Low Cutoff 2013 Round-Up

This will be the last Low Cutoff post in 2013, and what a year it has been. Though Low Cutoff has archived posts that go back a few years, the site itself was launched little more than 12 months ago. With the addition of Blips, I've been publishing stories every weekday (with exceptions, of course), which has been a wonderful practice to maintain that both keeps me on top of current happenings, while also forcing me to write something everyday. Here are some of my favorite posts from 2013:

Unfit For Consumption
Ever-Present: Proteus (Mac) Review
Half-Tucked: Uncharted: Drake's Fortune (PS3) Review
Selfish Superhero: inFamous (PS3) Review
Blips: New Media Literacy
The Remake Impulse
Bonus Feature: Interview with Miasmata Designer, Bob Johnson
Blips: The ____(name) of ____(medium)
Retro Blips: Critical Void
Blips: A Gran ol' Time
Blips: Buyers Market
Blips: Antagonist Gamer
Blips: Press X to Rosebud
Blips: The Artist's Dilemma
Blips: The Ludonarrative Dumpster
Bonus Feature: Interview with Pippin Barr
Development Hell: Crypt Worlds (Mac) Review
Blips: The Age Of Games Is Upon Us
Gotcha!: An ARG Story
Blips: Hidden Fortress
Blips: Indulgence
Blips: Video Games: Legacy: Origins
Blips: Platform Exclusive

Additionally, my work also appeared on a few other sites. Here were my favorite freelance stories from 2013:

How the magic sounds of Proteus are making their way into the real world (Kill Screen)
Completely Hands-On (Unwinnable)
Twilight Crossfade (re/Action)
Inside the videogame version of the Marina Abramovic Institute (Kill Screen)
Real Simulation, False Prophecy (PopMatters)
The Stanley Parable Review: A Review of The Stanley Parable (Kill Screen)
How an artist turned Shadow of the Colossus into a rumination on chance (Kill Screen)
The PlayStation 4: A Review in Four Parts (Kill Screen)
The top 10 worst buzzwords of 2013 (Kill Screen)

As far as actual games go, I don't have a list of 10 games that were released this year, but I will mention a few that I played this year that I really enjoyed:

Miasmata
Proteus
The Stanley Parable
Pac-Man CE DX+
Crypt Worlds
Braid
WipeOut HD Fury
Gran Turismo 6
Money Idol Exchanger
Slave of God
SimCity 2000
World of Glue 

I'll be doing a "best music" list over on the old Gold Skulltulla blog, so keep a lookout for that. Otherwise, see you in 2014!

Blips: Shipping Out

Source: Who Built That Video Game?
Author: Michael Thomsen
Site: The New Yorker

If you've sat around for the credits on any video game with a big budget or from a large studio, you've probably noticed how long they seem to go –much longer than they used to. While maybe some have slowed the scroll, more often it's because a greater number of people is required to make these kinds of games than it used to take. As Michael Thomsen's recent New Yorker piece speaks to, this has lead the majority of video game companies to outsource at least one aspect of their development process. This means that some element of most games (probably art assets) was produced outside of the country where the game company is based because it's cheaper to do so. Why keep 20 artists on staff in California when you can pay for 20 artists in Malaysia for a fraction of the price?

Thomsen also points out that these low paying outsourced jobs can be economic opportunities for the laborers that acquire them, but as far as general corporate practice goes for the commissioning corporations, it's a race to the bottom. The video game industry has a difficult enough time providing decent labor conditions for their in-house staff, let alone the responsibility for conditions of workplaces on other continents. I certainly don't expect an industry with a reputation for "crunch" labor and a high rate of worker burn out to approach a dicey practice like outsourcing with careful oversight. I'd love to see the game industry get its own house in order first, but I fear that outsourcing might actually be seen as a solution to those domestic issues instead of a simple matter of expansion.

Blips: Derivative Works

Source: The Players-Authors Project
Author: Greg Lastowka
Site: Gamasutra (blog)

I realize I just railed against the use of "content" to describe video games, but the term can serve as valuable industry shorthand at times, even if I have to cringe a little when I say it. I'll keep the mentions to a minimum. I put in this disclaimer because I wanted to share Greg Lastowka's blog post on research he's done on what players are actually doing with "user-generated content" (UGC). This blanket term is used to cover everything from character customization to modding tools with wide spectrum of degrees in between. We've heard that allowing players more creative control in games is the way of the future, Minecraft being the recent blockbuster success story. But what about when players use those customization tools simply to make references to other games, skirting a fuzzy line between fair use and copyright infringement?

Well, this is where Lastowka's research comes in. He has a link to the full 160 page report in his blog, but I'll just be focusing on the highlights he summed up so nicely. First, consider the snap judgement that if you give someone a level editor, they'll just make World 1-1 from Super Mario Bros and be done with it. While that's not entirely untrue, that level and others like it don't represent the vast majority of user-made levels in a game like LitteBigPlanet. However, in many cases the most popular custom levels and characters tend to be referential in nature. Still, the referential slant of popular UGC would still fall under the umbrella or original, creative material, not piracy. Your fake World 1-1 isn't meant to be a stand-in for actual Super Mario Bros, but a similar experience translated through a different platform. Also interesting is how little the oft-lauded act of "remixing" actually occurs. This means that most use of co-opted intellectual property in UGC would have a hard time justifying itself as "fair use" under close scrutiny.

There's a lot more to the report, which I'd encourage checking out. What with all the recent YouTube issues when it comes to footage of video games, it's interesting to see research on how players use the tools that developers have provided in-game. OK, I only said "content" a few times; I can live with that.

Blips: Bad Words

Source: The top 10 worst buzzwords of 2013
Author: Dan Solberg
Site: Kill Screen

My list of horrible video game buzzwords from the past year is up on Kill Screen. Consider giving it a look. It was a fun list to make because it allowed me to write jokes about dumb PR phrases while also venting a bit about the ways certain industry terms are used outside of upper management corporate strategy meetings. Spoiler: "content" the my number 1 worst buzzword this year for exactly that reason. I guess people are averse to using "product" now; perhaps it references the market too directly? I don't know, but "content" is just "product" for Millenials.

The other buzzword I was considering including was a perennial favorite, "fun." In 2013, it felt like "fun" came under fire more than it had previously, thanks in large part to critical breakdowns of what the term actually means in the context of video games from Ian Bogost and Leigh Alexander. It's similar to the way "beauty" was tied to the value of art for a very long time. All of a sudden there were painters and sculptures creating works that were not conventionally beautiful, works that could be a bit uncomfortable to hang over the couch, yet they were incredible, moving works of art. The need for games to be "fun" is likewise a limiter on what's possible in the medium as well as potentially constraining of what "fun" can mean. This is not meant to condemn fun games (after all, who doesn't enjoy having fun?), but rather to acknowledge what's actually being said when the "fun" descriptor is thrown into the mix.

Blips: Boom and Bust

Source: The Glorious Lie of the Indie Bubble
Author: Ben Serviss
Site: Dashjump

The indie game bubble is a myth. The rising number of indie games being produced regularly does not reflect the marketplace that led to the crash in the 80s, and developer/writer Ben Serviss explains why that's the case in a recent post on his blog Dashjump. Problems arose in the 80s not just because of the tremendous glut of games being released, but because many of these games were low quality or were copycat designs that stirred confusion in the marketplace. There may be an expanding number of indie games being released now, but the bar for quality has also raised tremendously, which an impressive number of games are able to meet or surpass. Developers with game design degrees are pouring out of colleges and institutions like never before, which ensures that more indie devs know the basics of how to approach the practice. Game prices are down, and more people are able to get their hands on development tools than ever before.

However, the story's not all roses, as commenter Daniel Cook points out. The indie game space might not be a bubble, but that doesn't mean some of the market trends shouldn't be a bit concerning. Development costs for indie games are going up as more money is being spent on visuals to make games stand out in an increasingly crowded environment. This makes production less sustainable in the long term as it intensifies the need to have a "hit game" (not a statement of quality) simply to survive because there's less room for error. Previously underrepresented genre niches now has overflowing coffers of games for players to choose from to the point where that kind of gap-filling novelty doesn't go as far as it used to. Actually Cook's breakdown is an incredibly succinct post about the difference between development now and in the 80s and opportunities the near-future market may hold.

Either way you look at it though, it doesn't appear that video games are headed for another bust in the near future. I'm not saying it could never happen (Zynga and social games have had better years), but I think we can leave those particular alarms switch off for now. There are plenty of other issues worth concerning ourselves.

Blips: Look Closely

Source: Two Games That Undermine The Concept Of Games
Author: Maddy Myers
Site: Paste

Maddy Myers really nails it with her recent piece for Paste about the institutional critique of The Stanley Parable and Antichamber. While other games like Hotline Miami and Spec Ops: The Line attempt to twist the expected campaign path back on the player, they do so at the player's expense. The curtain pulls back and the games accusingly ask, "why did you do that?" The Stanley Parable and Antichamber both satirize the role of the game developer instead, which actually further empowers players by allowing them abilities that would break most other games. In fact, "breaking" these games is part of the point. Myers begins her piece with a puzzle in Antichamber where continuing forward locks you in an endless loop, a metaphor for the typical gameplay loop that serves as a core element of game design. However, the only way to progress in the game is to break the loop and go back from where you came, a move that surprisingly leads somewhere totally new.

I haven't finished Anitchamber yet (a couple hours in), but I have a running theory that the game is about games as artworks, or rather, art as a game. This is in contrast to The Stanley Parable which is a game about games, which could be interpreted as art. Antichamber rewards astute perception, the sort that reveals hidden truths that require time and focus to unearth. The white cube space might as well be the "white cube" of the modern art gallery, the snarky puzzle hints on the walls the accompanying wall text. There's even a room in Antichamber full of sculptures in vitrines that reinforce the non-Euclidean nature of its world by appearing as different objects depending on the angle from which you're looking. How do you absorb an artwork, interpret it, and make it meaningful to you? For a painting, you look at it, study it, and live with it. The approach to Antichamber is only different insofar as the medium is different; ultimately what you're doing is the same.

Once I finish Antichamber, I'll flesh these ideas out more thoroughly (assuming I still feel the same by the end of it), but even now I can say that the game offers an opportunity to literally play with the idea of what games are and the spaces in which they can exist. That's a sophisticated level of institutional critique very few games approach, and fewer deliver.

Blips: She's a Robot

Source: GlaDos, The Stanley Parable, and the evil female AI
Author: Carli Velocci
Site: Kill Screen

This is a cool piece about gendered AI voices in video games by Cardi Velocci. It's no accident that Apple's Siri has a female voice since studies that Velocci sites show that people prefer to listen to a female voice over a male one. Also, as Velocci points out, listeners see the female voice as more comforting and conversational, while the male voice is more authoritative and direct. How much of those male robot associations are drawn from 2001: A Space Odyssey's HAL, is debatable, but it definitely seems to have set a precedent.

In games, the most famous robot voice is probably that of Portal's GlaDos, as performed by Ellen McLain. What's great about this casting is that GlaDos takes the assumptions about the female voice as a supplier of motherly assurance, and uses them against the player when her true nature as an authoritarian overlord is slowly revealed. GlaDos begins the game as no more than a glorified laboratory GPS, but gradually breaks "character" once you stop playing by the rules she's laid out for you.

When an update was available for my iPhone, I actually switched Siri to the newly available male voice, which is still called Siri. Inflection and tone plays a huge role in the way the voice comes off, and the male Siri voice sounds nothing like the menacing deadpan of HAL, but actually seems friendly and open to conversation. Mostly I just wanted a change of pace though, as so many robots have very similar sounding female voices and, for me, they've started to present as more robotic by association in such quantity. Maybe at some point we'll just go back to wanting our robots to sound like robots. I'd be into that.

Blips: Platform Exclusive

Source: If you love games, you should refuse to be called a "gamer"
Author: Simon Parkin
Site: New Statesman

In a new article for the New Statesman, Simon Parkin critically examines the term "gamer" and considers what it means to be a member of the "gaming community." It's a solid piece that gets at my own personal apprehension to using the word "gamer," and helped me better understand why I find the term uncomfortable. I found Parkin's most powerful point to be the way "gaming community" is thrown around, while no analogue exists in other pop culture media. There is no homogenous TV watching community or music listening community, but there are smaller groups that express dedication to specific shows, bands, and genres. "Gaming community" is a misnomer for "people who play games," which is, increasingly, everyone, thus stripping the original term of any significance.

As an insider in the "gaming community," I know that the term is supposed to be taken as a label for people who play certain types of games: "real" games, "hardcore" games, or any other type of game that could not be labelled as "casual" or "social" or played in a web browser. The irony of the image above is that Pac-Man was a kind of casual game in itself, debuting in bars and other social contexts for adults and kids to play alike. Would people who enjoyed playing Pac-Man from time to time be considered "gamers," or does the label imply a more concerned dedication and time investment in the medium? These kinds of elitist barriers exist in other mediums, those that separate the "likers" from the "lovers" (moviegoer v. cinephile), but somehow the general term "gamer" has been turned into a label that leaves no room for those who have not dedicated part of their souls to video games.

To be a "gamer" is to make game playing critical part of your identity on the level of an occupation. Parkin slyly points out that people who read books (another non-homogenous group) don't typically refer to themselves as "readers." and likewise, "gamers" should cast aside the label that makes them sound like a singular group (a less than flattering one, at that). All kinds of people play games, but "gamer" doesn't encompass this idea. There's a reason labels like "girl gamer" and "gaymer" have surfaced in recent years, and it's because members of those groups looked at what makes a "gamer" and they didn't see themselves. I highly suggest checking out Tracey Lien's expose from last week to learn more about how the "gaming community" came to be identified as a boys club, and some of the problems that have stemmed as a result.

It's time "gamer" went to way of the outdated stereotype it represents, or else the term is in serious need of co-opting and repurposing to better serve the actual range of people who enjoy video games.

:image by SplitReason:

Blips: Little Shooter, Large Scale

Source: Resogun is shiny, but it is not new
Author: Dan Solberg
Site: Kill Screen

My PS4 launch coverage comes to a close with my review of the side-scrolling space shooter Resogun. There's a lot to like about the game, which takes plenty of cues from old arcade games and previous revivals of said arcade games. As someone who simply enjoys space shooters, Resogun is a well made one of those, but one that ultimately feels like it's drawing much of its praise from the void it's filling in the PS4 launch line-up. Would anyone care about Resogun if it were released 6 months from now? I'm sure it would find a niche audience, but there's nothing like essentially being a pack-in title for a new console to attract some eyeballs.

That said, most arcade revival successes are cases of right place, right time (in addition to being solid games, of course). Geometry Wars is the shining example here, not only debuting with the Xbox 360, but also essentially introducing players to a new downloadable "arcade" platform, which proved to be a huge hit. That said, Resogun doesn't quite match the perfect pitch that Geometry Wars achieved. And while Geometry Wars was certainly cool looking, it didn't come off as a game that was really pushing the new hardware. Resogun can feel like it's trying a bit too hard here, with it's explosions of infinite voxels, as if it's trying to prove that the game could only exist on a machine as capable as the PS4. Kudos to Resogun's developers for excelling under the weight of all of that pressure, but ultimately that game is punching above its weight class.

Blips: Free 2 Disagree

Source: Game Design: The Medium is the Message
Author: Jonathan Blow
Site: Creative Mornings

This video is a few weeks old, but worth checking out if you missed it the first time around. Game designer Jonathan Blow (Braid, The Witness) breaks down why free-to-play games are a regressive movement away from the medium as one of artistic expression. For the most part, I'm on board here. The convincing analogy Blow sets up is one with hour-long TV dramas in the 70s and 80s. These shows were formed around the commercial breaks and the promise of syndication. Acknowledging that every medium has creative constraints that need to be worked within, these old TV shows felt much more constrained than modern hour-long dramas on cable networks. There are games that do F2P in an ethical way, but regardless, it changes the form that the game takes and the relationship between developer and player.

I'm about to start playing Gran Turismo 6, and have just learned that it contains microtranactions for cars. This has shifted my desire to play the game as one of excitement, to one of "I hope it isn't gross." From what I've seen of Forza this year, I'm not super confident. And that's a real shame. I haven't played a Gran Turismo game since 3, back when I was in high school, and have been greatly anticipated jumping back in with GT6 ever since it was announced for PS3. Having played DiRT 3 earlier this year, I've seen how commercial intrusion can put a damper on what otherwise feels like a pretty fantastic experience. In DiRT 3, you could not earn gold medals on certain events without purchasing additional courses and races. The extra gameplay isn't "extra" when it interferes with what I've already paid for; it creates an artificial gate (made worse by being in a game that costs $60 upfront). I've got my fingers crossed that GT6's microtransactions are truly extra features that will only appeal to people who care way more about cars than I do.

I just hate playing games that feel like the real challenge isn't the puzzles or the enemies, but in figuring out how to get the most satisfaction for the least amount of money. Unfortunately, this is the mentality that F2P perpetuates, and it's very popular.

Blips: Toys For Boys

Source: No Girls Allowed
Author: Tracey Lien
Site: Polygon

Why does everyone think video games are for boys? That's the question Tracey Lien tackles in her latest article for Polygon. Whether or not games are for boys or girls is largely a perception issue, with marketing controlling the messages in a very calculated way. Lien dives into the history of gaming audiences, back in the pre-crash days. At that time, game companies weren't doing market research, and developers were just interested in making games that were fun to play in the locations where they knew people were playing them: bars and living rooms. Both of these locations have their fair share of girls and boys, men and women, and most games seemed to reflect this "general audience" targeting.

Post-crash, game companies like Nintendo were trying to be smarter about the way they did business and were looking to minimize risk, especially with a lapsed public trust in the quality of video games. First this involved marketing video games as toys, and later as for boys. Market research told game publishers that people were still willing to spend money on toys and than the majority of video game players were male. It became a matter of putting two and two together that lead to the image of video games as "toys for boys," because that's largely what was being produced and near exclusively the way games were being marketed.

However, it seems that tide turned with the success of the family-oriented Wii and the popularity of social and casual games on gender-agnostic platforms like smartphones and Facebook. Now the male-dominated public perception and publicity campaigns ring false and even defensive at times. Yet, here we sit with the continued understanding that games are for boys when near half of people who play video games are female. Somehow social and casual games always need those qualifiers to set them apart from the "real" games, a stance which itself is macho posturing. There's nothing wrong with making video games targeted at a male audience, but video games as a medium, are for everyone.

:image by David Saracino:

Blips: Just Play Miasmata Already

Source: The Island
Author Joel Goodwin
Site: Electron Dance

With year-end list season upon us, my thoughts once again return to the exploration/survival game Miasmata. It's my favorite game from the past year (though it technically came out at the end of 2012) and I can't recommend it enough. Over at Electron Dance, Joel Goodwin seems to harbor similar feelings for the game, though perhaps I'm more gushing with compliments. Regardless, he's stated that Miasmata was the game that meant the most to him this past year, and I'm right there with him.

I interviewed designer Bob Johnson about the game earlier this year, which was research for a piece in Kill Screen magazine Issue 7. I also wrote about Miasmata and Proteus for the short-lived re/Action website, going in depth into how both games express themselves through their day/night transitions. Miasmata is a game rich with mineable material for criticism and interpretation, but also offers satisfying mechanics to engage with in the moment. I remember playing it and thinking how much it felt like the perfect ambassador to bridge triple-A and indie audiences. It's gorgeous, and comes from a small team. It has action and also introspective exploration. It's not handhold-y, but it tells you enough upfront. Miasmata feels exquisitely balanced, which is amazing because what you're doing from one hour to the next can have such hard swings. It's a machine that doesn't look like it should work, but it does. Oh man, does it work.

:image by Avery Campbell:

Blips: Bad Boys

Source: Need for Speed Rivals turned me into a feckless asshole
Author: Dan Solberg
Site: Kill Screen

I lucked into playing Need for Speed Rivals on PS4. After several requests for a PS3 copy of the game fell on deaf ears over at publisher EA, I had resigned to not playing the game in advance of its release. However, when I picked up a PS4 for Kill Screen at Sony's review event, Rivals was among the games included in the package I received. This was surprising as well because everyone else seemed to walk away with a copy of Assassins Creed IV instead, which was part of the official list. Maybe they ran out of Assassins Creed; I don't know, but it was a pleasent convenience for me that I happened into a game that I was assigned to review instead of having to hunt one down later.

The link above is to my review of said driving game, which I found tremendously fun at times, but ultimately a game that undercuts itself. The cops and racers dynamic is imbalanced, and the multiplayer is too sparsely populated and difficult to communicate with other players. I felt a bit childish playing a cops and robbers game with such a juvenile storyline too. The PS4 launch in general carries this whole "toys for boys" vibe that is actually a little off-putting, both from the assumed gender roles angle and the aura of immaturity. I realize "play" is about letting loose and not necessarily acting your age all the time, but it's different when you can feel that targeted message beckoning you to do so.

That got a little dark, sorry. Check out my Need for Speed Rivals review for the full scoop on the game and why I compared its story to a Dadaist poem of Fred Durst lyrics.

Blips: Redefining Fantasy

Source: "What is Final Fantasy?"
Author: Ethan Gach
Site: Gaming Vulture

Final Fantasy is in crisis, but is it the sort of crisis that precedes the coming of a chosen team of upstart dreamers who set the world right? It seems like the developers at Square-Enix are in desperate need of such heroes for their own company. As someone who got into Final Fantasy at VII, then went on to play and adore VIII, IX, X, X-2, and XII and went back and played VI too, I would love to see the Final Fantasy series continue to thrive. However, the nostalgia mining, the cold reception to XIII, and subsequent doubling and tripling down on it have put me in a position where I haven't played a Final Fantasy game in over 5 years. So, what would a "modern," "successful," Final Fantasy game be?

Ethan Gach asked that very question, and broke down the necessary components in a blog post. He posits that story is king in Final Fantasy games, and that the series has struggled most with adapting to a contemporary mode of storytelling, long reliant on extensive text dialogue, and later with visually impressive, wordless cutscenes. From what I've read about XIII, it sounded like an attempt to bridge the gap, but one that ended up cutting off the expansive, explorable overworld that is another hallmark of the series. The argument was not that games can't be linear or narrowly focused, but that such a design decision runs counter to what Final Fantasy is supposed to be. So, while I agree across the board with Gach here, I'd like to add the overworld/airship component as an essential Final Fantasy characteristic as well.

As Gach notes, Final Fantasy has been a rather amazing game series in the degree to which it reinvents itself with every entry. The battle systems in all of the Final Fantasy games that I've played have been entirely different, so much so that the constant evolution has also become a series staple. Returning to the well with direct sequels comes off as an indulgent commercial cash-in because it goes against the tradition Square-Enix created for themselves. With game development costs soaring higher than ever for flashy, state-of-the-art games, not to mention ones that are expected to last 50+ hours (more than 5 times the average game length these days), the question remains of whether or not it's possible to keep pushing this formula forward.

Though it contains the increasingly stale character designs of Tetsuya Nomura, Final Fantasy XV could have an answer here. The action-RPG combat certainly looks impressive, and here's hoping there's an interesting depth to it as well. That said, people seemed to think XIII's combat was a pretty great system too, once the game finally let you take the reigns for yourself. I foresee linearity continuing to be an issue here, but in fairness, not enough of the game has been showed to offer a substantive judgement. So, I suppose "What is Final Fantasy?" remains a question without a simple answer, but as for "What can Final Fantasy be?," well, that's up to Square-Enix to prove with XV.

Blips: Your All-In-One Entertainment Hub Again

Source: The PlayStation 4: A Review in Four Parts
Author: Dan Solberg
Site: Kill Screen

I wanted to sneak this plug in before the Xbox One launch. I was lucky enough to get to review the PS4 for Kill Screen, which I had no idea would be the case when I volunteered to go to a PlayStation event last week. At the review event, I sat through some hardware and UI demos before making my way to a dozen or so game rooms. I played The Witness, Octodad, Tiny Brains, Child of Light, Need for Speed Rivals, Infamous: Second Son, and Hohokum, among others. It was great to talk to developers and meet some folks in person that I'd only spoken to through other channels. It was a wonderful opportunity for me because I was there "reviewing" the PS4 from a more aesthetic angle, as if it was an art object. At the end of the event, I picked up a PS4 on behalf of Kill Screen and was able to spend a few more days with it before returning the unit to the office.

Soon, it became clear that I could actually write a real review of the machine, and that was the approach that made the most sense. However, I'd read some other hardware and OS reviews, and most of them are total slogs to read. Even despite Polygon's pretty layout, the text reads cold, as if written by committee. I wanted to write a hardware review that wasn't about covering every aspect of the machine, but got to the essence of what it does and how it fits into my own lifestyle. That I ended up dividing my PS4 review into 4 parts was total coincidence, but worked out pretty nicely. Anyway, I like the PS4; it's a better console than the PS3, but there's nothing I'm dying to play on it yet. Someday I'll probably want one for myself though.

Blips: Chess Storm: Reckoning

Source: Chess 2: The Sequel - How a street fightin' man fixed the world's most famous game
Author: Christian Donlan
Site: Eurogamer

I am by no means a "chess player," but some of the changes in Zac Burns' and David Sirlin's Chess 2, a ruleset and upcoming video game, do seem pretty exciting. The reasoning behind their variant is meant to solve what they see as problems in play at the grandmaster level: most matches end in draws and play relies too heavily on memorization. Basically, the highest level players don't seem to be having much fun with the game anymore, and Chess 2 is trying to tactfully shake things up to specifically address those issues. There's a concept of "dueling," which I'm not entirely clear on when it occurs, but it involves a Risk-like battle system where each player reveals a certain number of stones in their hand in a rock-paper-scissors draw, and that highest number wins the duel. The catch is that you only have a certain amount of stones per game, and they're single use, so once you're out, you'll continue to lose duels until your opponent also runs out of stones. This modifier is intended to add an psychological action element to the game that gets you to engage with your actual human opponent, not just their board strategy. It's sort of poker-like in that way.

For me, the most interesting and accessible modifier is the "midline invasion," which is a win condition wherein a player moves their king across the midpoint of the board, ala scoring a touchdown. This rule sounds like it could be a really fun addition since the king's position becomes something you always have to keep in mind, even as you're trying to play the rest of the pieces normally. It reminds me of the snail win condition in Killer Queen too. It's no surprise then that the minds behind Chess 2 have experience balancing rosters in the competitive video game scene. I'm sure there are a billion other ways of modifying chess, but this one caught my eye and seems to make a lot of sense. It's no use getting upset about it either; Chess 2 won't be replacing regular old chess after all, but it could make for a fun alternative.

Blips: Wargames

Source: The Video Game Invasion of Iraq
Author: Simon Parkin
Site: The New Yorker

Simon Parkin's latest article for The New Yorker is a real eye-opener: an account of one Iraqi boy who's a top tier Battlefield player. It's the sort of story that seems like it would be at odds with itself, but perhaps speaks to how little I actually know about life in Iraq. As one would expect, there's not much of a gaming scene in Iraq; there aren't many places to acquire games, much less buy them legally. It sounds like more parents are warming up to games though because it keeps their kids indoors where it's safer. Yousif Mohammed, the teen from the article, speaks of how a game like Battlefield, which has settings in Iraq, is actually more popular because of it.

I'd have assumed Iraqis would despise the American jingoistic fantasies of Battlefield and Call of Duty, but it's interesting to see how someone like Yousif approaches the game: mostly as a well-made mechanical system, but also as a cathartic opportunity to kill virtual terrorists. After all, the point of focusing on Yousif is not that he's an Iraqi who plays video games, it's that he's an Iraqi who's in the top 2% of Battlefield players, and his story is shows great resilience amongst incredible darkness.

On a side note, why is it that every game-focused article Parkin writes for The New Yorker is met with suspicious or indignant comments about the very notion of writing about games? Someone on this post actually accuses Parkin of publishing near the PS4's launch as a promotional stunt, as if Sony was paying him for an article that never even uses the word "Playstation." I mean, at least it's a different kind of trolling than we're used to with games, but it's ridiculous all the same, and disappointing considering it's The New Yorker and what one assumes is an educated and open-minded readership.

Blips: Little Launch

Source: Inside Tiny Brains, the tiniest PS4 game so far
Author: Dan Solberg
Site: Kill Screen

OK, let's kick off a new week with a bit of self-promotion, shall we? As part of the PS4 hoopla, I got a hold of the devs over at Spearhead Games who're working on the launch game Tiny Brains. I wrote a mini-profile (no pun intended) of the indie studio as a small team with a big opportunity. Tiny Brains was a Day 1 launch game when I first started talking to them, but got pushed back into the "launch window" soon after my interview. The game itself seems like a blast; I got to play it for a bit at the PS4 review event in NYC last week. It's a four-player local or online multiplayer game where you take on the roles of four lab animals with superpowers, running through bizarre testing chambers. It's an action puzzle game where everyone needs to work together to succeed. Check out the full piece to read more about what it's like to be an indie studio developing a next-gen console launch game.

Blips: It's PS4 Week

Hey, I know I just got back from a break little more than a week ago, but I'm going to have to apologize for an absence this week once again. With PS4 out this week, I've been attending events and diving headfirst into the console to see what it has to offer. Look for a piece forthcoming on Kill Screen that will act as a kind of "review" of the system, but it will be a bit more focused on the aesthetics of the console's UI options, controller and first-party games. I'm also playing a third-party game for review, so, busy, yes. To tide you over on the reading material side of things, here are a few links to articles worth checking out. Check y'all later (probably next week).

Ian Bogost on "Hyperemployment"
A deep dive into Tale of Tales' Luxuria Superbia
Art, authorship, and The Unfinished Swan
Crashtxt and the inclusive art practice of Twitter glitching

Blips: Looking Back

Source: Lilly Looking Through is a flight of fancy that keeps you wondering
Author: Dan Solberg
Site: Kill Screen

I reviewed the cute point-and-click adventure game Lilly Looking Through today for Kill Screen. It's a game that was born out of a Kickstarter campaign and has really smooth, lovingly crafted character animation. As I detail in the review, Lilly Looking Through is the video game equivalent of a short storybook. It doesn't take a long time to play through, and focuses on some brief instances between characters in fantastical settings without developing a conventional arc. I ended up liking it, but it also doesn't seem like a game that will stick with me. I didn't grow up playing a lot of these kinds of adventure games, so the genre has never really had its hooks in me, which is funny because first-person adventure games have been my bread and butter lately; can't get enough of them.

I think if you're in the mood for an interactive storybook, there's definitely some appeal in Lilly Looking Through though. I must admit that the underwater/colored tubes puzzle had me a bit stumped, and I solved it by just clicking things at random. I don't know if that's because the puzzle design is confusing or if that one's on me, but it was an instance where the game's animation priority kind of got in the way. I did think some of the steampunk machine design was neat looking though. Anyway, feel free to check out the review to see more. Thanks for reading!

Blips: Labor Intensive

Source: 'You Can Sleep Here All Night': Video Games and Labor
Author: Ian Williams
Site: Jacobin

I'm so pleased to share this wonderfully insightful piece by Ian Williams for Jacobin about labor practices in the video game industry. Well, the report isn't exactly exciting in a "good news" sort of way; it's a sobering reality check about an industry that flies under the radar when it comes to how it treats its workers. In summation it's a cycle of extended crunch time hours that inspires high burn-out and layoff rates, ensuring that there are entry-level openings for the most "passionate" of young developers, willing to subject themselves to menial, low-paying labor with equally low job security for a chance at the big time that has been promised them: the dream job of working in the video game industry. There are no unions and there is very little diversity in the workforce. Much of the data on the video game labor force is either obfuscated or not tracked seriously. I highly recommend reading through the entire piece for all the details and citations.

Indie development, which was only brought up briefly in Williams' piece, is often seen as an alternative to these corporate practices, but from what I've heard and seen from small development teams, this isn't a solution, just a different way of doing business with its own set of problems. For starters indie devs aren't known for getting a whole lot of sleep either. Small teams may work from home and subject themselves to the very same kinds of crunch time hours that big corporations do. A solo developer who self-publishes does not receive a salary, and is wholly dependent on the performance of their finished game at market to provide enough money to live off, not to mention fund their next project. According to Williams' research, the average indie worker income is only $23,000. It's the "starving artist" mentality all over again. I'm not saying indie development needs to be regulated, just that it's not free of the problems that plague the rest of the industry and makes for a poor (literally) alternative. The real solution is to actually fix the problems at the corporate level, not to point to another corner of the market that you hope will overtake the establishment and go on to not become the same structure that it once replaced.

Blips: Give 'em a Chance

Source: How an artist turned Shadow of the Colossus into a rumination on chance
Author: Dan Solberg
Site: Kill Screen

I'm elated that my piece on artist Oliver Payne's exhibition at Herald St in London has finally been published. Payne's show opened way back in February of this year and features a video of an installation with Shadow of the Colossus being played on two monitors simultaneously. Using video games in artwork is not an easy thing to do without the result coming out as pandering or nerdily out of touch, but this piece was much better than that. I contacted Oliver in April and we slowly exchanged emails throughout the summer (luckily I didn't have a deadline!). Finally I had enough to go on to complete my article, which was submitted in August, but seeing as it was about an art show that closed 6 months ago, featuring an already-thoroughly analyzed PS2 game, it was justifiably not top priority.

But hey, now it's here, and you can read all about the artwork's John Cage influence and how video games take on chance aesthetics, for yourself. Thanks for reading!

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: Peeling Back the Layers

Source: The Psychosis of Braid
Author: Leda Clark
Site: I am a Very Awkward Girl in Nerdy Activities

As someone who only played Braid for the first time some 6 months ago, I'm still eager to hear new opinions on the game. So I was more than pleased to see Leda Clark's analysis of the final level of the game, pointing out the parallels between recurring creatures in the game and objects present in the princess' home. It never occurred to me to literally look so closely at the details there, but the reuse of those objects as enemies and obstacles throughout the game is a somewhat profound realization. The meowing rabbit enemies aren't the totally random element that they seem, but they appear as dangling objects in a mobile in the princess' room. The consistent use of this imagery throughout the game speaks to the protagonist Tim's obsession with the princess and how his hurt at being unable to attain her affection has distorted his understanding of the situation and turned everything around the princess into monsters that would deny him his perfect maiden.

I've written before about how much I admire Braid's density, and now, once again, this has been proven further. It seems like any small aspect of the game could be extrapolated in its own full-fledged analysis without feeling like you're reaching for meaning. I'd love to read an essay on the paintings that are composed when all of the puzzle pieces in a level have been fit together. Since they present themselves as painterly compositions, I feel like they're begging to be put under the interpretive microscope. Why does the male figure not seem to be the same in every image? Who is the figure in the pictures and how does each one tie into the special power of the level with which it's associated? What is the significance of the paintings being comprised of jigsaw pieces? So many questions. Maybe I'll go back and examine this aspect of the game someday, but until then, I await The Witness with baited breath.

:image via Leda Clark's blog:

Blips: Video Games: Legacy: Origins

Source: How Long Can Video Games Matter?
Author: Mitch Dyer
Site: IGN

In a recent column on IGN, Mitch Dyer stacks up the historical importance of individual video games versus some of the time-tested, canonical books and films that have so much more staying power in the public consciousness. Dyer definitely has a strong point in that the video game industry consumes its own historical significance, leaving only crumbs in its wake for die-hard collectors to deal with. Only recently are we starting to get to the point where some games could have digital cross-generational longevity. That said, backward compatibility has been all but phased out of consoles (unless PS4 still plays PS1 games, which would be pretty great), and the essence of these games has become tied to their respective, soon-to-be-obsolete platforms.

Dyer's statements about gaming franchises being more recognizable than the actual games is also true. I've never played a Mega Man game, but I'm interested in trying some out. Now, I don't have a desire to play all of the Mega Man games since they're mostly the same, but some do certain things better than others and are more enlightening to their original historical context. Where then is the value of a game like Mega Man 5, which is overshadowed in every way by other games in the series? No one expects future generations to go back and play every Mega Man game to understand what they're all about. Those sequels were made for people who already loved Mega Man and want to play more of it in some slight variation, and the miniscule intellectual payoff of soldiering through all of them is undoubtedly not worth the time and energy.

I'd like to propose another way of looking at video games in historical context though: as part of the lineage of games in general. The value of one Mega Man game has its limits, but the side-scrolling action game has certainly had a profound impact on digital interactivity spaces. I'm convinced that World of Warcraft will be talked about well into the future as well in the context of its massively multiplayer online interactive systems. People might not play WoW 20 years from now, but perhaps they will play a game that follows that lineage (not necessarily the brand). Is it more important that we remember the Dallas Cowboys or football in general?

Lastly, I think Dyer is giving those famous books and movies he speaks of too much credit. How many Best Picture Oscar winning films have you actually seen? How many of those do you have vivid memories of beyond vaguely recalling the plot and some cinematic themes? Probably not near all of them, yet at the time they were released and evaluated they were highly praised in a way that said, "These are movies that future generations should know about." Yes, it's great that some masterworks of various mediums have be lauded and institutionalized to stand the test of time, but games like chess, go, and various sporting competitions have arguably had as much, if not more cultural impact (an immeasurable value, I'm aware). There's nothing to make me doubt that certain video games will eventually be added to that list someday too, and it wouldn't hurt if the industry kicked in a little effort to help while we're at it. The next generation is going to be faced with an even larger pile of media that adults think they should know about, and certain things will invariably be pushed to the side, but I believe the best games will stick around in some form.

Blips: Talking It Out

Source: Talking to the Player: How Cultural Currents Shape and Level Design
Author: Matthias Worch
Site: You Got Red On You

The influence of film on games has been a recurring discussion point for years, so I really appreciate designer Matthias Worch's 2013 GDC talk that steps back and looks through a wider lens at game design as it relates to oral tradition and print culture. There is a lot of nuance to Worch's presentation, so if this topic seems interesting, I highly recommend watching the whole thing above, but I'll do my best to break down some of the ideas I found most intriguing.

Principally, Worch describes video game playing as a conversation between the player and the game (the code). He describes what he sees as certain flaws in commercial (for entertainment) game design by drawing parallels to conversations between people. Imagine you're talking with someone, having an engaging exchange of ideas over a certain amount of time, and then after you make a great point, the other person totally ignores what you said and begins speaking about a different topic altogether. You try to interrupt and put the conversation back on track, but it's like talking to a wall, and no matter how hard you try, you've lost all agency in the dialogue. Worch says that this is like when a video game unexpectedly takes certain expected player inputs away, more or less breaking the social contract that you felt had been established. I know I've definitely played games where a non-interactive cutscene was triggered when I would have loved to play that part of the game instead. Whether or not these moments "work" or not is all in the transitions: how the conversation shifts from one topic to the next. No one likes to be interrupted.

Worch also boils down certain game design traits as rooted in oral tradition, and others in print culture, with his two primary examples being Skyrim and Final Fantasy XIII respectively. The points of comparison have to do with how much a game elicits stories unique to a player's experience with the game or if it elicits stories about how the game was written and sequences that all players got to see. These categories should be used as guideposts, not exclusive labels though, since every game has elements derived from both oral tradition and print culture. In fact, the ensuing dialogue between when a game is more open and when it is more prescribed is what gives a game's gameplay it's unique feel. Increasingly, the genre categorizations of print culture seem to loose relevance in favor of classifying games by "type of play." This is something I'm going to try and keep in mind as I write more and more reviews.

Blips: Interactive Horror

Source: Are haunted houses the original horror videogames?
Author: Dan Solberg
Site: Kill Screen

Aaand we're back in business. Let's kick things off with another bit of self-indulgence. On Halloween, Kill Screen published my piece on haunted houses as horror video game precursors. Many players speak of an intensity to the horror in video games that is not replicated in movies due to their interactive nature. In these games, you have to actively move your character into the next terrifying environment, constantly reinforcing the notion that you are both in control and totally powerless at the same time. Haunted houses employ a similar design in that you only proceed to the next room when you physically walk there, and everything that happens, happens to you, not to a third-party for you to watch from a distance.

I'm not a horror guy and this was the first paid assignment Kill Screen gave me. It was an offer to go to a haunted house and report on my experience in relation to horror video games. I couldn't turn it down because I'm not in a position to turn down that kind of assignment right now, but I definitely hesitated. Not only would this mean going to a haunted house, which seemed like a scary prospect that made me a little uncorfortable, but I'd also have to play a horror game for research. I'd owned the notoriously scary Amnesia: The Dark Descent for over a year, but never played it, and now I had no excuse. I did, but by the end, I was left thinking that most of these "scary" experiences are not as frightening as they are in my mind before engaging with them. That's not to say I've turned into a horror fan (far from it) or that nothing scares me, but I think I've learned how to better enjoy interactive horror in general instead of steeling myself against such experiences.

Blips: A Little Break

Hey there, you may have noticed that Low Cutoff is on a brief hiatus. Don't worry, we'll be back to normal posting midweek next week, but for now, I'm out of state working on a collaborative art installation that is taking up all of my time. I'll be back home on Wednesday next week, so look for things to return to normal on Thursday at the latest. Sorry for the interruption, but in the meantime, you might want to check out the latest Marginalia post on Electron Dance, which has a collection of posts that I was likely to highlight this week anyway. If that's not enough, check out Patrick Klepek's Worth Reading post on Giant Bomb. Have a good weekend!

Blips: Photographic Memory

Source: The Great and Secret Gaming Photographer
Author: Evan Amos
Site: Unwinnable

You're probably familiar with Evan Amos' photography, but you're probably never heard his name before. Amos' current passion project is documenting video game hardware with clean, high resolution images, and making them publicly accessible and royalty-free. He's already taken quite a few pictures and uploaded them to Wikimedia's database, replacing the small, low-quality images that were there before. Because of their immaculate quality and the ease of access to them, Amos' images show up everywhere. I myself used them when I was putting images together to make joking comparisons between consoles and characters from Game of Thrones. Amos' photos are hands-down the best images of video game hardware available online, and the exciting news is that he's looking to expand his collection.

I'm not in the habit of promoting Kickstarter projects, but this one is different; it's educational. Amos is documenting historical objects and releasing his work for free, and he's even donating all of the consoles he buys to NYU's Game Center after he's finished taking pictures of them. At a time when video game companies themselves seem to be dismissing their own past when it comes to preservation, it's great to see someone stepping up to tackle at least one archival aspect of gaming history. My only regret is that I didn't know about this Kickstarter before I used Amos' photos, otherwise all the people who saw that post would have known about the story behind the pictures. Even if you don't want to donate to the project, it's worth knowing that someone has taken up this task. Kudos to you, Evan Amos, and best of luck!

Blips: Portal Don't Need No Stinkin' Bullets

Source: Games of the Generation: Portal
Author: Simon Parkin
Site: Eurogamer

Portal is the only Valve game franchise that I care about, and in a new feature for Eurogamer, Simon Parkin explains why that might be the case. Portal shook up the first person shooter genre by making your gun a puzzle-solving navigation tool instead of a killing machine. It's a mechanically subversive game in light of the commercial dominance of shooters, but it also executes on an ambitious narrative that brings those mechanics, it's aesthetics, and its characters full-circle. As Parkin notes in his conclusion, it even resists then normal sequel structure for games where the second pass is usually better than the first. Not to put down Portal 2 (a fine game), but Portal did not need a sequel; its story is a parable, not an epic.

Parkin's remark about Portal's non-existent influence on the video game industry is questionable though, but I will buy it in a very specific context. In my opinion, Portal was most influential for it's use of physics and puzzle boxes. There have even been a few games that take Portal's puzzle-solving structure and apply different mechanics, like Magrunner, Q.U.B.E., and Quantum Conundrum, not to mention more distant cousins like Antichamber, but even in games where this isn't the core conceit, the influence of Portal can be felt. Now, perhaps Parkin is referring to the mainstream, in which case the bullet-gun shooters still reign supreme and have all but ignored the larger lessons or Portal when looking at the industry's broad strokes, but I'd argue that the influence is still quite pervasive in those games; it's visibility is just a bit more subtle.

Blips: The Killing Screens

Source(s): How The Walking Dead uses big data to make life-or-death decisions, The Stanley Parable Review: A Review of The Stanley Parable
Author: Dan Solberg
Site: Kill Screen

Two new pieces up on Kill Screen this week: a review of The Stanley Parable, and a look at how Telltale games uses player data from The Walking Dead. I've managed to become a more regular writer over there, so look for more pieces from me in the months ahead.

My review of The Stanley Parable was the first review I've been paid to write, so of course I wrote something that questions the role of video game reviews. The game seemed to call for it though. The Stanley Parable is an intensely self-referential game, both in terms of its conscious acknowledgement of itself as a video game, and of the player's acknowledgement of that acknowledgement. What better way then to present a critical look at the game than one where I take on a similar voice as the game's unreliable, 4th-wall-breaking narrator? Hopefully my criticism of the game comes through as well; it is largely a game for gamers and may have limited appeal outside of the open-minded segment of that audience. In truth though, The Stanley Parable comments on interactive narrative in general and has more in common with The Hitchhikers Guide than most video games.

The piece I wrote on The Walking Dead actually got me to play the game, which had been on my to-play list for quite some time. I was most intrigued by the stat screens at the end of each episode that show how your decisions in the game stack up next to other players' worldwide. I thought that the psychological effect of this screen mimicked the themes of the game about the importance of fitting into a social group. When my interview with Telltale CTO Kevin Bruner fell through, I felt a bit panicked, but ultimately I think I like the story that came out better than just hearing technical details from a developer perspective anyway. The article is also published on Intel's IQ website.

Blips: Speak Up

Source: Nathan Drake talks too much
Author: Brian Taylor
Site: Unwinnable

In a new piece for Unwinnable, Brian Taylor talks about the silent protagonist, and the misguided thinking behind its continued implementation in video games. He frames the silent protagonist through its most easily recognizable pop culture figure: the silent cowboy. The silent cowboy, as we remember him today, is a character born out of cinema that says more with a cold stare or a squint that he ever could with words. Of course the social context of wartime and post-war cinema was using the silent cowboy to reinforce societal norms with regard to masculinity, which makes carrying over silent protagonists into video games ironically appropriate, given how they've largely been implemented.

The conceit of the silent protagonist is supposedly that it allows the player to immerse themselves in the character, making them their own, but Taylor rightly calls BS on this. It's a theory that has since been disproved, except in cases where full customization is at your disposal. I love the analogy of games with silent protagonists as puppet shows: you don't become the characters, you just pull the strings of puppets that have no personality built into them.

The only reason I might prefer silent protagonists is when I don't have confidence in the writing ability of the game development team. However, now that more devs seem to be hiring dedicated writers and including them as part of the process early on, let's allow them to write dynamic characters instead of forcing them to write around archaic conventions.

Blips: Encore, Encore

Source: Performance and Replayability
Author: Michael Lutz
Site: Correlated Contents

"Replay value" is kind of an odd concept, no? Some games are clearly built for repetitive play, and others aren't, but more than anything, the desire to play a game again is entirely contingent on the player. I'll keep playing Tetris over and over, trying to improve my score or get to a higher level, but for most games that have stories with definitive endings, even if they're bad, skippable stories, I never touch them again. When I played Uncharted 2 earlier this year, I unlocked a bunch of character skins, one of which let me swap the Nathan Drake character model with a skeleton. I thought this was pretty amusing, and probably would have tried playing with it for a bit, but that game starts you off having to tortuously climb a vertical train car. If you're going to let me break the game in all these other ways, why not just let me skip sequences too?

In a recent piece on his blog, Michael Lutz compares playing games to live performance. Because of the interactive nature of games, repeat playthroughs will never quite be the same as the time before. If I want to play the beginning of a game a second time with a different character, I'm not really "replaying" the game, I'm continuing to play it under different circumstances. Even without New Game+ options, the experience will be different. You may develop a further appreciation for certain nuances in the game's mechanics or pacing, which changes your focus from what you paid the most attention to the first time around. When a stage actor performs in back-to-back shows, the second time isn't a reperformance of the first, it's another performance, based off the same material. While there are some well-known strategies for getting players to keep engaging with games once they've seen the ending, rarely is replaying the game the actual intention.

Blips: The Lovin' Spoonful

Source: UX Week 2013 / Ian Bogost / Fun
Author: Ian Bogost
Site: Vimeo (Adaptive Path)

At this year's UX Week conference, game designer and professor Ian Bogost gave a talk about the meaning of "fun." The context is worth noting here, which Bogost does early on in the video you can see above. This is a conference for "user experience" designers, which is seen as a separate industry from games, except where game companies hire UX designers to work on parts of their games (i.e. the menus). The backstory is that because of gamification initiatives and the creeping notion that making anything into a game makes it more fun, folks from non-game industries are looking to game people to show them how to make their products more game-like and thus more fun. Sounds pretty good, if things actually worked that way.

Bogost's core analogy is how the old Mary Poppin's jingle, "a spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down," is like when a company applies game elements (fun) to something that is perceived as not fun. A spoonful of sugar with medicine doesn't make it seem like you're just eating a bunch of sugar, at best it just makes the medicine taste slightly less terrible. It doesn't make taking medicine something that you enjoy, and it might even sour your taste for raw sugar by association. The same goes for gamification. If you're told that the menial task you need to accomplish is now a game, your mind might be distracted enough by the game elements that you forget that you actually hate what you're doing, but the notion that that task will be miraculously transformed into something fun is highly unlikely.

I'd encourage you to check out the whole presentation where Bogost goes on to dissect what we're actually saying when we call something "fun." It's a shorthand, often delivered as a formality for identifying something as satisfactory, but unremarkable. It's a word with an ambiguous referent, the same way saying "I'm fine" doesn't, on it's own, tell use very much about your current condition. Ultimately fun is born out of a respect for what you're doing and being allowed the space to be playful within that activity. If one behaves as if "at play," but they have no respect for the activity or the greater purpose for which they're doing what they're doing, then that person won't have fun doing it. The larger lesson is not to make things games to make them fun, but to present things as what they are, in hopes that the respect for the medium at hand can be fun for those who elect to make it so.