I used to be Andrew Carnegie... and now I live in a van.

Back in 2014, I wrote about how Animal Crossing: New Leaf was basically an Andrew Carnegie simulator: capitalism as perfection, and how to become a magnanimous millionaire.

Now, in 2017, I wrote for Zam about how I find Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp perhaps a better metaphor of how capitalism screws us all over than it meant to be.

Why I Play

 There is always something worth finding if you go to the farthest edges of the map.

I don’t like to play mages or wizards.

I do enjoy being an archer, a sniper, or an assassin sneaking through shadows.

I value loyalty less than I value compassion.

I naturally gravitate toward diplomacy and the resolution of conflict.

I worry less about threats to me than I do about threats to the people I love.

I will rewrite the goddamned laws of spacetime itself if I have to, to save them.

It is not where I go that matters.

It is how I feel for having been there.

 I was asked why I play, and this was my answer.

I play games, and here is what I have learned:
The X button on a PlayStation controller is at the bottom.
Underwater levels are always kind of a pain.
There is always something worth finding if you go to the farthest edges of the map.
I don’t like to play mages or wizards.
I do enjoy being an archer, a sniper, or an assassin sneaking through shadows.
I value loyalty less than I value compassion.
I naturally gravitate toward diplomacy and the resolution of conflict.
I worry less about threats to me than I do about threats to the people I love.
I will rewrite the goddamned laws of spacetime itself if I have to, to save them.
It is not where I go that matters.
It is how I feel for having been there.
- See more at: http://kernelmag.dailydot.com/issue-sections/staff-editorials/11949/why-i-play-video-games/#sthash.qqAuqENp.dpuf

I play games, and here is what I have learned:
The X button on a PlayStation controller is at the bottom.
Underwater levels are always kind of a pain.
There is always something worth finding if you go to the farthest edges of the map.
I don’t like to play mages or wizards.
I do enjoy being an archer, a sniper, or an assassin sneaking through shadows.
I value loyalty less than I value compassion.
I naturally gravitate toward diplomacy and the resolution of conflict.
I worry less about threats to me than I do about threats to the people I love.
I will rewrite the goddamned laws of spacetime itself if I have to, to save them.
It is not where I go that matters.
It is how I feel for having been there.
- See more at: http://kernelmag.dailydot.com/issue-sections/staff-editorials/11949/why-i-play-video-games/#sthash.qqAuqENp.dpuf

Happy New Year

I don't have a game of the year.  In the same way that multiple games left profound and lasting influences on me in 2011, several have likewise done so in 2012--Journey, Mass Effect 3, and The Walking Dead among them.

So instead of writing any kind of GOTY post, I will instead direct readers to Sparky Clarkson's The Year of the Games roundup, a collection to which I and nearly a dozen of my colleagues and peers contributed.  It's been a fascinating year, as the big-budget, AAA games wrap up franchises and stall out, waiting on a new console generation, and as indie and avant-garde-inspired gaming well and truly comes into its own.

Likewise, Critical Distance has once again rounded up their must-read highlights of the year, and they are indeed pieces that should be read.

And as for me?  Well.  I had many, many beginnings in 2012, and some endings too.  I look forward to seeing what games inspire me to write too much in 2013.

Go read this

File under, "I really wish I had written this:" Katherine Cross's "Game Changer."

It is hardly surprising that some men perceive the gaming world as, in Kimmel’s words, a “virtual men’s locker room” threatened by the presence of women. When women inhabit this space, claim visibility, and attempt to shape it, their presence becomes an existential threat to that “not PC” safe space that some of these young men enjoy. When abuse occurs, the conceit is that it’s “just a game,” which enables people to—in the words of one of Kimmel’s interviewees—“offend everyone!” It’s not like real life, which is too, well, real to risk flagrantly violating norms of decorum. But, at the same time, these male gamers know that the space is a real, tangible thing, in need of protection. Their “offending” serves to police the boundaries of who can and cannot inhabit gaming culture, and to keep out people who threaten “their” space.

Cross does her homework and her research, and articulates very clearly and cleanly the theories that I--and anyone else who examines sexism in gaming--have bandied about for ages.  She even looks at the moving goalposts: if women like it, it is no longer a "real game."

Oh, my, it's quite dusty in here...

Oh, hello.  *blows the dust off the blog*  I, er, let things sit around here for rather a long time, didn't I.

So, I said back in February that I was going to try to do a monthly best-of link roundup to my work from Kotaku.  That promise very clearly fell by the wayside, and hard.  Sorry about that.  I just ran out of steam, most weeks.  But better late than never, right?

Anyway, a roundup is easier when you know where it ends.  It has been a privilege and a pleasure working with the team at Kotaku.  It certainly made 2012 interesting in a number of unexpected ways.  That particular adventure, though, has drawn to a conclusion; the site and I officially part ways on December 1.  It's time for a new adventure.

Meanwhile, I've got a veritable mountain of links after the jump.  It's not everything I posted at the site (most weekdays, I ran between 3 and 8 stories); just the ones I can remember as a best-of.  Criticism, impressions, and general essays are arranged by month, with all the full game reviews (all of 'em) afterward in alphabetical order.  Because I am nothing if not compulsively organized.

Happy New Year! Etc.

The last big project I worked on in 2011 has now come to fruition, and yours truly has just appeared in issue 4 of Ctrl+Alt+Defeat, available here.  There are several excellent pieces in there from a number of friends and critics, so I recommend a read.

Also, Critical Distance did their annual retrospective of This Year in Video Game Blogging, and this here little blog received a very nice shout-out indeed.  You'll find many must-read pieces by many of my favorite writers in that post.

Meanwhile, here at Your Critic, I'm gearing up for a busy January, with a week of guest-posting elsewhere, a possible letter series, a couple of big pitches, and a long overdue blog redesign.

Also, for the record, my 2011 Games of the Year were Portal 2, Dragon Age 2, and Bastion, not necessarily in that order.  I realize this is hardly revelatory.  Look for an opus on DA2, when I can finally decide which part I want to write about most, in the coming weeks.

The Music of Mass Effect 3 - Preview

I've got Mass Effect 3 on the brain bad, guys. So bad. I had a dream about it a few weeks ago, that's how bad.  (It was a sad dream.  Shepard had to choose between two populated, thriving planets to save and she was really upset, talking to Garrus about how she was just one person and couldn't be everywhere at once, and didn't know what to do.)

I've been avoiding watching any leaked footage or reading anything with story spoilers, because I want to go into it fresh.  (These weeks are worse than when I was neck-deep in the Lord of the Rings fandom a decade ago. At least I already knew how that story would end!)

But when there was that ME3 leak on XBox Live, some kind soul created an edit of just the soundtrack music available in it, without any dialogue or visuals (spoilers!) to go with.  I listened to it once, thought, "Good, Mansell's definitely on the right track," and then the next morning woke up mildly obsessed with it.

There's also this:

Yes, it's true. I'm working on Mass Effect 3. :) #ME3 - and this is a preview of some music I've written: facebook.com/masseffect/pos…
— Sam Hulick (@SamHulick) December 19, 2011

Which was just followed by this link (non-Facebook version), to a snippet of ME3 soundtrack that Hulick wrote. 

I wsa going originally to do some intelligent total guesswork analysis on the snippets from the video, but right now I just need to get some completely irrational fangirling live.  Any game series that puts its hero's theme in 7/8, even for just the middle game, is a series that has me forever.

(Related: The Music of Mass Effect part 1 and part 2.)

Other Critics' Castles

Hello internets, I'm working my way back to civilization.

But while I was gone, some friends have been churning out some stellar video game essays.

Over at Two Whole Cakes, Lesley's written a pair of articles:

• Shepard Ain't White: Playing with Race and Gender in Mass Effect
• Probe Away! Mining for Queerness in Mass Effect 1 & 2

And my old college buddy at Retconning My Brain published her piece on the Asari: Bluer than your Matriarch's Orion Slave Girls!

So while I'm unpacking and trying to figure out what the cat wants, go read those.

How Portal 2 became a domestic World War 3

I follow #AltDevBlogADay on Twitter.  It's true, I don't understand most of the heavily technical posts or discussions (a coder, I am not), but I do find it fascinating to see what industry and development trends designers are talking about.

And every now and then, there's a true gem that I do understand.

Mike Jungbluth, today, shared a post called, "What does your game believe in?"  It's a fairly lengthy piece (albeit shorter than most of the ones I write here, heh) but has a couple of crucial excerpts:

From the characters that we control, the world they live in, and how the player interacts with each, if the core beliefs are consistent and persistent, that will be felt on an incredibly deep level. In fact, you could even call it the heart and soul of a game. That sort of special x-factor that helps to make a game feel more alive than even a bigger budget game sitting next to it on the shelf.

But like having beliefs in real life, it is a double edge sword. As soon as those beliefs are called into question, your entire reality can become questionable. The deeper or more core to the person or world the belief, the further everything can come crashing down the moment they are betrayed.

And:

Beyond just model sheets and reference for movements, really think about what drives the character forward. What has lead them to the point they are at when the game starts, and where do they draw the line in their world, as to what they believe in. Do their beliefs change or grow as the game progresses?


Do they mind getting their hands dirty or are they reluctant to do so? Both can allow for the same overall gameplay and creation of assets, but being aware of what they believe can make what happens before, during and after all the more meaningful when the animations or dialog matches those beliefs. This goes for not only the character, but the player. In fact, going a step further, this is how we can even begin to color the player’s beliefs, and make them question their own values versus those of the characters in the game.

One thing I love about this article is that, without using the exact words, it basically translates into: "HEY PEOPLE.  WRITE REAL, FULLY FLESHED-OUT, PLAUSIBLE CHARACTERS IN YOUR GAMES."  That's a piece of advice I can most certainly get behind.

It's worth observing, here, that both times I have attended a panel on female characters in gaming (in 2009 and again in 2010, both at PAX East), the conversation around character writing quickly lapses into a festival of complaints.  Our female characters are badly written and one-dimensional, the cry goes -- but someone quickly adds, "And so are the men."  And it's often true.

As the article cited above itself points out: Nathan Drake has all of the depth and consistency of a washcloth.  I love the Uncharted franchise but that's kind of in spite of itself.  Drake is a fun character but Jungbluth is completely correct to observe that cut-scene Drake and player-driven Drake basically have two completely different sets of beliefs and priorities, and I find that sort of writing jarring.

On the other hand, Bioware is renowned for putting breadth and depth into their character writing, and for making plausibly character-driven games.  The Dragon Age and Mass Effect franchises have now become bywords among gamers looking for thoughtful character and narrative design.  And their titles are selling, and selling well, so there's definitely hope for more of this kind of design in the future.

"But wait," you ask.  "What does any of this have to do with Portal 2?"

One of the longest, deepest arguments Your Critic and her spouse have ever had (and we've known each other since 1997) took place during the first week of Portal 2's release.  It happened in slow motion over three days and was, frankly, exhausting.  And what caused this argument?

In its purest form, the fight was over Chell's moral compass and character consistency.  Yes, really.

With some story spoilers for Portal 2: A series of events (chapter 1 - 5) in the game create a situation where your arch-nemesis, the computer GLaDOS, is being stored in and powered by a potato battery.  The beginning of chapter 6 separates Chell and GLaDOS, but at the end of chapter 6 you and your 1.1 volts of spudly evil are reunited, and in order to progress from chapter 6 to chapter 7, the player is required to pick up and then carry the potato.

And what about this angered Your Critic's spouse so?  In his own words: 

The overarching plot of Portal 1 is really Chell vs. GlaDOS. In Portal 2, GlaDOS is pretty bitter about it, and continues to try to kill Chell in myriad ways.

But then GlaDOS is rendered helpless and stashed in a potato. When you find the potato in 70s Aperture Science, she asks you to take her with you to replace Wheatley before he destroys Aperture Science.

My problem with it: Why in God's name would anyone want to do that?

It makes no sense. Here's the malevolent AI who wants you dead, and she's asking you to help her. The only evidence that you have at that point that Wheatley might destroy Aperture are some distant rumbling sounds. GlaDOS has been a proven schemer and liar so there's not a whole lot of reason given to trust her. She's exceedingly likely to betray you given first opportunity. So why save her? Why bring her back to power? Why would Chell choose to trust her mortal enemy on her word alone?

And even if she's right, what's the worst that happens? Aperture is destroyed, preventing anyone else from falling prey to its malevolent experiments. That doesn't sound so bad to me.

All I wanted to do when I found the potato was destroy it. Hurl it into the abyss. Mash it into a side item and put gravy on it. But the game wouldn't let me. The game forced me as a player to act completely contrary to what I felt anyone would normally act. And I hated it for that.

I did not take this plot development so badly amiss, and many players did not.  But the other gamer in my household exactly encountered the phenomenon about which Jungbluth was writing: a belief dissonance so stark that his preference was to walk away from the PC rather than to complete one of the most acclaimed games of 2011 (and the second installment in the most acclaimed franchise maybe ever).

All of this serves to remind us that good writing in games, needs to be front and center, not secondary.  As this industry, entertainment medium, and art form matures, the real crux of it all is what stories we're telling, and how carefully we're telling them.  Narrative gaming* is just the means, not the end.

*NB: Narrative gaming and non-narrative gaming are still fairly different; the latter is more in line with Tetris or chess or whatnot, and that's a different beast.

Link Roundup

I've just gone through the last six months worth of notes and drafts and come up with a roundup of interesting reviews and articles I never posted, as well as some new ones:

• Moral Combat - Conservatism in the Lives of Sims [The American Prospect]
• The Geopolitics of Where In the World Is Carmen Sandiego [The Atlantic Online]
• Gaming: good for teenage girls!  [Jezebel]
• Research - What makes gamers keep gaming?  [New York Times]
• Welcome to reviewing, Carolyn Petit  [Kotaku]
• A follow-up to my own "Chatty RPG": Curiosity Killed the Player [Gamasutra]

Also, I started writing the text below last summer, when the article cited was published at the New York Times, and then it fell off my radar for a while and got buried in a rather large pile of interesting drafts "for later."

So, later is finally now.

Games may or may not be art*, but there's no denying that this is:

What if Pac-Man is really a gluttonous German burgher out to gorge himself while dodging the ghosts of those he has so callously wronged, à la Dickens?

What if the pilots in Asteroids are merely profane technicians existentially trapped within a corporation that knows nothing more than to send them into the void to shoot rocks, until they become smaller rocks and smaller rocks, until they become nothing?

In other words, what if the characters and stories of classic video games were reimagined and reinterpreted as live theater in front of you?

The concept of "Theater of the Arcade" is fascinating.  There is nothing new about gamers getting creative with their favorite titles.  But most of what game consumers produce is considered... well, to those not directly involved in fan culture, it's generally thought of as nothing but a waste of time.  People see fanfic as either poorly written or as pointless smut (also usually as a "girl thing," which is a textbook-long discussion for another day).  And game mods, except for the very most popular, are something fanboys do for fun when they could be using their time and energy for "real jobs" or getting laid.

But the first wave of home gamers is grown up: a kid who was 10 when the NES came out in the USA is now 35, and some of those former kids are artists, playwrights, or even game designers...  And many are parents.  I look forward to seeing what their kids do with our early gaming icons in another 20 years.

*They so totally are.

Beyond the Girl Gamer 1.2: The Chainmail Bikini

 Beyond the Girl Gamer: Intro | 1.1

---------------------------------

The long and the short of this piece is really pretty brief, because it's something we all know, and have known for years.  This post in the series exists because it has to, because I can't overlook something so egregious that we all know it internally:

Our female characters are nearly all overly sexualized.  And even when they might not be so bad in the context of a game itself, they're beyond awful in the marketing materials.

Rather than re-hashing several years' and decades' worth of discussion and argument here myself, I'm going to spare myself the pain of wheel-reinvention and link you all to someone who does have the data: Go Make Me a Sandwich.

The post that first brought me to that blog was an excellent breakdown of sexualized depicion in WoW galleries, by gender.  Hint: it's all T&A for the laydeez.  She also addresses the kinds of poses that seem to be de rigeur for the men in the room.

So really we know this happens.  This leaves us with two real questions:

1.) Why?  Why why why?

2.) Aren't there other good ways to sell and market a game?

Over and over, we hear "sex sells."  We hear that a bronze chestplate -- plate armor -- that covers the whole torso on a male avatar but only the breasts on a female avatar (or plate greaves, that cover the entirety of the legs on a male avatar but wears like a thong on a female avatar) does so because the men and boys who play the game just want to look at the bare girl skin.

Really?  I mean, really?  Do we think so little of gamers that not only do we assume that they're all straight men, but also that they all have the proclivities of an uncontrollable 13-year-old?

Everyone -- I mean, everyone -- in gaming has been discussing this for years.  We're smarter than this.  Valve has just recently knocked it out of the park on marketing a game with a female protagonist and a female antagonist.

So I'll leave you with just a sample of what some others have written on the topic:

• TVTropes entry on the Chainmail Bikini (examples galore)
• The Border House on the Platemail Bikini, especially in WoW
• Wikipedia's "Portrayals of Women in Video Games" entry
• A UVA Undergrad on feminist media theory & video game characters
• Aleah Tierny's "What Women Want," via PBS
• University of Arizona: "The Effects of the Sexualization of Female Video Game Characters..."

And ten minutes or less on Google will bring you to at least a hundred articles, rants, and blog posts on the theme.  Some are better than others.  (I skipped the ones that referred to our protaginists as "sluts," for example.)

So in short: this happens.  It shouldn't.  And I don't even have the energy to do the comparisons between, say, Lara Croft and Nathan Drake.  To developers' credit, 2011-era Lara Croft is meant to be different from 1999-era Lara Croft.  But when heroes in similar games are Boobarella and Charming Schlub, I think the point is made.

Next segment: first-person vs. third-person and voiced vs. unvoiced characterizations, and the difference these make to the player in terms of gender and identification.

Silicon Sisters and More

I wish I had time to write about everything under the sun, but that's not how reality works.  Luckily, other people write too:

• To Chew Gum and Slap Asses: Play Like a Girl on Duke Nukem Forever.
• True Female Characters: The Escapist asks, "What makes a great female character?"
• Silicon Sisters: Dennis Scimeca interviews Brenda Bailey Gershkovitch on games by and for women
• Women in Games: Laura Parker writes about women in development for GameSpot.
  

Meanwhile, I do actually find myself with some time for writing and so I hope the next "Beyond the Girl Gamer" chapter or two will be ready by Monday.

Also, I finished Mass Effect (just the first) last night.  I have this to say about Shepard: COSMIC BADASS.  That is all.  Except it's not.  But it is for now.

Busy Critic

Housekeeping info:

1.) Your Critic and her spouse, as many gamers do, have acquired a cat.  He is, naturally, the best cat in the whole wide world; doubly so as he is named Guybrush.

 Guybrush Ulysses Threepwood Cox, Mighty Pirate Cat.

2.) The PAX East 2011 schedule is out and ready.  I've been putting together my schedule, and if all goes well (i.e. if the lines aren't too long), I'll be at the following (as well as probably some others):

• Friday, 10:30: Jane McGonigal Keynote
• Friday, 3:30: What The Heck Is A Community Manager?
• Friday, 6:30: Game Design is Mind Control
• Saturday, 3:00: Females on Female Characters
• Saturday, 6:30: The "Other" Us: If We're All Gamers, Does Our Gender Matter?
• Sunday, 10:00: Girls' Meetup
• Sunday, 12:00: One of Us

I was pleased to find that in fact there is not a panel on gender issues in gaming; there are three!  As this is Your Critic's beat, I am most pleased and hope to come home with interesting insights.  Also with the live-blogging, and you can follow my Twitter feed.  Which, I am forced to admit, may be more along the lines of "I am by the Nintendo booth where are the rest of you?" than anything entertaining.

3.) Our year-long "Beyond the Girl Gamer" series is starting this week.  In that vein, there is a new site out there which has gotten a lot of attention in the last two days: The Mary Sue.  I'm not sure how I feel about it really, and I suppose it's too early for judgement.  I do think their "why this, why now" statement has a few ideas worth hearing, though:

We know the point at which you would be satisfied is to just be able to geek out with all geeks, of any gender, without feeling like your femininity is front and center for scrutiny.  To not feel like you have to work harder than guys to prove that you’re genuinely into geek culture. We want simple things, like to be able to visit a comic book store without feeling out of place.  To be able to buy a video game without getting the sense that the cashier thinks we’re buying it for someone else.

But mainly we just want to be able to pursue our hobbies with the other people who share them.  We want to play with the boys.

So there are two reasons why there should be more out there devoted specifically to the female geek.

Because even if we want to play with the boys, there is a value to having our own space.

 So there's that.  We'll see.  They seem to have good intentions at least.

4.) We haven't had an Open Thread in a while.  The last one was fun.  So: get to it, if you like!

P.S. The meditation on genre and adventure games is still coming.  It's long, convoluted, and problematic, and Your Critic has been required to do actual paid work at her day job lately.  When it's not 2100 words of ugly, it's coming here.

Femininity vs. Nerd-dom

This is a quick run-by link dump, to remind you I'm still alive.  The Day Job is demanding a lot of my time and focus right now, and PAX East planning is taking up some of my other time.  I promise, I haven't stopped writing or thinking!

The juxtaposition of these two posts fascinated me.

First, Lesley Kinzel on female stereotyping in geek / gamer culture.

Second: Jezebel, on MTV "getting it wrong" with a female nerd.

The pair came to me within about 24 hours of each other, and really struck me: once again, it's a no-win situation.  But the money quote from Lesley sums up what I hope to take with me, and take away from, PAX:

Dudes, be human. Ladies and other female-IDing types, be awesome, no matter what you’re into or what you look like. Can’t we all just kill each other and not be assholes about it?

Happy New Year: Gaming Forecast!

Phew.  Been away from the blog longer than I meant...  Not only was Your Critic traveling for the holidays, but she came back with a bug and spent a couple of days incoherent in bed with a fever.

Let's not do that again in 2011.

Instead, let's play new games in 2011!  Here's a handful of titles I'm really looking forward to next year, in no particular order.

This was a triumph: Is there anyone out there who's not excited about Portal 2?  The first one was a brilliant little package, matching skillful writing with solid design, and reached so many players that over 3 years after its release, the cake memes and Jonathan Coulton song are still staples of the fast-moving gamer culture.

I'm also excited that it comes specifically with co-op multiplayer.  That's something harder to come by than it should be.





Nathan Drake: Okay, so thanks to GameFly this year I've discovered that I love the Uncharted games.  Sure, the first one had so much racefail that even Yahtzee commented on it, and I'm not going to say that they are highbrow, serious things, but... damn, Nathan Drake is fun.  It's just fun.  You're playing a modern version of Indiana Jones, what's not to love?  And at least the female characters hold up better than I expected.  (Admittedly, I went into the first two games with extremely low expectations.)

The action setpieces in Uncharted 2 are exhilarating in the way of the best action movies, and keep pushing you along actively even when you do what the movies can't: die and respawn.  So I'm eagerly looking forward to Uncharted 3 hitting our home late next year.  Graphics are far down the line in importance for me (writing, gameplay, and design all come first) but it sure doesn't hurt that this is going to be a gorgeous, gorgeous game.




Murder can sometimes smell like honeysuckle: The film student in me is drooling over everything that's come out about LA Noire.  The art and trailers remind me as much of Heavy Rain as of anything else, but this is Rockstar, the studio of GTA fame, putting out a modern heir to the tradition of the mystery adventure game, set in gorgeous art-deco Los Angeles.  I'm fascinated by the art, by the tech, by the advances in the medium of gaming -- and by the game itself, for its story, 'cause I love me some noir films.

My only complaint here so far is that it doesn't look like it's getting a PC port, and that's really how I'd rather play it.




And now for something completely different: Everything else here is a sequel to something I've played.  I never played the first two Deus Ex games, but after the trailer for Deus Ex: Human Revolution hit, I went and bought them on Steam, and I'm catching up! 

It's worth noting here that I don't usually play Square Enix titles and I haven't played an Eidos game in a long time, and that the first-person shooter isn't my preferred genre-of-choice.  But the entire aesthetic of this Blade Runner-meets-Snow Crash world is just too good for me to pass up. Plus, I can play this one on PC. ;)




Oldies and goodies: I love the genre of adventure games.  My all-time favorite is still The Secret of Monkey Island and most of the games I've enjoyed best in the last decade still have some connection to mostly-dead (slightly-alive) tradition of point-and-click adventure games.

So imagine my surprise when "a game with no shooting, just clicking and problem-solving" is a surprising new thing.  The game is Prominence, and I'm looking forward to it for standing out by being old-fashioned (and looking new).




And of course, there are loads of others.  I already pre-ordered Mass Effect 3 for my husband as part of his Christmas present this year.  And I'm guessing I'll get some New Vegas DLC, because that's how these things go.  But the thing about being sick on the couch is that mainly right now?  I'm playing old games on my DS, haha.

Success in the Real World

Can video games teach us how to succeed in the real world?

I don't know what I think of this article.  But I do have a story I can tell!

In January of 2008, I was living very, very far uptown in New York City, near the Dyckman St. 1 train stop.  It was a vicious, bitterly cold month and you could feel the wind off the Hudson up there.

I came home from work, changed into shorts and a T-shirt, and hopped onto my roommate's elliptical.  She wasn't home, and didn't mind me using it.  I did my 30 minutes of self-torture and then, in my workout clothes and sock feet (smelly sneakers blissedly off), I started to work on some chores.  I grabbed the bathroom trash and leaned out into the hall to drop it down the chute.

The door closed fatefully behind me.  As it turned out, my roommate had flipped the switch on the side of the door that made it lock automatically.  Never before in the 8 months that I lived there had she done this.  She had done this on the way to the airport, and would not be returning for six days.  And so there I stood, in the hall, in January, in socks, a t-shirt, and a pair of shorts.  My keys, phone, and wallet were all inside the apartment.

Now what?

I knocked on some doors and found that no-one who lived on my floor spoke any of the same languages I did.  (It's a heavily Latino neighborhood, and although I can get by well in French and at least ask for help in Mandarin, Spanish isn't my thing.)

Over the course of the following 90 minutes, I sprinted up and down 6 flights of stairs (I lived on 5, and the Super's apartment was in the basement) more times than I could count.  I hit up the lobby, I hit up neighbors, I did everything I could think of.  Eventually two women my age came into the lobby, I begged one to let me use her cell phone, and she said, "Actually, the battery is dead, but come with us" and brought me to their place and gave me hot tea and dug up the emergency landlord number and let me use their land line, and eventually we found the Super (who hadn't been in his apartment, and whose unpleasant wife spoke only Russian or possibly Ukranian) and I got back into my apartment.

It was quite an Ordeal, but after I got back in to my own bedroom I realized something: I had approached this challenge exactly the way I approach an adventure game.  I assumed there was a solution and that I just had to work harder to find it; I reviewed my entire wardrobe and my entire inventory; I thought about how to use objects together in the world; I started talking to every person I could find until I'd exhausted my speech options; I repeatedly checked every available location to see if anything had changed.

When my mom told me to get off the damn computer already in 1994, I made a (I thought) persuasive case for why playing Myst and The Secret of Monkey Island was improving my problem-solving skills.  14 years later, I was shocked to learn that I had been right!

There are lots of skills that we pick up from gaming.  I realize these days I think of the GPS, mirror, and dash lights in my car as a kind of HUD containing vital stats.  I always look up when I'm in a room and want to ascertain if I'm the only one there.  And apparently, I learned how to keep a cool head when it's six degrees out and I'm in my gym shorts.  Who knew?

Where's this train going, again?

In this space, I've once before questioned how serious, genuinely educational gaming could be tackled.

So far, the answer seems to be: not online, not with jazzy graphics, and not with a digital piece at all, but with serious, thoughtful hands-on games.  Art pieces, as it were.

The Daily Beast has a profile of Brenda Brathwaite and her Holocaust game:

Train ... is not a videogame. It unfolds atop a shattered window. Three model train tracks run diagonally across the broken glass. Game pieces include two stacks of cards, a black typewriter holding the rules, 60 yellow wooden pawns, and six gray model boxcars.

Each turn, players can roll a die and choose to advance their boxcar or load it with pawns; alternatively, they can use a card to speed or slow a boxcar’s progress. Brathwaite’s goal, she says, was to make a game about complicity, and so the rules drop the player not in the shoes of a Holocaust victim but a train conductor who helped make the Nazi system run.

 Brathwaite describes what brought her to create Train and the other five historical, moral pieces in the art series.  She needed a way to make history accessible to her daughter, and used simple tools -- dice, pawns, and an index card -- to make the Middle Passage come to life.  Her ultimate point is a great insight:

“I wanted to do a design exercise to see if you could use game mechanics to express difficult subjects,” Braithwaite says. “Every single atrocity, every single migration of people—there was a system behind it. If you can find that system, you can make a game about it. All games are, is systems.”

We've got this problem with "serious games" because, in part, of the words we've got to work with in English.  "Game," by default, means to us something unserious -- "What is this, some kind of game to you?"  We've created a whole image, a whole term, and a number of industries around the concept that game = entertainment.  Football, Call of Duty, Monopoly -- we don't expect a level of seriousness and depth in anything we call a game, and to do so seems only to diminish the gravity of the topic.

But Brathwaite is right: history's worst days, and mankind's darkest hours, have all been surrounded by systems, either ones put in place deliberately or cultural ones that grew over time.  The better we can understand a game as a system of rules, that participants then use to manipulate slices of reality, and the less we consider game as "pointless pastime," the better a tool gaming will be.

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.

Second Skin

In the "it's a small world" vein...

There's a documentary out there on MMO gaming called Second Skin. 

As it so happens, one of the producers, the Peter Brauer being interviewed here, is a guy I went to high school with.  Facebook brought us back in touch and revealed this common interest.

One of the things Peter said in the interview actually really resonated with me:

As for personal reactions, we have encountered just about every response.  Gamers have approached us to thank us for portraying them so honestly.  Other gamers have railed against us for showing too much addictive play.  Parents of gamers have thanked me profusely for helping them understand their children.  The diversity of responses to our film is one of the things I am proudest of.

This is kind of what happens any time any serious discussion about gaming shows up: some people shout "just a hobby," others shout, "waste of time," then you start hearing "addiction" and "violence" and "art" and it gets really messy.

But it's consistently amazing to me how deep and how visceral the opinions go.  How does this one choice of hobby end up creating a whole world of people and "other?"  Parents have been complaining about their kids' taste in music and fashion since the invention of recording and of clothes, respectively, but this "I don't live in their world" thing is such a disconnect...

Just more various musing about the nature of "the gamer."

Marketing Fail

Oh, XBox.  These days I'm kind of glad I don't have one of you: Get your girlfriend into games!

Directly from the source on XBox Live Marketplace:

Get Your Girlfriend Into Games! is a set of minigames designed specifically to engage any woman in video games entertainment. Best played in couples in versus mode. Suitable for children too!

Yes, XBox.  The best way for a male player to coerce his female partner into using the XBox is (1) to cajole with (2) products at a child's level of comprehension and (3) be competitive with it.  Bonus: terrible product, terrible graphics, and offensive cover art.

Look.  There are a lot of women out there who don't game.  There are a lot of reasons for that.  Some women just aren't interested -- they have other hobbies (just like some men!).  Some women were raised to understand that this was NOT a thing for girls.  And some women are turned off by so much of the designing and marketing being aimed specifically at a very certain type of half-imaginary white 18-24 male.

The best thing I can say about this story is that the commenters on Kotaku think it's pandering, ridiculous, and stupid.  And they're right.  I'm deeply sick of every single "Get your girlfriend to play games!" or "get your wife to let you play games!" article and item out there, because all of them ignore one really big, huge, relevant, salient fact: that girlfriend or wife?  Is a thinking human being.  And deserves to be treated like one.

Also?  No-one is going get more into gaming by being exposed to a terrible product.  If you would rather go dig a hole in an asphalt road using only the rear half a lobster than play that game?  Your girlfriend's not going to like it either.  Good games make gamers.