highlights

opinions

  • Reading time:1 mins read

He has the right to voice an opinion. Your response was unnecessarily rude. Please refrain from such “snarkasm” in future, ok?

Thing is, simply voicing an opinion isn’t terribly constructive either. It’s not an issue of whether this person has the right to or not; it’s an issue of whether doing so adds to the discussion.

Okay, so it’s “naff”. Fair enough. Point is, simply declaring it so doesn’t say anything particularly meaningful. Now if this assertion were paired with an explanation for why it’s naff (whether insightful or bizarre), then hey — there’s a point for discussion. Someone here might have a chance of learning something, or having an interesting thought, however trivial.

On its own, though, raw opinion is pretty rude itself. It takes up space, demands attention to itself, and gives nothing in return. It is a vacuum of communication, crying “I” at the heart of the world. Beyond that, it’s uncomfortably prevalent around here. Thus the snippy response; it gets tiresome. Perhaps unwarranted in this circumstance, of course; I’m just slowly getting irritated.

Lifestyles of the Rich and Stupid

  • Reading time:4 mins read

I don’t consider myself a gamer. Then again, I suppose I don’t “game” so much as I… play videogames, sometimes.

If my distance sounds disingenuous… well, sometimes it is, a little. There is, however, a difference between having something in your life and building your life around that thing. Videogames fascinate me, and I spend a good deal of time thinking about them on an abstract level. I’ve thought enough about them to make some money based on those thoughts. Sometimes I play them, a little, when I’ve nothing better to do. I don’t feel it’s got much, if anything, to do with my personal identity, though. It’s just something that’s there, in my life.

And I think that’s an important distinction. Most videogames currently cater to “gamers” — a label that suggests that they use videogames to give themselves identity on some level. And, well, that just explains everything, doesn’t it. Aversion to change, in particular.

A person doesn’t need to have that ego attachment to enjoy a videogame any more than I need to tattoo Trent Reznor’s name on my thigh to enjoy Nine Inch Nails. Or even to analyze his music on a deeper level, sometimes. Likewise, I don’t need to spend my life in the cinema to enjoy Orson Welles and appreciate the significance of his work.

That is, to an extent, what Nintendo’s going after now: trying to make videogames accessible to people who don’t necessarily want to base their lives around them — which, at present, videogames really aren’t much. The “casual game” sector, and the success of cell phone games, proves that there’s some headway to be made here. I think that whole subsection of the industry is a little misdirected (and frankly a little patronizing), though.

I’m reminded of a recent post by Matt McIrvin about the Wikipedia science community, in particular advanced physics — about how the people editing don’t know how to write at all and keep skewing articles toward the most inclusive, precise, elaborate definitions possible. McIrvin keeps trying to smooth out the language, to make more accessible analogies, and to winnow out the superfluous material so as to make the pages readable and the information comprehensible to someone with, at best, only a slight existing understanding of the material. And even then he often gets complaints from casual readers that the articles are impenetrable.

Addressing this doesn’t necessarily mean dumbing down the material; it just means stepping back and detaching yourself from it enough to understand the context and what’s actually useful. There is a place for insider science writing, and that’s in academic science journals. There is a place for “gamer games”, and the Wii completely supports them. Just as important, though, is making the information available on a certain practical level to anyone who might express an interest.

How often have you handed a controller to, say, a parent who expressed some interest in what you were doing, only for him to hand it back in frustration when he couldn’t make sense of what he was doing; couldn’t coordinate his hands, was overwhelmed with all of the buttons and their seemingly random effects? The interest is there; anyone can be interested in anything. The problem is addressing that interest and drawing it into full-fledged involvement, for the time spent with a videogame — rather than simply assuming an existing level of exposure and a certain set of preconceptions.

Though I have that exposure, I don’t really feel I go into videogames from the perspective of someone looking for a videogame to play; I’m looking for something on a more human level, to maybe contribute something to my life for the time I spend playing. That might be an abstract intellectual observation, as in the game systems of a Treasure game, or it might be emotionally-based, as in Silent Hill. I don’t play videogames simply because they’re videogames, though. I don’t at all care about videogames for their own sake; I’m only interested in what they can do for me. I mostly stick around because I see the potential bubbling away, for them to tell me something really interesting that I didn’t know before.

I think that’s pretty close to the definition of a non-gamer. And I think it’s pretty close to the stance of your housemom or random schmoe. Which is why I think, should videogames come closer to achieving that goal, they will find a much wider audience than they currently do.

Pongism, or: What’s the Point of Videogames, Anyway?

  • Reading time:10 mins read

by [name redacted]

Part ten of my ongoing culture column; originally published by Next Generation.

We play them, we critique them, sometimes we enjoy them, sometimes we make them. To what end, exactly? Outside of screwing around in search of that elusive “wheeee!”, what exactly do we mean to accomplish? Why videogames? Why do we even bother? It stands to reason that whatever keeps drawing us back to the darned things, it’s got something to do with their basic nature; something that appeals to our own.

The Nose Before Your Face

  • Reading time:12 mins read

by [name redacted]

Part eight of my ongoing culture column; originally published by Next Generation, under the title “The Value of Simplicity”.

So lately we’ve been swinging back toward thinking about games as a medium of expression. It’s not a new concept; way back in the early ’80s, companies like Activision and EA put all their energy behind publicizing game designers like rock stars – or better yet, like book authors – and their games as unique works by your favorite authors. This all happened just after figures like Ed Logg and Toshihiro Nishikado started to extrapolate Pong and SpaceWar!, incorporating more overt narrative frameworks and exploring more elaborate ways of interacting with the gameworld. From this initial explosion of creativity came Steve Wozniak and the Apple II, providing an easy platform for all of the early Richard Garriotts and Roberta Williamses and Dan Buntens to come.

Then stuff happened, particularly though not specifically the crash; the industry changed in focus. On the one hand we had ultra-secretive Japanese companies that – like Atari before them – usually didn’t credit their staff for fear of sniping and for the benefit of greater brand identity; on the other, what US companies remained tended to inflate beyond the point where small, expressive, intimate games were economically feasible. And then there’s just the issue that, as technology grew more complex, design teams grew larger and larger, making it harder for any one voice to stand out, leading to more of a committee-driven approach.

Boundary Scout

  • Reading time:5 mins read

My brother has been hounding me about how to recreate that crazy mysterious glitchy feeling from old NES games, and this whole time I’ve been telling him that I figure it’s impossible. But uh, I guess not!

Apparently the trick is to actually focus on making it seem mysterious and glitchy!

Well, the focus here is on the glitchiness — mostly because I think that would be a cool-n-subversive way of doing things. I think the real point is in the kind of thoughts and emotions and behavior that those glitches trigger in people who are prone to pick at them. I think all of those qualities are very close to the ideal purpose and potential of videogames in general.

It’s that feeling of breaking through the boundaries of an established system — of the suggestion of unknown yet possibly grand potential hidden somewhere beyond the mundane, that you — as a free agent and very clever person — are specially qualified to unlock.

The way a person might break through the boundaries could be mechanical or emotional or intellectual. Some of the best touches in some of the best games borrow from this principle. See the scanning in Metroid Prime, how it comes directly out of the themes at hand, then ties everything together, hinting at a sort of order and coherence and reality to the entire Metroid series and everything in it that you never really suspected before. Yet it never shoves the stuff down your throat; it’s just there for you to put together on your own — much like all of the abstract stuff in the original Zelda and Metroid and whatnot, except deliberate and intellectual rather than incidental and material.

And then there’s Riven.

I think my point with the overt fake-bugginess was to exaggerate and glorify the whole pointless search process that we go through — poking the edges of the scenery, seeing what’s possible within the world, experimenting, and only rarely being rewarded with anything for our effort. And when we are rewarded it feels cloying and false, like those dumb treasure chests that have to be at the end of every single cul de sac in every single dungeon, to overtly reward you for going down and simultaneously make you feel obligated to go down every one.

It’s working on the suggestion that maybe this behavior has a real purpose behind it after all, that sometimes — just sometimes — there’s something magical and special and completely unprecedented to find. And the point to that is to bring into light that whole behavior, that whole mindset — which, again, I think is implicitly what videogames are made to suggest, yet which I don’t feel is often really addressed for all (or even much) of its potential.

I think this mode can be addressed in less gimmicky ways, even if the gimmick is maybe one of the clearest ways to illustrate it. The problem is that a videogame has to work on a couple of levels at once. It needs to have a completely workable status quo, that feels solid, that the player is convinced is meant to be solid, for the player’s subversion of that status quo to mean anything. There’s a lot of psychology here; the player shouldn’t know immediately whether he’s supposed to be able to do what he’s doing, and that it has been accounted for; just that, for whatever reason, he’s able to.

Beyond the psychology and the multiple layers to keep track of, the game of course has to be designed and programmed as well as possible, to avoid unintentional exploits. So there’s a certain level of virtuosity required here.

…

Maybe I’m overstepping the line a bit, in defining the importance of these characteristics. The basic nature of a videogame lies in the causal relationship between the player and the gameworld; the basic potential lies in the narrative ability of that causal relationship (what it means for the player to act, given the established boundaries of the gameworld). The natural mode of player action is to explore those rules and challenge them. I suppose it doesn’t follow that the player need subvert a status quo as-such; it’s just, this is a good way to illustrate that mode of player interaction and its narrative and emotional potential.

The player should feel free; that he is at all times in control over his immedate decisionmaking, and that through his decisions he is just perhaps blazing into unknown territory, doing something nobody else has done, having a unique and visceral personal experience that’s entirely generated by his own free will. Half-Life 2 is great at making the player feel clever and subversive for doing exactly what the game is expecting.

I think it’s a misdiagnosis of this quality that has led to this sandbox nonsense (most recently reined in and made less inane by Dead Rising), and sense that players want “freedom” in their games.

…

I’ll get back to this. Will post what I’ve got now.

The Web of Change

  • Reading time:2 mins read

Yeah, still working on the column. I know it’s late. Sorry! It’s… complicated. Almost done, though.

Anyway. You know what I’d like to see? A utility that will allow a person to track… game evolution pathways, I suppose. It will accept data from a few input fields, and store it in a database. This could easily be online. The primary input would be a game’s title, the second set of inputs would be other games that were inspirations for that game; the third set would be games that the primary game helped to inspire. So on a linear path (which this wouldn’t necessarily trace), you’d get something like Pong -> Breakout -> Space Invaders -> Etcetera.

The utilty would have a few other facets; one would graphically illustrate a web of all games and links stored in the database. Simple illustration — just spheres with text connected by green and blue arrows, say. Another would trace the most popular “hubs” — your Pac-Men, your Ultimas. Maybe the latter would be somewhat incorporated into the former, showing more popular hubs larger or in a different color. Perhaps there could be a spectrum of hot to cold.

I’m sure this wouldn’t take more than twenty-five minutes for someone who knew a bit of the proper scripting. I, however, don’t, offhand!

Museum of Terror

  • Reading time:2 mins read

So after rattling around the city for a while, I eventually turned up a copy of this — the first localization I’ve been really proud of. Actually, a few poorly chosen words aside, I really like it. It’s been long enough that I barely recall writing any of it, so I guess I’m in a fair position to be impressed.

Aside from the localization — which really does flow well, I must say — the overall package is just handsome. Appropriately schlockish typeface and blurb on the back cover. Nice quality paper and printing. Complete, in order, and well-documented. And hey, they even superimpose the sound effects over the panels themselves, instead of simply noting them in the margins — a novel approach for Dark Horse. A nice package, overall.

Here are a few carefully-chosen samples, captured about as well as possible on the weird scanner in the other room:


So. I recommend it! And there are at least two more of on the way, both of which I recall as superior in at least one respect. The only problem you might have is in actually finding a copy. Although it’s part of the same push that Dark Horse has been giving to Kasuo Umezu’s Scary Book series, you can find the latter anywhere and — I swear — nobody’s ever heard of Museum of Terror, much less put out an order on it. The only place I managed to track down a copy was in Japantown. If your local Borders doesn’t carry it, I just suggest ordering it online. Amazon’s got a good price, especially for how damned thick this thing is.

It’s-a Heem! Again!

  • Reading time:3 mins read

So far, New Super Mario Bros. isn’t as annoying as I expected. Kind of flavorless, yes. Well-made, though. Some nice ideas in here.

I like how they’ve stripped down everything except the mushrooms, fire flowers, and turtle shell — and then refocused the game so it’s basically all forward momentum. There’s plenty of stuff to dink around and find; that’s kind of peripheral, though. The overworld map pretty much drives the point home: it’s a straight line from the first level to the final castle, with only the occasional tangent to access an alternate route or a special item. The levels themselves are much the same. And the way the secret routes and items are hidden is nice and old-fashioned; reminds me of Mario 1 and Sonic 1.

Likewise, the focus on Mario’s size-changing is interesting. In past games (except Mario Land), there’s never been much point in being small. Here, not only is being small occasionally of value; you can also be smaller than small. And to trade it off, you can be bigger than big. Conceptually, it’s definitely got its stuff together; this is kind of like how Gradius V focuses on the Options. In execution — well.

The problem, as Toups pointed out earlier, feels like a lack of confidence. That seems to be an issue with a lot of Nintendo games these days. A shame. I mean. With more confidence in its own ideas, Wind Waker could have been really amazing. And again, whoever conceived of this game was a really clever person. You want to revive an imporant series, you break down what defines it and you build upon that. In this case, you focus on Mario’s growing/shrinking ability and on forward momentum; ditch all the suits and playground design and as much clutter as you can get away with, then slowly build back up with an eye toward the central themes.

Even the level design is often quite snazzy. Same with the very limited treasure hunt aspect, and how that ties into the world map: spend the coins however you like, whenever you like; go back and dink around to find the other coins whenever you feel like it. No pressure to complete everything; to the contrary, the game’s constantly pushing you forward. Yet it allows leeway if you want to explore. Again, sorta reminds me of early Sonic. Heck, Mario even runs like Sonic now.

Partly because of all that, I really wish this thing felt less generic. Less… cardboard. Whereas Gradius V and OutRun2 almost supplant Life Force and OutRun, this comes off more like a tribute game than something important in its own right.

EDIT: Actually, I want to say it reminds me a lot of a milquetoast follow-up to Super Mario Land. You’ve got some of the same ideas in it: better use of Mario’s size and working it into level logistics; more thematic enemies, and levels with memorable one-time quirks. I keep expecting the fireball to work like the Power Ball, and bounce all over, allowing me to collect coins. Instead, it just creates coins. (Not sure of the in-game logistics there. I think the Mario Land model would have fit better.) What Mario Land has that this doesn’t is a bizarre and quirky personality of its own, allowing it to stand as a response to Super Mario Bros. rather than just a new take on it.

Just dreamed: the following phrase:

  • Reading time:1 mins read

“Government scientists developed a drug named Rygar” — conspiracy nut, about a supposed anti-errection product in the water supply.

The Ends of the World

  • Reading time:27 mins read

by [name redacted]

Part one of my ongoing culture column; originally published by Next Generation, under the title “Culture: Games and Metaphor”.

For the last several months, this site and others have been nodding along to figures like Satoru Iwata explaining that everything you know is wrong; that everything you recognize as videogames is actually backward and childish, and making bold claims about what the future might hold for the medium. We’ve seen the “games as art” movement and “new games journalism”, and the backlash to both. It’s understandable enough; we’re human. We get attached to things; mere familiarity is enough to calm us down. Make the world a little less lonely.

Something I’ve not really seen addressed is, well, what’s wrong with videogames, anyway? The simple answer is that, in their current form, they’re pointless. Or, well. They’re not conducive to conveying a point, anyway.

Girl in the Fireplace

  • Reading time:4 mins read

Well. That… certainly broke the template. There always was the potential to do something like this with the schow, and in forty-some years they never did. This is kind of like a revelation.

So this is what you can do with a time travel story.

It’s like… a Treasure game, the way it’s using the series concept. It’s like this is what the show’s format has been meant for all along, and it just hasn’t happened until now.

I like also how all the writers seem to be fighting to inject new, random bits of continuity and “mythology”. Christmas, you get the hand. Here, you get the Doctor turning his “mind meld” powers on a human. Then you get all the business about “Doctor” just being a title, like “Madame de Pompadour”, and it hiding something dark and secret.

We’ve been getting the “Doctor Who?” jokes since last March, and all through the new series the Doctor keeps dodging the question of who he is. This is the first time some real importance has been tied to the question, though. That the audience has been given the cue: “That’s a good point. Who is he, anyway? What’s his deal?” It all goes back to the beginning. One of the big, important unresolved issues that kind of got forgotten after 1969 or so.

Curious thing is, all through the ’80s and ’90s there was an attempt to bring the question back up again. John Nathan-Turner, the producer during the ’80s, addressed it by putting question marks all over the Doctor’s clothes. (“‘Doctor WHO’ — get it?!”) Then Andrew Cartmel, the script editor during the final couple of seasons, had this plan for suggesting that all we knew was wrong, and that the Doctor was way more than we’d ever imagined. That plan ended when the show ended, though the novels and stuff all through the ’90s took it in some seriously strange directions.

This isn’t clothes-deep, though. And it isn’t attempting to rewrite history. It’s just bringing attention back to the realization that we really don’t know who this guy is, outside of what we’ve witnessed. We don’t know what’s driving him or why. Though it seems we know a lot, it’s all just details. He’s a Time Lord. He’s been wandering for nine hundred years, basically on his own, separated from his own kind. Somewhere over the last couple hundred years, all the other Time Lords died out. Though to an extent it doesn’t make that much of a difference, as he was always alone anyway. At first he was hiding from his own kind; now he’s just… used to hiding. He even hides that he is hiding, with all of his adventures and attempts to do right by throwing himself in without a thought of caution, and the parade of assistants he’s enlisted. Then he always just moves on. Never bothers tidying up. Goes back into hiding, in his little box, outside the universe.

* * *

I think the best line — well, exchange — in this was between the Doctor and MdP:

“This is my lover, the King of France.”
“Yeah? Well, I’m the Lord of Time — and I’m here to fix the clock.”

Somehow, framing the story so you can also see him as sort of a fairy tale character from Madame de Pompadour’s perspective, and so you can see the weird logistics that fall into space then — well. Cripes.

I mean, it makes sense. For her and everyone there, he’s like a sprite or gnome, who keeps popping in and out of the world. And it just so happens that he’s the lord of time. So of course he’d be there to repair the clock. And of course the menace would be made of clockwork. That’s the only way it would make sense, his being there. And of course the only time he does appear is when the clockwork droids do — when the clock needs fixing. And of course they’re no real menace, because he’ll always be there, like the tooth fairy.

Somehow all that business is solidified in one brief exchange. He becomes a myth. A small, personal myth.

And in a sense, he’s not much more to us — even though he’s (effectively) been there through our whole lives. Forty-three years, actually. (Hmm.) On a practical level, he’s no less a mystery.

Experimental Gameplay 2006 – Part 2

  • Reading time:1 mins read

by [name redacted]

Jonathan Blow showed what appeared to be a humble-looking 2D platformer, that at a glance could well have been designed in Mark Overman’s Game Maker, and mumbled a few things about time manipulation. He referenced Prince of Persia: Sands of Time and Blinx: The Timesweeper, calling them relatively traditional in application. The player can only go back so far, and only under certain circumstances, making the time element sort of a gimmick. Blow wondered what would happen if the player were able to “undo” however many mistakes he pleased. What would that mean for design? Could it even work? If so, how?

( Continue reading at GamaSutra )

The Localization of Counter-Strike in Japan

  • Reading time:2 mins read

by [name redacted]

Taninami, a thirteen-year veteran of Namco’s arcade division, was assigned five years ago to find a solution to the Japanese “network game problem”. Whereas the US has enjoyed about thirty-five years of network connectivity, online games have never really caught on in Japan; for some time, received wisdom placed the blame on a nonexistent or comparably obscure architecture. And yet, now that broadband is prevalent, the market still barely exists.

So why is that, Taninami asked. Flipping the question around, he then asked what makes network games fun. He concluded that pleasure comes in part from the game itself – provided it’s a good game – and in part from the company the player keeps. He called this situation a “relationship of multiplication”: if the opponent fails to play fairly, then the game fails to be enjoyable. As far as Taninami was concerned, that social angle was the biggest problem.

As Taninami had a limited budget, he figured there was no point in wasting resources on development, when there are already so many well-made games available; instead, he poured all of his attention into the network aspect, conducting reams on ridiculous reams of research on how to ensure a fun level of competition. For the game, he selected Counter-Strike, due to its popularity elsewhere in the world. He asked Valve for a license to promote the game in Japan; they said okay and everything was in order. Almost.

( Continue reading at GamaSutra )

The Future of Mobile Gaming and its Enemies

  • Reading time:2 mins read

by [name redacted]

EA Mobile senior VP (and former JAMDAT CEO) Mitch Lasky kicked off his keynote at the GDC Mobile segment of Game Developers Conference 2006 with an extended spiel about his history with JAMDAT Mobile, the changing fabric of the industry, and what he sees as the biggest obstacles (and avenues) to future growth and maturation.

According to Lasky, one of the biggest forces for change has been his own company, JAMDAT — and in its current form, as the mobile division of Electronic Arts, Lasky sees it as perhaps the most important force for future change.

Lasky explained how Jamdat went, as he put it, from a value of zero to $684,000,000 in six years. When they began, they were a team of six people; previous to the EA merger two months back, JAMDAT was already the biggest mobile publisher. To contrast, The amount EA paid for JAMDAT is five times greater than Maxis fetched, making it the biggest EA transaction to date.

Of course with this kind of growth, it is only natural for other developers to go public in search of similar success. Lasky suggested the search was ultimately futile, as at the time JAMDAT went public it was “fundamentally different.”

( Continue reading at GamaSutra )

Foreign Data

  • Reading time:4 mins read

Back in the early NES days, the way Nintendo presented their games, all bunched together in an “official” lineup that you’d see repeated to you with every new game you bought, it’s like those games were the straight-out canon. Straying from the first-party line was sort of a risk; a trip into the unknown. Outside of some major players like Capcom and Konami, no one really talked about the “other” publishers very much. And yet every company had its own template, to distinguish its lineup from anyone else’s. You could tell a Konami game by the gradiated silver border; a Capcom one by the weird perspecive grid thing, with the box art centered on top of it; a Broderbund one by the entire bottom of the front cover being silver, leaving a little room for an illustration up top.

Now, most of the major companies had appealing templates, with reasonably appealing illustrations — and most of the games themselves looked reasonably appealing. If you didn’t understand exactly what the games were, from a title, a painting, and a couple of screenshots, you could hazard a guess based on the company’s other games and be intrigued. Some companies, though, they just creeped the hell out of me. Like Data East or Acclaim.

You look at boxes like this, and your brow furrows. In particular, the ones toward the bottom — Star Voyager and Winter ames and 3D Worldrunner — have layouts sort of similar, though not identical, to Nintendo’s “black box” template. Star Voyager’s screenshots show red lines on a black background, with what looks like an NES pad at the bottom of the screen. The Winter Games art depicts glowing neon outlines of people in snowsuits, leaving tracers. You look at these boxes, or any ads for Acclaim’s bizarre lineup, and you wonder. Mind that there weren’t any decent reviews out there for third-party games. To find out what these game are, you’d have to shell out money for them — and yet you’re ten years old. You don’t have fifty bucks, and if you did you’d probably spend it on something “safe”, from Nintendo or Konami, instead. These strange boxes will remain on shelves, and in the ads in game magaines, staring at you, making you uneasy, their mysteries locked out of your reach.

I mean, what on (or off) Earth is Lunar Pool? I’m reminded of when, as a boy, I was left in Epcot Center to wander unsupervised for half a day.

Now we know what most of these games are. We can go back and investigate the ones we’ve missed. We no longer have these page-sized masses of mystery glaring at us. And yet, even if you do dig in — have you seen how glitchy Karnov is? Or Breakthru? Are these games fun the way Konami’s and Nintendo’s games are fun? Is there something that no one’s explained to us? It still feels risky — a little dangerous, a little unnerving — to wade into these waters. Maybe those older, cooler, clearly wiser kids who skateboarded and could play arcade games like I never could said and did all sorts of things I didn’t understand — maybe they’d understand them. Maybe when I was older too they’d not seem so alien to me.

Today we’d just reject the games as crap. Look at the reputation Deadly Towers has achieved, thanks to Seanbaby and Something Awful. And yet — not having played it — to me that game was one of the most mysterious things on the NES. The box art, the screenshots — they seemed to hint at something beyond my grasp. So many times I almost went for it; after asking the Kay-Bee clerk for one last look at the box, I’d tell him this time I’d buy the game. I never quite dared. Instead, I have almost a full collection of Nintendo black-box games, and early Konami and Capcom releases. Ah well.