going to save the discussion for its own post. Stay tuned!

Melancholy Moo

2011-10-06T14:29:00.002-04:00

I was finally able to do a pretty in-depth story that's been important to me for some time. The subject is my friend, Ian Bogost, and the two major projects he's worked on in the last year or so. At a glance those projects are diametric opposites; perhaps if you read the story you'll be able to find some commonalities that might have even escaped their creator.

I've been getting excellent feedback from you guys via social media since this article ran at the beginning of the week -- thanks to those who've spent time with the story and if you haven't, please do. And for follow-up, you can check out a blog post by Frank Lantz, who's also featured in the piece.

One of Bogost's colleagues is Molleindustria's Paolo Pedercini, of whom I'm a big fan. Something interesting happened when he released a mobile game that was critical of the mobile hardware industry on iOS, and I interviewed him about that here.

I like standing up for what you believe in. As long as you're being rational about it. As you may or may not know, I've been doing a monthly column in Edge's print magazine for the past few months, and it looks like they've begun to make their way online. Check out the debut piece!

When people care about complex issues, discussion is challenging. Read about how MIT's GAMBIT team tackled the difficulty in making an RPG about LGBTQ identity issues in a community context, and check out Auntie Pixelante's scathing response.

Other things: I checked out Mindbloom and Glitch, and I spoke to former AAA execs Ben Cousins and Senta Jakobsen about Ngmoco's innovative new Stockholm office. Spending a lot of time getting ready for GDC Online -- not only have we Gamasutras got a lot of coverage to do, but I'm giving a microtalk on the critics' panel at the Game Narrative Summit. If you'll be at GDC Online next week, come say hi to us!

Sigh. It's a lot of stuff. Sometimes I feel I'll never be able to get it together.

Fans Are Intense

2011-09-13T13:48:00.002-04:00

I attended the Call of Duty XP event out in Los Angeles a bit over a week ago, and it was really elaborate. My summary of the event itself is here. The main draw was ostensibly the opportunity for core fans to spend an entire weekend playing and competing at Modern Warfare 3, but it was also their first look at Activision's Elite premium content service and social networking platform for the franchise.

The company had been rolling out information on Elite in careful bits and pieces, but it wasn't until XP that it announced the price. The company's digital VP, Jamie Berger, feels deeper social features will create a more positive community, and Beachhead, the Activision studio in charge of developing Elite, talked to me about working closely with the other studios, plus some important lessons from the beta.

I imagine that most of the SVGL readers aren't that into Call of Duty, given that the longtime crew usually tells me that you found my work or my blog because of my writing on weird JRPGs, or on survival horror games, or hentai games or something. Those of you in the latter crew might be happy to learn that I'm back on the pervy games with a new monthly at The Escapist.

This month I start out fairly tame with the sexuality of Catherine, but I'm the kind of person who gets a little bored and rebellious writing the same kinds of articles for too long, and then I write things that are weird. Speaking of Catherine, I also wrote about it in my Kotaku feature and reviewed it at Paste. Catherine, Catherine, Catherine. It's a good thing I like that game a lot.

And speaking of weird RPGs, things I like, intense fans, and me writing things that are weird when I get bored, my latest editorial at Gamasutra is about "Persona_ebooks," the Persona-themed Twitter tribute to both that series and internet sensation "Horse_ebooks." Maybe you don't know what I'm talking about, but trust me, you want to. Give it a read.

I've started Persona 2: Innocent Sin on the PSP. It's so weird. I don't even... like, I need to spend several more hours on it before I know what to tell you. But I'm looking forward to those hours, so take that bit for what it's worth.

[Today's Good Song: Broken Water, 'Kamilche House']

Live From Hurricane Irene

2011-08-28T03:40:00.011-04:00

Hi everybody -- sadly, I'm not at PAX like EVERY SINGLE ONE OF MY GAMING FRIENDS. I'm coming to you live from a "Zone B Hurricane Bunker" at the border of Bushwick, Brooklyn. The picture you see above you depicts the eerie cast the sky here had yesterday evening, before the inclement weather descended.

...Not an actual bunker. I'm just at home at 3:40 AM watching all-night Irene reports with my cats, Zelda and Yorda. I only had enough duct tape for one window, so I'm going to try not to exhaust my flashlight battery by using the light to play with the cats, who seem entirely unconcerned.

Actually, there's not much to be concerned about just yet; so far there's just been an intense amount of rain, since the brunt of the hurricane won't hit for a few more hours yet. I'm pretty safe where I am, but I'm kind of a disaster fetishist -- check out my Thought Catalog piece on thoughts about the hurricane.

Since the last time I've updated, kind of a lot has happened; I went to MA to visit some video game developers (and my parents!), so here's interview 1, 2 and 3 from my trip to Irrational. The main reason I went to MA will soon be unveiled!

I've done a couple of editorials at Gamasutra, too. I'm ambivalent in the truest sense of the word about the extent to which I've been sucked into Facebook games. Initially I meant to do some research for my monthly Edge column -- by the way, the current print issue features a piece I wrote on what I perceive to be a disconnect between games critics and the average players, and thanks to those of you who've shot some feedback my way on Twitter about that.

But anyway, yeah, I decided to play some Facebook games, and gradually my wall and my notifications list are being overtaken by game spam. It's driving me crazy, and yet I'm still logging into the stupid things every day. I had thought The Sims Social might be a little different, or a little smarter, but it's kind of the worst offender yet. You can read my Gamasutra analysis for details.

If you are of an industry mind, I've got a couple of things for you: Fellow Gamasutra editor-at-large Chris Morris feels the "revolving door", in his words, of executives at Atari is concerning, and I spoke to the company's latest mobile and digital executive hires about their hopes for the future of the venerated brand. Second, what's former Microsoft Games Studios VP Shane Kim doing these days? You got questions, I got answers!

Some of y'all might be playing Deus Ex: Human Revolution, but of my favorite things I'm doing these days is continuing my letter series with my pal Kirk Hamilton (fairly-newly of Kotaku staff!) about the original Deus Ex. I assume all core PC gamers will have a coronary when I say my persistent impression of it is "eh, it's not Metal Gear Solid." But if you pay even a little attention to this blog, you know I'm almost irrationally fangirlish in regards to MGS, so hopefully you can forgive me.

More seriously, I get why everyone loved Deus Ex so much. It's so, so smart, and I'm having a lot of fun with it. If you aren't up-ons, please enjoy The Deus Ex letters part one, two and three.

When Kirk and I did The FF7 Letters at Paste, one of the conclusions at which we mutually arrived is that sometimes stylization is more immersive than what's passing for "realism" these days. Now that it's au courant to do remakes, HD re-releases and the like of beloved games, I've thought about how pushing for lifelike graphics and "realism" can actually make some games ultimately alienating because they don't age well.

If you happen to be a NYLON Guys subscriber, or to see one on the newsstand, please take a look -- I edit the games section, and have kinda quietly been doing so for the better part of 2011. I just finished assembling NYLON Guys' October/November issue. Uh... did you realize how many major, major games are coming out around then? Here's a fun game: Count how many of them are third in their series.

I went to Capcom's Fight Club in New York, where I hung with Hip Hop Gamer and saw ladies dressed as Phoenix and Felicia. Vs. Tekken plays so, so well, for someone like me who's hardly hardcore about fighters. People take fighting games quite seriously, you realize. There was a line around the block to attend the event; a pair of limo drivers on the next corner asked me what all of those men were waiting for. Because it was in the Chelsea neighborhood, they thought it was a gay lifestyle event and approached me to find out what a woman could possibly be doing there. Wince.

Next week, I'll be at Call of Duty XP. I've never been to such a large-scale event around a single franchise. It should be exciting. Shout out if you're going too, and say hi if you see me! You know the world of the FPS isn't my natural habitat, so I've no idea what to expect.

You can imagine I'm a little tired. I'm half-hoping the power goes out this weekend so I can tell everybody I owe Monday deadlines to that I simply couldn't. Maybe I shouldn't say that in public. Oops.

Finally, thanks to Allan Offal for making an MP3 of DBZ's Launch saying "WELL HELLO", as I'd hoped someone would in my last post.

[Today's Good Song: 'Marquee Moon,' Television (my fave storm jam!)]

WELL HELLO!

2011-08-04T14:15:00.007-04:00

Had this boyfriend once I lived with who played a concerning number of Dragonball Z video games -- you know, the hybrid fighting/RPG ones. I mean, not that I didn't watch them. Like, a lot, to where whenever I am writing a new blog post, or whenever I'm talking to folks I haven't seen in a long time, I have this urge to go, 'WELL HELLO!' in the voice of Launch.

She was running the shop in one of those games... I think it was Budokai Tenkaichi 3... or maybe it was like, some equipment upgrade station... dang man, I dunno. But when you went in she was all WELL HELLO, and so, yeah. Cred points if any commenters can find a clip of that voice audio for me.

(UPDATE: Here is is! Thank you, OffalAl, for making this for us!)

So. Well, hello -- sorry I've been MIA from SVGL a little bit, but I've taken on some longer-term articles (which, like fruit, will bear slowly, stay tuned!) and had my hands full, and when I'm not doing that, I've been traveling. I'm coming to you live from midnight on Cape Cod, where my parents live.

I was raised here in MA, where summer meant Atlantic Ocean, the cold salted stone that borders it, and all of the shellfish that were dashed on its shores. This time of year, I love to visit whenever I've got time; this weekend we visited the Edward Gorey House, swam on a private beach in Yarmouth, ate lobster (favorite food, if I had to pick) -- working vacation, I suppose.

Personal junk aside, the last time we talked, I had been getting ready to stage the Bad Bitches exhibit's opening at Babycastles' Williamsburg locale, and I am happy to report it went lovely. Motherboard covered the proceedings here, and at Kotaku this month, I used my column to address some of the response to the exhibit and, loosely, the reasons I wanted to stage it.

Related to challenging norms, Brandon Sheffield talks to BioWare Montreal's Manveer Heir (friend of mine; I'm sometimes called "Womanveer") about diversity in game characters, I talk to Metanet's brilliant Mare Sheppard about Toronto's Difference Engine Initiative, and interview Starhawk's senior producer at Sony on inclusiveness.

Finally, my bro Kirk Hamilton (who works at Big K now, whoa) writes on the "Mass Effect beauty pageant" that took place to much controversy on Facebook. As a mixed race woman with pretty non-traditional features I can identify with folks who are tired of media ideals that don't look like them, but how I feel about Blonde FemShep is two things: One, lovely blonde women have probably had enough of being told they can't possibly be smart or admirable, so piss off; and two, please stop saying "FemShep." It drives me crazy.

Or, like, I guess, go ahead. I'm pretty not-into Mass Effect, so you guys have fun. I presume most of you guys like Mass Effect for the same reasons I like Twilight: trope-heavy pair bonding in the environment of beloved fantasy cliches where it's fun to laugh at yourself, or, at the very least, to laugh at yourself while secretly being kind of serious about it. Pair bonding is quintessential. I wrote about it here.

Preceding article has nothing to do with video games, bee-tee-dubs. You know how important I think it is that we enjoy things that have nothing to do with video games. Like music! So if you're on Spotify, please add this 1990S MUSIC PLAYLIST, entitled "liquid television," an enormous 11-hour trip back to an era when flannel wasn't ironic. You're welcome.

[Today's Good Song: Broken Water, 'Peripheral Star']

Quick Bits

2011-07-19T13:12:00.005-04:00

Long time no see! Yes, blah blah I'm busy, you know the drill. I finished playing Catherine (I liked it) and I am finishing up Ocarina and I wrote this little love-letter to young Link. SO CUTE.

I also curated an exhibit themed around alt-sexuality games at Babycastles in Williamsburg, and the opening party was ah-mazing. Here's the event page, and there are Flickr galleries by attendees posted on the wall if you want to see a little of what it was like. I was so excited about how well-attended it was, and what meant most of all to me is that everyone was interested in and curious about the games, their creators and what it was like to play them. I lost my voice from giving so many little tours of the cabinets.

Now for some bad news: Silent Barn, Babycastles' first home in Ridgewood, Queens, has been burglarized. Not only is it the home of my friends, it's an important art and show space for our neighborhood and for New York City in general. Audio gear was stolen and people's creations were destroyed, which is a horrible thing to have happen to people who literally live their lives to create a community for artists. Please stay tuned -- if there's anything we can do to help them recover I'd like us to try, because they're the kind of folks who deserve our caring, even if it's just to keep them in our thoughts and send good karma.

[UPDATE: Kickstarter to relaunch the space. Please consider helping!]

Other stuff as I try to catch up with you guys: Awesome Madoka pixel art video; Anamanaguchi remixes Ra Ra Riot. More soon.

Sup Ladies

2011-06-27T11:00:00.000-04:00

The feature on female protagonists I wrote for OXM is now online, featuring thoughts from Hideki Kamiya, Valve's Erik Wolpaw, Crystal Dynamics' Darrell Gallagher and BioWare's Mac Walters. In it, I aimed to take the standard wisdom about how to make good female characters from "cover their boobs and make them admirable" to "let female protagonists be people above all." Okay, so it's a bit more complex than that, but the industry folk I spoke to for the piece had some pretty interesting thoughts, and I'd be psyched for you to give it a read.

Also online is video of the Jesse Schell talk I told you about recently -- have a look if you get a sec. Finally, I also recently published an analysis on the state of games for social good, with a list of the Games For Change Festival winning games.

Please Keep Being Stupid

2011-06-24T10:27:00.001-04:00

I've decided something: In some games, I want the voice acting to be bad, I want the environments to be listlessly unbelievable, and I want all the characters to be two-dimensional, stupid and annoying. Just let them stay that way, please.

Nope, not going crazy. First of all, in my latest Kotaku feature, I explain how the wildly fantastic Infamous 2 helped me loosen up a little and learn to be the bad guy.

I've always been kind of uncomfortable with pointless violence in video games. Not because I think it makes people violent, or because I think it's immoral, or because I think it's "making a statement" of any kind on the real world. It's just because, when I think of all of the possibilities in interactive entertainment, and the incredible things we can do with games -- it's a way to play, something fundamental to human nature, that can't be emulated in any other medium -- it's always just kind of seemed weird to me that all we want to do is shoot things. Shoot people.

In that context, the content out there and the way some people play often perplexes me, even occasionally grosses me out. I feel uncomfortable with games that look too much like real war, for example. I dislike that developers sometimes utilize sensitive real-world imagery or events to create "impact" for their shallow, repetitive, cheez-ball cover shooters. Like, if you're going to leverage real horrific imagery, real suffering, at least do something creative with it.

Right now, though, for once, I am wrecking the shit out of New Marais. I am a little bummed at how far my Serious-Critic thinking cap has taken me from that kind of pure, mindless joy that can keep you playing video games for hours.

These days, when I write, I feel responsible for encouraging people to ask for more than what we've got, to create more than what there is. But I used to love that pure chaos, the freedom to wreak havok. Loved it about Grand Theft Auto games, too, far more than the ponderous storylines or the missions, most of which I would avoid or let someone else play for me. Until the fourth one. It took itself too seriously.

Then it kind of hit me. In order for unadulterated destruction and killing sprees in games to be fun, it has to be funny.

Its context must be so absurd that you can't possibly take it seriously even if you're trying. In Vice City, I, advocate of respect for women in games, passionate evangelist for games as more-than-toys, blah blah blah, was "that player" -- yes, the one who would beat up a prostitute to get my money back, as the old adage goes. I mean, I literally did that.

Because Vice City was flipping hilarious. It was a perfect illustration of absurdist Miami excess, an excellent satire of what was "cool" in the 1980s, and its humor was, very wisely, an indictment of an entire culture and era.

I mean, do I feel awesome explaining to my non-gamer friends about how I had fun running over everyone whose outfit I thought was too tacky? Is that what I want them to think of when they think of video games? Probably not, because they would then glaze over in the middle of my "satire... indictment... so canny" whatever apologia that I break out whenever I talk about GTA.

And I would be bummed if every game were like that. But Infamous 2 -- granted, much less crude and overt in its opportunities for violence than GTA -- is reminding me that it's okay if some games are just there to pretty much let me explode buildings and cars and people and whatever.

Infamous 2 is not a smart game. I have been playing it every free minute I get for the past four days, and I've done a ton of missions and I still don't really know what the plot is. Something something Ray Spheres, powers, this lady, a different lady, science, powers, a guy named Bertrand, powers and powers, that's about all I got. Cole McGrath is such a douchey cliche that he has to be less annoying as a bad guy than as Mr. Hero Helperton. The voice acting makes me climb the walls (although I do go for that gravelly-type voice Cole has).

The citizens of New Marais dodder around awkwardly like weird little scarecrows, wandering into one another and into firefights; I'm in the center of town throwing vehicles at some giant monster and the cars continue driving around, beeping at me because I'm standing in their way. They say stupid things, or sometimes they just run around in screaming hysterics.

But the game world -- you know, the things I need to climb on and jump off of -- is beautifully made. The game feels brilliant. All the important stuff is perfect, and everything else should stay just the way it is. Because if it were less funny and more real, maybe I wouldn't feel so awesome about ripping it all apart.

Now if you'll excuse me, I'm going back to massacring as many civilians as possible to evolve my rank from "Outlaw" to "Infamous." I mean, that's what the game is called, so it seems like that's what I ought to do.

A Tale Of Two Jims

2011-06-23T12:57:00.005-04:00

On Wired now is a long public apology of sorts from Jim Redner, the one-man PR team that 2K Games had contracted to deliver Duke Nukem Forever to reviewers. You may have already heard what went down: In a now-infamous Tweet (since deleted, but now screencapped on the Wired site), Redner implicitly threatened to withhold future review copies from those in the press whose tone he didn't like.

Naturally, we games journalists do not take kindly to those kinds of threats. The review copy isn't payola; we do not make a bargain with PR to help them get good press and sell their games. The job of the reviewer is to evaluate the product for consumers.

Before I go any further, a clarification is in order: I don't write "reviews" per se myself these days, although many of you have read my critical responses to or articles about certain games and called them "reviews." For the context of this discussion, "review" refers to work done by the employed games press with a score that appears on Metacritic, as those are the reviewers of primary interest to public relations.

Although in the past, I've done regular reviews for Paste, Variety and the Onion's AV Club, I don't do that kind of work anymore, for several reasons some of which would probably constitute their own blog post. However, I consider all of the professional games press to be colleagues, as we're all in the business of talking to gamers and the industry about games, and I consider us to share a common interest, although we may approach our work from different angles and for different subsets of the audience.

For the record, I didn't receive a review copy of DNF, nor did I play it or write about it after launch. In Nylon Guys I did a pre-release article about the environment around the game's launch and Gearbox's attempt to resurrect a classic, featuring an interview with Randy Pitchford. Aside from some blog-based personal editorialization that illustrates I've a negative opinion of DNF's tone and themes, I have not published any opinions on the final product itself except to direct you to coverage done by others -- colleagues whose opinions I trust as educated, and whose reviews I believe.

Okay, Now That That's Out Of The Way

Most of us, myself included, publicly bristled at Redner's implied threat. In our long-fought battle to earn credibility with our audience, it's become important to us to both demonstrate and inhabit honesty to consumers at all costs, even if game companies get angry at us. That's our job. Conversely, it's PR's job to ensure the best possible coverage for the game they are representing. If that means denying coverage to reviewers they expect will treat the game negatively, that's their right to do.

It's an uneasy dance that often gets difficult when what game journalists want (to be truthful) clashes with what PR wants (to be positive). In fact, that tension is what makes it hard for all of us, whether we write reviews or not, to do our job. In an industry where so much hinges on Metacritic, a bad score can be devastating to a development team, its publisher and its PR team alike: After two years' work and millions of dollars, a score can ruin it all. It's a lot for us to carry and to think about.

Scoring and Metacritic are problematic in and of themselves (Adam Sessler's GDC 2009 anti-Metacritic rant is an excellent illustration why). But where that tension exists, the fundamental mistrust and struggle for control between writers and PR escalates into a bigger struggle between games journalists in general and the games industry. Because so many reviewers also do other types of work, such as interviewing developers, looking inside industry process as part of a preview, or attending events, that there is so much fear and mistrust means it's often impossible to get at the truth.

Very few of us are trusted well enough to be allowed access to even a neutered on-message interview with executives who make major decisions on the industry's shape. Very few of us are allowed inside a studio for an honest look at how games are made, or at the people who make them, information that would illuminate and enrich audience experience with the medium -- and equally-importantly, as far as I'm concerned, would educate developers at different studios about one another and the business in which they work.

The games industry seems to me to be unusually secretive, and it continues to be allowed to be secretive because there's no easy solution to this vicious cycle of mistrust. The unfortunate side effect is that gamers hardly trust their games press, either, watching to see which of us are being "bought", making the wrong kinds of ethical compromises, whether we're telling them the truth.

The net effect: At least when it comes to consumer-facing stuff, we're a crippled, often powerless media contingent that feels bad even using the word "journalist" to describe ourselves even when that is absolutely what we do for a living. We hear all the time that we're "not real journalists" or that there's "no real games journalism."

Neither of those things are true, but you can't deny that there's a landscape that might often lead people to be that reductive about it. There's a poor definition of roles: My audience can't tell a consumer review from free-roaming critical thought; can't tell a news report from an opinion piece, can't tell a business article from a blog post ("great blog on Gamasutra," someone will tell me, after I publish a news interview wholly free from my own voice).

That sucks for our readers, it sucks for us, and it sucks for the game industry.

The Review In Question

Ever since Redner's self-described Twitter "brain-fart", he's said that it was one particular review that set him off -- both in today's Wired guest column and in a long email apology he sent to numerous members of the games press. He claims that this one was not a fair opinion of DNF, but a "scathing diatribe." Personally, I feel that his explication loses most of its steam when he refuses to call out which review was so egregiously possessed of "venom" that it warranted that kind of response -- how can we evaluate whether or not his position is fair unless we can weigh the review in question?

However, the offending review is widely believed to have been done by Destructoid's Jim Sterling, who gave the game a 2 out of 10 and said the game could "only endear itself to the sociopathic and mentally maladjusted." Not having played the game, I can't personally say whether his blisteringly low opinion is warranted. That it's such an outlier tone and score-wise from many other decisively negative reviews of the game seems telling to me, but either way, it's definitely a venomous writeup.

Harsh, yes, but not surprising: Jim's made a career out of his inflammatory public persona, biting language, and viewpoints that are as likely to be jaw-droppingly juvenile and offensive as they are to be crazy hilarious to some.

You may not know this, but years ago I was part of Destructoid's staff with Jim. The site was quite young then -- we would all talk amongst ourselves about how we dreamed of making it big --and I was still learning how to do this games journalism thing. Without the welcome of Niero, the site's founder, and Colette Bennett, the friend who discovered Sexy Videogameland and invited me to join the scrappy Dtoid team, I don't know whether this blog would have discovered its wider initial audience, or whether I would have become visible to those who eventually hired me for the projects on which I built my career. I owe them a great debt of thanks, and I think well of the entire staff as people.

Oddly, that includes Jim, to an extent. While I definitely don't always approve of his language, his tactics, many of his viewpoints or his method of dealing with conflicts, I respect his right to do it. He has an audience that likes his shtick and he drives massive traffic for those who employ him. It's not the way I'd do it, but there's room for all kinds. I told him as much when I saw him at E3, gave him a hug and tweeted a photograph of us together. While we'll probably clash in public many times when he insults someone or something I like, we'll probably never want to work together, and we'll probably never want to read much of what one another writes, there's no actual feud.

Whenever people ask me about this, I've always said, "The fact that Jim's out there doing his thing doesn't stop me or anyone else from doing ours."

However, an episode like this makes me wonder if that's really true.

Well, Actually, It Makes Our Lives Harder

Jim Redner did the wrong thing, of course; while he is free to send or not send review copies to whomever he wants, threatening people in the public forum is just tacky. It got him fired by 2K. Yet, what's the responsibility of a reviewer, especially in the Metacritic era where that stupid number means so much?

Jim Sterling's cult of personality commands such a large and loyal fanbase that it would be foolish for the public relations community to ignore him. More importantly, it would be foolish for his employers to stifle and censor him: He defines communities wherever he goes, and he manages to command the conversation. Here I am writing about him right now, and this happens whenever a Sterling-centric conflict flares. That's power, whether anyone likes it or not.

Maybe we don't owe anyone good press or a positive review, but do we owe the review process -- and by extension, the industry we cover -- a basic level of dignity? That's an open question for all of us to chew on, but more importantly, for now: To what extent should a cult of personality impact the way this industry relates to its press?

One thing I've always appreciated about Jim is that, at least in the conversations I've been involved in, he has never claimed to be a "games journalist." He's accepted his role as pundit and entertainer and he enjoys it, and he's been honest about not giving a damn how professional we think he is. Again, let him do his thing.

The problem is, Jim disdains the idea of being a professional, but the industry is forced to treat him like one because of the audience he governs. Imagine if a PR firm said, "no, Jim, we don't like 'that thing you do', and we're not going to send you any more review copies." Mass hysteria from the community! "Someone is blackballing Destructoid," the conversation would go; "they're quashing Jim's voice!" people would shout.

That kind of snafu would be even more destructive to a company and its brand than a bad review from Jim. So when Jim doesn't like something, PR has got no choice but to take the hit. That's as much of a vicious standoff as anything PR has ever done to the games press.

Not only does that seem a little unfair, but it does affect the rest of us. We may be able to see Jim as a single figure in a broad landscape of writers, but some of our audience doesn't. The industry doesn't. Again, we suffer from our poor definition of roles. I can't tell you how many people have told me that they think "we are all" bullshit, and they cite Jim Sterling. How many times do the rest of us have to say, "we're not like that?"

Even still, all we can do is to do our own thing, the best we can. I'm not disputing that. The issue I have is this: Why call Jim Sterling a "reviewer" and allow him to participate in the Metacritic system when his methods are so frequently aberrant from the work the rest of the product review community does?

So Hey, Jim?

I'm sure someone will point this blog post out to you, and if you're reading this, all I'd like is for you to consider framing your Destructoid work outside of the review format and to remove yourself, just your "reviews", from Metacritic. Probably achievable just by not headlining it 'review' or whatever -- no one makes Yahtzee give an "official" score. Yes, again, Metacritic sucks and is problematic, but unfortunately it's the ultimate distillation of our relationship with the industry and until we find a better solution, I believe it's best for everyone involved if we approach it with a sense of responsibility and a measured attitude.

I know you believe we cover an entertainment medium and none of us should take ourselves seriously, but you chose your own role, so let us choose ours. We can respect what you do for your readers, but we'd like you to respect what we're trying to do for ours. If you don't want to be a professional, if you don't want to be a games journalist, then leave the reviewers to their own space.

It'd be a win for everyone, I think: You'd be free to say and do whatever you want, and about whatever games you want, without busybodies like me banging on about how you should be more responsible; Destructoid will probably have an even better time working with the business once PR's less afraid of your power as a rogue variable, your audience can get whatever uncensored whimsy you feel like producing at any given time, and no one on any side of the fence will have to argue about whether the impact you're having on people's scores is fair.

Part of why I hate writing formal reviews is because of this ethical minefield and these drawn-out conversations that keep rearing their heads. Bet you hate them, too. So let's neither of us be reviewers, and hopefully the result is more fun for you and helps us journalists improve our relationship with the industry.

Please just think about it?

UPDATE: Responding via Twitter, Jim politely disagreed with me; the following is an unedited quote from his feed:

"To answer: If I wrote my reviews in the same tone that I write my satirical or rant pieces, I think there'd be a point in what Leigh says. However, I do not. I didn't write the Duke review, or any review, to be "funny." There's a significant change in tone when I write them. Even when harsh, I work VERY hard to back up my scores with solid reasoning & feel points of view similar to mind deserve a voice on MCritic.

And as far as DNF goes? I'm not the only one and Redner may not have even been talking about me. This was harsher: http://is.gd/sXGODu Anyway, that's my response. Feel free to debate it, but don't flame Leigh or anything. I respectfully disagree - emphasis, *respectfully*."

Happy Birthday, Sonic!

2011-06-23T12:48:00.005-04:00

Happy birthday, Sonic the Hedgehog! Today is the blue guy's 20th anniversary, and I was a Sega kid who now feels kind of old. Tim Rogers' Kotaku piece today provides "helpful advice" to Sega on how it can finally make Sonic "not suck" -- mostly hilarious satire, but some for-serious chestnuts in there, too.

Ever wonder what Sonic the Hedgehog is doing now? Good thing I wrote this Thought Catalog piece a little bit back that describes exactly that.

Media As Care For Others

2011-06-22T18:56:00.001-04:00

"When you really care about what your game is going to do to somebody... if you put that in there, people feel it and they acknowledge it. They appreciate it, because nothing feels better than the feeling that 'someone else cares what I've accomplished.'"

-- Jesse Schell, G4C 2011 Closing Keynote

Insular Illumination

2011-06-22T18:19:00.006-04:00

Horrible insomnia last night; zero sleep. 9:00 AM this morning found me Netflix-ing The Secret of Kells, a very lovely animated film which I hoped would soothing enough to assuage that awful eye-aching, chest-knit agony that sets in when you've been without rest too long and can't find any in the face of exhaustion.

It was! Really enjoyed it. The star is the animation and the visual technique, but the music was lovely too, and I was impressed that despite the fact it's a story of a religious book, it avoided being messagey. It was so pretty I didn't mind it being plot-light; would love to see the same animators do another film with more story substance, as the storytelling was mature and nuanced. I recommend it!

The main theme of the film is the idea that a beautiful book has the power to bring peace. In happy synchronicity, Jesse Schell's fantastic closing keynote of the 2011 Games For Change event today also focused on the idea that communications media -- especially games -- have enormous power to affect behavior and bring peace and world change. It was a very moving talk; you can check out my writeup on Gamasutra right now, although I advise you to keep an eye on the Games For Change video library; I'm hoping they put video of Schell's talk online so that you can watch it yourself.

Also new: longstanding and much-beloved online zine Insert Credit has relaunched! I read Insert Credit before I was old enough to drink, and that's where I first heard of a dude named Brandon Sheffield, never knowing at the time that he'd be a coworker of mine nearly a decade later. It's with great pleasure I accepted his invitation to me to contribute here and there from time to time.

For starters I join all the staff in contributing this piece as part of a huge manifesto-of-sorts on the state of games journalism. It's not a topic I actually like talking about too much -- don't talk about making it better, just do it, is sorta how I roll -- but in this case, I felt I had some new thoughts to contribute, since it's been a while since I addressed it.

Finally, allow me to take a pause on all this positivity to direct your attention to my latest Thought Catalog piece, where I had a little time to try to talk "sense" into those dudes who are always complaining that girls don't like them because they are "too nice." LOGICAL FALLACY.

Games For Good

2011-06-21T12:42:00.004-04:00

The annual Games For Change event is going on here in New York City, an event fairly dear to my heart (and not just because coverage of the event in 2007 was the very first feature I ever did for Gamasutra). The field of applying gaming and game design concepts to learning and activism is still shaping up, as more and more organizations notice the enormous economic and social breadth of the medium. This is exciting to me, because it means people will be exploring the power of interactive entertainment and the goodness of play for all kinds of things besides just the fun of it.

This year, the keynote speaker was Vice President Al Gore, who as you know is passionate in his career about global causes, particularly climate change. For such a prominent figure so active in philanthropy to come to New York City to tell nonprofits and game developers hoping to partner in the change games arena that he believes in this power for games was really significant, I think. Check out my keynote coverage at Gamasutra, and there'll be more from the event in the coming days.

On a related note, I was honored to be once again invited to judge the games entered in this year's Life.Love game challenge, hosted annually by Jennifer Ann's Group, which works to educate young people on the dangers of teen dating violence and how to protect themselves and their friends. This year's games were of an impressive quality -- check out the winners! That Jennifer Ann's Group uses game design to reach out to its target demographic is another example of how positive our medium can be. Please consider supporting Jennifer Ann's Group by sharing its resources with people you know or in any way you can.

Yes, games are very positive. Meanwhile, Infamous 2 lets me throw a truck at a helicopter and electrocute those annoying street performers that drum on pails and I love it. More on that soon. Meanwhile, check out the latest GamerDork podcast, where I once again join Leon, Neil and their fabulous accents to shoot the breeze on E3 and the games we've been loving.

Cole, Spyro And The Jerk Trend

2011-06-17T13:11:00.008-04:00

I recently interviewed Insomniac's Ted Price at Gamasutra, and I also did a profile of him for an upcoming issue of Edge. Next issue? I'm kind of not sure, actually, because when I write for print magazines lead times are long and I have trouble keeping track. I send in my work and some time later you guys tell me on Twitter that you liked my article. What would I do without you?

There were portions of the discussion that I didn't end up using in either interview; among other things, we talked about Spyro, and I asked him about Activision's multimedia toy project, Skylanders, that stars a tougher, scalier version of the little dragon that seems more likely to jive with its target audience -- today's tweens, presumably -- than the friendly spark-puffing purple guy of yore.

Price, who is one of the more pleasant executives I've ever interviewed, told me he likes Activision's take on Spyro -- "Boy, Spyro has changed!" he laughed.

For Insomniac, Spyro was an effort to diversify after Disruptor, the company's debut game, which had been a first-person shooter capitalizing on the Doom trend. The studio, which has now been around for 17 years, was relatively young at the time, and still defining its flavor, but even with Spyro the team was discovering that it liked unusual weapons, as in all of the dragon's different breath abilities.

The mascot platformer genre was in its heyday, if you remember. It wasn't just Sega and Nintendo that chose characters to represent themselves in Sonic and Mario -- almost every studio was trying to pin down a cute-but-cool animal buddy that could represent it. It was the 1990s, and it was important to be "radical", in the 1990s sense of the word, which meant your mascot had to be cute and appealing, but he also had to have "attitude."

"There was always that tension within the studio, a good tension, about who Spyro should be," Price told me. "We started out with a Spyro that was kind of cocky and a jerk... we found the fans didn't necessarily appreciate the cocky nature, and it made him a less endearing character."

In other words, it was possible to take that "attitude" too far. These days, although Insomniac is still successful with Ratchet games, mascots in general are fewer and further between, and probably for good business reason, as Sega's numerous off-the-mark attempts to resurrect the Sonic brand have demonstrated.

Recently I have played two video games back to back where the protagonist is a cocky jerk -- and they even have the same name, Cole (L.A. Noire and Infamous 2, to be specific). Is "cocky armed jerk" the game industry's new "mascot character?" I certainly think so. I even find hometown-hero type Nathan Drake to be a little bit of a dick, but I think I might be in a minority here.

But in a sense, I think we're seeing the same bell curve trend happening with our modern protagonists that touched the mascot action genre in the 1990s. In an effort to answer our cries for something more interesting than the silent space marine, games are giving us all kinds of "tortured, complex" dudes, arrogant bastards who don't have to be a "good guy" to win. Maybe they're even setting themselves up to be hoist by their own petards, because those are apparently themes that show games fans how modern and edgy our narratives are.

But Price was correct: After a while in the 1990s, we became turned off not only by the glut of sameness in the mascot genre, but even more by the "attitude" that was supposed to make those animal characters so cool. I think the reason the mascot genre became less relevant wasn't necessarily because we were oversaturated with the format or because we were tired of that type of game mechanic and level design: I think we stopped liking that type of hero.

When's the last time you played as someone you found truly endearing? How many more jerks, named Cole or otherwise, do I have to play as this year? Do you guys notice this as well, and are you bothered by it? If so, what do you think historical patterns indicate might be coming next?

In unrelated news, it is Friday, this weekend is Northside Festival and I'm going to see Woods tonight, one of my absolute favorites. This weekend is also exciting because my friends' band Quiet Loudly are playing with Holy Spirits, whom I also love. Holy Spirits just did a lovely cream-and-gold vinyl split 12" with Mutual Benefit; you can listen to it on Bandcamp and I highly recommend you do! (Substitute all these links for the usual 'Today's Good Song' and you come out ahead!)

In honor of festival weekend I've written The Different Types of Drunk You Can Be at Thought Catalog. I'm a jerk. And now we're back on topic.

Electric Core

2011-06-16T13:39:00.004-04:00

We've all still got E3 on the brain, I guess. More things I did there: Hung out with Lisa Foiles, who gave me a pretty hilarious spot on her video toplist of "things you really missed at E3." Tim Rogers' Duke Nukem impression is also included. Watch it, it's funny!

Other things I did: Talked to executives, and a couple of those interviews are go! THQ core games boss Danny Bilson talks to me about defining the core space in a world where everything is going social and online; EA Sports' Peter Moore also weighs in on the latest trends, telling me there won't be any offline games in the future, and sharing some thoughts about Wii U.

I've also just started playing Infamous 2, which showed up while I was in L.A., and I should have something to say about it soon. You guys like it?

[Today's Good Song: 'All of the Lights' Mashup (Kanye x Ellie Goulding x Portland Cello Project), The Hood Internet]

For Dummies

2011-06-14T13:33:00.008-04:00

If you're not sure what it's really like at E3, or have trouble explaining it to a friend, I am here to help you. I've written "7 Things You Do At A Video Game Conference," a guide for dummies. Or for cynics. Please, please do not take me seriously. At least not too much.

In addition to those things, while I was at E3 I also did an interview with Insomniac's Ted Price about going multiplatform with Overstrike. Amazing dude, amazing studio.

Eurogamer's review of Duke Nukem Forever is the most thorough and best one I've yet read. The only defense people who are, for whatever reason, big fans of this game have been able to mount is that it's impossible to review this game in context, yet this review handily acknowledges all the forces that might come to bear on a review of a forever-awaited sequel in a defunct franchise and explains itself well in their light.

I mean, it seems that way to me, at least. I was never really even interested in original Duke Nukem; back in those days I could barely be bothered to put down my Genesis controller long enough to say, "first-person shooters? Those aren't video games, those are weird sports for boys." Ha.

But as much as I've long agreed at the consensus that Duke is an embarrassing exercise in looking backward that probably didn't need to happen, I feel weirdly sorry for Duke. I know, I know -- Randy Pitchford was so effing psyched that effing Duke Nukem was coming back that we got this enormous marketing presence stuffed in our craw that told us that if we didn't think stupid dick jokes were funny we had no sense of humor, and if we didn't want to spank women to shut them up we needed to loosen up, and if we weren't also so effing psyched about effing Duke effing Nukem then we weren't even Real Gamers.

I know. It sucked. It was a condescending mistreatment of us as consumers through and through, and this coming from me -- more liable to tell entitlement to quit whining than to take up arms and feel incensed. I'm not exactly glad that the game is getting probably the worst critical reception of any major launch I've seen in years, because who wants developers to fail?

I will, however, admit to feeling sort of satisfied. We all suspected there was no more place for clunky, gross Duke in our modern landscape, and now we can say told you so. More than that, doesn't it make you feel a little proud of the modern gaming landscape? In all of that Duke buzz, weren't you a little bit afraid that he would make a grand return, heralding a new wave of hysteria for the kind of misogyny and poop jokes that we thought were left well behind in our adolescent days? Wouldn't an excellent Duke game have been kind of, y'know, bad for everyone?

Luckily, no: It really is over. There's no room for Duke Nukem, neither its tacky design nor its stupid jokes. And I'm glad.

But like I said, I feel kind of a sympathy pang, too, like when the Simpsons started to show Nelson's home life and you realized how sad the world that sneering bully lived in was. I mean, it was funny, and it helped you like Nelson a little more, but it was sad! It was cute!

And I choose to doubt that anything went on at Gearbox besides a bunch of dudes who had spent a bunch of time working on this, really hoping everyone would love it, or at least like it and have a little fun. And we don't, and that's always sad. RIP, Duke.

[Today's Good Song: Craft Spells, 'You Should Close The Door']

Does Cole Phelps Dream Of Cloned Sheep?

2011-06-13T12:44:00.014-04:00

I returned to New York from Los Angeles late on Friday night, and I spent the whole weekend in bed, alternating between sleeping and eating. My limbs ache and my feet still sting. And that was E3! In case you're interested in actually-relevant takeaways, I've rounded up some conclusions about the state of the industry after the event at Gamasutra -- here you go.

Now, let's talk a little bit about L.A. Noire, which I played in the time leading up to E3 and which I don't feel much motivated to resume now that I'm home. L.A. Noire is in a tough spot; you'd be hard-pressed to put it into any extant genre, as it ties a bunch of ordinarily-disparate elements together. The experience of playing it is disorienting and schizophrenic, as Kirk Hamilton highlights with this piece on the game (it's billed as a "review", but I will call it L.A. Noire fanfiction because I want to tease him about it).

Tom Bissell's thorough assault on each little fracture in the game's formula is a long but largely fair evaluation, and it also doesn't neglect all the things that are truly impressive about it. Now, I certainly can't defend L.A. Noire, as I don't even really feel like finishing it, but I will play devil's advocate for a moment, if you don't mind.

I didn't really crystallize my neutrality on the title until I spoke to players who weren't heavy gamers -- the mainstream, cinema-going, noir-loving audience that Rockstar and Team Bondi hoped to snag with this game. I certainly think that if any game can become a victim of the critical echo chamber, it's L.A. Noire. With its weird dissonance between gameplay and story, its bold strides in the direction of lifelike conversation and its pastiched format, it's a game critic's dream; no title ever aimed for realism in narrative that wasn't dragged under the lens of speculation for us to discuss amongst ourselves.

But as critics we have a perspective on games that the intended audience doesn't often share. Most of the reviews I read complained of the listlessness of L.A. Noire's "open world", a massive and beautifully-reconstructed 1940s Los Angeles that taunted with visual richness and epic scale, but was lifeless for anyone who deviated from the linear narrative.

To that, I say it's not an open-world game, and only "people like us" would scrutinize how it does or doesn't hold up to that label. It's a game about conversations and investigations, and as such that entire massive city is simply window-dressing, a way to pace our transitions from one place to the next. That you can have your partner drive and skip those sequences was virtually horrifying to some -- why would you want to drive if there's no reason to and you don't have to and there's nothing to do on your way?

Because it engages you with the setting. They built that huge, gorgeous city just for setting, and I've always found the act of driving in Rockstar games to be a kind of narrative tourism, a zen-like gentle glide on the trigger buttons that gives me a sense of place, of backdrop. I don't need to interact with it for it to have value; driving in L.A. Noire's Los Angeles clears my head. It reminds me where I am. Yes, sometimes I just wanted to get to the next point in the story, to the next clue site and I'd skip it, but plenty of the time I liked reminding myself I'm in the driver's seat, figuratively. This is a game that lets us feel what it's like to drive through old L.A -- that in and of itself was pretty cool to me.

On the one hand, I think it's unfair to compare L.A. Noire to Grand Theft Auto. There are some surface similarities, but they are not the same type of game at all. On the other hand, it's fair to expect that your average consumer will make that comparison: After all, they made Red Dead more comprehensible by permitting the "GTA with horses" characterization, so it's fair that a game with vehicles, under the marquee of the same developer, using some of the same tech and colored with some of the same flavor should invite similar expectations.

I actually never liked action behaviors in Rockstar games. I always found the shooting clunky, missions unfairly time-crunched, overly demanding of precision. Especially as I was largely more interested in the larger arcs: The world-as-character, the typical GTA rise to power and control, and less individual missions where I have to dodge gunfire to pick off yet another fleeing gangster.

What I love most to do in GTA is drive and see what happens. I actually never got tired of exploring the vision of New York as presented in GTA IV -- it felt so rich and alive. I drove until I crashed a car and made someone mad at me, and then I searched for hidden jump ramps as I fled the cops. I went to TW@ and I read all the personal ads. I listened to the radio. That's how I play. Funnily, that's how any guest to my home who'd pick up the game would play, too: We'd all sit on the couch and drink and people would just drive around smashing shit up. I didn't want to play the missions. I didn't care.

L.A. Noire is the first game in the family that was compassionate to my distaste. I hated those damn chase sequences, and I loved being allowed to skip them when I failed. The developers seemed to realize that in a game with numerous elements, some people will prefer some types and others will prefer other types, and they allowed the player to intuitively cause the types they preferred to come to the forefront. That's worthy of praise.

I still wanted that sense of place and the ability to move through it in L.A. Noire. And because it's not an open-world game, and it never even suggested I'd be rewarded for heading off the beaten path, I didn't mind that the only place to drive was really from one location to another, albeit through whatever meandering route I felt like cruising.

Our job as critics is to explore systems and test their limits, but if I wasn't one, would I have really run for hours just to see what would happen even though I had no reason to, even though the game had clearly placed my next locales in my notebook? Throughout the whole time I've played the game, I never drove any other car but the cop car -- why would I? I'm a cop! When people are disappointed that Cole can't shoot people up in the street, I wonder why? What about the game suggested that the player should want to do that?

When we looked at the map of Super Mario 3, backgrounded with dancing bushes for show, did we complain that we weren't allowed to visit them? Nah. We didn't need to; everything that was relevant was clearly demarcated.

L.A. Noire at least aimed to design for intuition, not for our knowledge of game systems. It wanted you to use human facial-reading, not guess at what the game wanted you to do. Unfortunately, this worked imperfectly (enough has been said about the evidentiary system and the doubt versus lie problems that I don't need to add to it), suspending the player into a weird rift wherein you're never sure whether to do what comes naturally or try to figure out what the game wants.

I also think that the developers understood that L.A. Noire in its optimal shape -- a game that focused on interrogation, investigation and story, an "adventure game", if you will -- would have been highly difficult for a wide audience to understand. The mass market would not understand, and therefore not buy a Rockstar game where you can't drive and shoot. I believe the developers wanted to court that wide audience to try unfamiliar game elements by luring them with more familiar ones. It was a double-edged sword in the end, but I think probably a necessary sacrifice.

Because of L.A. Noire's misshapen-ness, its schizophrenia, everyone has trotted out the whole "ludonarrative dissonance" thing again -- you know, the fancy word us game bloggy types use to mean that the gameplay doesn't match the storyline. Grabbing Bissell's example, if Nathan Drake is such a good hero, then why can he kill like 800 people with wisecracking aplomb? How come Cole Phelps can offend witnesses, blow investigations, run over pedestrians, destroy police cars and steal civilian cars and still be commended as a hero, promoted up the line?

You know something? It doesn't bother me. Maybe I'm weird, but I've never believed that a game would benefit from perfect realism, perfect immersion. No, soldiers at war will not regenerate all their wounds if they hide behind a crate, but the regenerating health bar has been one of the most useful and indispensable design developments in the first-person shooter genre. It's just more fun that way.

And now we get to why I waited to decide how I felt about L.A. Noire until I could discuss it with people who were not game critics. Because until I had this job and spent all my time with other people who did, I never minded that games allowed me to do absurd, dissonant things. Only a critic looks at this beautiful, fascinating recreation of a place in time that doesn't exist any more and worries about what you can't have.

Back in the day, I used to like making my sprite run around in goofy circles when I got bored or frustrated, or trying to see if I could get them stuck in a wall. As Kirk and I discovered in the FFVII letters, that we could do squats to earn a wig from a cross-dressing wrestler named "Bro" didn't make the game any less moving, charming or meaningful to us. And I know L.A. Noire made much of its kinship to film and its potential for immersion, but I don't believe that other, older games cared less about story than it did.

Maybe because L.A. Noire takes itself so seriously, we take ourselves too seriously, too. But I think being able to create that dissonance in games is actually important to our sense of power as a player; it helps us control the dispensary rate of the story and its intensity. It lets us know we're the leaders of an interactive narrative when we can stop doing what the game wants and just do something dumb. That's what makes games fun.

I don't expect the game to compensate for my desire to push back against it from time to time. That'd be ridiculous. How would I feel like I've momentarily escaped their systems if the systems won't let me, if they call me to account in a big way for every pedestrian Cole accidentally crunches, if they force me to be demoted because I scuffed my car? The thing people call "ludonarrative dissonance", at least in this case, I call "being a video game."

And I don't know if I would have even noticed it, been bothered by it, considered it a mark against the game if I hadn't been part of the critical sphere where we're constantly examining and questioning immersion. All good video games, no matter how realistic they strive to be, require a suspension of disbelief in order for the game design to work.

That suspension of belief, that okay, I'll meet you halfway, between player and designer, is something we elect to do. I say this all the time, but I think engaging with a game and its weird rules is always a choice. Any player who sits down with a controller in hand and expects the game to fill in all the blanks for them is going to be disappointed.

All that aside, it mostly doesn't work as a game. The evidentiary and conversation system has players constantly feeling inexplicably punished, constantly second-guessing themselves. You can blow a case simply by visiting sites in the wrong order, with no clue as to what the correct order would have been until you fail. The core mechanic's fundamentally busted, and that's not all right.

I do think that engaging with it is still more fun than it's getting credit for, and it's interesting at least. When people ask me whether they should buy it I say it's hard to explain, not "it's bad" or "you shouldn't." That it's hard to explain is an unfortunate consequence of the fact the game tried some brand-new territory.

I think L.A. Noire's main problem is simply that it tried too hard not to be a video game. But if you read the E3 analysis I linked up top, you'll see I believe there are so many titles out there content to just be video games, to just be products, and to just be the same kind of product, that I appreciate the effort. We must take halting steps before we can stride in different directions. L.A. Noire might be some kind of five-legged mutant, but I'd rather that than yet another cloned sheep.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY DAPHNY

2011-06-10T03:39:00.001-04:00

#BIRTHDAYPRINCESS

News From E3

2011-06-08T15:23:00.005-04:00

I'm sitting on the floor of a very crowded press room, preparing to go see BioShock Infinite, which I am beginning to suspect will be the GREATEST VIDEO GAME IN THE UNIVERSE. So I'll make this quick with a few key stats:

Favorite Games I've Played So Far: Rayman, Ghost Recon, El Shaddai

Best Press Conference: Microsoft

Most-Heard Marketing Song: Kanye West, Power (as predicted by Sam Kennedy)

Most Attractive Employees: Ubisoft

Favorite Hands-Off Demos: BioShock Infinite, Metro: Last Light

Bands Publishers Like To Play At Press Conferences: Los Campesinos, LCD Soundsystem, The Kills, Tokyo Police Club, Yeasayer

Celebrities Seen At Press Conferences (Including video): Peyton Hillis, Ice-T, Drake, Lil' Wayne

Number Of Drinks I Had Last Night: 7

I've written up Microsoft's conference, EA's conference, and an interview about Dead Island so far, much more to come.

Finally, they are giving out copies of the beautifully-redesigned new EDGE at E3, so if you have one my column is on page 32.

Adventure

2011-06-04T12:03:00.002-04:00

I've talked a lot here and there about how my background in crude old adventure games was significant to my childhood, but today I fill in the 'Gaming Made Me' column at Rock Paper Shotgun with a little homage to the granddaddy of them all, Adventure (or ADVENT or Colossal Cave or however you like it to be called).

Today, though, I'm going out to have some fun before the flight to E3. It's Open Studios and Hillstock here in Brooklyn on the same weekend, so I'm going to drink a bunch of bloody Marys and support my friends' bands!

I'm Gonna See The Folks I Dig

2011-06-03T13:34:00.006-04:00

How is it that it isn't even E3 and I'm already tired? I hung with One Life Left maestro Ste Curran this past week here in New York and finally learned to play cricket (special thanks to Sabrepulse for being my batting coach), so I suppose I've been a little heavy on the revelry.

Heavy on the L.A. Noire too. I expect to write more on it quite soon (my preview ran in the May issue of NYLON Guys), but right now you can read takes by Kirk Hamilton, Tom Chick and Mitch Krpata.

Meanwhile, I did this story on the complex journey Jason Rohrer's Diamond Trust of London's taken on its way to a publishing deal with Zoo Games -- he and I talked about how the evolving DS software market hit everyone hard and what the consequences could be for developers in progress like him.

And I joined the awesome Michael Abbott on the Brainy Gamer podcast, just to make Manveer Heir mad, basically. Also to talk about my work lately, the internet and E3, I guess. I love-love-love talking to Michael and hearing his excellent radio voice. Tom Bissell is on this one too, so there's that! Check it out.

Let's see, what else: If you read OXM, I have a feature in the magazine this month that's like six pages long, dealing with the state of female protagonists in games. They seem to be working hard to up the magazine's ante, and although I actually haven't seen a copy myself, I hear good things. Try to find it if you can: I talked to a lot of cool people for it, like Hideki Kamiya, Erik Wolpaw, BioWare writer Mac Walters, Darrell Gallagher from Tomb Raider, and so on and so on.

You can find me in Edge mag every month from now on also. I'm extremely excited about this.

I leave Sunday for E3, which I'm covering for Gamasutra. I doubt I'll blog much, but I'll try to make sure my Twitter is useful to you, packed with exciting, newsworthy/drunk updates from Los Angeles. California, will you take me as I am?

[Today's Good ~~Song~~ Album: 'Sun And Shade', Woods]

Let's Talk Elite

2011-05-31T10:23:00.003-04:00

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.

The Story Of Neverdie

2011-05-27T12:23:00.003-04:00

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.

Bullet Hell

2011-05-25T12:10:00.005-04:00

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!

Gamasutra:

-Analysis: Developer Disdain For Games Writing Illuminates Wider Gulf -- on that infamous Danc criticism-of-critics. Interesting discussion in the comments.

-Interview: Beautiful, Creative El Shaddai Is Daring To Be Weird -- it seems like it's really "my kinda thing", and I can't wait to see it at E3. Related: Shane Bettenhausen (who ended up as biz dev director at Ignition, if you didn't know) and I discuss El Shaddai and E3 on Sidequesting's Main Quest podcast.
-Boy Meets Girl: Nival's Unusual Prime World Goals -- these Russian folks are making an online social game with a design that intends to encourage boys and girls to play together, specifically. Do most girls really prefer support roles?
-Interview: Heroes of Newerth's Marc DeForest On Evolving Business Models -- interesting data on how user bases shift depending on a company's monetization strategy. I MADE BAR CHARTS FOR THIS ONE, Y'ALL. Leigh Alexander, renaissance woman.
-Interview: Crowdstar Raises $23M Toward Growth Efforts From Major Investors -- Everyone continues to insist this space is not overvalued.
-Interview: Supercell Talks $12M Funding, Gunshine And Bridging Gaps -- Big funding house likes social and browser MMOs. Surprise!!!!1

Thought Catalog:

-Why We Love Animated GIFs --MAGIC.

-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!

-We Are All F*cked, We Are All Fine -- I CHOOSE YOU, EXISTENTIAL CRISES.

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:

The inimitable, handsome and charming Jim Rossignol writes probably the only Witcher 2 review you need to read; someone named Ron Alpert talks about trying to sell a mobile game during a food truck documentary (he heard about my taco truck obsession, I gather); Head-scratching, the mysterious 'RPGsBeBroke guy' seems to have started blogging again. Finally, brilliant award-winning video game composer Winifred Phillips, most recently of LittleBigPlanet 2 fame, gives a neat interview to GameSpot. Oh! And I, 'irregular non-correspondent', join the boys at GamerDork for a new podcast.

Okay! Now I'm caught up. And I'm going to stay caught up, because E3 isn't about to happen, or anything.

Why I'm Not Into Going

2011-05-04T18:53:00.002-04:00

"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."

-- Garrett Martin, 'Paste Goes To PAX East'

[Today's Good Song: Crystal Stilts, 'Shake The Shackles']

We Were Made For Being Happy

2011-05-04T01:52:00.006-04:00

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.

Sun Up

2011-04-26T10:26:00.003-04:00

It's finally warming up in New York. Of course, now that I typed that, I've jinxed us for another week of 45-degree gray skies and perma-drizzle, because the weather here's sadistic. Sigh. So I'd better catch you up quickly, because I want to do as little sitting-inside-typing as possible.

While it was raining I finished watching Twin Peaks and started playing Portal 2. Early opinion, besides the obvious "it's awesome", is that the people who complain about its length are probably trying to wolf it down too fast. You can play Portal 1 in one sitting, but this one's meant to be done in small bites, I think. Besides, it's not like I can rush into co-op while PSN is still down.

I also wrote an article about procrastination and one about escapism over at Thought Catalog, being something of an expert on both of these. I also talked to Randy from Gearbox about games as art. Ha, I mean, I actually kind of did, but we're more talking about the sophistication of content in an evolving landscape blah blah blah no don't go away.

The FFVII Letters are still going strong as we approach the end of the game, so stick with us on that. I'll be sad when it's over, but then I'll probably just start playing FFVIII or something. And if you want me to go on a podcast for an hour, having two excellent accents is probably the way to get me to do it.

[Today's Good Song: Actually, it's an entire album. Go listen to the new Fleet Foxes at NPR!]

No More Questions

2011-04-14T11:17:00.007-04:00

After answering exactly 2871 questions, I've disabled my Formspring account. Having one has been a fascinating, puzzling and often unsettling experience -- I don't regret wading unarmed into the pool of madness, but it's gotten a little overwhelming.

It's such a strange commentary on the nature of social media that so many people wanted to write in questions to me. I'm not a celebrity, a pop star or a politician; I'm a writer, and not even on anything of particular global gravity -- at the end of the day, it really is just video games, which hopefully are a relatively small thing in the grand scheme of your place in the world. If I am considered exceptional in my field it's because the bar's not high, which isn't much to write home about.

That's part of why Formspring was such an interesting experiment for me, as someone who also likes to write about web culture trends and social media. If you have the opportunity to ask someone who writes about video games any question you like, it seems to make sense you'd decide to ask them something about either video games or writing, assuming those things interest you.

However, I'd say more than half, possibly more than two-thirds of the questions I received were not about video games, by the end: the proportion had ramped up exponentially the more widely-visited my Formspring (and the service in general, as I was a relatively-early adopter) became.

In other words, the more people who came to ask me questions, the fewer of them were actually germane to my work. People wanted relationship advice, to know about my preferences in food, music, liquor, clothing, haircare, art and literature, about my experiences in childhood, about what I am looking for in a partner, and any number of things.

I like answering questions; I've said before that I look at my writing online as a way to be engaged in a large-scale conversation on a topic that I love with other people who share that interest. And I've observed with some curiosity the trend toward all interactivity, whether that's gaming or writing and talking online, away from the long-form toward the quick-hit.

I wrote last year about that trend, and how being able to take the pulse of the gaming audience through Twitter contributed to me blogging less, and Formspring was another way to make me feel connected to my audience with more immediacy and more brevity. I guess in my fascination, it stopped mattering whether we were even talking about games too much.

At first, I tasked myself with not refusing any question that was submitted, even if it was nonsensical or something like "y u mad girl" (an actual question which I answered with "iono"). It was its own kind of game; even if someone was saying something offensive, I'd initially respond instead of delete simply because I thought it was so funny and so strange that people would behave that way when we don't even know one another.

During an interesting period when I'd weighed in about the Dickwolves Thing, Formspring became a place for people to stage arguments with me. That was a contentious topic and many people wanted to challenge me one-on-one. I sort of liked that; if something's heated and makes me feel passionate, it felt like a brave experiment to take on trolls and debaters alike directly.

I began to get more and more questions; in the past months, occasionally up to 20 a day. I spend about eight hours a day online working, sometimes more if I'm socializing too, and I'd get email alerts and immediately answer the Formspring question. I could probably do an entire extra article or blog post in a day with the amount of time I spent typing answers to Formspring questions about what people should do about something their significant other said, or what my views on religion are, or even something related to my work, like in what contexts I don't mind long cutscenes and why.

Interestingly, I observed that answering a particular type of question would solicit more of that type. Engaging trolls or talking about sexism would bring more trolls and more confrontational gender questions. I had to start drawing a line -- and I learned saying "I don't want to talk any more about that" would cause people to submit things equivalent to "so you won't take a stand or express your views, huh?" As if the fact I'd been doing so extensively was disposable to them because I didn't answer their question, or because my paragraphs-long response was no longer at the top of the page.

But I continued answering questions. Partly because I'd become hooked, the same way you get hooked on your Twitter and Facebook feed. It got to where I'd soldier grimly into that Formspring inbox, dreading what I might find, and yet feel like I'd committed: It says ask me whatevsies, and so I've gotta answer.

I felt I was doing some kind of "research", as if analyzing the volume and tone of Formspring questions could answer my questions -- who reads my articles? How are they being received? How am I being received? And yet there was no pattern, no meaning. For example, what factors contribute to Kieron getting questions mostly about his X-Men work versus the weird Wild West of mine? Probably lots, but I don't learn anything by pegging 'em. And none of it helps me get my head around what makes people want to stray from the path of their natural life activities to say something chillingly hateful to me.

But even that was empowering and fascinating -- I will never know those people, but they all know me. If there are truly such sad assholes in the world, I'm glad I have the ability to make them angry simply by existing. And confronting it on Formspring made me feel even thicker-skinned -- I can be as vitriolic as anyone should I want to, but I can't think of any person I hate enough to motivate me to submit that hatred for their evaluation (and rejection). I must be a pretty big deal to these people.

It goes to one's head. And it's distracting, and for what? There was no useful information, no dot-cloud to be gleaned. My friend Mitu Khandaker wrote yesterday at GameSetWatch about how the human brain is incapable of accepting the very real concept of randomness, but that's what it is.

People ask me questions for the same reason someone Tweets about their breakfast -- because someone's listening and because they can. Because it's the kind of interaction people do not get to do in their real lives, where you cannot tell everyone in your office unsolicited information about your meal or ask a stranger on the subway whether he believes in God.

It's been fun, but there are probably better things I should be doing with myself, including prizing my privacy more. There's definitely a tipping point for social media exposure, and as I said earlier this week, I think I've passed it.

[Today's Good Song: Moon Duo, 'Mazes']

Minimalism And Magic

2011-04-13T15:23:00.008-04:00

Kirk Hamilton and I have been writing all those FFVII Letters at Paste, banging on about how special and imaginative the game is. Yet as Kirk pointed out in our last letter, it contains a Meteor called "Meteor," a Weapon called WEAPON, and stuff called Black Materia and Huge Materia (to differentiate itself from regular old Materia, of course). Creative.

But in today's new edition in the series, I talk about how the simplistic names are abstraction at its happy work yet again -- when we don't have to think much about what things are called, it gives us more mental resources to think about what they are. Simple names make important concepts intuitive, second-nature. And then when something is named rather prettily, like the sunken Gelnika or Turks leader Tseng, it makes more of an impact on us.

When I was a kid, every game I played was painfully basic in presentation and interface. The only explanation I have for why I so loved these ancient computer games I wrote about in Thought Catalog today was that I was young, had an overactive imagination and had little else I wanted to do with my playtime -- not to mention it's not like we had many more sophisticated adventures in the 1980s, right?

I also think they impacted me so much because they were SO terse, so crude. That blob on the wall is a cabinet I'm supposed to open? How the eff would I have known that without stabbing in the dark? Why does the game tell me I'm holding a map if it is of no use to read it? I must type ENTER HOUSE and not OPEN DOOR or else the game will tell me that area is not available, and if I go WEST at this intersection I'll be instantly killed? Cool.

That cursor blinking at me, demanding my next move, frustration a constant pall -- and yet the continual possibility of sudden, lucky solution teased at the fringe of my awareness just as much as did the threat of sudden, accidental death. I'd hold my breath and get chills; they remain among my favorite gaming memories.

When young there was nothing I loved more than rich universes. I'd write about my favorite games, draw pictures and play pretend. That's why so much of my writing lately has hinged on parsing exactly what's changed -- either about games or about me -- that makes me so inattentive and easily bored.

When I play games that give me lorebooks, diary entries, character stories hidden off the beaten path, I'm surprised at how little I care. It's not so simple as impatience for reading -- I like reading, and I don't even mind when reading in text adventures or visual novels comes at the expense of interactivity. "I've changed," I shrug to myself when I have a million New Unread Notes blinking at me in this or that UI and I just scroll through them quickly because the star or dot or highlight or exclamation point that tells me I haven't read them yet bugs me like it does in Gmail.

Yet as we observe in the FFVII Letters, some types of games can make me go way, way out of my way and to much inconvenience for even the possibility of discovering a new piece of information. Why will I do it for characters and plot threads that are so minimal, when I won't do it for things rendered in much more depth?

Because I like minimalism, I guess. I like to do the brain-work myself, the imagining myself. And I get such a thrill from looking at the title screens of these old adventure games I can now revisit thanks to the magic of this web-based IIe emulator that I don't even try to play them that often, because it still feels good to think of them as ghosts I never conquered, awesome machines that have forever outsmarted me. It still feels good to preserve them as half-remembered, near-legendary things.

And also because I still can't beat most of them without a walkthrough, and you know once you open a walkthrough for one puzzle your tolerance for future ones steadily decreases, and before you know it, you're just going through the motions, and that's no way to honor my past. I get addicted to hints (you should have seen our phone bill, and my parents' consternation, back when Sierra still operated that buck-a-minute hint line).

Anyway, you might have missed this 2009 Classic Moment In SVGL History when I wrote this "open letter" to Bob Blauschild, the designer of two out of five of my best-remembered -- and most frustrating -- adventure games, whose name sketched on the title screens always stuck with me. I did it mostly as humor, never expecting that he'd ever see it, but he did, and here's what he wrote back to me.

Hearing from Mr. Blauschild was frankly a little dazzling, because I still maintain that lifeline to the way I felt about those old computer games and the invisible, sadistic entities that made them. Once in a while if I think about it, so is the fact that I now have periodic occasion to be in the same room as "Lord British", whom as a kid I presumed had to be some real-life mysterious English lord, sitting on a throne made of mainframes, silently challenging the world's peons to encounter him at Ultima. When I was tiny I thought he maybe wasn't even real, some artificial consciousness assembled in green pixels.

I think that's part of the Minecraft juggernaut today, actually. There's the idea of a single figure who goes by the moniker of 'Notch', creating the weather in a savage and lawless, endless world that challenges its players to eke out defiance -- and beauty -- one hard-won step, one precious discovery at a time. Awe and death are both certain in Minecraft, and you just never know which is coming next.

[Today's Good Song: Memory Tapes, 'Today Is Our Life']

Noise Chamber

2011-04-12T09:12:00.005-04:00

For a while I had comments turned off on the blog. This was mainly because they only ever caused me stress. The internet's a funny thing, offering literally everyone the ability to react immediately and be heard. In some cases, that's a good principle; it's done wonders for media and creative thought.

In other cases, it's obnoxious and destructive. If you're one of those people who's addicted to Twitter, you might get an inkling of that -- you end up hooked on a drip of irrelevant information, a sea of thought and opinion noise that you can't really explain why you're reading but can't seem to stop.

That's how it is for me and comments some of the time. Yes, I write so that I can hear what people have to say back on a given subject -- for me my work is a form of large-scale conversation -- and yet paradoxically in order to do it I need to do it in a vacuum, in a way that's for me, that could exist whether people are listening or not.

Writing for the commenters is a bad policy. This is because so few of them are ever actually useful to the writer; commenting is something that in general benefits readers more than it does writers. I turned comments back on because I feel like that's something you guys need, want and deserve, but I very carefully cultivate a state of remove from the obligation to read them all.

I wrote my latest Thought Catalog piece, "The Different Types of Commenters There Are", mainly as satire, but there's a grain of truth in all humor, right?

Coincidentally, someone asked me last night on Formspring what kinds of questions annoy or tax me, and I began the response thinking "oh, very few," and concluded it while realizing, "actually, that's kind of a lot."

People ask me a lot how I manage to "put up with" the internet. It's not particularly easy. And yet I am such an active Twitter user, such a high-volume Facebook user (sorry, friends!) and there is nothing in the world that says I need to maintain a Formspring and make myself so available, but I do.

I think because being engaged in dialog with people in general, my readers in particular, is important to me. Even when it's hyperstimulating or exhausting, it helps me feel realistic, if that descriptor makes sense. But general word of advice to anyone who's of a similar need and mind: Careful you don't let people feel entitled to you. Do it on your own terms. Be aware of how people are responding to what you put out there -- yet remember, you are not some object in need of being constantly shaped by 'constructive criticism' from the outside. You're you and at the end of the day people can listen or not, and you can detach.

I think I let myself be so available that some people became more interested in me -- and not even me-as-a-person, but me as some kind of visible entity that could be commanded to react and share herself on command from strangers -- than in my writing, even when my writing's what made me initially visible to them.

Sometimes you guys write me and say I've grown some teeth, or gotten an "edge", or that I seem angrier than when I was a friendly community blogger puttering around SVGL mostly undisturbed. I think that's because I don't always know how to deal with that feeling -- that everyone feels entitled to be heard by me or answered by me, no matter what they want to say. I mean, that people observe changes in my public personality and can talk to me about them is sometimes surreal enough.

One exciting thing about me being freelance now and having a little more free time and emotional space is I can really concentrate on shifting my focus back, away from "being a video game writer for you" and back onto "writing about video games for you," if that makes sense. Excited about that.

[Today's Good Song: Papercuts, 'Do You Really Want To Know']

Evolution

2011-04-11T10:35:00.006-04:00

Clearly I've been thinking lots lately about how your relationship to games changes as you grow older. Games are changing as they grow too, and that has a lot to do with it. (I mentioned "Why Don't I Lose Myself In Games Anymore?" from Kotaku yesterday and if you've been following the FFVII Letters, you'll recognize some of the themes).

Besides the stuff I've already shown you, I've also found a slightly more obnoxious way to state my impatience with modern roleplaying games. If you follow my Twitter feed, you might have heard of Suparna Galaxy. For background, here's a helpful transcription of the conversation that started it all. Then we began to take it really seriously, and a big group of us made a wiki of lore for our fake game world.

Now we have done a podcast with the excellent Big Red Potion crew. There is professional voice acting. There is soundtrack material. And we thusly offer ourselves for interview as the developers on the project. We are very, very serious. I can't explain it. You should just listen.

And in more straitlaced commentary on the changing gamer, I've done a Gamasutra editorial today about the portable platform market and how, with his comments about how people are "too old" for the Nintendo DS, Jack Tretton suggests Sony might be misidentifying the market a little. Still really want an NGP, naturally. I get gadget-lust easily.

In other craziness, I am apparently a centerfold. Look, ma! In good fun, I participated in GayGamer's 'PlayNerd Centerfold of the Month', following in the tough-to-follow footsteps of friends of mine like Anthony Carboni and Andy Schatz and gave an interview and did a photoshoot. I had so much fun, as the team there's so cool.

Today's Good Song: via Pasta Primavera, Loud Valley, 'The Refrain' -- there is a Red Dead vibe here, I think.

Career Announcement !!

2011-04-07T10:09:00.008-04:00

Hey, so we have a new editor in chief and business director at Gamasutra! We've made a few notable and very exciting changes over there, which includes my decision to become freelance Editor at Large for the site. As you might've noticed, I've usually got so many projects going on that many people have assumed I've been freelance all along, ha.

I'm still very much part of the excellent Gamasutra team, except now I'm at liberty to take on all kinds of other projects, too. I'll continue to develop original trade-focused reporting and interviews for Gamasutra as I'm doing other work -- for one thing, you've probably spotted me doing some more social media and general-audience type stuff at the fantastic Thought Catalog, where I'll be appearing twice a week. You can still find me monthly at Kotaku as well, doing my column on the culture surrounding games and gamers.

I've also taken on the games section in NYLON Guys -- the May issue of NYLON's bimonthly men's mag came out really lovely so, if you want to read my feature on storytelling in L.A. Noire, or see some indie devs and Facebook games I thought were worth spotlighting, keep your eyes peeled for it.

I have a few other projects underway I can't say much about just yet, and I continue to work with other outlets both in the games press and outside of it on various things that you'll likely see surfacing soon. And of course I'll continue to look after SVGL! It's pretty much the most exciting time in my career thus far, and I remain deeply appreciative of everyone's support and attention.

And I want to do all kinds of other things in all kinds of areas, so if you'd like to work together professionally in some capacity, I'm available to discuss -- no idea is too crazy, so hit me up! I can't wait to see what will happen.

Meanwhile, this is MY NEXT PROJECT SRSLY (see also the wiki and the twitter convo that started it all)

I Have A Really Great Idea You Guys Listen

2011-04-07T09:21:00.005-04:00

Everyone has a Really Great Idea For A Video Game. When I meet new people and tell them about my job, they sort of launch into their Really Great Idea as if they think there's something I can do to get it made (sometimes they even ask me to "tell Xbox about it" or something).

Back in the 80s and 90s, I can't imagine how many kids sent pencil-and-crayon "design docs" to game companies about the kinds of games they wanted to see made. I don't think I ever did that, but I hear from a lot of people who have, and I really hope the longstanding game companies kept those letters from kids. What a fun little gallery that would make, huh?

Cute kids aside, I actually don't think all that much of people who aren't game designers telling game designers what they should do, as they don't necessarily have the mind for systems and how they work in practice (not saying I do either, or anything). Even most indies don't seem to feel too strongly about their first game, and talk more of what it taught them than how it was a Really Great Idea. But seriously guys I had a Really Great Idea wait don't walk away --

Last night I dreamed I was playing this really sweet oldschool Resident Evil -- third person, wider-angle, where the challenge was more exploration than action. It was set in the Umbrella Mansion, except years later and in ruins after the Raccoon City incidents. And you can play as either Leon or Claire, just like RE2, probably like, mining the old site for information or cell cultures or something they only just now realized were left behind, like, trying to get it before Wesker does (let's make him not dead or let's set this before RE4 & 5 or something because u guys i totes <3 him).

The cool thing in my dream was if your character dies, you don't actually die, you become infected by whatever killed you, with different viral effects depending on the type of monster that bested you. You get different abilities, but with some trade-offs -- like, okay, now you have a sweet tentacle arm but you can't use your gun anymore. Maybe the abilities can give you advantages in the environmental puzzles, like you can jump higher and reach an area you couldn't otherwise, or break through a wall to a secret room.

And then to keep you from totally powergaming, you will die if you don't use antidotes on yourself, like you have a certain amount of time depending on the virus. And if you're killed as a zombie you are actually killed and have to try again.

Wow. Yeah. Sorry about that, I just HAD A DREAM ABOUT RESIDENT EVIL and got all excited for a second.

In all seriousness, though, the way the RE franchise has changed over the years is one of the things I grieve most (maybe even more than missing Sonic!) . Part of it might be the principle I wrote about at Kotaku yesterday -- that as we advance toward clarity, realism and direct versus abstract representations in games, they're becoming less immersive.

Another part of it is the "Westernization" of the franchise, according to how Capcom seems to perceive the West's tastes. And, honestly, based on what sells at retail and what the mainstream gamer seems to love, it could be naive of me to say "you don't have to make a first-person guns and muscles game to sell a lot of copies in the U.S." Numbers beg to differ, so what do I know.

People still make and buy niche JRPGs, but I think the survival horror genre has been the biggest casualty of the decline of the Japanese industry. The numbers may say I'm in the minority when I say this, but I don't find a sustained gameplay pattern of direct confrontation to be as satisfying as the mystery of exploration, the uncertainty of lurking spectres. I wrote, somewhat clumsily, about this in this ancient 2008 article where I wonder if the "survival horror" genre really still exists.

Again, it comes down to the literal versus abstract, the direct versus the implicit, the real versus the unreal, and I continue to believe that in an eagerness for accessibility and instant comprehension, we've sacrificed all the things that can really suck us into a game brand when we develop for the former rather than the latter.

On a related note, we continue to do The FFVII Letters over at Paste. We're at part six now, and I kick it off by talking about how concepts of "the map", or the world of an RPG, have evolved. Kirk and I've been overwhelmed by the positive response you all have given us for the letters; if you've been following along, thanks for joining us! We're having so much fun at it.

Finally, because it's so fun to revisit things from your past, I have also written 'Why You Should Watch Labyrinth Over Again.'

[Today's Good Song: Panda Bear, 'Last Night At The Jetty']

Yes. This.

2011-03-29T15:22:00.003-04:00

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

2011-03-25T21:39:00.001-04:00

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

Friends Friends Friends Friends Friends

2011-03-25T08:08:00.006-04:00

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!

2011-03-22T08:48:00.008-04:00

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

2011-03-17T11:05:00.005-04:00

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]

Hello San Francisco!

2011-02-28T10:53:00.003-05:00

I am here yet again for GDC! I am very excited and very busy, and hope if you run into me you'll say hi.

Real quick: My Kotaku feature from Friday. Please check it out if you have't yet! Thanks sincerely to everyone who's sent some mail about it. I'd love to be able to reply to you each individually, but I'm just not able to get the time during GDC week, my busiest all year. Still appreciate you all very much.

Gamasutra's GDC SUPER SPECIAL GDC page GDC, where our coverage of all things GDC will be. Bookmark it! Now! GDC!

Love Means Sometimes Having To Say You're Sorry

2011-02-02T07:13:00.004-05:00

I didn't really want to come out with some huge statement about dickwolves. I am aware of my status as one of the more prominent female voices on games, which means people often would like to see me lead discussion on things people categorize as "feminist issues."

Note I think it's perilous for anyone to suggest rape is something only women can talk about. But in any event, whenever I say something about an issue people see as a "feminist issue"I always somehow manage to whip up the jerks and dissatisfy the feminists; I get boxed into being "that woman writer" again, and not only do I have to deal with emails about what a dumb bitch I am, I don't actually feel like I'm helping the conversation.

But I was asked on Formspring for my opinion and it seems my response got pretty widely circulated, so I figured I'd link to it here.

Two depressing things: First, I said how I felt and have now been aggregated, from what I can tell, into some kind of "anti PA" box despite the fact my response says "I love Penny Arcade" and that I was refraining from opinion on the joke itself, which does not really personally offend me. [Note: After I complained about this on Twitter, the 'Pratfall' timeline made an edit to note this -- this site is a great, uncolored chronology of the events and I appreciate the keeper's attention to my position.]

Second, after I basically said "since I don't have a strong opinion it seems obvious to default to respect for people's feelings", someone still saw fit to say "the truth of the matter" is that people are making too big a deal out of it. I wonder if it's a gamer thing, to always need to segregate everything into two opposing sides, and to genuinely believe that the idea of absolute fact can be applied to every situation. The truth, huh?

Actually, since I answered that question and began following the discussion more closely I probably approve less about how Mike is handling things publicly. The joke doesn't offend me, but the idea that what people wear or don't wear at PAX is going to create some sinister delineation between people who were hurt and people who weren't creeps me out.

This weird combativeness, like promising to wear the shirt to PAX, or playing Tori Amos while drawing? [Amos has sung about surviving rape and was a founding member and major fundraiser of the Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network, which will receive proceeds from the 'anti-Dickwolves shirt', but Mike says playing her music was just a coincidence, his iTunes was on shuffle and that you would be "crazy" to suggest otherwise.]

I do understand it sucks a lot to be at the center of an echo chamber that seems to be saying you're a bad person because you made a joke you didn't intend as offensive. But the willful refusal to even consider "hey, we may have been wrong here, and we feel bad that some of our fans are hurt" just seems weird, and inconsistent with the smart, fun tone I've always enjoyed about PA.

People are going on Twitter to try to publicly harass and insult rape survivors over this. They're leaving harassing comments for one of the most vocal objectors in this conversation claiming she must be fat, ugly and bitter to be insulted by rape jokes. You guys. This is fucking sick.

Who tolerates this? Regardless of their own position Gabe & Tycho have an opportunity to speak up to at least encourage compassion and education within a gamer community that's so often self-absorbed, immature, entitled and outright hateful. I'm trying to understand what would make them want to pass on that.

Something I learned in writing about games is that after a point you do kind of have to feel responsible. "I'm just doing my own thing and if you don't like it you can leave" doesn't work anymore after you've taken active steps to cultivate and lead a community. I've written some articles or blog posts in the past or said some things in public that I am not super proud of, looking back, things I would never consider saying now that there is a much larger community of readers who may be influenced.

Nobody asks to have others look up to them, and you could argue that if you're just making art, or comedy, or commentary, it's others' decision to pay attention or not and that you don't owe them anything (I sure feel that way about my Twitter account!).

But like it or not, if your audience grows large enough, people will start to look to you to help them shape the way they feel about issues or interact in their community. I do the work I do because I love the world of gaming, and because I love it, I try to make sure that the examples I set will help create positivity in the community.

I mean, sometimes I feel angry or resentful or aggressive and that comes across in my work. I have a bold personality, I sometimes speak before I think. I feel irritated sometimes at the obligation to be super duper nice to people and I can sometimes be haughty or judgmental. I'm not going to sit here and represent myself as some shining example of social responsibility. And it can be hard to field people's anger if I've said the wrong thing-- or even if they just think I have and I disagree.

You work for years doing everything you can to contribute good stuff to the gaming community, and then you do one ugly thing and the sheer volume of noise online can make you feel like the whole world's razed everything you created and now hates you.

I've been there. There's been a time or two (in my past, not related to this discussion) that I made some visible missteps and ended up not coming out of my room for a week. It felt like the whole world wanted to make fun of me, say these hateful, sexist, abusive things to me, and discuss how I acted on one or two occasions without knowing me at all -- and I hadn't actually said anything that could be perceived as discriminatory or injurious.

So despite the fact that deep-down, I wasn't pleased with my own behavior, I determined not to be sorry to those losers for anything. I clung instead only to people who would stick up for me.

Maybe that's how Jerry and Mike feel right now. Maybe it feels like an enormous assault over something that to them was one of however many zillions of jokes they've made over the years. The feeling that everything you've worked for can be made worthless to some people over one misstep is actually traumatic.

For me, the worst thing about my experience was not the negative reactions themselves. The worst part was feeling like people had got me wrong. That people now believed I was this awful person, that the fact I had been rude once meant I didn't respect others or that I wasn't loved enough as a child or something.

Maybe Jerry and Mike feel like people have got them wrong, too, that they're now being accused of "supporting rape" or of being these dismissive, insensitive people. When a community turns on you like that it's sick-making. It can be hard to want to say you're sorry. It's hard not to say "if you don't like me anymore, then leave." Admitting you're wrong often feels like you're giving your power away to these people who are tearing you down or are taking their reactions to an extreme that feels unfair.

I mean, those are the only reasons I can think of for those two not to take a more constructive stance here, to try to lead the discussion in a positive direction. Because unfortunately when you become a community leader, whether or not you explicitly asked for it, people look to you for how to act and react sometimes. It's not always easy to find ways you can do the right thing and still be yourself, but you should try. It's your job. People are believing in you.

Anyway. I said I didn't wanna say much about this, but I guess I never could shut up, eh? That should do it; I said on Formspring already and now I'll say here that that's all I want to say on this.

Annoying Players On Purpose

2011-01-26T19:55:00.001-05:00

It's the biggest perceived "issue" with what people generally call art games -- they're counter-intuitive or inscrutable, players get frustrated, and then they don't buy that artist's line that the emotions they're feeling are part of the intended experience.

The sensation that a designer has intentionally withheld his or her intention from a player's reach often makes them feel tricked, excluded and frustrated. I'm the sort of player who likes to analyze what the designer is trying to get me to think and feel -- and even I feel annoyed by games that punish me.

As it turns out, the problem with some of those games isn't that they made me feel bad. It's that I didn't understand why they did. I learned this by talking to Douglas Wilson from the Copenhagen Game Collective about the group's surprisingly fascinating philosophy of "abusive" game design.

The designers in the collective work in the discomfort zone because it's a way of starting a conversation between the player and the designer. Ultimately, their work seems to see games partially as frameworks for interaction between people, not as the interaction themselves. It's really thought-provoking: Read the interview!

Post [About] Some Fxcking Cats (And Bulletstorm)

2011-01-25T16:41:00.007-05:00

So I did this article about why despite the fact that research shows exponentially more people self-identify as "dog people" rather than "cat people", cats are virtually the unofficial mascot of internet culture. Even weirder, I assert the cat phenomenon originated in the most aberrant and un-cute of places. Read it, will you?

It relies on the idea that culture's like a living organism; like a cell culture, maybe, like a species, or like a volatile compound. It compensates for inertia, it evolves around environmental events, against homogeny and in response to its own weaknesses. Weird to think of 'cat pictures on the internet' as potential evidence for this concept, but I think it is.

Do you think game culture is evolving? Maybe "game culture" hasn't really been "a thing" for long enough, but when I look at the way creators represent themselves in mainstream games and the way the consumer culture reacts, I just never see anything changing. Of course, the interesting changes, statements and reactions, are happening at the fringe.

There are things happening in indie culture and in those that consume it that are commentary on or responses to (or against) the mainstream. But in all other entertainment media, you can look at trends in even the lowest-common-denominator works and see that they reflect their times.

Film genres evolve as ways for people to represent and express the way they feel about the things that are happening in their world or in their society. Each period of music history has a sound that correlates to the unique circumstances of that era. Do games do this?

I find myself weirdly depressed reading Richard Clark's Gamasutra analysis today about Bulletstorm. He, like many people (including myself, in general) is impatient with adolescent violence. The game's lead designer himself responds in the heated and thought-provoking comments discussion to say he's an adult catering to other adults; that having fun being immature is not the same thing as catering to teenage boys.

Some commenters seem annoyed that gloriously, silly-stupid violent games like Bulletstorm keep on getting made despite the fact that the primary negative stereotype about games and gamers is that they are silly, stupid and violent. That stereotype doesn't just make us look weird in front of our friends and families, it results in ignorant government and legal trouble.

Yet others ask an equally-valid question: Is Bulletstorm supposed to feel responsible for "elevating the medium"? Does it need to feel guilty if people think it's "bringing it down?" It's just one product, one idea in a sea of many.

I had no problem with the silly-stupid sexuality in Bayonetta because I thought it was refreshingly different camp stylization, so I'm probably not in a position to complain about the visual and auditory stupidity of Bulletstorm.

I bet I'd even have fun playing Bulletstorm. I'm a hundred percent behind the idea of a statement that modern shooters, with their bald heads, sullen frowns, "gritty" landscapes and lobotomized attempts at creating "emotion" through hackish and often offensive storytelling, take themselves way too seriously, try way too hard to be "adult." I love that the designers see Bulletstorm as a protest of that tradition.

After all, people complained about Bayonetta, I rolled my eyes and thought, "stop taking yourselves so seriously; not every video game needs to be a Good Example." I felt that letting Bayonetta be weird and naked if she wants to be was a more positive statement than telling me if I wanted to respect myself as a woman I was only allowed to play as a turtlenecked androgyne.

I saw nothing destructive, and I was disappointed that people feeling alienated by Bayonetta prevented them from seeing what a fun, stylish freak of a game she was in.

And I still feel that way -- and maybe more others would too, if exploitive shit wasn't the rule, not the exception. I don't really fault people for disagreeing with me and for being unable to smile much at Bay-bay-bay's naked hair wolves. We've been looking at CGI boob physics for too long to be anything less than cynical and bored.

That's probably why some of the Gamasutra commenters are uncomfortable about Bulletstorm. I could sit here and say "but Bulletstorm doesn't look stylish, it just looks gross and childish," but plenty of people felt that way about Bayonetta and I saw that as just a matter of taste; that mine was simply different from theirs.

So I see both sides, I guess. Most of all, I'm just bummed that this is a conversation we keep having, that big fancy new games are either so samey-same as to cause no ripple when they sink down quietly in the fast-moving river of this industry -- or controversial in the same old way, over and over again.

What's more boring -- an endless parade of man-child bloodbath games, or endless circular conversations about them?

Old Dudes And Internet Romance

2011-01-17T15:05:00.004-05:00

Things change so fast, don't they. By that, I mean there're some things we accept about the video game landscape that we maybe couldn't have imagined even a few years ago, like motion controls, glasses-free 3D, or buying small download titles without packages.

The internet's changed pretty quickly, too. I am not especially old, but as I was an early adopter and eager to get online from a young age, my earliest memories of "going online" are of a glitch-addled land of the weird, some exciting and foreign country.

This isn't a video game article, but it's about an adventure I had in the "world" of ancient internet -- my first INTERNET ROMANCE, where I was 14 and the poor fellow was 30. It's a fun story, so please give it a read.

Lost Time

2011-01-13T09:33:00.001-05:00

Jeez. The holidays come, then I get a flu, before you know it I've been away from the blog for a couple of weeks. Lots to catch up on, so forgive me if I just quick link-blitz you for now on a little of the stuff I've done here and there in the meantime:

Kotaku: New Year's Resolutions for Gamers -- How many do you think people will want to adopt?
Thought Catalog: How FourSquare Intends To Be Vs. How FourSquare Really Is -- Why I think geolocation apps and "games" aren't "social". Now with 50% more derision.
Thought Catalog: Five Emotions Invented By The Internet -- Deep angst in the digital age.

And I don't know whether to blame holiday nostalgia for younger days or the sense of juvenile vulnerability brought on by being sick for why I've launched on a deep, focused revisiting of Final Fantasy VII on my PSP. And I'm not sure why I assumed a game that I and everyone else loved on such a massive scale that it's possibly not been repeated since wouldn't hold up, or wouldn't be as interesting on reflection.

In a strange way, it's more interesting as an adult, looking at the little details of the game world, traits of the experience that probably wouldn't appear (for better or for worse) in modern designs, and try to think about why it was that the FFVII universe seized us in such a lasting way.

It hasn't even been that long since I tried to think about this, since I was very moved by playing Crisis Core when it came out (although this is my first real play-through of FFVII in some years). I've just never really been satisfied by any of the writing I did around it nor by the firmness of any of the conclusions I made. Going to try to do some fun and useful stuff this time around, so stay tuned.

Yeah. Crazy busy, but what else is new?

Other good stuff: While I was sick I watched this "Princess Jellyfish" show basically in one sitting and I am impatient for more episodes now.
Today's good song: Avi Buffalo, 'Where's Your Dirty Mind'

Game Of The Year!

2010-12-23T08:54:00.007-05:00

So, we've done it again this year -- done a mammoth staff top ten games at Gamasutra. Please check it out!

My "personal favorite" game of the year is Bayonetta. It was inventive, interesting and well-executed. I'm pleased that it seems to be based on a strange vision, not on a "what will sell" market-research parade (as far as that goes, they probably got to 'naked chick' and then stopped).

I'm pretty sure most of the games in that top list will get sequels of some kind; some have announced them already, even. But as impressed as I am with the number one game, I feel kind of done with its world and its conventions. As it is there's no way I put as much time into our number seven game as I did into its predecessor.

But the idea of a Bayonetta 2, which seems possible although unannounced, of course, makes me excited. I would be eager to see what they'd expand on or polish more or deepen. In fact, just writing the blurb in the top ten made me want to go and put Bayonetta on again. That emotion means something to me.

It's strange. I feel that we've never seen such a dense crop of excellent and diverse games as we have in 2010 (although 2008 stands out in my memory). And yet I am at something of a loss to really feel much for any of them. They've sown no permanent furrows in my memory. I'm simultaneously impressed and disengaged.

Maybe because I'm well-installed in my career now and am trained to be less fan, more observer? I dunno. The idea that "something's missing" from the world of the AAA blockbuster isn't new. In fact, I don't think that there's anything "missing" this year, per se. Like, it's great. I just didn't fall in love this year.

Anyway. In case you didn't see it, earlier this year I wrote about how crazy bad-ass Bayonetta is a really cool game character in spite of -- no, because she's hypersexy-unreal. Oh, yeah, and while I'm thinking about that piece?

Tsk, oh, Leigh Alexander, you'll say anything to pander to your majority-male readership, won't you? No, fuck off. That was just one of the reactions to an article I cared about this year that made me realize that I am not interested in reactions to my articles.

Of course you're allowed to disagree with things I write or even insult me. Free country. I just don't have to care that you're doing that. You might have noticed the comments on SVGL are off. That decision has come at the expense of my traffic, but I don't really mind. I would rather enjoy what I do again.

I am pleased that people can no longer register their immediate, unconsidered reactions to everything I say. I hope this will also encourage people to distill out issues that are actually meaningful to them and discuss them in their own online spaces. If one really has something one feels one needs to say to me or about me, there's email, which I reserve the right not to read nor to respond to.

I am very grateful to you for your readership; should it be your holiday I hope you have a safe and happy one with your dear ones, and should it not be your holiday, I hope you at least get some downtime because of the other holidayers.

Fight!

2010-12-22T15:39:00.008-05:00

So, you saw this lawsuit, right? I feel like at least one of the people whose name appears in the complaint has diligently studied this article of mine.

I'm no lawyer, but it looks like the people who are in the deepest 'ish' are West and Zampella, if Activision turns out to be able to prove any of this. And I am told little off-the-record anecdotes by people who would know that seem to suggest that the behavior on their part -- specifically as concerns being difficult to Activision and Treyarch -- is at least plausible.

I have seen Jason West in person only once in my life; it was at Bungie's Halo Reach booth, where he was shuttling in to see a private demo.

But, you know, I don't know. Numerous lines in these legal documents are redacted, primarily to protect EA, according to the notes on them, but Activision is promising to try to get that information unsealed. Surely all of the facts remain to be determined by a court. It's unseemly for a member of the press to armchair-speculate. But you guys can do that all you want!

ANYWAY. Tension between Activision and EA has been brewing for some time and becomes increasingly uglier. This is the ugliest yet. So! It's time to choose your sides. Who is the evillest empire?!

Renowned academic, designer and satirist Ian Bogost, of Cow Clicker fame, is offering Facebook users the opportunity to show, via bovine demonstration, which side you support in this battle royale. Do you work best in an environment of "pessimism and fear", or do you like "a mean BBQ"? Which of these two execs really got the horns put on him when West and Zampella Respawned?

"Today we settle disputes in the courtroom or the boardroom," said Bogost, speaking exclusively to SVGL. "But in different times men clicked to the death to resolve their differences. Thanks to the power of the Web, once again we can let the people decide! Click your cow to victory! Click it for democracy and truth and justice! Click!"

Play Cow Clicker, pick either Bobby Kowtick or John Riccowtiello and show your support. On Facebook. Which is about being social and sharing your feelings on things, right?

PS: Cow Clicker was named one of 2010's top 10 Cult Hits on today's Gamasutra top five by GD Mag editor Brandon Sheffield.

PPS: This cowfight may or may not have been my idea

'Virtual Reality'

2010-12-21T09:24:00.002-05:00

I received an interesting press release and I had several reactions to it, but rather than say anything I decided I'd just post it whole here and see what you guys thought. I opened the comments for you.

Virtual Worlds Pioneer Brings Fiancée Back From The Dead In Virtual Reality

Hollywood, CA – December 21, 2010 – Virtual worlds pioneer, Jon NEVERDIE Jacobs, has revealed that he has brought his fiancé back from the dead as an avatar, and part of the launch of his latest virtual destination, the new Club NEVERDIE. The controversial entrepreneur believes that virtual reality will be the means by which humanity transcends death itself, and has taken the first step towards this with the inclusion of the avatar representing his late fiancée, Tina Leiu, who passed away suddenly in 2005. Two weeks ago Jacobs made worldwide headlines with the sale of the first Club NEVERDIE, based on a virtual asteroid, for a new world record $635,000 USD.

One of the stunning central locations found at the new Club NEVERDIE is the exotic Tiki beach resort with private houses and ‘The Island Girl Spa’ dedicated to Tina Leiu, who was known in the online gaming world as the avatar, ‘Island Girl’. Jacobs explains how he has kept Tina’s spirit alive in his new virtual destination. “Tina was a beautiful Samoan Princess and, in addition to her career as a singer and actress, was also a licensed therapist and healer. One of her unfulfilled dreams was to open a Spa in American Samoa where her family was from. By creating ‘The Island Girl Spa" at Club NEVERDIE, I'm able to in some way fulfil her last ambition. We've also created an Avatar in her likeness and she automatically revives anyone who dies gaming on the island, bringing another level of meaning to the name Club NEVERDIE. For me the return of Island Girl at the new Polynesian Club NEVERDIE brings everything full circle and represents an important statement to the online community and the world; that virtual reality is the place where we can transcend death, perhaps not on a literal level right now, but very possibly in the future. I plan to continue to lay the foundation for that future with the virtual worlds developed by NEVERDIE Studios.”

Tina Leiu was a popular singer, actress and gamer in her own right. In 2004 she narrowly survived a sudden attack of myacarditis brought on by the flu. During her convalescence she spent many hours as Island Girl inside the virtual Entropia Universe. When she passed away suddenly in February 2005 as a result of complications stemming from the myacarditis, MindArk, the developers of the Entropia Universe built a virtual memorial inside the world to allow the gaming community to pay their respects. In a touching effort to keep Tina's memory alive, Jacobs would occasionally allow their son, Taliesin, to log the Island Girl avatar online to play inside the virtual world. However, the developers finally requested the avatar be retired, so reluctantly Jacobs logged Island Girl out for the final time at Club NEVERDIE in 2007. He comments, “I was very disheartened to shut her avatar down in the first place. I feel like virtual reality is ultimately a place where we can live forever. It really went against my hopes and beliefs for its future to have to retire Tina's avatar and face the incredibly painful death process for a second time. Now both I and our son Taliesin can feel close to Tina once again, knowing her avatar is there waiting for us every time we go online and visit Club NEVERDIE. It’s actually a beautiful tribute to her that she would have loved.” Taliesin agrees, stating, “I think it’s awesome. It feels really good to see the avatar because it feels like my Mom is still there playing the game.”

The new and improved Club NEVERDIE gaming destination cost over a million dollars to develop and is this time located on NEXT Island, a free to play, virtual tropical island paradise where time travel is the main attraction and the focal point of a real cash economy where players can buy, sell and profit from the trade of virtual goods for real cash, with an exchange rate fixed to the US Dollar. Users can visit a range of incredible virtual environments and can of course, visit the Island Girl Spa, safe in the knowledge that should they die in the game, Island Girl herself will always be there to revive them.

ENDS

Online Gaming Continues To Suck

2010-12-21T08:58:00.002-05:00

"Developers and publishers have not come up with more interesting ways to play together online. Online games continue to suck. It’s generally... melees, bad behavior and poor matchmaking. There are more ways to play together.”

--Billy Pidgeon, " The Year In Review: Game Biz Analysts On The Worst Happenings Of 2010"

I FIND FIREFOX

2010-12-20T23:24:00.005-05:00

[this is my kitten, yorda -- thanks to my friend @facepaintz for the 'yorda firefox meme']

[Today's Good Song: Foxes In Fiction, 'School Night']

JASPER HALE

2010-12-17T09:19:00.006-05:00

Have you seen this video yet, about Rockstar's facial motion capture work for L.A. Noire? It's like nothing I've ever seen before, even in tech demos. I mean, games have gotten ever more graphically and technically sophisticated with every passing year, so I suppose I ought not to be surprised that this kind of thing is possible.

At the same time, I watch this and I feel unprepared; a little quiver of panic swells and I want to know quick, are we ready for this? I notice that the acting isn't excellent. For the first time watching footage of a video game, I visually notice the acting, not "the animation." I don't know how much to blame the actor, either -- maybe they have to exaggerate facial movements for the sake of the rigging.

This is a really interesting question: Do we want games to be so real that we can critique the actor performances? Have we ever had to consider this issue before? Will the Oscars ever consider "best actor in an interactive entertainment piece"?

I disliked Heavy Rain for a few reasons, but primarily was that it cleaved so close to real -- while failing enough to be unsettling. Doofy, stilted expressions, motions, on otherwise lifelike beings. It was a schism that made me uncomfortable. What am I going to do about L.A. Noire?

Of course, things can be absurd and still be desirable. There's just, y'know, a 'way to do it'. ... Damn, anyway... this is my article on how 'Twilight' is better than 'real life'...

Currently feeling like I want some vampire bro to carry me away to a snow mountain... at first I thought I was 'team Edward' then when I watched 'Twilight Eclipse' I felt like I might be 'team Jacob'... couldn't decide, watched 'Eclipse' again and then went 'I'm totally team Jasper Hale'.

You can add that to my nonexistent Wikipedia page: 'videogame journalist Leigh Alexander has declined to take sides in the Edward v Jacob fight, expressing 'strong affinity' for Jacob but then deferring by expressing publicly [via her blog] that she prefers Jasper Hale'

'lvml', Merry Xmas...

[Today's Good Song: Robyn, 'Call Your Girlfriend']

Haute Of Breath

2010-12-16T12:09:00.006-05:00

If you haven't had enough retrospectives yet, Slate is doing its year-end conversation between prominent critics on games. It's one of my favorite features generally (oh-em-gee so flippin' stoked to have participated last year). This year, in addition to Slate's MC Chris Suellentrop, there is my friend Tom Bissell, NYT's Seth Schiesel and a dude with whom I confess to being totes unfamiliar, and they seem to be having a good conversation.

As I type this they seem to be debating how seriously to take video games; Schiesel likes Call of Duty: Black Ops best and says that it's fine for games just to be fun; Bissell says fun is not the point, that Black Ops is cynical and that Schiesel's favorite of last year, Dragon Age, is "boner-killing" (yes, thank you).

I have to side with Tom here. I definitely think Seth has a point about a contingent of haute critics so desperate to be taken seriously and/or for games to be treated like "art" that they elect to see depth where fallows lie; in last year's roundup I think I chided my friend Jamin for weighing Uncharted's Drake, whom I see as a fairly basic action-hero construct, a knockoff of Indiana Jones, as, like, a meaningful protagonist (despite me finding the franchise to be one of the finest-crafted couple of games we currently have to hold up). I cringe at my own past blogitorials, where I whipped a few poignant play moments into frenzies of gravitas (no, I will not point them out).

Seth says we should just be past that, and if we like blowing things up in Black Ops, it's cool to just admit it, like the millions and millions of people who've bought the game. Games are accepted now, so we no longer really have to worry about their souls. Just like what you like!

I am not the biggest fan of that line of thinking, because it embraces the idea we want a furtherance of the medium of gaming just so that we can be "accepted" or "feel cool" (the main idea of my column in Kill Screen Issue Zero), when I think some of us just want to see how far games can go, want them to be richer and more inclusive.

Either way. Black Ops is a spiritually dead piece of work, and I don't want to reward that. And that's all beside the point: Even if games, or just some games, were just for fun, Black Ops isn't that fun.

I think there's a fair lot of people so desperate not to take games seriously that they see "fun"where there isn't any.

Ultimately, when intelligent people get together to discuss their favorite games, the conversation turns out similar: Why do we play? What's good and valuable about this game versus that? What are our values as critics? I'm not always prepared for these debates, especially as I think the people involved won't always agree. I get tired just reading the back-and-forth. So tired! That's why when people want to ask me what's my game of the year I blurt it out and then I wander off so I don't have to discuss it.

Oh, yeah, my game of the year. Not time for that yet. But! The developer of my game of the year is listed in my colleague's article today on 2010's best developers. Actually, there are two developers listed in here whose games could top my list, but I am trying to work out where to draw the line between "the best" and "my favorite", which I am not convinced are the same. Sometimes I think it matters and sometimes I don't.

[today's good song: galleries + foxes in fiction, 'borders']

Awwwww

2010-12-15T17:16:00.003-05:00

I love holiday card time. This De Blob one is especially nice -- THQ's putting some effort in this year, I've heard, as Kotaku got a cake and Destructoid's has Mr. Destructoid in it.

It's a damn good thing no one sent me any cake. I am getting an early start on my New Year's resolutions for health, and oh my god I am weak in the knees when I see fondant.

Bites

2010-12-14T12:09:00.000-05:00

We're continuing Gamasutra's end-of-year retrospectives, and today I kick in the top five controversies of 2010. Do the thing where you try to guess em before you click on them and go see how many you got right. Because, you know, if you picked something different from me, you're wrong, naturally.

I stick up for a friend in this Bitmob piece, and I also have some things to say about Twilight, of all things. Such a fundamentally useless and vulnerable heroine appeals to so many people for a reason -- when sexism is escapism for the modern feminist? I dunno, man.

Please accept my apologies: I haven't done Today's Good Song on here for a while. To make up for it, have an entire music mix from me, my second Fall-season mix, download here.

Finally, here's actual gameplay for Catherine.

ONE Music Post -- My Favorite Albums & Songs Of 2010

2010-12-14T11:10:00.010-05:00

Indulge me, willya? These are just 'my favorites', things I loved most/listened to most, I am not a 'music critic' and dunno what is 'the best'.

my top 20 albums
20. four tet - there is love in you
19. twin sister - color your life
18. woods - echo lake
17. perfume genius -- learning
16. mountain man - made the harbor
15. amen dunes - murder dull mind
14. junip - fields
13. royal baths - litanies
12. warpaint - the fool
11. green gerry - odd tymes
10. the bitters -- east general
9. cloud nothings -- turning on
8. white denim -- last day of summer
7. art museums -- rough frame
6. ariel pink's haunted graffiti -- before today
5. herbcraft -- herbcraft discovers the bitter water of agartha
4. deerhunter -- halcyon digest
3. tame impala -- innerspeaker
2. white fence -- white fence
1. joanna newsom -- have one on me

my top 10 songs (that aren't on any of those records):
10. born stoked -- wet illustrated
9. no way -- pepepiano
8. pure -- blackbird blackbird
7. take it all -- omnivore
6. marathon -- tennis
5. wolf pyramid -- night manager
4. lately (deuxieme) -- memoryhouse
3. horchata -- vampire weekend (embarrassing, but the most-played does not lie)
2. fingertips -- holy spirits x gem club
1. lawn knives -- GOBBLE GOBBLE

i left out obvious stuff like kanye on purpose. also, compilations and stuff don't "count" but boy did carissa's wierd's long-awaited 'they'll only miss you when you leave' get a lot of play here too.

back to regularly-scheduled videogame programming!

Hairy Palms

2010-12-13T09:57:00.007-05:00

The refrain about how tacky and misrepresentative the Spike VGAs are is so prevalent now that I can't believe anyone still asks me what I think of the VGAs or did I watch them or blah blah blah. But miraculously people still ask; I haven't responded in a structured way since 2008, so it's a good thing Jeff Green played appropriate complainant this year, saying what I would have said if I felt it'd make a difference.

We spend a lot of time saying "video games aren't like this" and yet the stereotypes persist. Maybe video games are like this, and we're a vocal minority. Isn't that a terrifying thought?

This fascinating New Yorker profile of Shigeru Miyamoto may not tell you anything much you fans don't already know about Nintendo's heart and soul, but the tone and word choices are illuminating: The article illustrates the bizarre paradox between the seriousness of people who make games and the way they're generally perceived by others, with the product an inscrutable plain lying in between.

For the most part, the piece refrains from judgment, but does contain one particularly damning quote: "The best analogue for [video games'] combined disreputability and ubiquity may be masturbation." And if you don't know where the author gets that, and if your instinct is to splutter and argue and ignore what elements of our business and culture might have led him to that conclusion, you're in denial.

So what's the big deal about the Spike VGAs and aren't I excited about the marketing-coordinated super-reveals of pre-rendered cinematic trailers of games that are at least a year away and aren't I so happy we're getting any mainstream celebration at all? Tch.

It's a marketing blitz; it's an advertising show. But can't we sell the scale, scope and excitement of new video games without being like this about it?

Also, to throw levity on the concept of Being A Total Douche, reflection on this parody "GDC commercial" that Mega64 did last year might be in order. It never stops being funny.

Finally, for other, bigger disappointments in the game industry's year, check out my colleague's retrospective today. On Friday, I contributed a piece on 2010's biggest surprises, and the picture is very cute.

Trends Of The Year

2010-12-09T08:54:00.002-05:00

So every year at Gamasutra we do these retrospective lists about everything. Like, everything. We'll be doing one every day or so from now til year end. Today, I contributed a Top 5 Major Trends Of 2010 list, so feel free to check that out, if you're into it.

Sexy Jerks

2010-12-08T12:43:00.003-05:00

If I go on Twitter or read blog comments or engage with strangers from the internet for too long, I become annoyed and depressed. So I set about a new game of Fable 3 last night, resolving to be the biggest asshole Albion had ever seen. Like, I was just gonna pretty much kill shit, I said to myself. I was gonna have like five wives living in hovels and wear mad tattoos and belch on everyone.

It wasn't just that I was feeling sort of irritable and wanted to expunge some anger. I mean, Fable 3 provides for me to be pretty much as big of a chicken-kicking scumbag as I want, so it's not like it's even real rule-breaking. It's more I've never been very good at playing the bad guy in games. I want everything to come out nice. I care what people think.

When I'm looking at some happy video game villager, I just don't have it in me to do the wrong thing. I've watched friends playing Fallout 3 blowing away innocent folk and their two-headed cows with a sort of envious glee, but with a vague anxiety in my gut. It's not I want to be a goody-goody; I think moral ambiguity makes interesting characters.

It's just I kind of want to make a really bad mess of my gameworlds and laugh about it and not take it seriously. I wish I could say it's because of really compelling design that I'm never able to do it, but no. I'm just hard-wired to be a good girl. I think that's why people really like Grand Theft Auto games so very much: There's no good-guy option. Messing the world up is what there is to do.

I mean, we'll see. I don't have to shoot a housewife in the face in order to be a really big jerk, so I might still be able to achieve my dreams.

Speaking of wanting everything to look nice, I'm for some reason preoccupied with how my hero looks. I futz around with his hair and outfits until I think he looks "sexy." I can't really tell what drives my character-creation decisions most of the time; sometimes I go with an intangible "tone" that suits what I hope to get out of the story, others I make people I'm attracted to, or sometimes I develop an idea of a character and then assign looks that go with.

But I do notice there's a strong correlation for me, when I'm playing a game that requires me to make my own hero, between physical attraction and character admiration. I don't want a bad-looking person. I have to stare at them for hours. I'm objectifying them like paper dolls. Is that what male game designers do when they're creating sexy female heroines -- you know, the kind we have so much trouble with? Kinda scary thought.

In The Habit

2010-12-07T10:28:00.011-05:00

So, a report that aired on the BBC about "video game addicts" is basically bullshit, right? I didn't see it, but that's what everyone seems to be saying. Of course, "everyone" would get their panties in a bunch any time it's implied that video games are anything less than a perfect, virtuous and ideal use of one hundred percent of your time. That's why John Walker's RPS piece, being fairly measured, is my favorite response to the documentary.

Of course, even the largest and noblest of media outlets can't resist a sensational angle, which is why the "games addiction" phenomenon can be so exciting to folks like the BBC. In the '90s, it was all about "internet addiction", remember? However, it's more than sensationalism that makes the angle a little problematic. It's that video games are here getting stuck into a larger social problem: The psychiatrizing (allow me to use a made-up word) of everything, and the excessive abuse of clinical terms to explain away coping difficulties or to compartmentalize larger life problems into their own individual symptoms and syndromes.

Think about how many times you've used clinical terms over the past few years. You're addicted to True Blood; you're "a little OCD" about doing your dishes, you're "depressed" about your sports team losing, you're "having a panic attack" about running late to work. Of course, in the vast majority of cases, you are not actually. You're exaggerating. Maybe because every other nightly news ad is a prescription drug commercial, making the idea of widespread disease frighteningly normal. Maybe because your world is so crowded with the noise of social media and awareness of mass culture that you feel you need to use hyperbole to be heard.

Who knows. But when we talk about "addiction" to non-chemical things, there's a very significant difference between "a person is unable to stop repeating a behavior because they suffer extreme emotional and/or physical stress when they try" and "a person refuses to stop repeating a behavior and denies it is harming them." The former is addiction. The latter is someone who's just failing to develop as a human.

The type of people in this documentary, people who play 20 hours a day of WoW until their relatives become concerned, are not addicts. They're just losers. And if they didn't have WoW, they'd probably be doing something else to the unhealthy exclusion of all else.

That being said, I continue to be alarmed by some gamers' refusal to even examine their play habits. Defensively, they claim, "would people be complaining if I read books for 20 hours a day? What about film buffs who spend all their time on movies?" People would probably be complaining, yes. But guess what: Game designers create compulsion loops on purpose. They want you to feel invested in goals and satisfied by achieving them. That's not inherently harmful, but maybe it is to vulnerable people?

News flash: The metric of an online game's success is how many hours people are spending playing. Engagement metrics are how projects get funded and remain commercially viable. It is in the designer's best interest to make sure you stay playing, that you keep coming back. Again, that's not to say "people are designing addiction" or "making games people will want to return to and enjoy for long periods is wrong." It's just to say that it's irresponsible to ignore this fact, if you want to have a reasoned say in any "addiction" conversation.

So maybe "game addiction" is an of-yet unsubstantiated concept. But those defensive gamers aren't doing anyone any favors by vehemently rationalizing the fact they push buttons all day to the exclusion of all else. They just make normal gamers look bad.

People die in Chinese internet cafes, of exhaustion or starvation, bottles of pee under their desk. What's going on there? We're going to have to have good answers to these questions as games become a bigger and bigger part of society, so I hope auto-apologists develop an interest in being ready.

[Since people complained in comments: I should probably clarify that I am not categorizing psychological addiction as people who are losers that just don't do anything else with their lives.

I'm saying that psychological addiction is an actual problem, not just people who don't see anything better to do with themselves than play video games and refuse to try. There are plenty of people who have legitimate psychological dependencies on games or other behaviors.

But let's look closely at the issue instead of just calling someone with no life an "addict." The over-diagnosing of American society leads a lot of people to complain that they are "addicts" as an excuse to make a developmental failure or laziness into a real problem. A large number of people would rather claim they have a "condition" than deal with life; it's like when people are dangerously obese in the absence of a medical cause and, shrugging, blame their genes without addressing their diet.

the thing i'm saying here is that psychological addiction to games is likely to be a genuine issue that is not able to be correctly examined because of all the people who use clinical addiction as an excuse for their failure to nurture an emotional life, and because of all the people who are so defensive about their focus on games that they don't want to look at or talk about the issue. if you are an addict or have known one, as i have, this is what should offend you, the aimless firing of the word into an important discussion.]

Lost Pieces

2010-11-12T16:29:00.001-05:00

This is far and away my most favorite game soundtrack ever. What pieces of games music absolutely slay you?

Outside

2010-11-02T09:06:00.002-04:00

"In speaking with game designers like this, I increasingly come to the conclusion that it's vital to be involved in activities... that feel like they're derived from somewhere outside of the industry. This doesn't seem to be a popular opinion."

-- Baiyon, 'Sense of Wonder: Indie-fying Japan' (Gamasutra)

[Today's Good Song: 'Teenage Dream' (Cover), Weed x Foxes In Fiction]

It's The Little Things

2010-10-29T12:54:00.005-04:00

Yesterday I wrote about the big gameplay-and-narrative friction we often find in RPGs, but there are all kinds of smaller ones, too.

The Guiltless Hero: You're the only one who can save this world -- but only after you go in that stranger's basement and open all his treasure chests, and then take all the coins out of that lady's kitchen cabinet, and then smash people's crockery to see if there's anything in it. They don't even notice!

The Shameless Invader: Hey, what's up? I'm just making dinner, please do open my door at any time you like and come on in so I can talk to you about stew ingredients, my bratty son or how scared I am for my life. It's not like you're on a quest or something.

The Distracted Wanderer: It's finally time to bring that object you almost died retrieving to that guy who desperately needs it so that he can give you something crucial to this world-saving quest that only you can undertake. Oh, wait, hang on a sec, why don't you just check that grassy field over there first? Might be, I dunno, some mushrooms or flowers or something you could use for something. No? How about in that random cave?

The Castle VIP: Welcome, heavily-armed stranger! I'm totally the king of this city, and my castle is crawling with guards with pointy spears. Their job is to stand at either side of each door and chat about how great I am. Make yourself at home! The treasure room is upstairs. No, you can't get in there now, but you know you will at some point. No one'll stop you! Make sure and stop by my throne room and introduce yourself before you leave? Maybe after you're done rummaging around my gorgeous daughter's room for who knows what?

The Pushover: So hey, do you want to undertake this thing? Your input is really important to me. No? Oh, well, too bad, because you kind of have to. Why did I ask you? Because you like having choices when you're adventuring! Oh, dude, do you wanna help out this chick over here, too? No? Aw, too bad, guess you'll miss your ultimate weapon. Did you realize you're supposed to answer "yes" to everything, and your being asked is only a formality? Yes? Now you understand.

The Ingenious Collector: Hey, pal! Heard you're pretty good at adventuring and stuff. I really really don't know what I'll do unless I get one of these thingummies... small, round, costs five bucks at the store over there? Thanks, pal, you're a lifesaver! I'll name my firstborn child after you!

The Sucker: Okay, not to be a pain or anything, but now I need something else... there's a five percent chance you might find one after spending ten hours in the world's most dangerous dungeon, but I really absolutely need that thing. Oh, you got it? Oh, man, thanks! Here's one of those cheezy things they sell for five bucks at the store over there! Use it well!

The Neglectful Leader: You and your loyal band of friends braved trial untold to reach this place, the final battle. You might die tonight, but at least you have each other. This epic journey has taught you the meaning of love, sacrifice and true friendship. You're all in this together, so everybody give one last high-five and shout out what you're fighting for! Your loyal party-mates, that person with the awesome special skill that you had with you for a while, and... wait, who's that dude? Oh, yeah, he joined your party and then you ignored him because he sucks. Group hug, what'syourface! Your personal motives are totes important to me, yeah, the... yeah.

I seriously love RPGs so much.

Party System

2010-10-28T11:37:00.008-04:00

It's that "too many games to play" time of year. I don't deal with it well. I'm pretty poor at multitasking, in fact -- I like to concentrate on one game at a time, and if it grabs me such that I feel like finishing it, I'm compelled to do so before I start anything else. Of course, I can take diversions into downloadable action games, or take one disc out of the Xbox 360 so that my friends can do that multiplayer deathmatch whatever thing they love to do in Reach, but mostly I'm a one-thing-at-a-time kind of gamer.

Actually, sometimes I get so overwhelmed I don't really play anything at all. I celebrated my birthday by partying a lot and going to a lot of music festival bands (fortunately, my result was a lot better than this), and in terms of gaming all I really did was beat Persona 3 Portable. You know, basically the game I already beat a while back when it was out on PlayStation 2.

Actually, it felt quite a lot different this time. Although it changed really nothing about the gameplay (although making those P4-style tweaks to the battle system was much, much needed), the gender swap changed lots about the narrative for me and the way I related to the characters. Remember that Kotaku article I wrote about that?

RPGs are kind of tough that way. On one hand, it's a "role-playing game"; it's meant to be the story of a character's journey, and any good story allows different people to get different things out of it. On the other hand, the gameplay is most central, and in most cases there is an "optimal" way to do everything. Story-driven decisions can sometimes be directly at odds with the decisions you "should" be making to optimize your character's strength or progress.

For example, in the case of Persona 3, your character starts dating another character and you'd rather they spend every possible day together -- but because your "rank" with the game's characters affects your power to create the Personas you summon in battle, it makes more sense to distribute your time equally among other characters, even those you're disinterested in. In fact, it's essential.

The conflict between what you'd like to do to create your story and what's ideal for the gameplay is probably the primary problem with RPGs. That's why open-world RPGs like Fallout 3 are so good; their format makes great strides toward alleviating that friction. By the way, I'm almost relieved New Vegas is so buggy -- "oh, I'm waiting for a patch, that's not out yet, is it, I dunno, I haven't looked" takes some of the pressure off my queue of games to play by the end of the year.

The other main issue, particularly in the Japanese RPG format, is that you can make a million different character classes for the player to choose from, and each one still has an optimal set of equipment and attributes that renders all others useless. It's puzzled me since the '90s: You go to a new town and the shops offer a whole raft of equipment, but one is the best, period. Why not just buy that one? Oh, can't afford it? If not for "better stuff", then what are you grinding for, anyway? Go kill some whatevers until you get some more currency, solved problem.

It's made that whole customizing and outfitting process seem very pointless, some kind of tacked-on relic that's no longer relevant. I go through those motions and sigh, "oh, so this is one of the things they mean when they always say 'Japanese design doesn't know how to get up to date.'"

Not that I really believe that, of course. The Persona games could never have come out of the West, for example. And in fact, it's a completely traditionalist JRPG franchise that's taken the first approach to characterization and customizing that I really like, the first marriage of party system and leveling mechanics that I'm having a ton of fun with.

I dunno why I just assumed I wasn't going to like Dragon Quest IX. I haven't played a Dragon Quest game since I was a child, and that's because I just assumed I'd have to be killing a million slimes in an endless dungeon and being all super old-school and shit. But I decided to give it a try, mainly just to do due-diligence, and am finding DQIX completely enchanting. With the Final Fantasy series having lost its way so badly lately, DQIX demonstrates a real opportunity for the brand to become the quintessential must-have fantasy RPG.

You have a main character, a Chrono Trigger-style silent protagonist, and the central story arc blooms neatly into many smaller side-threads that feel organic -- something that I think Western RPGs lack, as you often find yourself feeling as if you're fulfilling tacked-on errands for a character you have no narrative reason to support or be interested in.

And you generate your party as your own custom characters that you can swap in and out at any time, with no limitations to how many you can create within a given class (they cap how many characters in total you can create, but it's a pretty generous number). You create their look and name them -- which basically means you're free to imagine whatever you want about who they are and why they're with you.

I used to be turned off by these kinds of systems; I'd rather have a party of story-based and well-realized characters working together, than view my heroes as interchangeable dummies, the sum of their abilities and nothing more. But the world is rich enough that you want to make little people you believe could exist there, and it solves the "only one optimal choice" problem in a neat way.

Say you decide to make a Priest for your party; you conceptualize a little bit what you want that character to look like. But outfit them in the items that provide the best bonuses to their strength and defense and suddenly my floppy-haired staff and robe character looks awkward in the same kind of armor that another character is wearing. They don't look like the character I've visualized; they don't look like they're going to be playing the role of healer in my party.

For the first time, I start choosing stuff that's less-than-optimal from a stats standpoint because it just looks cool on the character; it makes them look how I want them to look. I want my Mage in a dress and heels, dammit, and if it makes her weaker -- aren't the magic users supposed to be more sensitive to damage than the hero is, anyway? I can deal.

It breaks the boring "upgrade to new equipment, sell the old equipment, repeat" cycle in a way that enhances my concept of my characters at the same time. I find myself hanging on to all the cute little robes and hats and armor plates and outfits there are, because I might want to use them on a new character. Seeing what kinds of new characters I can make up and add to my hero's journey becomes a big part of the game's fun. They all look so cute!

Also cute: NEW KITTEN. I decided on naming her Yorda. Shh, we can make fun of me later.

Cathy

2010-10-13T19:22:00.002-04:00

If you don't recognize SVGL's new banner, get up to date! I'm more excited about Catherine than I've been about any other "well, I don't know too much about it but this seems awesome" title in some time, so I'm very psyched at the Catherine banner made for me by Cristopher Boyer.

Nice work, eh? Cristopher is Detroit's IGDA coordinator, and is CEO and co-founder of media development company Variant. His work involves helping nurture and support new game development, web and tech businesses in Michigan -- "It's all about the new economies here right now," he tells me. Good lookin' out, Cristopher, and thanks so much for the banner.

As always, past banners by me and by wonderful generous gift artists can be seen at the official Sexy Videogameland banner gallery!

A little while back, fellow Atlus fan Colette Bennett wrote at Gamasutra about why she's looking forward to the game so much and the kinds of themes and interactions she thinks have the potential to emerge. Check it out.

What I've done regarding Catherine is, uh. Despite having an embarrassment of riches in my "to play" pile, I have been diligently aiming to finish Persona 3 Portable, and when I encountered Vincent's little cameo in the game...

Okay. I don't know what's lamer. That I made a YTMND, that I am showing everyone, or that I keep loading it up so that I can laugh at the thing. That I made. Yeah. Well, here you go.

Music For Nerds

2010-10-11T11:59:00.005-04:00

Because I'm big into music and always yakking about bands, I get a lot of people asking me about "nerdcore" bands and, like The Protomen or whatever. I always say I don't like them -- totally willing to admit I'm biased because I make my entire living in the world of video games, but I really dislike the idea that gamer fandom is something that needs to seep into every single pore of a person's waking life. Also I think they're just bad, but that's subjective.

Why should I make it, like, a personal mandate to browbeat gamers into being interested in things other than games? If games are all you like and you want to eat (McFarmville?), sleep, breathe and listen them every minute of your day, that's totally your business, isn't it? More power to you. Do what you love.

It's just that personally I think we can have a richer experience relating to interactive worlds when we have well-rounded lives -- and more importantly, we as consumers will ask for more nuanced, more genuinely social and more diverse game experiences when we are broader and more curious media consumers.

And whether or not it applies to me (protip: it does) I've always flinched at the idea that 'nerd' is a label we should all brag about, like we deserve to be segregated for our interests, like we must embrace this stereotype of being single-minded and socially inept just because we like this or that. We want people to get with the idea that games aren't particularly weird, that they belong in people's lives, right?

Anyway. As much as I am sassy and opinionated about most stuff, at the end of the day it's mostly a big put-on. I'd never tell someone in seriousness that they shouldn't enjoy something that's important to them. But this article on SomethingAwful basically encapsulates, in more depth than I've ever gone into, why I mostly don't really dig "gamer music."

Which makes the YouTube I've posted at the head of this post a little bit of a guilty pleasure, right? (The author of the SA piece told me on Twitter, though I can't find the Tweet now, that this tune is more forgivable because it is self-aware and not taking itself seriously).

In related news, you might all like (or become angry at) this Hosta song, 'No More Video Games', which I stumbled across today on Indie Rock Cafe's decent Summer 2010 mixtape. I came there looking for tracks by Sleep Good, a band from Austin, which is where I spent my entire past week (more on GDC Online later! I'm still catching up on sleep!)

Salute

2010-09-30T08:16:00.005-04:00

Sometimes people are ugly when they're being honest, but let me be honest.

When I decided I was going to try to enter games journalism I also decided I was going to reach the top of my field, you know, be "the best" at the kind of writing I intended to do. I think if people told me how hard it was to break in I wouldn't have started. But once I broke in, and I wanted to keep succeeding, when everyone said to me, "well, it's hard", I'd silently append maybe for you.

And people would say stuff like all games journalism sucks and it'll never be a serious profession and you'll never make your career this way and things like that, and I'd nod sincerely, but privately I felt that I had the capacity to change those rules, even if those who were warning me had become cynical. I suppose I'd set a goal not just to succeed, but to succeed in areas where others had failed. I had a special pride.

So with that in mind -- whenever a publication shut its doors, or a prominent voice left journalism for development, or someone migrated into another field or fell out of the public conversation because they couldn't keep sustainable work, I confess, I felt a little satisfied. You don't feel there's anything more to be done here; I do.

Like they'd failed for a good reason. Or if they left for a better opportunity, it's because they missed the chance to make better opportunities in game writing, which meant there were more for me to discover. Even when it was people I liked very much and whose work I would miss. Even when it was good people losing jobs and I felt for them -- it's not like I'm glad to see people out of work -- there was always that subtle satisfaction in the fact that no matter what the reason, I was hanging in where others weren't.

And for every writer that retired, was fired, gave up, was promoted out of editorial, I felt I automatically advanced, like when someone stepped out of the line, I could step forward. Some of the time, I even felt like a reduction in the noise everyone was producing was a good thing for game journalism, like pruning branches from a tree so that it doesn't choke itself.

Mostly I'm happy with my career. There are only a few people who could make me second-guess that, who make me think that if they don't feel there's anything more to do here, maybe there isn't. And, I mean, could is theoretical. Since I started, no one has left that has made me feel loss instead of that self-serving sense of opportunity until today.

Writers of my particular breed have the opportunities we do because of people like Kieron -- really, him and a handful of others -- being the really-really-first. I remember after a few weeks of Aberrant Gamer columns, largely the first pieces of writing with which I distinguished myself in any way, I saw that he had posted some kind of neutral comment, I don't even remember what it said. And I remember becoming really overwhelmed and excited and thinking that if Kieron was noticing my work, well, then, I was pretty much going to be okay.

Since we began talking a few years ago he was one of those few people that I held up, on various fronts, to say I want to be like you. That he was "here" in this space and had done it forever for so long and in his way always made me feel like I had more growing to do, like there was more room here for that. It wasn't just his writing, it was his attitude about writing, about audiences, about games, everything, that made me feel like this is an arena for sophisticated people and I wasn't wasting my time.

I knew about his plans but I got choked up today nonetheless because I'm a big sap and he'll probably be embarrassed but I'm always a little embarrassing like that when I actually admire someone instead of paying lip service to the concept of admiration, the latter being something Kieron would probably never do.

Not like I'm going anywhere right now. And it's not like he's dead or something, geez, Leigh! But the transition of Kieron Gillen makes me consider for the first time that a battle won in a war of attrition isn't much of a victory. I suppose I still have to keep getting better and more useful to this space, then.

So. Thanks for everything, man.

Out With The Old

2010-09-24T14:16:00.008-04:00

Are you tired of it by now, how I have big gaps in blogging and then open my newest post with a statement about how busy I've been? Yes? Okay, then I'll skip that part.

Who's playing Halo: Reach? I must say, I've never been much of a Halo, player, which is to say I dabbled in Halo 2 (by "dabbling" I mean 'held the controller for approx 5 mins, watched someone else play for approx 15 mins, and wandered off') and never played the others at all.

But it's easy to see why, regardless of personal taste, the launch of the title has been a big deal from every angle.

Hello, Halo

There's the business aspect: Bungie's last game before it's officially independent, and the information it can offer about trends in packaged software sales. Those are declining, of course, but a launch of Reach's scale promises to offer some answers on whether the core gamer will still show up at retail for the right kind of game.

There's the scope of the tech and design, too; I'm told they rebuilt the engine from scratch and used a mocap studio because having a lifelike world was so important to the game's aim. There's the design angle -- how do you iterate on such a huge property and still please your core audience? And then, of course, there are numerous critical angles to explore, as Reach is arguably the most narrative-focused iteration in a franchise that no one would have ever called contemplative or narrative-driven in the past.

For someone like me, there were tons of brand-new angles to consider. So I attended the game's launch in Times Square and covered it for Gamasutra. I interviewed senior staff from Bungie and also from 343 Industries, Microsoft's internal division that will take the reins from here on out.

Are you worried about the future of the franchise now that it's effectively changing hands? Concerned by Microsoft's suggesting that it could decrease the time between installments and annualize the franchise more? You may or may not have noticed that the talented Chris Morris writes on current events for us at Gamasutra now -- he sees cause for concern about Halo's future.

Doesn't Anybody Stay In One Place Anymore?

Change is always hard, though -- particularly for gamers. Innovation and evolution seem especially difficult to achieve successfully in this space. If you change what fans are used to, they react poorly. But if you give them more of the same -- if, for example, a sequel doesn't change much over its predecessor -- they also react poorly.

This has been hard for game developers to keep pace with as it is, but now we're in a long console cycle where there's no new hardware on the horizon whereby tech advancements can refresh a property all by themselves. Notice an increasing number of franchise tangents, reimaginings, reboots under discussion? That's because it's so hard to sequelize in the current environment.

I'm impressed with the industry's approach to combating staleness. Lots of designers have told me later that a long console cycle means that development on the hardware itself -- you know, the basics -- are pretty well down pat, so they can increasingly focus on refining less tangible elements like story, gameplay, and the interplay between the two.

In order to make things evolve and keep gamers engaged, devs are going to have to try some things they've never done before, and while they won't always hit the mark, ultimately an environment of experimentation and learning is an excellent thing for games. It's pretty exciting, actually -- at this point in a long lifecycle you'd expect us all to be getting a little restless and bored, but the future's full of possibilities that I, for one, can't wait to check out.

But again, we're talking about gamers, here, and many of them freak and pre-judge when they see something different. Easy for me to say -- even I had a teeny episode of nerd rage when I saw the trailer for the new Devil May Cry reboot. If my reaction had been any more knee-jerk, my cat would have gone flying across the room.

So I decided to examine the deceptively complex situation in an in-depth analysis at Gamasutra. What a double-edged sword for Ninja Theory, appointed as the new steward of a beloved Japanese franchise. I don't really envy them at all. I admit, I don't like it much more than some of you guys do, but let's be optimistic, because one trailer is not at all enough information on which to create a judgment.

Part of my hesitation comes from the ways I don't like to see Japanese art and design trends so quickly sloughed away in the eagerness to "globalize." Certainly, something's gotta change over there, but I don't know if the reason Japanese games don't sell in the West as well as they used to can be fixed by exporting properties to European studios. We'll see, I suppose.

All Together Now!

All of the major interviews and coverage I've done in the past few weeks, in fact, seem to point to the theme I'm discussing here: Innovation, freshness, evolution and change. In case you have missed:

Interview: Atari GO Goes For Online, Social, Mobile Publishing Strategy -- The head of Atari's newest and largest online publishing initiative explains why being a true online publisher is a key survival strategy in the changing climate.

In-Depth: THQ's Farrell Thinks Outside The Old Hardware Lifecycle -- speaking to investors, THQ's CEO talks about our new climate and where publishers would be served to reallocate their attentions.

Interview: DeLoura On The Rapidly-Evolving Tools Space, New Divergence -- longtime tech strategist, most recently of Google (briefly), talks about changes in the development tools space that both respond to and influence changing business models and design paradigms. Similarly, they're both creating and reacting to a major gap between the AAA and the new mobile/social/indie space.

Interview: IGN Provides Free Office Space To Indies With New 'Open House' Program -- speaking of indies, IGN has a cool new no-strings-attached program to support and network with indie developers.
D
Interview: Building On BioShock 2 With Minerva's Den -- And pursuant to what I said on the narrative-building side, our friend Steve Gaynor talks challenges, opportunities and process in creating a compelling tangent to BioShock 2 and the world of Rapture with the new Minerva's Den DLC.

I Ain't Done, This Ain't The Chorus

I have written a satire of the Gizmodo-browsing, startup-starting, latte-drinking social media entrepreneur over at Thought Catalog. It is all intended in good fun, so please read How I Became A Social Media Millionaire In One Week.

Going to GDC Austin? Are you a student, aspiring student or recent grad? If not, does the sound of me standing behind a podium asking questions of teachers who are sitting at a table sound awesome to you? Did you answer 'yes' to any of the preceding questions? If so, have I got the panel for you.

My article on first-person shooters is in GamePro's October issue, which I think might still be on newsstands. I don't know! I forgot that I even wrote it! I'm sure I'm forgetting some other things here, but hey, this is enough for you guys, right?

So lastly, I want to thank everyone who has checked out Babycastles and made a donation to help their fundraising efforts. Since I pleaded for the support of the SVGL Army, fundraising has really ramped up, and we owe so much of that to you guys, and those of you who passed the word along. Thank you so much for believing in the ideas that are important to me and my friends. I can't say it enough.

Indie Games Take Manhattan (With Your Help)

2010-09-20T11:49:00.006-04:00

I've talked to you a bit before about Babycastles, the arcade some friends of mine are founding in a local community space here in New York City. It's meant to be a tangible showcase and play space for independent games, the kind a wider audience wouldn't necessarily encounter on their own. How great for indies, how great for games!

What's more is the founders want to take what they've begun with indie spirit out here in the DIY scene and build a bigger fancier indie arcade IN TIMES SQUARE. Imagine! A mecca for hands-on indie gaming in the culture capital of America! This is something I think all who love games might be interested in supporting.

Babycastles needs funds, though. You guys were so supportive of Kill Screen when I told you about it, and SVGLers helped very much in the fundraising effort -- this is the same kind of idea, a spiritual alternative to what already exists that will be good for the gaming space on the whole.

Every little dollar helps, but the Babycastles team has put together a ton of awesome incentive packages, too (apparently they have added a pixelblock rendering of me to the available bonuses?!). Please check it out and consider making even a small donation in support of a great cause -- we've only got a couple of weeks left!

(Wanna know what it's like? Check the article I wrote -- in the process of researching it, I learned I wanted to do everything I could to help).

The Official SVGL Banner Gallery Is Here!

2010-09-12T00:45:00.004-04:00

I swap SVGL's design and banner header a lot. It's, like, a 'thing' I do. Over the years, I've accrued a massive gallery of SVGL banners, most made by me, but with plenty of gifts from readers and friends. Unfortunately my hard drives have been fickle things, and I've been unable to hang onto all of them (I lost a big zip file last year full of gift banners).

Lots of you enjoy the little visual bonuses, and I've been asked many times over the years to create a gallery of the site's banners. I finally went ahead and did it, and here it is! I made 'em unless otherwise noted in the image title.

I have tried to credit creators where I knew them. There are a couple there that were given to me and I, embarrassingly, cannot remember who the artist was. If you gave me a banner and yours is not credited or is miscredited, please please email me. If you gave me a banner I've used and you don't see it there, please re-send for inclusion in the gallery. If you are credited and do NOT want your name used, that's totally fine too, just shoot me a mail.

I love these pictures. I may at any time re-use any of the ones that are in there, too, because as much as I love to change up the design here regularly, some of those are just way too fun never to be seen again!

I felt a little nostalgic assembling this gallery, so I hope it's not too cheesy if I deliver you all a sincere thanks for being part of Sexy Videogameland. Game journalism is my full-time career, and sometimes floods my life even more than I want it to. But I started this blog with the hope of making that happen, and it happened for me in great part because of you guys. Because you thought it was worth reading, because you gave me your feedback and you liked "being here" with each other and because you supported my work. Most of you probably weren't "here" in the beginning, but I know some of you were, so thanks. A million.

The New Immersion

2010-09-11T16:47:00.007-04:00

As social networking has surged, I've found myself blogging less. When I began SVGL, I used to post sometimes multiple times per day, if my time permitted; I was full of ideas and I loved having the opportunity to regularly connect and engage with the community that was building itself here.

So I've observed the slowdown in my blogging habits with some concern. Has it meant I have fewer ideas now? Am I just too busy with my pro work to keep up my dear little blog anymore? Am I less interested in video game conversation than I used to be, now that the majority of my waking hours are spent in that space? Am I burning out, or something?

Then I realized I still produce just as much community content as I did before; it's simply taking a different shape. Many of you have transitioned with me from SVGL to the venues I use with far more regularity: Twitter and Formspring. I imagine that if one accumulated the sum total of text related to the video game community that I place on Twitter and Formspring on a regular basis, the result would be pretty parallel to the amount of content that I used to produce blogging. I'm still sharing my ideas with the community; it's just taken on a different shape.

I remember when N'Gai Croal, one of the most venerated writers doing the work that I hoped to join, began to post less on his Level Up blog. Alongside that, he was becoming a real power Twitter user. I didn't see the point of Twitter at the time; "why would anyone be interested in what I am doing all day, and what do I care what all these strangers had for breakfast," I wondered. When I heard trendy folk saying that Twitter was anything close to "journalism", I was scornful. It seemed preposterous.

I teased N'Gai a lot about his early-adopter Twitter evangelism. But he is well-reputed among us all for his prescience and his big-picture thinking, and I now realize that at the time, he had immediately realized something that took me a lot longer to grasp: Twitter is a brilliant communication platform, and it does, in fact, serve the same function for many that a lot of blogs do.

The first time I attended events like GDC or E3, people came up to me and said, "oh, I read your blog." The most recent time I attended these events, people came up to me and said, "oh, I read your Twitter." I found it bizarre, but it makes sense.

Twitter and Formspring are quick-hit, instant-access experiences. 140 characters are more effective than 1400, sometimes. Rather than cull my RSS feeds and read sprawling forum threads to discover what the community is interested in and speak to it, you use these social networking venues to bring your interests to me directly (that plenty of Formspring questions are about my sex life and shoe size or whatever is an unfortunate side-effect).

And I realized recently that these new media are having a similar transformative effect on the video game industry. We're being trained in this socially-networked era of bite-size communications, and all media are evolving alongside it. I used to read music blogs to discover new songs, but now I simply follow those bloggers on Twitter and when they post a new track, I just pick and choose what links to click from their feeds. My favorite book right now is a reflection of these new fashions of interaction.

When it comes to video games, sales of traditional 60-hour packaged software video games are declining, but sales of smaller, easy-access digitally-distributed titles are on the rise. Even someone who was a "light" gamer before has new options: instead of downloading and installing some kind of PC executable, they're playing iPhone apps while they wait for the subway.

Much conversation takes place in the social gaming space about how they will cannibalize the console industry, as if the two platforms were mutually exclusive. This message is often reduced to its barest bones, and translated as "Facebook games are the new 'video game', and console video games will cease to exist."

Certainly that message is worth scoffing at; gamers still want depth. But the way they want it delivered is definitely evolving; social media is gaining steam, and we, the primary 'gamer generation', are growing older. Maybe the adolescents of the coming era are begging not for a gaming console, but for a Steam account. We want our content available in an accessible, jump-in-jump-out way. We want it always on, always there, living intangible and persistent on invisible digital strings.

But these rising trends are having massive impacts on the economic models of the businesses they're enabling. To use the music example again, I can listen to 20 new songs a day if I want to, just by following artists and music bloggers on Twitter. Do I spend money, though? Not too often. I buy records often when I'm in love with a band, but I listen to free digital music much more. Most of the music I own, I found or someone gave it to me. How are bands supposed to make any money?

That the game industry is so high-risk has been my greatest lament regarding traditional games; when success is so hard and so much cash is required to even give it a shot, no one wants to lose millions because they tried something new and interesting that didn't work. If people are buying fewer console titles -- and they are -- then the game industry becomes even more hit-driven than it used to be.

We've always looked to indies to use their freedom and agility to create real innovation, but independents have long had challenges of their own -- low risk doesn't mean no risk, and lower cost doesn't mean "affordable." If indies can't reach their audiences, they're still disabled. And broke, probably. The upside of this online shift in the way we consume is that the indie scene becomes even more relevant. When the real good content is discovered by crowdsourcing on social networks and obtained by a one-click download, the playing field of AAA guns and indie developers looks a lot more even.

That doesn't mean I feel convinced we're not losing something in the transition. My least-favorite phrase in developer interviews used to be "bite-sized chunks." Not only is that aesthetically unappealing, but to me it spoke of a design philosophy that eschewed depth in favor of accessibility. I'm still not so sure it doesn't.

I hope I never stop blogging, and I hope game developers will still make hours-long walled gardens for me to escape into, just like I've done since I was a little girl. There's hope for console devotees in games like the rightfully-flourishing Red Dead Redemption, which seems to face an easy skate from here to Game of the Year for pretty much everyone. One can play that game for hours. One can also play it for five minutes.

The chronology of the gaming consoles I've owned is now finished over at Thought Catalog. I notice a marked decrease in sentimentality from the first installment to the last. Chalk it up to nostalgia, but my changing relationship with the landscape has a lot to do with it, too.

A Single Star In The Sky

2010-09-08T10:51:00.003-04:00

"At E3 I saw people putting on speeches but I thought the future seemed a bit dark. The 3D games didn't spark my interest. I think motion control's a bit old now, I don't think those games are the future. It all seemed a bit dull."

-- Keita Takahashi

[Today's Good Song: Katamari On The Rocks]