Post-Emo-Existentiell Gaming

A Week on the Farm: Introduction

2010-03-05T10:50:00.000-08:00

I’ll admit it, I’m a prejudiced gamer. While there are some genres I like and others I don’t, generally I can adopt a “to each his own” attitude about games. Similarly, I try hard to avoid the hardcore gamer geek stereotype of questioning others’ commitment to or involvement in gaming based on what they’re playing. The-more-the-merrier I generally say, whether you’re a Halo addict or a click-management connoisseur. Continue Reading at Existential Gamer...

Are Post-Modern Games Possible?

2010-02-24T12:39:00.000-08:00

Indie/minimalist game designer Jason Rohrer, recently said the games industry isn’t quite ready to start banding around terms like modernism and post-modernism. That’s a pretty bold statement to make about an industry that prides itself on being cutting edge, but perhaps it’s true. Are we jumping the gun in terms of the “stages” of art by thinking that games are already modern/post-modern? Or do the old genealogies not apply when talking about a medium that has matured so rapidly? Continue Reading at Existential Gamer...

EG Radio Ep3: Chocies and Consequences

2010-02-21T16:57:00.000-08:00

Did a podcast over at EG. We talked about DLC, indie game bundles, and some specific points of Bioshock 2, Dragon Age, and others. Give it a listen!

EG Analysis: Critter Crunch

2010-02-20T08:27:00.000-08:00

Puzzle games haven’t changed much since the release of Tetris, and for the most part they are highly abstract affairs. There is no narrative to Tetris, only gameplay in its purest form. Ditto modern puzzle classics like Bejeweled. Some have themes pasted on, like Super Puzzle Fighter II Turbo, while others, like Puzzle Quest, add RPG elements. Yet the mechanics of all puzzle games are essentially the same – abstract color matching with the occasional tweak to powerups or multiplayer styles. Continue Reading at Existential Gamer...

E.G. Impression: Heavy Rain

2010-02-12T11:00:00.000-08:00

Pushing an art form forward often means looking past big flaws to the original genius underneath. While I don’t think originality for originality’s sake should be rewarded, when someone takes a risk that pushes against established norms, those who tire of existing paradigms should stand up take notice. With games even if the experience as a whole fails a breakthrough mechanic or risky procedural narratives can make an otherwise mundane or head-scratching title extraordinary. Continue Reading at Existential Gamer...

When Less is More

2010-02-02T11:51:00.000-08:00

Book lovers frequently criticize movies and games on the grounds that they lack imagination. The minimalism of text, no matter how well put together, requires readers to constantly flex their imagination in ways not possible when visual images are given to you. But such critics have never waxed nostalgically for an old 8-bit game only to go back to it and realize how much their “imagination” had colored their memories with flashy graphics impossible on the hardware of yesteryear. There’s something about boiling a gaming experience down to its basic elements that allows one to focus only on the relevant mechanics and let your mind fill in the rest. Street Fighter alone offers several examples that attest to this fact. Continue reading at Existential Gamer...

Existential Gamer Update

2010-01-26T12:15:00.000-08:00

It's been several months, a honeymoon, and a move since I last posted here - and this will probably be my last. I've posted my first post over at the Existential Gamer's new site. Go give it a read and add to your Feeds. I'm not disbanding PEEG, but don't expect to see much out of it in the near future.

Oh who am I kidding - you already weren't expecting much!

The Failure of First-Person Narrative

2009-11-28T15:59:00.000-08:00

I've never been big on first person shooters. However the recent glut of writing about Modern Warfare 2 and its effective (or not so effective) "No Russian" level has got me thinking about many discussions of first person narratives lately. Far Cry 2, Red Faction: Guerrilla, and both Call of Duty 4 and World at War are all games that have garnered much critical discussion yet I've let them slip by me because of their genre.

These have sat in the bottom of my GameFly queue for a while so I was quite surprised yesterday when World at War showed up in my mailbox. I popped it in this morning with an open mind and was immediately impressed by its graphical polish. The interspersing of real footage with a dramatic stylized history lesson of America's involvement in World War II was made for the post-MTV generation. The tension of the opening scene - my character's capture and the graphic execution of a fellow Marine seconds before my rescue - pulled me into the game instantly. Unfortunately that excitement died alongside my fallen comrade the moment I picked up a gun.

Not being a veteran of first person shooters I felt more like a frightened James Sunderland who had never held a gun before than a hardened Marine. What button do I push to shoot? Should I crouch to avoid enemy fire? Who are these people yelling at me - My CO or a random AI grunt? How do I tell the difference between friendlies and hostiles when everyone looks nearly the same? While I realize the panic that grips a soldier during a firefight is a major reality of war, generally you have many months of order and training to fall back on that helps create order out of the chaos of the battlefield.

I had none of that training. Call me spoiled but I like having a tutorial available when I play a new game. World at War has none. Perhaps developers believe anyone who plays and FPS are "hardcore" and wouldn't need such a thing. Yet the game that renewed my interest in the genre, Battlefield 1943, did so largely because of the tutorial that held my hand as it explained the basics combat. Being thrown into a chaotic and dangerous situation where I have no idea how to protect myself creates the perfect atmosphere for a survival-horror game, but not so much for a simulation of war where your training and trust in your squad mates are essential to success.

Assuming the opening experience for veterans of the Call of Duty franchise would be markedly different and knowing I would eventually get the hang of things, I perservered. A few suspension-of-disbelief shattering moments aside (I'm talking about the CO who yelled at me for 5 minutes to kill one glitch-hiding hostile while the rest of my squad stood around doing nothing.) I reach the end of the second mission and a member of my squad is killed before me in a scripted surprise attack. Cut to the set up for the third mission and the aforementioned glitzy graphics lamenting the loss of my fallen comrade. Who was he? I have no idea. But apparently he was important enough to me in those two brief intro missions that I should be choked up about his death.

Two missions into the game and I have no real attachment to characters, or even, to myself. While it's still early in the game I think much of my distance from the game's narrative is that I still feel confused by what's going on around me. This is a problem that could easily be solved by adding a tutorial for nubs like myself and using that time to introduce me to my squad.

Anyone who has seen Full Metal Jacket knows that if you really want to get into the psychology of a soldier you need to start with Basic Training. A game doesn't necessarily need to go that far. A a simple sweep and clean mission punctuated by down time where the player can overhear their squad mates talking - humanizing them - and scripted, hand-holding attack sequences would do wonders for giving a player both the narrative drive to care about their team and the tools to do something meaningful to protect them.

First person shooters do a great job of immersing the player in a world of limited vision and ever-present danger. They don't necessarily need a tutorial to do this if the player perseveres enough to learn the ropes. I imagine this is why many players stick with the genre. The learning curve is small and the gameplay immersion instantly gratifying. But a good narrative, particularly if a game aspires to create an emotional experience for the player, requires more than just placing a player with a pre-existing skill set into the heart battle. They need a reason to care at the micro-level, not just the patriotic thrill of a brief stylized history lesson. In the case of World at War they developers choose to give the player a name but it is really just that. No backstory, nothing to connect him to his squad. Maybe more of that is revealed over the course of the campaign, but they haven't given me a reason to stick with the game so far through either story or gameplay.

Post-Emo + Existential Gamer

2009-11-03T17:40:00.000-08:00

Recorded my first podcast this weekendwith one half of the duo that runs Existential Gamer. Hopefully this will be the first of many to come as they're looking to add more contributors and redesign the site in the coming months.

It's quite nice to get some synchronous conversation going with another passionate, critical gamer. Give it a listen. We paint a pretty broad swathe from Batman to Demon's Souls to Uncharted to Geo Defense with some meanderings here and there to talk about gaming on a time budget as well as the potential (or lack thereof) for risk-taking in AAA titles.

Is Demon's Souls Hardcore?

2009-10-29T15:11:00.000-07:00

Or does it just require patience?

We live in the ADHD age, where multitasking is commonplace and television shows have to pique our interest within 2 minutes or risk being passed over for 10 second YouTube snippets. Gamers, of course, are frequently thought of as the cornerstone of the ADHD generation. Look at the comments on most gaming sites and it's obvious that most commenters don't even finish reading the post they're commenting on, much less play the games under discussion with a critical eye. Not that there's anything wrong with playing games that way, but if there's one often overlooked reason for the rise of so-called "easy" games - games with few punitive measures or that emphasize flow over difficulty - it's that many gamers have no interest in being patient and watching an enemy's patterns before launching an attack. Yet this is exactly what Demon's Souls demands of the player.

It's interesting to compare Demon's Souls to God of War. Both games have a similar aesthetic and third-person hack-em-up style. Yet GoW-style games are basically button mashers. Aside from setting up for the occasional flashy combo you can hack and slash your way through the game with nary a thought of defense or anticipating enemy attack patterns. These games put the player into the psychological frame of mind of a raging barbarian. Perhaps that's the head space most gamers want to occupy. It is a fantasy after all - why have to worry about resistance or consequences? Kill, maim, destroy at all cost, with nary a thought for self preservation (there's very little chance of death anyhow).

Demon's Souls is the soft, exposed underside of God of War. Ostensibly you're engaging in the same behavior - kill, maim, and destroy - but not at all cost. Rushing blindly into battle leads to near certain death, even against enemies that are relatively weak against you. The price for failure is that you lose all the souls you've gained, and souls are the currency through which you become stronger and progress the game. Death isn't just a momentary setback that forces you to replay the game from a set checkpoint - it costs you all the progress you've made since you last "leveled up". There is a bit of grace involved. If you can fight your way back to the point at which you died you reclaim all the souls you lost, but you only get one chance at this. Die again and only the most recent death, and the souls lost as a result, can be regained.

The result is a game that borrows a page from the survival horror genre. Because death is costly and can come at any time if you're not careful the player has to slow down. Unlike survival horror, however, this concern for your avatar's well-being isn't in the service of fear per se (though the game is quite eerie at times). This concern makes you approach each fight cautiously and means you respect each opponent rather than thinking of them as expendable. There is something cool about needing to pause and size up your foe before every battle rather than thinking of them as a minor annoyance to be batted away. Even enemies far less powerful than you can and will take you down if you try to button mash your way through them. Sure, you may only have to strike them once to destroy them, but let a group of them surround you and they will repeatedly stagger you until you, literally, give up the ghost.

But this doesn't make for a difficult game. Heck, you can take down enemies much stronger than you if you are patient and watch their patterns (of course, if they can kill you in one hit it can bedifficult to learn their patterns!). So why has this game gotten such a rap for being "difficult" and "hardcore"? Have our gaming chops gotten so rusty that we lack the patience and intellect to analyze an enemy before we attack?

An interesting cross-case is Batman: Arkham Asylum. This game has - quite deservedly - gotten much acclaim and I don't recall reading any review that cited it for its difficulty. Yet the combat is similar in that it requires patience. Despite what most may think Batman is quite fragile - low level thugs can take him down with a few well timed hits so you learn very quickly to be patient with them. You have to utilize counter attacks because enemies can and will attack you while you're in the middle of dealing with one of their buddies just as they do in Demon's Souls. So why is no one calling Arkham Asylum "hardcore"?

Perhaps it's because combat in Arkham Asylum is specifically designed for you to be patient and counter - it's right there in the tutorial and the game makes it apparent when to counter thanks to Bruce Wayne's spider-sense like situational awareness. Or maybe it's because combat in Arkham Asylum is flashy. You are rewarded for extended combos which require patience to execute. Combat is also quite beautiful to watch - unlike Demon's Souls which looks good but gets stale quickly. These visual treats make the game seem easier despite enemies that are just as threatening and combat that requires patience rather than button mashing.

While I wouldn't go so far as to call Demon's Souls a thinking man's game its charm lies in the 3 P's - Patience, Persistence, and Pattern Recognition - rather than quick reflexes. Only in the ADHD age could a game be considered difficult for not rewarding quick reflexes above all else. If Demon's Souls is at all old-school it shows just how much the standards of gaming fun have changed since I got my GED.

PEEG Critique: Avataritis

2009-10-24T15:17:00.000-07:00

The past week has seen an interesting bit of criticism in the blogosphere regarding character customization. Martyn Zachary leads the way with an intriguing discussion of why rampant character customization is not necessarily a good thing for narrative in games. Responding to the piece on his own blog Chris Lepine explores the psychological reasons why gamers are drawn to character customization. Both pieces are, unfortunately, a bit heavy on academic babble but once deciphered I think they open the door to re-thinking our obsession with custom avatars in games. I recommend reading both pieces, but you'll find a substantial summary below.

Zachary's original piece makes a compelling argument against using blank slate create-what-you-will character customizations as a narrative tool. Developers seem to think that letting players create their own protagonist will forge a greater empathetic bond, immersing them more fully in the gameworld. This only sells players short, however. Nothing about the external qualities of a protagonist - their gender, age, race, etc. - is necessary to fully humanizing them in the mind of the player. The internal facets of that character, the basic emotions and range of human experiences common to everyone, are all that need be fleshed out to create a relatable protagonist. Falling back on character customization, then, concedes that players need to be able to make a protagonist that resembles themselves or their external experiences if they are to relate to him or her and understand their motivations.

Zachary also claims that customization is a developer's answer to the rampant homogenization of protagonists, specifically the white male hero. Rather than utilize other races and genders as pre-defined protagonists many developers simply use customization in the belief that players ultimately want to see a protagonist that mirrors themselves (or an idealized version of themselves). White male protagonists were the norm before technology allowed for customization simply because that represents the largest, and therefore most profitable, player base.

Where Zachary argues that this sells gamers short - after all we can identify with a range of protagonists in other media with little trouble - Chris Lepine says that gamers in particular have developed an inability to relate to the inner lives of others unlike themselves. After a little detour into Reichean psychoanalysis he concludes that gamers have been unwilling to reveal their differences (their hobby) to outsiders in a society that often shuns gaming as an immature diversion. As a result, gamers have become insular, refusing to connect emotionally with the characters they play unless they fit a pre-defined mold they are already equipped to understand - the rugged white male protagonist. This is not necessarily a condemnation of gamer psychology - certainly not all gamers feel this way - but an explanation of why customization has become the selling point du jour. Lepine takes a different tack by claiming that modern gamers think the external background/appearance of a character doesn't represent who they fully are - it's just window dressing - but further they don't want to care. The internal lives of others, even our fictional protagonists, are off limits because our internal lives have been hidden and off limits for so long.

The difference between Zachary and Lepine's conclusions is subtle but striking. Zachary accuses developers of condescending to players in thinking they can't relate to characters radically different from themselves. Lepine, on the other hand, accuses them of thinking gamers are so stubborn and broken from years of marginalization that they won't relate to protagonists that they cannot modify into the exact image they want. Strangely, Lepine's conclusion leads to a industry-stunting spiral. Years of being marginalized as an audience have made gamers unwilling to allow the medium to change and grow in ways that would garner it more critical acceptance. Because games have been ignored as an artistic medium gamers curl into their shells and refuse to let games take them to difficult narrative places where the industry as a whole would be viewed as a more mature form of art, thus garnering the respect they desire.

Both pieces, though full enough as they are, leave open one crucial question. Why is it important for a player to relate to the inner life of the protagonist? What does a pre-defined, fully realized character offer in terms of narrative that can't be accomplished by letting the player create their own hero?

Giving the player the freedom to create their own hero means relinquishing quite a bit of authorial control. Rather than telling the story of a particular person the developer instead has to focus on crafting the story of a world, a setting in which the player generates their own story. When the player is in charge of crafting their own protagnoist, choosing their internal psychology and motivations (or choosing not to care about them at all) then the possibility of any pre-defined narrative exploration of their psychology is eliminated. The character becomes just a vessel to explore the world - the setting becomes the real protagonist.

Not that there is anything wrong with this. Many books and a handful of movie franchises have been successful on the strength of their setting rather than individual characters - the Ring of Fire and expanded universe Star Trek/Wars come to mind. But this shouldn't be the only type of narrative available to games. If we want the player to explore the inner life of a character they have to be fleshed out and meaningfully portrayed in advance, giving the player the chance to understand them from the inside and make choices based on what they believe is best for the character. It's relatively easy to decide as a player what course of action is best, particularly if your focus is on gameplay benefits rather than narrative continuity. It's easier still to make those decisions from the viewpoint of a customized avatar whose background you've decided for yourself and who, frankly, will likely be similar to yourself or archetypes you are pretty familiar with. To put yourself fully into the shoes of another, one who is fully realized with their own code of ethics and motivations, and then be tasked with deciding what to do with their life is to truly engage with with an interactive narrative. This is what I think GTA: IV tried to do. Niko Bellic is not a character whose psychology and background the player has any say in. His motivations are revealed through the course of the game but the player decides who he's going to be friends with and, in several situations, who lives and who dies. "What Would Niko Bellic Do?" is the pertinent question of the game, and a much more difficult one to answer than asking what I, the player, prefer to do or what course of action gives me the best in-game bonuses.

There's a possible literary corollary to this protagonist-as-avatar versus protagonist-as-setting distinction. All authors must make the difficult choice of whether to tell their story in the first or third person. This choice has radical repercussions on how the story is perceived and what information the reader is privy to. Most importantly, spinning a tale in the first person is generally the best choice for authors who wish to make the main character the central focus of the word. Few writers can convey the psychological complexities of a character in the third person as well as they can in the first.

First person narratives are the equivalent to games with pre-defined protagonists. Their story, their struggle, and how they interact with the world the author has constructed becomes the focus. When players are given a choice over how the protagonist behaves it should be in the service of better understanding the protagonist, not simply to find out what happen in the game world. This is the strength of first person narratives - they let us get inside the head of the protagonist with all of their biases and limitations. As players we do ourselves a disservice if we forget that and try to understand the game world from our own perspective rather than theirs.

Games without pre-defined protagonists put the emphasis on the world itself, or perhaps the characters in that world. The setting is a sandbox in which the player can test various identities for their avatar and see how the world responds to it. While the author still has quite a bit of control over how the world responds to different player types, the player interacts with the world to learn about themselves or the archetype they choose to embody rather than to learn to view the world from a different vantage point. This is a very valid way of gaming, but thus far developers haven't been explicit about these goals when creating games with player created protagonists.

The bottom line is that developers need to ask themselves what type of player is playing their game. If the player has no interest in story and only gameplay matters then no amount of backstory for the protagonist is going to draw them in - they're probably skipping the cutscenes anyway! Unfortunately the emphasis on character customization suggests that they are asking themselves this question and concluding that only gameplay matters. But of course the industry only seems to think gameplay matters because it has always been the only thing that matters, well that and flashy graphics. If we don't give players the chance to engage with deep and meaningfully different protagonists then we'll never see how important and powerful games as narrative devices can become. Unfortunately if that happens the industry has little hope of maturing into anything resembling high art.

Gaming on a Time Budget

2009-10-22T13:06:00.000-07:00

Ok, I feel a bit sheepish doing this, but I've been wanting to write a blog post about this very thing for a couple months now. This article on the Escapist says exactly what I wanted to say though, so why repeat? Go read it.

What Do You Fight For?

2009-10-18T08:37:00.000-07:00

There are many of us out here on the interwebs who take games seriously and urge others to consider the important lessons we can learn through interactive media. Unfortunately the very industry we are trying to protect and expand frequently fights against us with their belief that the best kind of marketing is still that which targets the testosterone-fueled adolescent male demographic. Think back to EA's "Sin to Win" debacle, the backlash to which some have argued was anticipated and even desired by the folks in EA's marketing wing in effort to ramp up publicity on the game.

Not all games aspire to take the industry to a deeper level of course, but even the lowest-common-denominator titles regularly churned out for the masses need not stoop to the level of juvenile humor to draw attention to themselves. Yet it's interesting what advertisements say about the games we play, even the ones that we find relatively innocuous.

The following two advertisements for Tekken 6 contain deeper messages that are completely at odds with one another. Part of a larger ad campaign centered on the theme "What Do You Fight For?" - an interesting question given the near Kojima-like obtuseness of the Tekken storyline - these two ads are radically different in their view of life's priorities. The first is a decent attempt at investing fighting with meaning and purpose as real-world fighters talk about their motivations: personal growth, justice, equality, even Christ (thanks Evander!).

While it may be a bit macho-saccharine in its execution and is ultimately in the service of a fairly standard gaming genre, at least it attempts to speak at something deeper expressed through the human desire to compete in physical combat. Seeing this isolated video might garner applause for the marketing folks at Namco for at least giving their potential audience food for thought.

Unfortunately those thoughts are far more interesting than they may have intended when you pair that video with the following:

Justice, equality, heels, and hair straighteners. Makes me want to ask the ad firm what market they're fighting for.

PEEG Critique: Lack of Substance Abuse

2009-10-15T12:00:00.001-07:00

Got a new, hopefully weekly, feature for you here at PEEG. You've probably notice my experiment with a weekly feature in the form of my commentated news recap, and while that's great for stimulating my thinking and writing about things in brief quips I need to engage more deeply with something on a regular basis. To that end I'm going to put frequent blog reading to good use by highlighting and critiquing a notable blog entry or gaming related article each week.

This week's entry requires has some back story. Edge ran an interview last week titled Death of the Author in which three developers discussed the concept of emergent narrative and its potential to push developer scripted stories into the background in favor of stories authored by the players themselves. It's a concept that's been floating around a while and one I personally find exciting. However not everyone thinks the concept is so groundbreaking. Michael Sylvain accuses "emergent narrative" of being nothing more than an empty industry buzzword in his response to the interview titled Lack of Substance Abuse. Is this an important point? Does anyone really know what an "emergent narrative" is and, if so, is it even very important for the future of the gaming industry?

For most of digital gaming's history "story" was a brief framework under which the player is charged with a task. The only narrative needed in Space Invaders was that aliens were invading from space and you needed to stop them. Narrative was simply a backdrop - and an often unnecessary one - for gameplay. Can you really remember the narrative that drives most fighting game characters to do battle? Do you need to if you wish to play them well?

As storytelling in games has matured and technology expanded to allow more robust input from the player we've begun to find ways to give the player more control over the story beyond simple succeed or fail mechanics. This means developers have learned to be comfortable giving up some authorial control, but certainly not all. If a player can do whatever they what happens if they don't wish to engage in the grand sweeping story the developer has spent years putting together? What if Niko Bellic doesn't care about finding an old enemy, making money, helping his cousin, or exploring Liberty City? You can't give a player total freedom while maintaining any sense of a greater goal or focus. Perhaps you can provide multiple paths for a player to follow, but even so they are still finite and constrained by what the developer envisions - all outcomes are in some way scripted in advance.

Emergent narratives are the most recent proposed solution to this discrepancy between story and player choice. Such stories wouldn't be fully scripted in advance but somehow created as the game progresses based on choices players make or their successes and failures. But Sylvain doesn't think this concept holds water. In the first place there's too much hyperbole involved with the notion that an interactive story becomes a qualitatively new experience. The goal of all this emergent narrative talk seems to be to argue that the landscape of how stories are told is radically changed by interactive media, but this is just too much big talk with little to back it up.

I agree that in an attempt to legitimize gaming as a unique media we tend to scream positive accolades about our medium at every opportunity. Perhaps we shouldn't be quick to think "emergent narratives" or any other new idea will suddenly revolutionize the industry, making the broader culture stand up and take notice of what gaming is capable of. Heck, by the time we get to something like emergent narratives your average person who hasn't spent years learning how games work might not understand the process well enough to appreciate it anyway (like the analogy Chet Faliszek uses in the Death of the Author piece about audiences in the 50's wouldn't understand Memento).

But to give up and think the only thing interactive about games is the gameplay sells our medium short. We may not need to think in terms of creating grand-sweeping interactive narratives, but we need to expand the conversation around how the interactive elements of a game can push narrative in directions it hasn't gone before. It's not too grandiose of us to think there are narrative styles out there that cannot exist in a non-interactive medium, is it?

Sylvain's main claim is that there is a justifiable tension between the narrative of game - its story - and the freedom a player exerts by being an actor and having some control over the direction of the game. At its core the leap to talk about emergent narratives means we avoid a deeper exploration of the discrepancy between narrative and gameplay. I feel this is a very interesting and relevant point. Haven't we already created an interesting narrative in the ways we charge a player with completing a task while the larger story elements are beyond their control? What sort of fatalistic story are we already weaving in games as a result of gameplay and story frequently butting heads?

For example, Aerith dies in Final Fantasy VII regardless of how powerful a party you create. While this may seems like a cheap trick that removes any sense of autonomy from the player, it tells us something about the inevitability of death and its repercussions (especially when you lose all the gear Aerith was carrying!) . Why can't we use this tension to explore meaningful concepts like fatalism a bit more?

Imagine a game about time-travel where the outcome is always the same regardless of the actions a player takes. This would let the player explore the breadth of their autonomy while leaving the ending essentially the same - you can't change the outcome but boy is it fun to try! The static elements of a game's narrative point to things that are most consistent about our experience playing a game. Similarly it is the static elements of human experience regardless of time period or culture that point to something special about the human condition. Authorial intent can play a similar role, but only when we stop avoiding so-called ludonarrative dissonance and look for ways to embrace it.

It's unclear whether Sylvain thinks embracing this tension can co-exist with innovate attempts to circumvent it. His resistance is to the unspoken assumption that emergent narratives will completely supersede any attempts to understand how to work within the limits of the current paradigm. I think both approaches are valid, and in fairness to the industry it's probably a vocal and idealistic minority of idealistic bloggers and developers - of which I include myself - who are calling for a rethinking of how narrative and gameplay interact. I doubt traditional storylines will relinquish their role as meta-game elements anytime soon.

Weekly News Recap 10/11/09

2009-10-11T17:29:00.000-07:00

It seems like every week I'm talking more and more about the state of digital distribution so why stop now? This week CEO of Gearbox Software Randy Pitchford criticizes Steam for being a digital distribution service run by a a game developer. In his view Steam, run by game developer Valve, has a conflict of interest. Any digitial distribution service is going to take a little off the top for being the middle man. Don't they have the power, then, to hinder competition by charging more for competing games than they would for their own?

Pitchford recognizes the value of digital distribution but argues that the real value in any distribution service, even B&M stores, is whether a consumer feels that the distributor is interested solely in serving them, that is, giving them what they want rather than trying to push their own product.

Then again this may be a moot point as it seems that everyone is able to get in on a little digdis action. With Amazon joining the ranks of online and B&M retailers selling download codes for the PSN (and others) it seems your options for purchasing games are no more limited than they were in the days of pure physical media. The big question now is what kind of wholesale price do these distributors make and how much leeway do they have in lowering prices to create a competitive environment? I doubt any industry insiders will be giving us those numbers any time soon.

At least the high mucky-mucks aren't leaving us to fend for ourselves. The London Games Conference will host speakers on digdis which they are calling the biggest issue facing the games industry today. I'll try to keep updated on the proceedings - apparently this isn't something that's going to evaporate any time soon.

Switching gears a bit the aforementioned CEO of Gearbox has also spilled the beans about achievements. Apparently there's such a large culture of achievement (and by extension, trophy) whores that toning down the difficulty on your game's achievements is likely to net you thousands of additional sales. I wrote about the potential downside of trophies back when they were first added to the PSN. By and large my views haven't changed, but now that there's a tangible financial incentive to include trophies I hope that developers won't view them as a shortcut to higher sales in favor of developing better gameplay ideas. Trophies and achievements are strictly meta-game rewards and it would do well for developers to remember that and not think that a new set of achievements or an update that adds trophies is a legitimate tool for increasing the value of their games. Ultimately this mentality is more about marketing that moving the industry forward.

Weekly News Recap 10/4/09

2009-10-07T13:26:00.000-07:00

The land down under may be doomed to another decade of gaming cencorship as one holdout Attorney General is keeping Austraila from incorporating a mature rating into its games classification system. Currently interactive media must contain content safe enough for a 15 year old or risk being refused classification and effectively banned from the country. While Michael Atkinson, the one naysayer, thinks games can have artistic merit it's not worth the risk of allowing children or disturbed individuals engage interactively with violent, sexual, or drug-related themes. Two things smell funny to me. First, not all games with this objectionable content include them in an interactive way. The current law would prohibit games with objectionable cut scenes (no matter how "artistic") would be refused classification. Secondly, this particular AG doesn't seem to understand the lessons one can learned in an interactive medium. If the worry is that acting out one's violent and/or sexual fantasies in a game might spur one to act them out in real life think about how many lessons can be learned by giving players an opportunity to act them out and suffer the in-game consequences of such behavior. Allowing someone to experiment with - and yes, see the positive side of - certain objectionable behaviors, along with the often inevitable consequences of those behavior is a much better "teachable moment" than simply shuttering all such behavior behind lock and key.

Now that the PSP Go has launched there is a wealth of information to follow up last week's news about the effect of digital downloads on the market. Responding to concerns that a first-party digital distribution system creates an effective pricing monopoly it's nice to see that third-party companies can choose to make price cuts - temporary or permanent - at any time. This is actually a beneficial change for the consumer as they no longer have to wait for retaliers willing to take a cut in profits by lowering prices on games they've already paid wholesale rates for.

There's also a handy price comparison chart for UMD games and their digital counterparts. Interesting reading, particularly with such a wide variety of price differences, some in favor of the UMD and others just the opposite. Important to note is that many hard to find or out-of-print games fetch exhorbidant collector's prices in physical media - a non-issue when it comes to digital versions.

If you're still not sold about the move towards digital distribution the Entertainment Consumers Association is putting together a petition and grassroots advocacy campaign for gamers rights with regards to their digital purchases. There's a lot of great information there and a wonderful place to get involved if you're worried about the future of games when borrowing, selling, and trading in are nothing more than boring facts we tell our grand kids.

Battlefield 1943 versus Crash Commando: Two Perspectives on Spatiality

2009-09-30T15:16:00.000-07:00

This entry is my contribution to the Blogs of the Round Table for this month.

I've been playing Battlefield 1943 and Crash Commando on the PSN quite a bit lately and it recently dawned on me that they are nearly the exact same game played out in different perspectives. They share an underlying pick-a-weapon-and-kill-or-be-killed mechanic but because one is a 3D first person shooter and the other a 2D side-scroller they are drastically different experiences for the player. I'm going to look at five ways in which they differ as a direct result of their spatial representation then decide if this makes one mode of representation stronger than the other. But first a quick run-down of the games.

Battlefield 1943

If you've played one online FPSer you've pretty much played them all but the general gist is as follows. You pick one of three soldier types (which determine the weapons available to you) and you and your team battle it out on small islands trying to capture and control specific bases on the map. Along the way you try to kill as many opposing players as possible. You see through the eyes of your soldier and have full control over direction you look. This is important because it is vital that you pay attention to the space around you. Attacks can come from behind, to the sides, and even above. Play continues until one side depletes the other's "energy bar" by getting the requisite number of kills, with more energy deducted per kill based on how many bases your team controls.

Crash Commando

The fundamentals here are the same as in Battlefield - pick a soldier (in this case a set of weapons) and destroy the opposition. Unlike Battlefield there are several game modes such as a free-for-all deathmatches and objectives-based maps where one team has to blow up certain objects while the other team defends. Crash Commando, however, is not an FPSer. You can see your character at or near the center of the screen at all times. Enemies are clearly visible when you are in range of their weapons and for the most part all the action occurs on screen. It's your classic 2D side-scroller so you never have to worry much about anything happening off screen.

Here are the key differences I see between the games.

Point #1: Crash Commando is less frustrating.

It's par for the course with either of these games that you are apt to get killed frequently when you first start playing multiplayer. However, repeatedly dying in Crash Commando doesn't make me want to throw the controller at the screen as much as it does in Battlefield simply because in almost all cases you can see who killed you. Heck, as a general rule you can see them before they kill you so you know you at least had a chance of taking them out first. Dying in Crash Commando is a matter of not being fast enough or accurate enough rather than being ambushed by an unseen enemy. In Battlefield you are often killed without ever seeing your killer. Without the HUD that indicates who killed you and how you'd never know who or what took you down! This sort of dead-but-don't-know-why is a staple of the FPS genre and generally what drives new players away from them, but it's largely unavoidable because your perspective leaves you blind to a large portion of what's going on around you at any given time. In Crash Commando your local area awareness is nearly complete regardless of how skilled you are at the game. You don't have to worry about controlling a camera to focus on threats so you end up feeling responsible for your own deaths because you could see them coming.

Point #2: Battlefield 1943 is more visceral.

Crash Commando is very bloody. Any death, even a clean sniper shot, causes a player to erupt into red bits. Battlefield lacks any blood - deceased soldiers disappear leaving only their packs behind. Yet Battlefield leaves me feeling more uneasy, more terrified, and more shaken after I've taken a hit or been fragged. The limited field of view makes you agoraphobic, always frightened of what may be lurking behind or to the side, or who may be straight ahead but too far away to see. Space in Crash Commando is far less open and far more visible and that makes you feel more secure at any given time, especially when no enemies are around. In Battlefield you feel as though you are at the center. Taking a sudden hit raises your heart rate as you scramble to find an all but invisible threat before it's too late. The difference in effect is similar to the difference between horror films that rely on shock value and those that are more subtle, showing less and letting the viewer's imagination create the scares.

Point #3: Battlefield 1943 encourages more team-based cooperation.

For the most part Crash Commando's "teamwork" consists of doubling up on firepower. Because any and all threats are visible on screen at all times there is little need to flush an enemy out into the sights of an awaiting teammate. Battlefield encourages this type of team work because it allows you and a partner to watch each other's back, letting you focus on threats in one direction without worrying about what may behind you. Without any real ability to ambush or need to protect one other other than when threats come from opposing sides Crash Commando's teamwork ends up feeling like little more than a Contra clone.

Point #4: Battlefield 1943 has a greater variety of distinctive weapons.

Strictly speaking Crash Commando has more basic weapons than Battlefield (11 compared to 9), but for the most part its primary weapons are identical. They may have different levels of damage, speed, or reload times, but with the exception of grenades and grenade launchers each weapon has the same range - the length of the screen. The 2D playing field limits the weapons' distinctiveness because you don't have weapons that are better or worse at different ranges. In Battlefield you have long-, short-, and mid-range weapons, each of which can be used at different ranges but with greatly diminished returns. Each weapon, then, has a unique feel to it and will appeal to different types of players leading to more diverse player types. In Crash Commando most players tend to play the same because once you've learned how to use one weapon you've basically learned them all.

Point #5: Crash Commando lacks a Roshambo dynamic.

One element common to many multiplayer games is the psychological guessing game offered up by some sort of rock-paper-scissors dynamic. In Battlefield this is based on the type of unit a player chooses and the range at which they fight. A sniper will take out an infantryman any day of the week, but a fast moving rifleman at mid range will make him wish he'd never picked up a scope. Crash Commando lacks this because its fast pace, relatively limited active playfield, and similarity of weapons means any player's weapon choice has a nearly equal chance of defeating any other player's weapon choice at any time. This puts the emphasis much more on your physical reflexes than the ability to analyze and predict what sort of weapons and strategy your opponent will use.

Overall it looks like 3D is the clear winner in this contest. While the way in which it limits a player's view may be a bit frustrating and therefore discourage many new players from getting into the genre there's a reason that side-scrolling fragfests haven't really caught on. Both the level of immersion and the depth of strategy are greater in Battlefield than in Crash Commando. It's unclear whether 2D side-scrollers are inherently incapable of delivering the dynamics of an FPSer at as high a level as an FPSer itself. Any thoughts on how to overcome some of these limitations?

 Please visit the Round Table's &amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;a title="Round Table Main Hall" href="http://blog.pjsattic.com/corvus/round-table/"&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;Main Hall&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;/a&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt; for links to all entries.

Weekly News Recap 9/27/09

2009-09-27T17:34:00.000-07:00

The past couple of weeks have seen a bevy of news related to digital distribution, a topic I've already spent some time ranting about. Of most importance is the revelation that Nedgame, Holland's home grown version of GameStop recently announced it is boycotting sales of the PSPGo. Obviously they just realized that selling users a piece of hardware sans a removable media drive is essentially shooting themselves in the foot. How can they continue to rip off customers by treating used games as their own personal "buy low, sell high" stock market if there is no removable media to trade* - the thing even comes with built in storage!

Forgive me if I'm wrong but I don't remember Circuit City boycotting the sale of mp3 players because they wouldn't be able to sell customers CDs for it (then again, they're out of business now - whoops!). This is the new gaming order here folks, and as far as I'm concerned the sooner price-gouging B&M-used-game-mega-stores go the way of the Jaguar, the better. But Nedgame also claims that Sony is creating a monopoly on software sales which raises an interesting point. Is a distribution service a monopoly?

Back in the 80's Nintendo didn't quite create a monopoly on game software, they just controlled what games were allowed on their system. It worked pretty well from a QA standpoint, though some cried foul. Sure we may miss out on the occasional deal of the day or liquidation sale noted at places like CAG, but if you look at a service like Steam you see that great deals happen all the time, not for any particular reason, but simply to give games more exposure. Without competition among distributors, though, we occasionally see some fishy pricing practices, notably that downloadable titles are more expensive than their boxed retail brethren. Sony promises to combat this discrepancy, but that doesn't necessarily mean lowering the prices on downloadable titles. After all, if there are no boxed retail versions to compare them to, parity is achieved, no?

That small economic speed bump aside there's only one more real barrier to full acceptance of digital distribution and that's advertising. How with the hype machine ramp up for Final Fantasy XIVVLXQ1ß if there isn't ample acreage of GameStop storefront upon which to affix posters? Fortunately a small change to the way our distribution interface works can fix that problem. This is evident by the way firmware 3.0's addition of "ads" in the XMB helped a little known title achieve record sales. It's easy for a small indie title to get lost in the shuffle of weekly updating, but a little reminder in the XMB can make all the difference in the world.

*I actually have no idea if Nedgame is as nefarious in their practices as GameStop. I'm just assuming. Haven't heard any rumblings of a GameStop boycott. Yet.

Weekly News Recap 9/13/09

2009-09-13T18:33:00.000-07:00

Bit of a short news week this time around.

I've recently been turned on to the virtues of the FPS genre thanks to a friend getting me into Battlefield 1943. It's all the fun of WoW's battlegrounds without all the tedious grinding. Still, now that I'm on board I can't help but be disappointed that there are no immediate plans for additional Battlefield 1943 DLC. DICE says they are too busy working on other Battlefield projects. For once I understand the frustration players feel when a developer stretches themselves too thin. But it begs an interesting question - is it better to shoot for breadth or depth in a franchise? Both Valve and DICE seem to have settled on the former track, expanding their game universes through multiple releases rather than working to better existing games. The ability to support a game through dlc is relatively new and gamers may have taken to it so fast that you'd think it was their God-given right to have their favorite game supported until judgment day. Beneath it all though I wonder if it isn't a good idea for a specific product to continue to receive upgrades over time. Call it the MMO model. Imagine if a classic like GoldenEye were still supported with dlc. Perhaps Rare would still be a household name.

Finally Braid is only $5 this weekend. Did you hear me? Five bucks for Braid. Go get it.

Weekly News Recap 9/06/09

2009-09-08T14:28:00.000-07:00

[Bit late on the recap this week owing to the holiday weekend and a road trip. On the plus side I finally have my HDTV back so I can, y'know, read the text of games I play]

Ever since he inserted himself polygonally into the tutorial for Farenheit/Indigo Prophecy I've had a bit of a mancrush on David Cage. There's something reassuring, if smug, about a director explaining, in-game, that you're about to experience something so different from the norm that he needs to break you of years of gaming habits. Now he's come right out and said that players should play through Heavy Rain only once. With re-playability a key selling point for most games that's quite a bold statement (badum ching!), but one I respect. I played through Indigo Prophecy last summer exactly that way - I didn't repeat sections that went badly, nor did I play through it again to get a "better" ending. IP, unfortunately, has its share of game over screens so I still repeated a bit, but it left a clear mark on my gaming habits. Now, rather than try to see everything, do every side quest, and get the best gear (I'm looking at you Crisis Core!) I approach games with a one-time-only mindset and I think it's high time more games made that take advantage of that kind of player. Hopefully Heavy Rain is successful because of it's consequence heavy game play and future developers realize the untapped story telling potential therein.

Not to re-ignite any hard feelings about the lack of BC on all but the earliest PS3s, but it's rather interesting what sort of creativity is engendered by constraint in the gaming world. In an effort to milk more money from the franchise Sony will re-release enhanced versions of God of War 1&2 for the PS3. Shameless attempt to make money though it be it strikes me as far more appropriate to actually take the time to update a golden oldie than to simply port it (I'm looking at you Wii Virtual Console). The work required to re-vamp a game for modern consoles is considerably less than building a game from scratch and greatly increases a game's longevity. Look at the great work Capcom did with Marvel vs. Capcom 2. Personally, as I get older I'm less inclined to keep old consoles around nor do I want to spend money to play an exact copy of something I already own. Giving me a little something extra is a great way to re-kindle nostalgia and let me show people an older game without feeling like the geezer who drones on about how much better Atari 2600 games were.

Weekly News Recap 8/30/09

2009-08-30T17:32:00.000-07:00

[I'm trying something new (though not entirely original) here at PEEG. My time is in short supply of late which puts a cramp on my style as far as blogging and playing games about which too blog. But I still manage to keep up-to-date on what's happening in the game industry and gaming culture so, in an attempt to keep my fingers typing I'm going to subject you, Inconstant Reader, to a weekend update of sorts. Basically these are my quick thoughts on several interesting game related news stories from the previous week.]

The FCC is considering a standardized rating system that would apply to games, movies, television shows, and mobile apps. Many commenters see this as another step towards censorship which I find that a weak concern. What scares me most is the logistics of such a thing. It takes long enough to get a product rated by an independent organization focused on one specific medium - imagine a governmental body charged with standardizing ratings across multiple types media!

That issue aside I'm rather intrigued by the idea. A standardized system could garner more equity across ratings. For example, some things that are tame enough to be included in a PG-13 movie will elicit and MA rating in a game. Standardized ratings would expose this gross inequality, or at least open up debate as to why one and the same action is more "mature" if it's included in an interactive medium (even if the action itself is part of a cutscene or otherwise out of the player's direct control). I personally doubt this umbrella system will ever come to pass, but I don't see it being a gross blow to the games industry if it does.

According to the Chatty Cathys of the interwebs Best Buy is willing to bribe people out of returning their recently purchased PS3 Fats for PS3 Slims.

Obviously no one likes feeling they just got shafted by purchasing a $400 piece of hardware only to learn the following day that a newer version of it could be had for 3/4 the price. But isn't that exactly what a company does if they try (and fail) to keep these things a secret? Why not let people know about a price drop or new system in advance? Because sales will probably wane in the interim as people hold out for the newer, cheaper system. So by withholding that information the company is basically decieiving consumers. Put another way, the company is hoping consumers will get shafted. That's just bad PR if you ask me. By officially announcing something like this, say, a month in advance and also - though this is a pipe dream - encouraging stores to inform consumers at the point of purchase, you give people a choice. Maybe I just can't wait a month to get the system I want, but I should be able to make an informed choice. Besides, marketing people should know the American consumer enough to realize that we're impulse buyers at heart!

Finally, on the subject of American consumerism... can you believe that people would actually consider purchasing a Scribblenauts strategy guide!? Talk about not seeing the forest for the trees. Scribblenauts is not a game about winning, it's a game about creativity. The only possible reason a person would desire a strategy guide for such a jewel of a game is if they approaching gaming as just another conquest. Everything I've read about the game suggests that it won't be all that difficult - it's not the destination but the journey that's important. Using a strategy guide is like making the journey on rails... in an enclosed vehicle... with a single window... facing the ground....

Change of Address

2009-08-29T06:52:00.000-07:00

It's come to my attention that some readers may misinterpret the domain name of my blog. While it's possible to connect the dots from my PSN ID (ZapatoDelDiablo) and note that my domain name is simply the English version of that pithy phrase - shoe of the devil, or, devil shoe - some have taken to thinking that I prefer to be known as the devil's hoe. Apologies for that shortsightedness and I assure you this is not the case (though why it's worse to be one of Satan's garden implements than footwear I'm not sure - there's an "E" there people!).

Therefore I'll be moving this site to optimusprymus.blogspot.com. Please update your bookmarks and RSS feeds accordingly. Both of you.

Video Games Live

2009-07-15T12:44:00.000-07:00

Inconstant Readers are no doubt aware of my recent gaming slump. Aside from occasional forays into SFIV and a slow but steady second slog through Puzzle Quest (a corrupted file ended my first play through) I haven't had much hands-on experience of gaming in the recent past. That did not, however, keep me from being as giddy as Henry Jones Sr. upon discovering that Video Games Live was coming to Pittsburgh.

Wait, I mean Video Games LIVE!

Or perhaps it would be more appropriate to call it Video Games LIVE!!!!!!111oneoneone

Yes, it's geared towards that sort of audience. But I'm getting ahead of myself.

I've been in love with Nobuo Uematsu's music for over 17 years, ever since I dubbed - to 4 cassettes! - a friend's copy of the Final Fantasy VI OST which, no doubt due to Americans not having the slightest clue what an OST was at the time (Original Sound Track for those of you still out-of-the-know), was strangely titled "Kefka's Domain". Having played through the 60+ hours it took to complete the game and all attendant side quests and developed an overdue appreciation for Final Fantasy (I had played I and IV but didn't think them anything special) popping those tapes into my Walkman and pedaling to school every morning was nothing short of sublime. The way each character had a unique theme woven seamlessly into the bulk of the soundtrack, the fantastic reprisals of each major theme during the closing credits, and, of course the absolute be st final battle music in gaming history (yes, even better than One-Winged Angel - you fanboys realize that wasn't an entirely original composition, right?) all came together to make me appreciate just how powerful music in games could be.

Flash forward a decade or two. I've imported every OST, lyrical interpretation, and piano etude from Final Fantasy 1 through 10. I've longed to hear The Black Mages in concert. I've become familiar with other composers through my love of games - Akira Yamaoka, Yasunori Mitsuda, and Harry Gregson-Williams come to mind. Game music has found itself a staple of both my yoga and massage therapy playlists. When I heard about Video Games Live I thought this was finally it, game music has achieved mainstream appeal and I would be able to enjoy some of my favorite orchestrations in their full symphonic glory.

Someday perhaps I will. For the nonce, however, I'll have to keep dreaming.

Don't get me wrong, I love what VGL is trying to do. Anything that helps get the masses to recognize gaming as an artistic cultural artifact is a good thing. But the current iteration may not necessarily be a gateway to widespread acceptance.

Simply put the focus of the concert was more about fan service than about music. Extreme fan service. I'll admit that perhaps the video game concert of my dreams is on one end of a scale - something very much akin to a traditional night out at the symphony only all the pieces are from games - but VGL is firmly at the other extreme. The cosplay extreme if you catch my general drift. There must be some kind of middle ground.

I've got no problem with the costume contest that opened the show (and the pretty bad-ass Lich King getup that won was no joke), nor the guitar hero competition and general geeky swag-fest atmosphere that permeated the theater. But when it comes to the actual concert, well, I want to pay attention to the music.

Sure the youngsters that inevitably beg their parents to go (along with the more twitchy of the older gamers in attendee) probably couldn't handle just sitting and watching an orchestra perform, so the three screens of video clips are a good idea. Heck my SO really appreciated getting to see the graphical transformation of legendary franchises over the years (although it's jarringly obvious that VGL doesn't have the right to use images from Square-Enix games - a glaring omission when music from several Final Fantasys, both Chronos , and Kingdom Hearts is included). Having a little something pleasing for the eye as well as the ear is only appropriate for a concert rooted in a multimedia art form like games.

Still the emphasis on greatest hits medleys rather than full orchestral songs takes its toll on the artistic integrity of the music. The only piece played in its entirety and not wedged into a medley was One-Winged Angel. This meant that as a fan of the music I wasn't able to close my eyes and get lost in the nuances of a pieces with which I was familiar. Instead I had to settle for the occasional soupçon of a loved phrase during long mash ups that mostly string together riffs of the most well-known and recognizable themes.

The real let-down was the entirety of the second act during which Tommy Tallarico used an entire symphony orchestra as a platform to live out his rock-star fantasy. Electric guitar in tow (even for Scars of Time which screams for acoustic) he dominated every song with his "look-at-me-not-the-orchestra" antics and volume cranked up to 11. The crowd loved it, but as I told Renee afterward it was more like a celebration of Beatlemania than a celebration of the Beatles, more like an emphasis on Michael Jackson fandom than Michael Jackson's music.

For all my gripes it was still a very enjoyable experience. There were several moments of gooseflesh and many more of pure joy (though years of overexposure to rabid fanboys have long since deadened my heart from being affected by the first three notes of Aerith's Theme). I'm very glad that there's something out there that highlights one of the lesser talked about artistic aspects of games. Music-in-games talk today is almost exclusively about interactive music, but it's important to remember that there are well-established craft elements that stand up on their own (music, cinematography, voice-acting, etc.) and need to be recognized. But until such times as the market will support a traveling show of game music in a more traditional orchestral style I'll just keep cranking up my symphonic suites in the comfort of my own home.

What do you want out of your local video games/high culture crossover?

Tossing My Hat into the MJ Tribute Ring

2009-06-26T22:31:00.000-07:00

It says a lot about my web viewing habits that I first heard about Michael Jackson's death through a game site. As I've processed his passing throughout the day (and done my share to aid last.fm's spike of song plays) I've tried to think of his impact on my game playing. Like any self-respecting gaming child of the 80's I played the ever-loving snot out of Moonwalker for the Genesis and pumped several dollars worth of quarters into its isometric arcade counterpart. It's Robo-Michael. Who can resist that?

Still MJ has been somewhat absent from modern gaming, with the exception of the to-be-expected rhythm game appearances (themselves far too few - although trying to actually sing decently like Michael is its own genre of comedic buffoonery). Fortunately we live in the era of the custom playlist so I submit for your approval my suggestions for songs to include in your custom soundtracks for games that allow it if you need a little more MJ in your life:

Burnout Paradise - Beat It

Several different racers offer custom soundtracks and by and large any song with a nice driving beat would work, but Beat It is especially appropriate given the more urban feel of Paradise. Besides, doesn't being the marked man whilst cranking this one sound immaculate?

Flock - Leave Me Alone

The video for this one's got quite the trippy, psychedelic carny vibe that melds well with a trippy, psychedelic alien abduction vibe. Can't think of any other tune for herding defenseless sheep. (Bonus: the dancing elephant man scene haunted my childhood!)

High Velocity Bowling - Don't Stop 'til You Get Enough

70's bowling league vibe meets disco. A spare made in heaven.

Little Big Planet - Speed Demon

You might think this song better suited to a racing game (SARBC perhaps?), but you can make racing games in LBP too! The claymation goodness of the video screams LBP and the beat reminds me of some of the tunes in the Savannah levels.

Magic Ball - Remember the Time

Yes, I actually bought this game off the PSN. No, it's not worth the money. But I've got it now and if I want to chill a little bit to some rather laid back Arkanoid-style action this ain't a bad pick. Period costumes ftw!

Mortal Kombat vs DC Universe - Bad

Much like the pairing of MJ and inner-city West Side Story-like cool this clash of titanic IPs was probably best left to fanfic - but we love it nonetheless.

Noby Noby Boy - In the Closet

Um, not gonna touch this one ;)

Pain - The Way You Make Me Feel

There ain't much in the way of punk/ska/oy!oy! music to go along with Pain in MJ's back catalog (unless he went through a neo-punk phase I'm not aware of). Thus we'll have to stick to the lyrically appropriate. You knock me off of my feet!

PixelJunk Eden - Baby Be Mine

Not the most well known of MJ's songs, but the laid back synth beat is perfect for swinging around on the end of a thread and getting your grow on.

PixelJunk Monsters - Smooth Criminal

Just imagining those little monsters marching along to this one makes me squeal with glee. Those crafty criminals, they'll get their due!

Street Fighter IV - Wanna Be Startin' Something

My guilty pleasure. I'd give anything to be able to use custom soundtracks in online games. Mamma say mamma saw my moccasin - to your dome! (Oh yea, and you're a vegetable!)

Super Stardust HD - Heal the World

Perhaps I'm bordering on ironic-douchebag territory here, but come on, you are trying to save the world here (of course 99% of games have that general idea). This song really belongs in Flower - if only it had custom soundtracks.

Supersonic Acrobatic Rocket Powered Battle Cars - Off the Wall

Lyrically appropriate. Think of a lovely roller disco ballet - of the supersonic acrobatic rocket powered variety.

Wipeout - Another Part of Me

Nice driving synth beat in this one, very reminiscent of the early techno that characterizes the franchise. Best reserved for endless mode on the easier tracks where you can just go on autopilot and live in a trance.

Yinz Come Back Now, Hear?

2009-06-16T08:27:00.001-07:00

I'm officially a Yinzer. You may have noticed my rather lengthy absence from blogging and would be forgiven for thinking I had met my prediction of falling off the face of the interwebs after a scant few months (just two, really? had you no faith at all?). But, in fact, my life has been a whirlwind of change the past few months - physically, spiritually, and emotionally - which has resulted in my transformation from southerner to northerner. Or midwesterner. Or eastnorwester. Whatever it is you call Pittsburghers (apparently western PA is it's own classification).

No doubt some of the details of this transformation will leak out over the course of future blog posts (any tips for thematically linking life-changes to gaming are appreciated!). For now I'll try to slowly get back into the swing of things and catch up on all of the great blog conversations I've only skimmed. Fortunately I've got a grip (is that appropriate slang up here?) of half-finished posts I began over the past months to kick start my return to PEEGing.

That said I'm not letting you get out of this post without some post-emo-existential gaming ranting.

Michael Abbot once wrote about the clarity of focus that comes from travel when you are limited to your portable devices. This isn't travel per se (though I have logged many hours into Patapon 2) but a major move and while I do have my PS3 available it is hooked up to a gloriously low-def television at my girlfriend's place. In fact, due to packing the wrong set of cables for a time I had to use component cables on a composite connection which - while doable - results in a PS3 output in old-school black & white! There's something to be said for getting down to just the bare essentials in SFIV - and not spending 20 seconds narcissistically deciding what color outfit to pwn your opponent with. Moving from my rather respectably sized, widescreen, HD, epilepsy inducing purveyor of next-gen eye candy to a modest, boxy CRT in no way diminished the joy of SFIV (the same can't be said for my atrophied skills after a two-week hiatus). That's a great testament to the primacy of game mechanics. I wonder if I would have just as much fun playing online with hitboxes alone.

I can't think of a single other PS3 game I own that would hold up well under similar graphical degradation. LittleBigPlanet relies on the tactile look of it's scrapbook objects to draw you into its world. Flower is just depressing without the element of color (as emphasized in the second dream). Word on the street is that you shouldn't even bother with PixelJunk Eden unless you have an HD screen to pick out those pixel-sized particles of pollen.

But SFIV reigns o'er all with it's wonderful online play and poke, prod, and decieve game mechanics (it's certainly not the compelling narrative that keeps me coming back!). I'll take it monochrome on a green, scan-lined background if need be. Any other current-gen games you can say the same for?

The Politics of Appeasement

2009-02-24T12:01:00.000-08:00

Time for another fascinating BoRT topic!

Turning Over a New Leaf: February's BoRT invites you take a game design suggested by another blogger in last month's Round Table and build upon it. You should ignore the literary source of the original design, but attempt to communicate the same themes and/or convey the same mood as the original game. This means you can alter the game genre, change the setting, and add new layers to the game mechanics. This is not an opportunity to critique a previous design, but to honor it by striving to reach the same goals, while adding your own personal touch.

The Source

Last month's post that I'm choosing to work with is Chris at ihobo's entry on Pride and Prejudice. You really should take a look at it before continuing - after all, that's the point of this month's topic!

What I really like about the design of the game is the simplicity of the mechanic: A engages politely, B engages rudely. This allows for a lot of fun in anticipation. You know you want to engage rudely, say, but you're excited to see exactly what form that rude interaction will take. Will it be a barb-tongued statement? I disrespectful hand-gesture? I've always enjoyed this element of thematic dialogue trees where the general tone of your options is presented but the specifics aren't revealed until after you make your choice (a la Indigo Prophecy or Mass Effect).

So much for the mechanics, what about the theme of the game? While Chris isn't specific as to the theme it seems that the game is more of a sandbox for exploring various interactions with people in high Victorian society. At the end of the day the point is in the interactions themselves and playing it might give you the feeling, qua the novel, that there really is no ultimate point, that the rules of etiquette and games of intrigue played by the characters are just shallow ends in themselves. It's enjoyable, yes, but serves no purpose beyond its own enjoyment (despite what purpose the characters may think it serves).

What kind of game could I design with the same mechanics and theme? Call me a bitter cynic - I am, depending on which philosopher I last read - but one thing enters my mind when I think about people engaging in varying polite/rude interactions and taking themselves all too seriously when at the end of the day none of it really matters. Politics.

The Thought

Ian Bogost's phrase "procedural rhetoric" is foremost in my mind with this project. You can read a great hashing out of the concept here but in short the idea is that the way a game's mechanics are designed and how we ultimately master them to drive the game forward tells a story in itself, often a very loaded story. Much of the recent dialogue about Far Cry 2, for example, concerns the idea that its mechanics portray imply that seemingly meaningless violence is the only solution to even fairly mundane problems. As a developer one has to be very aware the story the mechanics of the game tells, not leaving such things up to mere chance. Not that you can't portray this underlying mechanics-driven story any way you want, you just need own it and be aware of shaping it (hence the rhetoric).

With that in mind I figure that a game about politics developed by a political cynic like myself would have to very much express through its game play the utter futility and meaninglessness of it all. (Perhaps that's a gross exaggeration but hey it'll be a Wii game so it has to be grossly exaggerated and not taken seriously anyhow! Oh, did I mention I'm a Nintendo cynic as well?) The game would follow you as a newly elected Congressman embarking upon your brief two-year term with the only directly expressed goal being re-election. In fact this should be so explicitly stated so early in the game that it makes the player question the entire logic: "You've just been elected to US Congress, now what are you going to do?" "Get re-elected!"

That's the general theme and the mechanics enhance this by pretty much giving you little control other choosing which members of congress to talk to and whether you want to act politely or rudely towards them, or in the parlance of the game, appease or displease them. You're trying to get re-elected, but in the context of the game the interests of your constituents are irrelevant to you. Building relationships and coalitions with with senior Congressmen is what will get you re-elected, not trying to gauge what your constituents want. Of course building bridges with some Representatives invariably burns bridges with others. . .

The Game

The Politics of Appeasement begins with a brief cut scene which shows your Mii avatar (in a nice suit of course) barely winning the race for Representative of your district. The incumbent which you have defeated congratulates you and offers you the following piece of advice: "Make sure you meet the right people and ignore all the rest. Otherwise you'll end up like me." It's never made quite clear what state, let alone district, you are representing.

After the intro you are given control of your Mii using the same point-and-click interface found in Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice (the Mansfield Engine). Your new secretary is showing you around your office in Washington and explaining the control scheme: generally A interacts with objects and people positively, B interacts with them negatively. Instead of politeness and rudeness, however, your interactions are meant to appease or displease and to this end only really have an affect when others are around. You are promptly introduced to the congenial Representative from a neighboring district and instructed to appease her. Pointing your Wiimote at her and pressing A brings up a short quip congratulating her on winning re-election and making a passing remark about the clear-headedness of her constituents. This invokes the appearance of a Sims-style happy face above her head and an increase in her attitude towards you (detailed below). Interacting with A on objects in the room causes somewhat obvious but awkward interactions with things that would appeal to the Representative: pointing out a recent photograph of you with a well-liked Senator, making her aware of congenial literature on your bookshelf.

After his departure your secretary announces the visit of another Representative, one which she clearly indicates as your rival, a man a bit disgruntled by your predecessor's defeat. Before the meeting you are given instructions to use B to interact with him in a displeasing way. Doing so presents dialogue that is very cleverly dismissive in a way that seems cordial but contains undertones of hostility and the corresponding angry/unhappy face above your rival's head. Similarly you may interact with the objects in your office in a manner that promulgates displeasure: putting your feet up on the desk or straightening pictures (an indication that you aren't playing full attention to the Representative).

After this intro you are left on your own to peruse the Congressional directory and make a few calls to fellow Representatives. Much like the Sims you can chose to simply talk or invite them to to an event (mostly fundraisers) for more detailed interactions, all of which involve use of the appeasement/displeasement mechanic. On any given weekday (when Congress is in session) you may only make a set number of calls (say 5), attend 1 fundraiser/function, and, if available, cast a vote on a Bill (more below). Each Friday new poll numbers are released indicating where you stand with your constituency. It must be noted that in addition to there not being any direct line of connection between you and those you represent (indeed, the player has no idea who they are!) these poll numbers are the only visible indication that they exist, though it provides the one structured goal of the game.

In addition to it not being clear exactly where you are from nor who you are representing it's also never made explicit what political party you align with or what your campaign platform was. These details seem extraneous to game play - you re-election depends upon the relationships you make with other Representatives (and maybe the occasional Senator) rather than on pushing a specific agenda. With that in mind you proceed making calls and visits to other political figures. At any point you can press 1 to call up a window showing your relationship to other Representatives (for simplicity's sake the number is limited to 50 or so rather than the full 435) and a handful of Senators. Below each face/name is a scale from -10 to +10 (replacing the Notoriety meter from Jane Austen). A good number of Representatives are neutral with you from the outset, though you can get a sense of who may be a member of your or the opposing party by noting trends in positive and negative associations.

By selecting a specific Representative you can pull up more details about them including humanizing touches like their personal likes and dislikes as well as their political leanings (bills they've recently authored or voted for/against, more on that below). Most importantly you can see a graph tracking the changes in their relationship to you. By comparing days when a particular Representative's attitude for you shifted to your interactions with them or others you start to get a sense of who likes whom and who you may need to appease or displease to influence more powerful figures that you may not be able to directly interact with (depending on the specific Representative and their attitude towards you they may not take your calls).

The core mechanic of the game is a complex logic puzzle that represents a system of relationships. The design needs to be such that feedback is obvious yet the underlying threads are obfuscated enough that the player needs to put in work to discover them. For this reason there may not always be an immediate cause/effect relationship between my actions and the attitudes of others. For those directly involved yes, it should be immediate, but for others it may take a day or two for word to spread and attitudes to change. Ultimately, of course, even the logic of these connections is tied into the weekly poll numbers in a somewhat more inscrutable way. Figuring out having who on your side makes for good numbers and in turn figuring out who to go through to appease those people is where the real strategy comes in. Then again there's no need to appease everybody or even anybody. I hear tell sometimes being a maverick can pay off...

Now this is a game about politics so eventually we will need to actually do what the legeslative branch is supposed to do, namely craft and pass new bills into law. As a first-term Representative you won't have the power to craft a new bill (there's always the second-term sequel/expansion for that) but you may occasionally be asked to sponsor one by a well-liked colleague. Sponsoring a bill has enormous consequences, and the biggest shifts in others' attitudes toward you comes from agreeing or refusing sponsorship. Voting, which happens more often than sponsoring, also affects attitudes greater than individual interactions do.

As for the bills themselves it's important that they not engage the player's personal political leanings. In the spirit of the game these bills avoid anything resembling a hot-button issue and instead are light-hearted and comical as well as mundane. One bill might mandate that all federally funded schools use green chairs in their classroom. Another may levy a tax on people who keep walruses as pets. Again it should be unclear what, if any, interest the player's constituency has on these bills, though conversations occurring before the bill is put to a vote will indicate where particular Representatives stand on the issue. Also you vote yay or nay on the bills from your desk at the end of the work day - it becomes obvious by its omission that at no time do you actually sit in Congress and debate politics or cast your vote.

A Second Term?

Well that's it. Reading it over this definitely represents a very narrow and cynical view of politics but I suppose that's the point! At the end of the day, if done correctly, the game should leave the player feeling a certain sense of exhilaration and fun at the politicking yet be consciously aware that they're not really doing anything in the interest of public-service. Playing the game is an end in itself. If it's a means to anything it's merely a means to re-election. Why be re-elected? That's obvious: so you can continue to play the game!

Please visit the Blogs of the Round Table's main hall for links to all entries.

I'm a Leaf on the Wind. Watch How I Soar.

2009-02-15T12:38:00.000-08:00

Though I've recently read and largely agreed with a post by L.B. Jeffries about the benefits of blogging for the long tail rather than the game du jour, I've actually been looking forward to trying my hand at the latter. Over the months that I've been reading gaming blogs I've often felt a bit out of the loop and unable to legitimately formulate my own thoughts because I lacked either the time or the tools (still a Sony-only household) to play some of last year's most discussed games. With all the critical hype surrounding Flower I'm excited to have a chance to throw my tam in the ring during the early stages of what looks to be one of 2009's most talked about experiences.

There's already been some discussion out there in the blogosphere. Michael Abbot's initial shoot-from-the hip impressions have spawned a deluge of comments which I've intentionally avoided for the sake of forming my own critical opinion before having it blown in other directions by my fellow bloggers. So after 2.33 playthroughs here's one PEEGers impressions:

Flower is a game about symbiosis. The hyped up notion of zen-gaming actually works in the game's favor by swaying players' expectations. Before booting it up you expect to accept the simple grandeur of the landscape as a way of turning the game into an exercise in relaxation. It rather reminds me of Cloud, a game I was introduced to back in 2006 as an academic attempt to create non-violent and non-exclusively-goal-oriented play in video games.

The stage progression is what really makes the game. The first dream is 100% natural, bright and airy, free and merry with some random rocks breaking up the landscape and a spectacular tree to capstone the experience. The second flower's dream might initially be seen as more of the same. While there are hints of human interference - the intentionally constructed stone circles - they are non threatening enough that one might not even notice them on the first play through, despite the obvious counterpoint they make with the randomly placed stones from the first dream. The desaturated color palette - an idea that seems to be gaining more purchase lately - doesn't even negatively affect one's mood because it provides a wonderful canvas to paint on.

I probably wouldn't have felt any tension between the natural and artificial elements of the landscape in the third dream if it weren't that I have a friend with a unusual fear of windmills. We've seen the windmills in pre-release videos of the game and, being that you control petals flowing on the wind, they seem like a perfectly reasonable and non threatening addition to the landscape. But as elegant and appropriate as they may be they still represent the beginnings of a tension in the game between nature and technology. This isn't just a narrative tension either. In the third dream you encounter for the first time some constraints on the hitherto free flowing game play. Once you've activated the windmills and enter the canyons it becomes nigh impossible to escape them and re-entering them to search for more petals is a might frustrating as the wind, seemingly generated by the windmills, constantly tries to push you out.

I'd like to stop here and think about this for a moment because in light of where the game goes I think the third and fourth dreams are the game's apex and best represent the symbiosis I mentioned at the outset. Though it doesn't really hit you over the head until the fifth dream there's a steadily building dread - literally an approaching storm - of technology encroaching upon the idyllic meadows and canyons of Flower. At the climax of the fourth dream (what I consider the second act) this becomes very obvious and I was a bit put off by it. I've got more than a little of the tree-loving hippie in me, but I just wasn't excited about being subjected to another trope about technology's deflowering of poor, innocent nature, nor with the rest of the game being a struggle to overcome the evil monoliths of electricity and steel. Not to mention the irony of such a story being told on as bloated a piece of technology as the PS3!

Fortunately Flower doesn't do this. While you may feel, particularly in dream five, that technology is the enemy and must be eradicated, by dream six you start to see how wonderfully nature and technology can get along. The sixth flower's goal isn't to return to the human-free meadow of the first dream but to achieve harmony through balance, a balance that had, in fact, already been achieved in the third and fourth dreams. Your primary goal in the sixth and final dream isn't to destroy the city but to repair it. It's an interesting critique in its own right of the idea that too many games equate "realism" and "grittiness" with drab and colorless landscapes. The solution isn't a full reversal to the land of dandelions and roses, the solution, in true zen fashion, is to find balance and harmony.

Still I have to admit that I've not successfully sat down and played all six dreams in one sitting because I simply can't stand the fifth dream. My poor flower has yet to be resurrected from that nightmare; it sits bowed over and pathetic despite the three bonus leaves resting in its pot. I don't even know if it's possible to make that flower bloom and I'm not sure I'll ever find out - I simply hate that dream! I hate trying to thread the needle, re-living the torture I experience years ago at the hands of Irritating Stick. I hate the way that stage interrupts my calm. In fact after getting literally sucked into the darkness and kicked out of the dream I've needed to "calm down" by playing some Street Fighter - at least there I know to expect tension and how to deal with it. How's that for harmony!

That said the fifth dream is an integral part of the experience. While I'd prefer the chilled out experience of the first dream to the fifth, both of them are extreme ends of a spectrum that needs balancing, a balancing that was present in the third and fourth dreams but that the sixth dream helps you re-discover. The first act is more play than game, the last more game than play, but the real genius is that thatgamecompany has taken the tired debate over what is most important in a video game - set goals versus tools for free form play - and distilled it into an experience that makes you appreciate the symbiotic relationship between them.

Ultimately that makes Flower a wonderful game of self-discovery. To which set of stages are you more apt to gravitate? The first two (Act I) where you can forget entirely about humanity and technology and just flOw, freeform, through the wondrous scenery? Act II (my favorite) where a careful balance is struck between push and pull, control and being controlled, set amongst a backdrop where nature and technology not only coexist but seem to feed off each other? Or the final act which is much more goal oriented, much more tense and dark but, subsequently, may offer a more gratifying feeling of accomplishment?

Time to go poke my nose in on other people's thoughts.

The Metaphysics of Persistent Worlds

2009-02-06T13:49:00.000-08:00

While not exactly post-emo-existentiell (the post about which is coming tomorrow, I promise!) I figured hey, might as well get as much mileage as you can out of your written work, no? So below you will find the abstract I've just submitted for the planned World of Warcraft and Philosophy book. Even though the book has just been announced and the articles not yet written nor finalized I'm betting this book will come out before Final Fantasy and Philosophy (which I'm in!) because they've delayed the sodding thing to coincide with the next Final Fantasy game. That's April 2010 in the States, for those of you keeping track.

Bits of Ogres, Bytes of Orcs: Is Azeroth Metaphysically Real (and What in the World is Metaphysics)?

Philosophers have some strange conversations. I mean really strange. The kind of conversations that would cause the average person to question how we’ve managed to survive this long. You get a couple of philosophers playing World of Warcraft and you can rest assured that both the intelligibility and practicality of their discussion will taper off dramatically. But as you’re reading this book you’ve probably done your share of face melting and gold farming so I’m going to assume you’re okay with that.

I got involved in just such an obtuse conversation once after killing an orc outside the badlands. “I’ve slain an orc!” I proudly proclaimed to a colleague. “No”, he replied, “you initiated a computer program that displayed an animation of an ‘orc’ ‘dying’.” Yes, those scare quote gestures were included.

“Orcs aren’t real”, he declared. In true philosophical form I responded with a question; “what does ‘real’ mean?’” That question is the heart of the field of metaphysics. What in the world is metaphysics? Metaphysics is what’s in the world!

Specifically what are the key components of the universe? The ancients came up with the idea of dividing the world into four categories: earth, air, fire, and water. Modern scientists will say the universe is composed of atoms and not-quite-understood subatomic particles. But the term atom, in fact, was coined 2500 years ago by a Greek philosopher named Democritus to describe the smallest building block of the universe. Can the entire universe be described as complex interactions between basic physical particles?

Perhaps, but chances are if someone tells you that Warcraft is just a complicated computer program you’ll disagree. There is more to the world than what our five senses tell us, just as there is more to WoW than pressing keys to produce elaborate animations. What about consciousness and emotion? Are they real? Few would deny that they exist in some way, but if you ask whether they are completely separate from the other building blocks of the universe, well, then you’re thinking like a metaphysician. Ask the same question about Azeroth and you’re thinking like a philosopher who loves WoW.

Back to that dead orc. Or rather, ‘dead’ ‘orc’. Is it real? To be more technical I might say that what I did was execute a series of computer commands that interacted with a program stored on a centralized server, made changes to that program, then broadcast those changes to any other computer in the world that happened to be paying attention at the time. More physically speaking I might say I created a pre-defined pattern of electrical currents racing through a circuit board, a pattern that is recognized and replicated by other computers in the world.

How would my colleague, the Azerothian non-realist, describe an orc? He would say an orc is a pre-defined identifiable pattern of atoms - patterns that we recognize as biological and would include, among other things, green skin and large teeth. However there have never been examples of such patterns of atoms existing so orcs aren’t real - and certainly can’t be slain!

But now we’re arguing over semantics. To put things a bit more simply he might say the orc doesn’t really exist because it’s just a computer crunching numbers. But that leads us to the granddaddy of metaphysical questions: are numbers real?

By now this may all sound like I’m beating a dead orc. Philosophers have been arguing over this stuff for millennia and now we’ve got Azeroth and other persistent virtual worlds to add fuel to the debate. Actually, we’ve got 200+ Azeroths to add to it because each server hosts a different Azeroth, a different possible world. What happens on Uther stays on Uther - unless you transfer your toon to Kalecgos.

So even if Azeroth is real, which is the real Azeroth? Well, now you’re beginning to see how much fun metaphysics can be. . .

____________________
Post-Script: The abstract has been accepted!

The Poseidon Adventure - The Game

2009-01-31T12:39:00.000-08:00

Corvus has gone and given us liberty to write a second blog post for the Round Table this month and my cup runneth over! Seeing as how the BoRT was one of the parents involved in this blog's conception (try getting that image out of your head) it's fitting that it should now be so encouraging and supportive of its progeny's interests. So before this metaphor gets too ridiculous let's refresh our memory of the topic and get down to business ('cause it's business time... do'h!)

The Prompt

Putting the Game Before the Book What would your favorite piece of literature look like if it had been created as a game first? In a time when bits of Dante’s Divine Comedy are being carved out and turned into a hack-n-slash game, I find myself longing for intelligently designed games–games with a strong literary component–not merely literary backdrops. So rather than challenge you to imagine the conversion of your favorite literature into games, I challenge you to supersede the source literature and imagine a game that might have tried to communicate the same themes, the same message, to its audience.

The Thought

There's definitely a spirituality-theme focus emerging with my blog posts. It's not intentional I swear! Well inasmuch as there may be a spirituo-religious element to post-emo-existentiell gaming it's intentional, but since I've yet to explain exactly what this blog's title means that probably makes little sense. I'll get to it. You'll just have to take my word for it and settle for another IRS IOU .

The spiritual crisis this week has concerned the difference between viewing salvation as innate/inherent versus viewing salvation as the result of good works. Put another way: does God help those who help themselves or does God help those who wait passively and pray?

I'm not a religious person, but the more generalized question of when to rely on others and when to take matters into your own hands is one for the faithful and faithless alike. In Paul Gallico's The Poseidon Adventure this has very immediate consequences: do we wait for rescue or navigate the perilous hallways of a capsized ocean liner in an attempt to rescue ourselves?

The Novel

You may not know that The Poseidon Adventure was a novel before it was a film. Hell, you may not even know it was a film way back in 1972 if you've only heard about the two films from a couple years back (neither of which I've seen). I'll admit that I didn't know it was originally a novel until I read it just last year either, but the Gene Hackman film has been on my favorites list since I was a boy.

Though the film and novel differ substantially as far as the personalities and fates of individual characters are concerned the basic plot and themes are consistent. A luxury cruise ship is hit by a wave in the middle of the ocean and capsizes. It doesn't sink, however, and a goodly number of people who were in the ballroom (roughly the middle of the ship) survive. Reverend Scott, a hulky, adventurous Ivy-League footballer-turned-preacher tries to convince the survivors that they need to begin climbing towards the ships hull where rescue workers would have to cut through to find them. He's met with much hostility, both from people who have resigned themselves to their fate and those who believe it's the rescue worker's job to find them and that they'd likely get themselves killed if they did anything but stay where they are. After assembling a handful of "adventurers" Scott's party begins their ascent.

The majority of the book concerns the struggle of the survivors not only against the constantly shifting and hazardous confines of a ship that wasn't designed to be navigated while inverted, but also against the constant bickering and break-down of morale that is the hallmark of any group of people under duress. Several members of the party die during the treacherous ascent but eventually a handful reach the propeller shaft where a rescue party cuts through the hull and saves them.

One very important difference between the novel and the 1972 film is that the film makes the moral of the story obvious. Scott's group are the only survivors the rescue crew finds. Everyone who stayed behind and "waiting for a miracle" perished. God helps those that help themselves.

In the novel, however, Scott's group discovers that they aren't the only ones to survive. The story of the other survivors is never told - it is unclear what role, if any, they played in rescuing themselves. That ambiguity - whether or not more of the group might have survived if they'd simply stayed put - is the main point of The Poseidon Adventure game.

The Game

The Poseidon Adventure incorporates four general gaming/rule sets:

Platforming At it's heart the game is a variation of 2D platform/puzzlers along the lines of Lemmings or The Lost Vikings. Your goal is always to head towards the propeller shaft - generally up though detours will have to be made. You have a cast of characters with different skills - some can climb, some can swim, some can lift heavy objects, even some who apparently can do nothing but complain. You can take control of any character at any time and use them, often in concert with others, to create paths that the less able bodied members of the party can traverse. Ideally, through teamwork and ingenuity, you can lead your party safely to rescue. The trick, of course, is that the environment is not only inhospitable, it's constantly changing. Water levels are constantly rising, fires flare up and burn out restricting access to some areas temporarily (or permanently), and pieces of the upturned ship break hold from the floor/ceiling to block or reveal passages.

Dialogue Trees The members of the survival party are largely strangers to one another and have varying philosophies of how to approach the situation. Some are more gung-ho Reverend Scott type characters, others are much more reticent and apt to complain that the group should simply stop and await rescue. Their skill sets are not immediately obvious. By directing some characters to engage in conversation with others the player can learn what skills each character has (thereby "unlocking" them for use). These dialogue trees are also used to discover individual character motivations, useful in case they lose morale (indicated by a morale meter) and refuse to go on. Dialogue with surviving members of the ships crew can illuminate alternate pathways to the propeller shaft. While dialogue is an essential part of the game the player must always remember that time spent talking is also time spent waiting, time in which the ship could be changing - for better or for worse.

Logic Puzzles One of the key components of both the dialogue and the platforming is the incorporation of SAT-style logic puzzles of the "Suzie won't share a boat with Richie but must sit next to Johnny" variety. Certain characters (like families) work better when they're near each other, others will prefer to take the lead or bring up the rear. Some character's skill sets only become available if they are near other characters - Martin's desire to protect Nonnie, for example, gives him the strength and esteem be a leader. Throughout the game the player will need to establish some sort of marching order, but of course that order will be compromised when the group must separate to conquer multi-part obstacles within a given level.

Ludonarrative Holism I can't think of a pre-existing phrase for this last rule set and in truth it's not a discrete rule set at all but more the result of combining the three previous elements of the game. Taking a holistic ecology type of approach the game ultimately ends up resembling something like the Grow/Cube series in which each action has an affect on both previous and future actions forming a very complex web of interconnectedness. Your ultimate goal, of course, is to escape the ship. But the ship is constantly changing and the really evocative ludic point is that some of the ship's changes happen regardless of the character's actions, while others are the result of who you have in your party and what they do. It should be difficult if not impossible for the player to know the extent of this interconnectedness, thus creating uncertainty as to whether a take charge attitude is helping or harming. The extremes of both views will be expressed in dialogue between characters.

There is no central character in the game. "Winning" means getting a character - any character, even if it's just one - to the propeller shaft to be rescued. Not having a centralized main character puts emphasis on the relationships between characters. The major theme of the game is the value of activity versus passivity as it is expressed by people in a disaster situation.

Though the player controls the characters they don't have unlimited control. Some characters will refuse to do certain things, or will refuse to do them under certain circumstances. The morale meter mentioned above is quite important because if it gets too low a character will altogether refuse directions by the player . They will simply sit resigned to the fates and have to be left behind.

Make no mistake: characters will get left behind and characters will die. Sometimes these sacrifices must consciously be made. A switch has to be pulled but doing so is obviously suicide. Who will do it? Who has the skills to do it and moreover who is willing to do it (or can be talked into it)? Some characters may not have the skills necessary to take the path created. Do you leave them behind or try to find another way? Other times death is entirely accidental. An explosion happens, a boiler tears loose, the ship shifts and someone falls to their death. Was it foreseeable? Some characters may think so (there's that pesky morale problem again).

Information is power or, if you prefer, knowing is half the battle. This is certainly true in The Poseidon Adventure. Dialogue between characters is crucial both for learning their skills and learning how to keep them motivated. But because time plays such an important role in the game, the tension between taking action and waiting being paramount, all dialogue is spoken and unskippable. Time spent talking and time spent thinking is time for water levels to rise and for the ship's geography to change. The player is largely in charge of when and where dialogue happens. They select who talks to whom and the general tone of the conversation - think Mass Effect. The game play effects of conversation are immediately evident in the form of new skill availability and/or morale shifts. Plus the player learns information that will help keep morale strong in the future.

The dialogue is also idiosyncratic and personal, really adding to the depth of personality in each of the characters. When it comes time for the player to make choices about who lives and who dies the player should have to weigh game play needs (skill sets) against their personal likes and dislikes of individual characters, not to mention the characters' relationships with each other.

There's a prologue level in which the player has the opportunity to cause interactions among various characters and explore the ship prior to its inversion. Like the rest of the game time is limited in this prologue, but it does let the player gain access to some character's skill sets ahead of time. The trick, of course, is that the player has no way of knowing which characters are going to survive the inversion so some of the discovered skill sets may be moot, though the knowledge gained in the form of the ship's layout and the relationships between characters may be valuable.

The uncertainty associated with who will and who won't survive the initial disaster brings me to the last and perhaps most controversial aspect of the game: much of what happens is ~~random~~ procedurally generated. The layout of the ship, the initial survivors, the motivations and skills sets of individual characters as well as the quality and quantity of changes within the ship after the adventurers set out is different from game to game. I have in mind something akin to the nefarious AI Director in Left 4 Dead. This has the advantage of giving players an meta-narrative God-like entity to praise or blame for actions that happen in the game.

Once reaching the game's final chamber - the propeller shaft - the player is confronted with a sizable wait during which there is some dialogue among the remaining survivors (or interior monologue if only one remains) over whether they will be rescued or have possibly pushed themselves to their limits and wasted the lives of others for no reason. The player could even direct the characters back out of the shaft in search of an alternate means of escape - though to alleviate frustration the path is blocked. The point is to give the player and the characters some time to reflect and possibly even regret the choices and sacrifices that have been made. Eventually the rescue crew cuts through the hull and the characters are led away to safety and closing credits with one caveat: the player can see other rescue ships loaded with passengers from the Poseidon. They are distant and blurry so it is impossible to tell, but it is suggested that some of those other survivors might be people the player has left behind, might be just those characters who preferred to wait for rescue or lost morale and resigned themselves to their fate.

It's never made explicitly clear one way or the other, but the player should be left with the ambiguity of wondering whether their hard work and sacrifices were actually necessary.

 Please visit the Round Table's &amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;a title="Round Table Main Hall" href="http://blog.pjsattic.com/corvus/round-table/"&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;Main Hall&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;/a&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt; for links to all entries.

Big Daddies Make Me Do Bad Things

2009-01-31T08:47:00.000-08:00

Yea, I know that sounds bad. But it's really an intro to my new post up on ~~PS3Fanboy~~ Joystiq PlayStation. Having finally gotten on the Bioshock bandwagon I talk about the disjunct between how I thought the game would make me feel vis-a-vis the Little Sister condundrum and how I've actually responded thus far (hint: sea slugs taste good!).

It's also my last column on the site, which is particularly bittersweet given the outpouring of positive response to last week's post (disregard the misprinted byline). While I'm sad to bid the folks over there goodbye it's been a great deal of fun and will always be the cattle prod that spurred me to finally start writing my wacky philosophical thoughts about games (deadline + paycheck = productivity!). With any luck I can continue with that enthusiasm here.

For any readers coming here from Joystiq: welcome! Feel free to comment and please, please check out the blogroll ("The Good Stuff"). I am by no means the only crazy person trying to take gaming dialogue to the next level.

Check back later today for my second BoRT post, this time on The Poseidon Adventure!

Team Silent and the Narrative Me

2009-01-24T10:28:00.000-08:00

New column up on PSFanboy. This time the train rolls through Silent Hill (with a slight detour through Liberty City and the Capitol Wasteland) to determine if games with multiple endings can reward consistency in decision making and maybe even tell us a little bit about ourselves along the way. Unfortunately, for the sake of my publisher I decided to replace "handgun felatio" with "HK45 tonsillectomy". Feel free to make the switch back in your head. It's far more poetic that way.

A Call For Ludopedagogical Suggestions

2009-01-20T11:53:00.000-08:00

Next week, as a way of ending my Existentialism in Pop Culture course with a bang, I'm going to have my students play a few games with existential themes. As I see it, the major advantage to using games is that they allow students choice which - as will become evident when I finally get around to expounding upon the meaning of "post-emo-existentiell gaming", is probably the most central tenant of existential thought. For this to work each student has to be able to play the game for herself the first time through. This rules out any sort of class play through and means it will have to be done in a campus computer lab. Thus I am constrained to games that can be played within a browser or that require minimal hardware requirements (read: essentially none) so they can be installed on aging computers (think Windows 98).

Fortunately the games that I find best express the central themes we're covering are small indie affairs anyhow. I'd like to do 5 or 6 short games. Thus far I plan to do Passage, Execution, possibly The Marriage, and finishing it all with You Have to Burn the Rope. I'll write about my reasons for choosing these games and the themes they explore after I determine their success/failure within the course as a whole (I've only ever done Passage in a course before and even then it wasn't an ideal -individual - experience). I implore you, Inconstant Reader, to give me any suggestions you can for other games (or game-like experiences) to do. Keep in my the technological constraints and preferably they should be games that can be played in less than 10 minutes.

Social Networking in Game Spaces

2009-01-17T09:08:00.001-08:00

New column up over on PSFanboy. This week I'm discussing the socialization mechanics within Playstation Home in an attempt to get people thinking about what they really want rather than just griping about how boring it is. Not my best work over there, but I like the little Prometheus graffito in the header graphic ;)

Who Killed Fyodor Karamazov?

2009-01-11T16:29:00.000-08:00

Alright, here it is as promised. My raison d'blog. The Round Table prompt mentioned yesterday that provided the cattle prod for the musings you are presently so captivated by.

The Prompt

Putting the Game Before the Book What would your favorite piece of literature look like if it had been created as a game first? In a time when bits of Dante’s Divine Comedy are being carved out and turned into a hack-n-slash game, I find myself longing for intelligently designed games–games with a strong literary component–not merely literary backdrops. So rather than challenge you to imagine the conversion of your favorite literature into games, I challenge you to supersede the source literature and imagine a game that might have tried to communicate the same themes, the same message, to its audience.

The Thought

As anyone who's had more than a 10 minute conversation with me probably knows I'm in total agreement with Gordon Marino when he described The Brothers Karamazov as "nothing short of the Platonic form of the novel." It simply doesn't get any better, in my humble opinion, and despite its somewhat daunting size I try to find time at least once a year to read it. Of course this is the literary work that pops into my head the instant I read this month's Round Table question. Can it be a game? What are its key themes? There are so many it's difficult to distill them into some one or two, much less something playable, but let's see what I can do.

The Novel

Some background for the uninitiated. The Brothers Karamazov (not to be confused/abbreviated with The Brothers K, an entirely separate novel) is Dostoyevsky's last work, published serially and finished in 1880, less than a year before he died. Its plot centers on the titular brothers and their relationship, coming together after many years apart to settle affairs with their father. Fyodor Karamazov, the patriarch, is a profligate old man (I first learned the word profligate from the description of Fyodor, and I cannot think of the word without envisioning him), a drunkard and buffoon who is squandering his money away, money which at least one of the brothers, Dmitri, believes is rightfully his.

The three brothers are thinly (by which I mean not at all) veiled representations of three parts of the human soul: the sensual, the spiritual, and the intellectual. Dmitri, the eldest, spends his days drinking and carousing with women, and is locked in competition with his father not only over money, but also for the affections of a certain woman. Ivan is an academic who has returned home to help smooth out the differences between his father and brother. Alyosha, the youngest, is currently residing at the local monastery in preparation to become a monk.

It doesn't take long before Fyodor is found murdered and Dmitri is accused and put on trial. The bulk of the novel revolves around the interactions of the brothers as they attempt to find the truth, ruminating at length on philosophy, religion, and the meaning of life in the process. Ivan begins losing his grip on reality, Alyosha questions whether his faith in Dmitri is justified, and Dmitri begins to see that his way of life leads to degradation and murder regardless of whether he actually did what he is accused of or not.

The Game

How to distill this book into its basic elements in a way that would provide the foundation for a game? If I have to categorize the novel into a basic literary genre I can't help but (begrudgingly) label it a murder mystery. Who Killed Fyodor Karamazov? or Murder in a Russian Province. The thing about mystery as a genre is that it has a definite answer which is revealed at the end of the work, and which hopefully you are able to piece together based on clues given throughout. With a game, however, we're not so constrained. There may be several different "endings" dependent upon player choices and interactions.

Of course when thinking about a murder mystery represented in multiple mediums, one of which is interactive, one thing naturally springs to mind - Clue. Here we have a board-game with a randomized ending and game play that revolves around sharp questioning and deductive reasoning. The film gives a nod to the ambiguous nature of the game by providing multiple endings, giving no one canonical answer to the mystery, but several. Similarly the novelization of Who Killed Fyodor Karamazov? has more than one possible ending, depending on how you wish to read the text (no spoilers here, but there are two "canonical" interpretations).

With Clue, though, the "ending" is determined before game play begins. Players try to discover the truth but they do not in any way influence the truth (even if they do try to influence other players' perceptions of the truth). With a video game the opportunity exists for the player to influence the actual truth even if they they as player (narrator) are not directly involved in the acts leading up to the murder (though they could be, but I'd rather they aren't).

Yes, this involves reverse causation. Yes, I'm comfortable with that.

I'm imagining this as a game of exploration and interaction that relies heavily on the player moving along value-laden axes similar to the morality scale of games like Fallout 3. However, instead of focusing on morality these axes chart one's focus in life. Players progress along axes corresponding to Dmitri, Ivan, Alyosha, possibly even Smerdyakov (the fourth, illegitimate brother). In fact, if we take the novelization as necessarily distilling down the elements of the game into more simplistic parts, then the full fledged game could have further axes representing "minor" characters such as Katerina Ivanovna or Lise (the chaotic "Joker" of the bunch).

The important point is that each of these axes would correspond with a trait (sensualism, intellectualism, ~~Shatnerism~~ spiritualism, etc.) that color your perception of the world as the player/investigator. The information you receive from other characters in the game - their interactions with you - would reflect your particular outlook. Of course where you stand along these axes is itself dependent upon the conversations you engage in and the places you explore. Thus if you play the game from a more spiritually oriented perspective you may not get all of the information about Dmitri's debauchery from characters wishing to spare your feelings. If you are more intellectually oriented you may not be given as many options that require leaps of faith. These interactions also afford an opportunity for some exploration of questions about philosophy, religion, life, the universe, and everything else that happens on page 42 (Garnett translation).

As mentioned above there need not and in fact should not be an exact, canonical answer to who killed Fyodor. Instead the intent is for the experience and the answer/ending to be tailored to each player based on how they play the game. Playing the game as a sensualist culminates in a conclusion in which it only makes sense (ha!) for Dmitri to have killed his father for money or jealous rivalry. Playing as a spiritualist could result in Fydor's "murder" actually being a suicide - a warning about the inevitable fate of those who lack faith. This malleability of endings mirrors the existential theme (more characteristic of French rather than Russian existentialism, clove cigarettes not included) that one's perception determines reality, that the truth we see is a choice.

Naturally questions may arise as to what constitutes the "best" ending, but those conversations themselves express the major theme of the game - the human determination of meaning and value. The feeling that I get from reading the book is that the most successful life is one that reaches an equilibrium among the brothers (with perhaps a pronounced slant away from the sensualist). This would also be characteristic of a more "objective" view that defines modern thinking and probably most players. Rather than progress too far along any one axis we should try to keep them all in balance, thereby achieving the "true" ending.

A brief aside. Dostoevsky, himself a deeply spiritual man, intended for The Brothers Karamazov to be the start of a series with Alyosha as the main character. For him the spiritual life was the best one and would therefore lead to the most rewarding ending. But given what plays out in the novel the take home message seems to be more about the importance of balance, of not devoting oneself purely to any one part of the (steadfastly Russian!) soul. Hey, this is a game, so we have to leave room for a sequel...

Hurrah for Karamazov!

 Please visit the Round Table's &amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;a title="Round Table Main Hall" href="http://blog.pjsattic.com/corvus/round-table/"&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;Main Hall&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;/a&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt; for links to all entries.

Post-Script: Corvus' inaugural Blogs of the Round Table podcast (or Bortcast) includes a discussion of this very post! Take a listen here.

Post-Post-Script: Krystian over at Game Design Scrapbook has written a follow up post that focuses more on the design choices one would have to tackle with this project

Why?

2009-01-10T12:37:00.000-08:00

Who am I and what makes me think I have anything to say worth blogging?

I'm a philosopher, a teacher, and a gamer - in no particular order (but certainly not chronological).

Psychoanalytic question: What are you avoiding by focusing your attention on writing this blog?

Vague existential answer: My death, but of course that's not unique to me.

Overly practical answer: My dissertation.

Yes, I'm a graduate student. I'm 30.5 years old, and I should be finishing my dissertation. I've been a gamer my whole life, became a philosopher in high school, and a teacher/professional philosopher after college. My formal training is in ethics but by the time I was suppose to formulate dissertation ideas I had developed a love for all things technological and internet-y. So I came up with a thesis about virtue theory and the internet, one which grows more outdated every moment that I spend not writing it. But one of the necessary consequences of writing a dissertation is that you will lose all interest in the subject matter. Quickly.

I can't deny my drive to play games. For the longest time I couldn't validate it within the academic world. I proposed a course exploring ethics (excuse me, "normative theory" :cough:) through World of Warcraft, but it got vetoed ("Ethics and war?" "Excuse me ma'am, it's WarCRAFT, World of Warcraft" "Pah! You're no Allen Buchanan, kid!"). I assumed I was doomed, like most people, to live two separate lives, personal and professional and never the twain shall meet.

But a spot of light. In March of 2008 PS3Fanboy.com put out a call for columnists. Columnists about anything related to games. Hrm, I can relate philosophy to games. In fact I have more than a few friends that like to discuss games intellectually. Let me throw my hat in and see what happens. Congratulations, you are now the proud owner of a weekly column that will be read by the gaming masses! Go out there and drop some knowledge on 'em!

Preparing to write these columns changed my life. Not in the near-death experience kind of way, more like in the changing the light bulb kind of way. You still use the same wattage because it's comfortable and familiar, but the spark goes out and you have to fumble around with minimal lighting for a while before you get off your lazy ass and down to the hardware/drug/grocery store and get a new bulb on the cheap. That kind of change.

I started look around the web to find things similar to what I wanted to do, something to provide guidance. Boy did I discover a world I had been missing. It started (and always, always ends for me) with Michael Abbott and the Brainy Gamer blog. Here's an academic doing it right. Doing it beautifully. And I'll be damned if there aren't dozens of others doing equally wondrous things (I'm sure once I get the whole "blogroll" thing figured out you'll have the origins of my RSS feed vomited on the side of the page). I lurked. I posted. Mostly I desired to be a part of it. I want play alongside the Vintage Game Club! I want to participate in the Round Table!

But I'm writing for PS3Fanboy. And I'm supposed to be writing my dissertation. And most of all (and this is the real clincher) - I HATE writing! Yea, I know, I chose the wrong profession. Been knowing that for damn near a decade.

Still, deadlines make me productive (even if I'm a savant when it comes to finding ways around them) and I like having written even if I don't like writing (in much the same way I think it would be cool to have been shot, though not so much the actual getting shot part). I've still got the PS3Fanboy gig, though that whole "weekly" thing seems to have gone out the window (sorry, Andrew). I've learned a lot from it, a lot about the culture of the internet which I'd written abstractly on but not experienced first hand, a lot about how to relate to non-academics. And a hell of a lot about the world of PlayStation.

I also learned a lot about limitation and what I can't do at PS3Fanboy. Because I'm now so entrenched in the world of "intelligent gaming" blogs I can't help but want to take things to a high level, but I have to keep them accessible. That's good training for teachers. But there are still limits to what I can do in a 1000 word column at PS3Fanboy. Not to mention that it has to be at least somewhat relevant to the PlayStation brand.

Should I start a blog? Hell no! What part of "I HATE writing" was unclear? I can't even manage to garrote myself into doing my weekly fanboy posts (not to mention the D-word). If I'm going to write more stuff to put in a gaming blog, shouldn't I just save it up for that?

Probably.

What about all the stuff you'd love to say about Jason Rohrer's magnificent games?

Tough.

Damn you (bless you!) Corvus Elrod!! (Am I the only one who thinks he simply must look like Hugo Weaving whenever I see his name?) This month's Round Table really tugged at my aorta. But how can I participate in the Round Table and talk about the video game de-adaptation of my very favorite book (The Brothers Karamazov) if I don't have a blog?

You can't. So start a blog, dummy.

So I did. Maybe I can finally get into this whole writing thing. Maybe enough to even finish the dissertation. Hell I've got the post for the Round Table half written already. Not to mention this post and the outline of a second one explaining my "statement of purpose".

Or maybe you've mistakenly ran across this in a cobweb strewn corner of the web in 2018 and somehow read all the way to the bottom only to realize that this blog never had more than this one post but damn was that author prescient as to his own shortcomings.

Know thyself. Indeed.