Another Day, Another Press Conference

This isn't even about the PlayStation 4 at all, actually.  My opinion on that is currently irrelevant: it seems like a PC circa 2011, only it can't also run productivity software.  It'll be six months before the details that matter are available for me to form a strong opinion.  We'll probably end up with one in the house in 2014.  That is neither here nor there.

This is about the press conference at which Sony announced the PlayStation 4.

Sony's big problem: diversity.  The vast majority of presenters on-stage were white men, a huge percentage of whom were even sporting the same haircut and glasses.  The exceptions were a small handful of Japanese businessmen.  Naturally, the circles I hang out in on Twitter took exception to this.  When Patricia Hernandez gave it a mention on Kotaku, the predictable troglodytes crawled out of the woodwork to leave nasty comments.

One jerk, though, nailed the actual problem without even realizing he had.  In trying to explain why everything Patricia wrote was an invalid complaint, he said: "The reason there were no women on-stage is because the presidents and developers who happened to develop the software being presented happened to be male. It is not part of some sexist agenda, it just so happens that the people behind the creation of the content being presented happened to be men."

DING DING DING DING DING.

This is, in fact, exactly the problem. There are no women in leadership at Sony and, if there are, SCE does not feel comfortable bringing them into presentations or the public eye.  In fact, I can't recall ever seeing a woman executive presenting for Sony, despite the fact that many of their best game franchises and studios have very high-ranking women making them. So why, in 2013, is Sony still so resistant to having women in its top echelons?  I refuse to believe that, worldwide and especially in the Americas, there are no competent female executives -- except for that the systems that generate executives continue to favor a very narrow spectrum of men.

I have no love for Microsoft or for the 360, but during their major press conferences at E3 and so on, they almost always have women on stage at some point, even if they are generally presenting non-gaming, non-"core," family-friendly tools and features.

I am sure that most of the men on stage were perfectly lovely fellows.  But the narrowness of that particular slice of humanity really hit home when one came on stage to introduce what was later revealed to be a new inFamous game.  "In 1999, I got tear gassed at a protest," he began his story, which went on to feed in to the current era of paranoia.  The cops, it turns out, aren't always 100% good.

Really.

You don't say.

I'm sure there is no population out there who could have told you that.  Every day.  For the last century.

The statement was not ill-intentioned; far from it.  It was naive, and came from a place of privilege, from one very specific outlook.  It was a statement from a guy born into a population that doesn't routinely have trouble with cops, TO a population that doesn't routinely have trouble with cops.

And that's the kind of statement that comes out of a really, really narrow outlook.  When everyone looks the same and shares the same life experiences, nobody's going to introduce a new perspective into a presentation.  So you get more of the same, designed for the same people, even as the audience gets continually more diverse in every way.

What happens next?  I guess that's up to Microsoft, and we find out at E3.

"I'm trying to undo it, remember?"

[This entire post discusses the story and endings of Bastion at length and in depth.  Consider this a spoiler warning.]

The revelations all came from Zia; she was my key to understanding Bastion.

Bad Romance

Romance in Mass Effect can be... a little awkward.  You just want to go have a chat with Kaidan about the ship, or to see how Liara's doing, and bam!  Suddenly, you're in the middle of some forced and uncomfortable flirting.

It's more than a little awkward when you're playing the game with your spouse, and awkwardly flirting with the same girl he picked.

Even more awkward because in many ways, Shepard is designed to be an extension of the player's own being -- the customizable look and dialogue choices speak to this, and a very very large number of players make their first or canon Shepard in their own image.  My Shepard is, therefore, female, and bears a distinct resemblance to me (if I were in shape like a space marine and not like a lazy gamer).  

So Shepard is a girl.  And I am not exactly known for flirting with other girls.  In point of fact, I really prefer dudes.  I married one!  It works well for us.  And so flirting with Liara is awkward, particularly with my husband watching.

It is an uncomfortable fact: no matter how aware or progressive you are, sometimes you're going to walk flat smack into the own brick wall of your privilege.  At least I've had the good sense to know it for what it is!

The games that would drive a player into such a choice are few and far between, and more's the pity.  For however mildly annoyed I am for feeling strongly guided into a Liara pairing (and I wouldn't be annoyed at all, except that 1. Kaidan is creepy and 2. I'm not playing solo), there are hundreds and thousands of LGBT gamers out there who are rightfully annoyed that they don't get the chance in other games.  In fact, Mass Effect only presents the same-sex option to a female Shepard; a male Shepard has the choices of racist girl or exotic blue girl.  And I resent that choice on male Shepard's behalf.  M. Shepard should also have had the chance to be creeped out by and reject Kaidan.

I hear that BioWare has had some significant progress in this area in Dragon Age and especially in Dragon Age 2.  And I know that originally Ashley and Kaidan were written as romanceable by any Shepard, and that it was scrapped.  David Gaider's response to the "straight male gamer" is excellent and famous, as it should be.

I don't really have anything useful to add to the discussion, other than my own observations.  This area's not my specialty and I'm more than happy to defer to others.  We all know that diversity -- of all kinds -- in our games isn't where it needs to be.  I've mentioned the several PAX panels on that theme I attended.  In that light I'm mildly pleased to see this token choice put in, even if it does run into the hazy, muddy, troubled waters of "dudes like girl-on-girl."

Now if you'll excuse me... I need to go flirt with my husband's love interest.  And after that, to Virmire...

April Ryan: we meet at last!

The Longest Journey came out in 2000, and since roughly 2001 I've had a veritable cacophony of friends telling me I need to play it.  I'd started once before in 2006, but the copy (not even mine *cringe*) got stolen before I could progress.

There are two main venues of discussion available with The Longest Journey.  The first is of it as a game: its artistic, technical, and narrative merits.  The second is of it as different from other games: how Ragnar Tornquist and company appear to be at least 20 years ahead of everyone else [it's a 10-year-old game and others still aren't there yet] on diversity in gaming.

I'm learning to be better about jumps for post length: 

All gaming for all gamers

Brought to you by Jeff Green (of PopCap), this rant about the VGAs is amazing in every way.  My favorite bits:

The videogame community--those who make them, those who play them--encompasses a much larger, broader base than the Spike TV dudebro douchebag contingent. Really, saying the "videogame community" at this point is all but archaic, anyway. Because it seems that, with FaceBook and Angry Birds and Kinect and every other industry-broadening milestone, everyone is playing games now. There are people who love games, who care about games from all walks of life, both male and female. So when you aim your show at the station's primary demographic, rather than those who love gaming in general, you are alienating and insulting all the rest of us who would like to participate in and enjoy the event too.

Fortunately, the gaming industry has other awards shows, like the Game Developers Choice Awards and http://www.bafta.org/awards/video-games/, that actually know how to salute the industry without relying entirely on Olivia Munn's boobs and marketing-department-produced TV commercials to do so. But it would be great if, in the coming year, the folks behind the Spike VGAs could look into their hearts, look around at the vast, multigenerational, multicultural, gaming landscape and come up with a show that truly celebrates all of gaming for all gamers, that treats videogames not as things to be laughed at or apologized for, but as the incredibly complex and sophisticated pieces of entertainment they are. Way more sophisticated, at the very least, than the sophomoric, tacky spectacle that you put on to "honor" us.

I just want to stand up and applaud, really.

Black Ops Marketing

An interesting item appeared at Jezebel yesterday: Call of Duty Acknowledges Existence of Female Gamers.  The piece basically boils down to its closing sentence:

Even if women are still second-class citizens in the world of video games, hopefully this commercial is a sign that marketers are starting to realize female gamers make up a large and diverse group. And sometimes we enjoy a good explosion, even if it isn't pink.

Personally, I'm mixed on the ad itself -- I'm really not a fan of that genre of game and on a personal level I'm inclined to side with the whines and rants about the level of violence and plausibility in that commercial.  But just because I really don't care to play a Call of Duty game doesn't mean I can't be impressed by the first ever non-Nintendo game-related ad I've seen to feature that much diversity in race, age, gender, and body type.

I hear actual CoD players are more or less fans of the ad.  I wonder if that translates into them not being total jackasses to female players on headsets in online multiplayer?  Someone with an XBox, report! ;)

"Holy crap, I'm a GIRL!"

In the very early stages of Portal, the orange and blue portals are set up so that you can see yourself passing through them.  Listening to the audio commentary, you learn that the developers created this room so that you, the player, would understand how the portals really worked; you needed to understand that orange and blue were two sides of the same coin, and that you were passing through the coin, no matter where its sides lay.

But I passed through the portal, saw myself, and understood something else entirely.  "HOLY @&*%, I'M A GIRL," I shouted happily, to the eternal annoyance and confusion of my roommate.  ("What, you didn't figure that out twenty-odd years ago?")

Overwhelmingly, fixed (as opposed to characters you can fully customize, as in an MMORPG or recent BioWare titles etc.) video game protagonists are straight, white, and male.  This is not news.  Sometimes there's a strong narrative reason for a character to be the way s/he is; other times, not so much.  Sometimes the player character and his fixed narrative have a strong place in the game (any iteration of Metal Gear Solid, for example) other times, the character is more transparent and the player is truly conceiving of him- or herself in the first person.

And admittedly in Portal, the fact that you are Chelle doesn't matter much.  Sometimes you catch a glimpse of yourself, but the game exists primarily in the first person and every player I've ever known felt that he or she was in a one-on-one battle of wits with GLaDOS.  The character has no back-story given, so you write your own.

But: Portal presents a game where nothing about the player character really matters, so they flipped the coin and it came up female.  And that's something we really don't see often, and definitely not enough.

I've been working on posts around this topic for a month, and keep coming up with thousands of words, rather than the few hundred which are suited to a blog post.  Luckily, a blog gets to keep going.  I'll write more about the whys, hows, and what-to-dos another time.

Serious Gaming?

I've been really interested by Ta-Nehisi Coates's recent post on Serious Gaming.  He's writing directly about the American black experience and the presence of slavery in gaming, but includes (emphasis mine):

I know this won't happen anytime soon--no gaming company would risk it. But there's a lot of juice out there. I'd love to see a Total War type game, that seriously took on the Civil War, for instance. With slavery included. But one reason why it won't happen because "serious people" believe games to be idle time. Any game that engaged the black experience would be immediately accused of trivializing it.

It's been proven true over and over again that gaming has much the same problem that comics always have: a large subset of the population believes that the medium exists entirely for the benefit of and consumption by children, and has a huge problem with actual adult, mature, or serious material being presented.  And I don't just mean sex and violence that wouldn't be appropriate for young'uns; I mean actual, mature, serious storytelling and topics.

Except we know that a huge number of gamers are now in their 30s.  They got an NES for their birthday in 1986 or '87, or used an Apple IIe at about the same time, and never looked back.  Now they're (we're) adults -- the responsible, contributing-to-society, tax-paying kind -- and they still love gaming.  Many of them (us) are married or parents or both.

So is there any valid reason that a 30-year-old who likes reading books that address serious topics and watching movies that address serious topics wouldn't also enjoy the occasional game that addresses serious topics?  Yes, there's the whole "escapism" argument, and sometimes, that's fine.  I don't watch Spaceballs looking for an in-depth analysis of, well, anything.  But there's a whole arena of documentary film and serious narrative film out there that does exist to impart a message, or to educate the viewer.

When we think "educational" games, we think Oregon Trail or Lemonade Stand or Math Blaster.  In other words, we think kids and school -- and we don't associate much merit or high production values with the genre.  But Coates is right: there's a lot to be learned, for a serious gamer, in many well-assembled modern games.  And they could go deeper.

Is there enough of an audience out there to create an ROI for a "serious" AAA title?  Good question.  But I'd argue that in this era, an indie studio could put together a fairly robust, serious title.  

If there was some kind of "Underground Railroad" game that used mechanics like those in any stealther (Thief, for example), would it be trivializing the story, or enhancing it?  If an RPG truly addressed gay characters, or racial minority ones, or the problems of sexism... would we learn anything, or would it just be another set of mechanics that need to be learned and triumphed over?

Multi-Genre Gamer

Talking with a friend today made me think about this a little.

Some people are very dedicated to a genre of gaming. Everyone knows someone who's got every Madden ever released, or who salivates for Square-Enix. Me... I'm not like that.

I've played and enjoyed some shooters, RPGs, puzzle games, old-school adventure games, new adventure games, MMOs, PS3 games, stealth games, board / card game adaptations, PC games, DS games... I've enjoyed "girly" games (a description for another time) and explosively violent games. I like God of War and Metal Gear Solid and Phoenix Wright and Monkey Island and a whole bunch of other titles and franchises.

Honestly, from my admittedly brief (~ 8 months) run as a GameStop employee, and my not-so-brief (~ 20-year) history as a gamer, I think it's useful to see the whole range. No-one's going to enjoy playing everything; I certainly don't. But it's brilliant to see genres kind of cross-pollinate. A game like Fallout 3 draws from the RPG, the FPS, and even at times the old adventure game. And then there are the more indie / avant-garde titles available as downloadable short-form games: Flower, World of Goo, and Braid among them. Those games tend to meld, reinvent, or avoid genre entirely.

I never thought anyone would see me playing a survival horror game, and then I turned out to kick ass at Resident Evil 4 when my ex-boyfriend left the controller unguarded for a while. There wasn't a Japanese RPG on Earth that could captivate me, but then Chrono Trigger and The World Ends with You (both on DS) managed to grab me in for at least 50 hours each.

So I doubt I'll ever enjoy a Final Fantasy game... but once upon a time, I'd never enjoy an FPS, either... and then there was BioShock. Never say never.