Blips: Girly Games

Source: Girly video games: rewriting a history of pink
Author: Leigh Alexander
Site: The Guardian

Back when the NES was a current-gen console, my whole family shared it, though my older brother and I played it way more then anyone else. We had dozens of games, including two "girly games" that were supposed to be mainly for my little sister to play (she was pretty little at the time too). However, I still think my brother and I spent more time playing Barbie and The Little Mermaid than she ever did, even though she felt particularly betrayed when we eventually traded them in at Funcoland for newer titles. The Little Mermaid is a solid sidescrolling action game, and Barbie is a super weird, surprisingly tricky action-adventure title, and had I not had a sister, I doubt I'd have ever played them. That'd be kind of shame, seeing as "girl's games" are routinely dismissed as trite, poorly made, and unworthy of serious consideration. Yet ironically, Barbie and The Little Mermaid are actually pretty interesting.

In 2012, Rachel Simone Weil founded the Femicom Museum, an archive of games containing feminine design elements. Some of this archive was shown in a recent exhibition at The Visual Arts Center in Austin, Texas, where Weil constructed a kids bedroom TV setup as an image of an imaginary past, serving as a shrine to girl games and pop culture of the 90s. In a recent profile in The Guardian covering the show, Weil states that "works by or for women are so often deemed marginal or embarrassing or inadequate or inappropriate, and therefore omitted from history. And then decades later, we're wondering, ‘Where were the female writers, politicians, artists? Where were the girly games?" Weil's exhibition and the Femicom Museum come out of a desire to preserve a facet of gaming history that, even in the 90s, wasn't really given the time of day in the Western press or larger cultural recognition of the medium. Girly games are still around to some degree, and they have a genealogy. It's great that Weil is intent on providing resources for better understanding that lineage.

Blips: What's the Story?

Source: Games by humans
Author: Brendan Keogh
Site: The Conversation

Source: Irrational Games, journalism, and airing dirty laundry
Author: Leigh Alexander
Site: Gamasutra

I'm presenting a double-shot of reading material upfront today, so I'll try to keep this brief. Unless you've been living in a cave, you've probably heard about the closure of Boston-based studio Irrational Games, developer of BioShock, BioShock Infinite, and a host of other games across the past 17 years. The announcement was framed by a letter by creative lead, Ken Levine, who's one of the few game developers to garner a Hollywood director auterism within mega-budget game development. In the announcement, Levine states that he'll be staying with parent company 2K Games along with a dozen hand-picked Irrational staff to form a new venture within the company. The rest of Irrational's now-former staff, are seemingly on the job hunt. This isn't the way these types of things usually go, which has prompted rampant speculation as to what's really at the heart of a studio closure in the wake of a critically acclaimed, high-selling game.

At the heart of the responses from Brendan Keogh and Leigh Alexander are considerations for the largely unseen labor forces that make AAA games possible. While it's not the job of the press to help find these folks new work (though showing a bit of goodwill seems only courteous), it does seem worth reporting on these issues as they effect industry labor trends. I'm not seeing a lot of reflection on what 2K's part in Irrational's closure was, but they're the ones with the power in this situation, more so than Levine. This kind of reporting is extremely difficult because the "grunts" aren't allowed to speak with the press in most instances, as any negative sentiment about the company has the possibility of costing those individuals their jobs, or in the case of a studio closure, they've likely signed away their grievances into silence. It often feels like the only way we ever hear about this stuff is from journalists who used to be in the industry themselves, and thus can draw from personal experience and the trust of contacts they were able to make during their industry tenure.

So, while I'm not interested in the story that foretells the downfall of Irrational Games a year out from when it actually happens from an anonymous inside source, there is value in labor practice transparency. For me, it's a question of timing and audience. "What good would it do?" Leigh Alexander asks. I'm less concerned with impartiality as I am with fairness. I'm not the sort of person who'd "do anything for a story," because the story itself is only half of the equation. What you do with a story is just as important, and sometimes that means publishing a very public expose, and sometimes that means withholding comment. Though, I'm of the mind that we need a lot more of the former at present.

Blips: When the Dog Bites, When the Bee Stings

Source: List articles contain a revealing truth about how game journalism works, and why it should change

Author: Leigh Alexander

Site: Edge

I'm as guilty as anyone of making "best of" lists (usually for music), but I think Leigh Alexander has the right idea here: we should be writing not about what's "best," but instead, what our "favorites" are. Now, there's definitely some overlap between the two, as often when I'm saying a game or album is "the best" I'm actually just saying it's my favorite while using the more objective-minded term "best" as a booster to make my preferences seem more definitive. When we're talking about personal lists, I think there's a general assumption that we're looking at a list of favorites, but when a game is touted as The Best by a website or publication, it's taken as a much more objective statement. There's not one person's opinion of the game to justify its placement, there's the opinion of the committee, and the committee has no personality (see Polygon's group review of the PS4, despite the charming page design).

This past December was the first time I voted in year-end lists as part a group of writers, and definitely I lucked out in the blurbs I was assigned. For both this music list for Unwinnable and this games list for Kill Screen, I wrote about my favorite album/game of the year (Random Access Memories and Miasmata, respectively). I wrote about them as if they were ranked #1 on the site, even if they weren't. They were my favorites and I wanted that to show through as much as possible.

Still, best-of lists are a lot like review scores: when readers get bogged down in the numeric minutiae of one game ranked against another, the ranking system begins to take attention away from the actual subject at hand. I've listened to Giant Bomb's "game of the year" deliberation podcasts the past several years because that's the component of their lists that is interesting, and that's where you get to hear the staff speak passionately about their favorite games. The list itself is a byproduct that I couldn't care less about, except for the fact that it prompts such an intriguing discussion to arrive at that point. The more access to the list-making process we can give to readers, the more they'll actually get to hear why we like certain games so much.

Blips: Share this article with your friends?

Source: With the luster of social games gone, what now?
Author: Leigh Alexander
Site: Gamasutra

I've never played a Facebook game, and I'm kind of proud of that considering the general reputation of the platform. Granted, I stopped using Facebook before there were even games to play, some 6-7 years ago, so it was as much an aversion to Facebook in general as it was the trashy games being developed for it. Leigh Alexander has written up a great recap of the social games industries rise and, well, not necessarily a fall, but a sort of leveling. The perspective on the Facebook games platform and the games made for it is pretty damning, all told. A gold rush mentality set in place standards for doing business that then hamstrung progressive design ideas in favor of innovative revenue streams. A stereotyped stay-at-home mom target demographic that pushed developers to make games that they didn't enjoy making. A constantly shifting development platform that is near impossible for a small studio to keep up with resulting in unoptimized or broken games. The result of all this is a horribly tarnished reputation for "social games," a term that, taken literally, has a whole lot of appeal.

Alexander's article is titled with a question, "what now?" which isn't so much answered as it is exemplified in the text that follows. The designers that were interviewed range from apathetic, to disappointed, to downright hateful toward the Facebook platform and flailing social games giant Zynga. It's not that people don't seem to have interesting ideas for using a social network like Facebook as the grounds for game systems, but the waters also seem so toxic these days, that it's difficult to convince small upstarts to do so. I can't even tell Facebook games apart from one another, which seems to be equal parts copycat design and purposeful market confusion (one of the worst traits to be passed on to the mobile sector). So, we return to the question, "what now?" Well, the resounding answer from developers in the article seems to be "just leave it to rot."

Blips: Grunge Games

Source: Grunge, Grrrls and Video Games: Turning the dial for a more meaningful culture
Author: Leigh Alexander
Site: Gamasutra

"Gamer culture" is nothing if not off-putting, and I like video games, so I have to imagine there's not much incentive for those disinterested in the medium to want to join in. In a recent piece by Leigh Alexander, she states that the culture that surrounds video games needs to change if it's going to be a culture worth remembering. The parallel she draws is the grunge music counter-culture of the early 90s which was a reaction to the glam and excess of the 80s and hair bands in particular. Alexander speaks of Nirvana, Pearl Jam, and Rage Against The Machine, but also of Riot Grrrl bands like Sleater-Kinney and Bikini Kill, and how the spirit of that movement is carried on in the feminist DIY game scene: perhaps the medium's first true counter-culture.

Though grunge music and personal games have their share of differences, not the least of which is the change in environment from mainstream monoculture to the fragmented subsets of specialized niches we have now, there's an "against the grain" tone in both. I firmly agree with Alexander that this counter-culture is the most interesting thing happening in the games space right now, and it's disheartening the degree to which young people would rather in-fight over corporate loyalty than embrace the rebellious element.

In my opinion, this comes down to what's cool, and what's not. Grunge music was cool, but in a way that youth latched onto and adults largely repelled. For a long time, games in of themselves fulfilled the same purpose. Adults didn't understand them, and though they weren't cool in the high school clique sense, they were cool within the circle of people that appreciated them. Now, even though the grunge fad has passed, games haven't changed all that much, except for how they look and a refinement of mechanics. In games, instead of each new generation growing up with their own unique counter-culture like grunge, punk, goth, metal, or dare I say dubstep, they each get their own iteration of Mario Kart. In music, these movements are driven by youth and ambition, which stagnated in games around the time of grunge. There is an alternative scene in games right now though, and it's one worth championing.

Blips: Early Access

Source: The strange, sad anxiety of Jason Rohrer's The Castle Doctrine
Author: Leigh Alexander
Site: Gamasutra

Well, Jason Rohrer's home invasion/security game The Castle Doctrine is certainly proving to be quite the conversation starter, and it's not even out yet. The game, which centers around the titular Castle Doctrine, which is an American legal principle wherein individuals are justified in using lethal force against perceived threats inside their home puts players in the role of a paternal figure who must both fortify his home to protect his family, and break into other players' homes to steal from them. The concept of "perceived threat" is a politically charged issue with a great deal of visibility right now due to the Trayvon Martin court battle and the state of Florida's "stand your ground" law. However, Rohrer seems less interested in making public comment on this hot-button issue and instead focusing on his own personal experience as the de facto "defender" of the household.

In an enlightening profile in Gamasutra, Leigh Alexander discusses Rohrer's motivations for making The Castle Doctrine, as well as his reactions to the controversy stirred by media around his unreleased game. I feel the unreleased nature of this title is a huge caveat in the criticisms that have been leveled against the game so far. By the sound of it, players are supposed to learn to care about their family of characters though repetitive play, which is a concept that only exists and succeeds or fails in theory until we can actually play it. Likewise, Rohrer feels that critics of his game are misreading what the game is saying, and I'm inclined to refute that statement on the principle that meaning is not bound to the singular track of authorial intent, but if these critics are going off of interviews and small gameplay samples, they may indeed be misreading the work, because they're judging based on literal or conceptual fragments.

By all accounts, The Castle Doctrine seems like it'll be a pretty disturbing experience, and I'm curious to find out how prescient or out of touch it ends up being, once I can actually play it for myself.

Games For Change 2013: Speaking of Fun...

Before we get too far away from this year's Games For Change Festival that took place in New York City a few weeks back, I wanted to write about the two seemingly conflicting threads that I saw running through the keynotes. On one hand was the now-regular manta "make sure your game is fun." This sentiment comes about because most "serious games" are more concerned with delivering accurate information than probiding a fulfilling gameplay experience. On the other hand, there was also a new sentiment this year that declared "your game doesn't necessarily need to be fun." This notion was not born out of a regression from fun, back to sterile infotainment, but rather that fun gameplay might not be the best way to convey every idea a developer may want to express.

There have been an increasing number of game reviews that use the term "fun" in quotes, or describe games, as "not fun in the conventional sense." The first instance of this that I noticed was in reviews and essays about the game Cart Life, a Games For Change favorite and Hall of Fame recipient this year. Cart Life pushes players to empathize with the struggles of the main characters by carrying out tedious chores and making choices between options that have no correct answers. These characters' lives are difficult, grueling, and most definitely not fun. Wouldn't it be a dissonant, if not downright dishonest, experience for those games to be a blast to play?

Journalist and critic Leigh Alexander pushed for increased exposure of games from individuals on the margins, whose voices are rarely heard in popular and even indie game spaces. Many of these "personal games" don't play like the console staples we've grown accustomed to, and instead use accessible creation tools like Twine to expand the concept of what a video game can be. Personal games are acts of expression and palettes for interpretation. The game only needs to be as fun as the underlying concept requires, not as a prerequisite for being labelled a "game."

Prior to Leigh Alexander's presentation, professor Ian Bogost reflected on the nature of "games for change, " and whether those types of games are really the one's having a significant impact on players. He made a push for the creation of "earnest games" instead, games that though-and-through embody the concepts and systems which developers seek to express. These games would express earnestness through what Bogost terms "procedural rhetoric,"the language of games as presented through systems. All too often, games that aspire to social change feel disingenuous, as if the developers are only presenting information in game form so that the commissioning organization can show that they helped produce a game (how progressive!) about subject X. Bogost contended that most "serious games" are not fun because they fail to be fun, not because they never intended to be.

Robin Hunicke managed to both agree wholeheartedly with Bogost's plea for "earnest games" while also espousing the virtues of fun gameplay. While this may seem to put Hunicke in a hypocritical position, her company Funomena is focusing on games that use fun as a central conceit, making them earnestly fun. Hunicke is interested in the kind of fun that comes from play, as in the free-form, childlike play that few video games offer, least they be deemed "not-games" and cast into the abyss. Funomena's goal of creating games that are earnest in their campaign to be fun and socially conscious is ambitious, but their formula, not to mention the involvement of Katamari Damacy designer Keita Takahashi, seems promising.

There still remains a risk in "earnest games," especially those seeking to be "not fun" on purpose, of relying too much on empathy in directly simulated outcomes. Designer and academic Eric Zimmerman spoke of this concept as design literalism. He gave the example of a game that was in development for a school, where ultimately the endgame was that your character stays in school and learns about the virtues of doing so. In other words, it's a game set in a school about staying in school, meant to be played by students in school to detract them from not staying in school. Bored yet? He countered this by listing off games that already carry out the mission of keeping kids in school, though their content has nothing to do with that goal, such as chess club and sports teams. Zimmerman suggests that getting students to form a Starcraft team would be a much better "stay in school" proponent.

Zimmerman's theories about design literalism brought me back to Cart Life, a game where you learn to empathize with individuals, whose stories could easily translate to the struggles of innumerable people in the real world. Cart Life avoids design literalism through the player's embodiment of the struggling protagonist. A literal design choice would have been to see the characters falling on hard times from an outsider perspective and then deciding how to interact with them. For such a game it would be easy to assign the moral of "be nice to others," but it would always come off as the game telling you something instead of letting you figure it out for yourself. Playing Cart Life, you go about the banal day-to-day activities of individuals struggling to keep their head above water, and as someone who's playing the game from a position of privilege, I'm getting a perspective on life that I would not otherwise be exposed (this is the "change" part). Cart Life is a game designed with the utmost earnestness, and it's not "fun" in the traditional sense. It doesn't need to be, and would likely betray its original concept if it was.

You can watch all of the 2013 Games For Change Festival keynotes on the organization's YouTube channel.

Blips: Hunker Down

Source: Man Cave Fan Fiction
Author: Leigh Alexander
Site: Kotaku

Are video game consoles still relevant? Do people still want to pay hundreds of dollars to play a narrow set of graphically intense games on big TVs in their living rooms? Last week's Xbox One announcement saw Microsoft doubling down on the idea that their new console will be the latest and greatest all-in-one family entertainment center. This comes at a time when economic recovery is a slow burn and a luxurious new video game console will be launching into one of the most volatile, if not downright dire, markets for such devices. Can Microsoft muscle their way into a successful Xbox One install base? It feels like that's what they're trying to do.

If you've not seen Leigh Alexander's latest column for Kotaku, I'd encourage you to give it a read. In it she spins an apocalyptic vision of one man who, despite the rest of the world gone wrong, continues to worship at the foot of his entertainment altar, his new game console which acts as the centerpiece of his subterranean man cave. It's a Mountain Dew soaked, appropriately hyperbolic reflection of new video game consoles as survival bunkers for preserving old practices. For additional context, check out Alexander's scathing Gamasutra opinion piece on the Xbox One announcement, which makes the small details in her short story more resonant.

Now, while I continue to enjoy the TV console gaming experience, I'm not sold on the idea that I need a new one. Still, Alexander's allusion to the console gaming rig as entertainment altar is spot on, even if I'm a little embarrassed to admit it. When I moved to the DC area a few years ago, I came with very few things, none of which were furniture. However, I did pack a small TV and a couple boxes of video games and consoles. For eight months, my living room was barren except for a turbulent bundle of cords and LEDs atop a stow-away container, flickering like a little shrine.

As silly as that setup might sound, I mainly used it to play old games on old systems, nowhere near the personal entertainment basilica Microsoft seems to have in mind. The thing is, I use a more diverse array of gadgets for digital entertainment purposes than I did a decade ago, and if anything, my laptop is the all-purpose device that I plan on upgrading sometime later this year. So, at a time when I'm spending less and less time with my TV, Xbox One is asking me to spend more. At this stage in the messaging roll-out, that's not an idea I can get behind.