Blips: Privileged Action

Source: The Trouble With We Men
Author: Sidney Fussell
Site: Medium Difficulty

I thought today, which sees reviews breaking for Dragon's Crown, was an appropriate time to share this recent piece by Sidney Fussell for Medium Difficulty on the institutional misogyny in the games industry. The article is very in-depth and is full of a ton of useful links for getting up to date on certain gender issues in the game world. Fussell is very upfront about the nature of writing a piece on gender politics from a male perspective. I recommend reading the whole thing and even the (SHOCK!) thoughtful comments section below, but one point that really stood out to me was the mental separation between the game community and the game industry, as if they're not two totally codependent groups. Industry and community are one symbiotic whole, and sexist actions on either side are reciprocated on the other. This goes for more than just misogyny, but that's the topic at hand here.

Dragon's Crown, lest we forget, received a great deal of criticism a while back for its exaggerated character art, particularly of two female characters which seemed born out of a 12 year old's notebook. Now the game reviews are coming in and if you ever wanted a game to act as a general barometer of which reviewers to follow and which to ignore, Dragon's Crown is it. From what I've seen and read about Dragon's Crown, it's a game that's conflicted about who it wants its audience to be. There are tons of callbacks to Dungeons & Dragons and old-school brawler arcade games from the 90s, but the depiction of female characters seems aimed at a demographic who would be too young to get those references. I greatly enjoyed Vanillaware's Odin Sphere in the past, and would normally be be very excited about Dragon's Crown, but knowing how it represents women has tempered that interest. Like so many games that have come before, Dragon's Crown seems to be a fascinating gameplay experience, that for some reason, needs to embarrass its players that aren't heterosexual teenage boys.

To pull from Fussell's article, it's important to acknowledge these kinds of behaviors when you see them, and especially so if you're a professional critic. It's not that we need to censor or eliminate perviness entirely from games, but if you're a critic who turns a blind eye to the issue, you're doing a disservice to your readers who probably just want to know if a game is for them. If you're critic who can't see why the issue needs to be acknowledged in the first place, you don't really have any business being a critic.

Blips: Kickstarting Performance

Source: Kick: Started
Author: Pippin Barr
Site: PippinBarr.com

Back in May, I wrote about how indie game creator Pippin Barr had been in touch with world famous performance artist (and Jay Z dance partner) Marina Abramovic about some kind of collaboration. Now, a substantial chunk of that project has been revealed in the form of a Kickstarter for a physical space to house the Marina Abrmovic Institute, which will be an interactive space dedicated to the preservation and appreciation of long-duration artworks. There's great potential for game to be included under this curatorial umbrella too, seeing as many games take a long time to complete and some, like MMOs, never really end until the servers are shut down. How video games could exactly fit into the regular programming at MAI is unknown, but the potential is definitely there.

Meanwhile, Pippin Barr is creating a series of games as backer rewards for the Kickstarter campaign. One game will be an adapted version of the institute itself, featuring certain activities offered in the physical space, represented in video game form. The precise details of the how you'll play the game have not been revealed, but I'd expect something unconventional. Barr is also making a few other games based on some of Abramovic's performances and "methods," including Stopping the Anger, and Complaining to a Tree. I'm not familiar with these specific performances, and will be curious to see how Barr's sardonic wit translates to these kinds of premises.

5 days in, the Kickstarter is one tenth of the way to its $500,000 goal. While I could take of leave a meditation room full of crystals, the prospect of an institute for long-duration work is pretty exciting. Add in some new Pippin Barr games, and you've got a Kickstarter that I'd like to see succeed.

Blips: Antagonist Gamer

Source: Fez II Cancelled, Phil Fish Confirms
Author: Megan Farokhmanesh
Site: Polygon

I'm not going to recap the whole Phil Fish / Marcus Beer debacle; it's an ugly mess that ultimately ended in the cancellation of Fish's recently-announced game, Fez II on his way to leaving the gaming industry entirely. People have been playing the blame game all day, but what are some easy things that could be changed to reduce the chances to such scathing social media brawls occurring again? I'd like to cite a previous Blips post, highlighting an article by Michael Abbott about positive communication. In short, always begin a conversation assuming positive intent, and avoid unnecessary antagonisms.

Marcus Beer goes by the moniker "Annoyed Gamer," and I can't think of a more repellant term to call oneself. I have enough problems using the word "gamer" to describe myself or anyone else I think well of, due to the label's negative connotations as a signifier of social and cultural ineptitude. Tacking the word "annoyed" on the front is almost redundant, since the first thing that comes to mind when I think of a "gamer" is a upper-middle class, white teenage boy gritting his teeth in impotent anger, inches away from a TV screen. Gamers are perpetually annoyed, no? I can think of no group of people more suited to the word "petulant" this side of fussy infants. Yet, Beer takes on this label and slings mud, going so far as to derisively label Fish under the catch-all term "hipster." Get it? He's annoyed.

I'm aware that Phil Fish has said his fair share of inflammatory remarks, but at least they feel like they're coming from Phil Fish, the opinionated individual who makes indie games, not someone who's job it is to talk about how things bother him, who happily embraces the antagonist role in a play that never calls for one. Phil Fish on the other hand, went off on a rant not too long ago because he didn't like that he had been labeled an "asshole" by Ben Kuchera on Penny Arcade Report. Mislabeled or not, that Fish did not want to be perceived as a trouble-starter shows a desire to be part of a non-combative atmosphere (though the way he ended up presenting his viewpoint may have overshadowed those intentions). Judgement is a matter of degrees here, but I'll take the creative loudmouth over the destructive one any day of the week. Unfortunately, in this case we're left with the opposite.

Blips: Difficult to Swallow

Sources: Toys for Tight Schedules, Whew, Monopoly Isn't Getting Rid of Jail After All
Authors: Ann Zimmerman, Alexander Abad-Santos
Sites: The Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic Wire

The string of reports circulating about the new version of the ever-popular board game Monopoly, designed to be played in 30 minutes, are depressing on just about every level. The big takeaway from the initial article in The Wall Street Journal was that "jail" had been removed from the game board. Later it was revealed though a multitude of other sources that the "Go To Jail" space and the jail itself had in fact been retained (see above picture). Removing the jail was an easy target to attack to game as a more realistic version of reality, one where those who control monopolies can break the law and never see jailtime, but one that doesn't make for much of a positive moral lesson for children. Note that currently in Monopoly you go to jail if you have bad luck and land on the wrong space, which implies that everyone is up to illegal business, but only those who get caught get in trouble.

Where else to go with this horrible plot? How about the Hasbro PR person's use of the phrase "frictionless gaming experience" or their coining of the term "snack toy?" How about the fact that Monopoly Empire may be the most unabashed corporate shill in game board format for the franchise yet? At the very least it casts the widest net, featuring "big-name brands" instead of land properties. How about that no one is talking about how the game actually plays differently to make it work in a half hour setting? How about that since it's a board game, it's really easy to make your own rules and change your old Monopoly board into a totally new game? You know, pushing kids (or adults, for that matter) to be creative.

A shorter version of Monopoly could potentially be interesting. However, a frictionless snack toy where you vie to control Xbox and Coca-Cola instead of thinking up new rules for an old game with your friends, kind of sounds like the worst thing ever.

:image credit The Telegraph:

Blips: Where Have All The Voxels Gone?

Source: Meet the voxel, the pixel's long lost cousin, and why it became videogames' Betamax
Author: Jason Johnson
Site: Kill Screen

I liked this piece by Jason Johnson on voxels mainly because I've heard of voxels for a while now, but never knew what they were, and now I do. The analogy of voxels basically being 3D pixels was probably the most helpful in understanding the key difference between them and polygons. It seems like the only new games that use voxels these days have framed their game around the fact that their graphics are made of voxels, like Voxatron. As Johnson lays out in the article, producing voxel-based assets on the level of high-end polygon modelling is way more computer-intensive.

Think of it this way: you have to build a sculpture of a human figure using polygon and voxel methods. The polygon way is to construct a wireframe and then cover it with an appropriate skin (paper, fabric, resin) which can then be painted. The voxel way is to construct the figure out of Legos, each being the appropriate color as you place them. In order to get relatively smooth rounded surfaces, you have to build with a lot of voxels, basically increasing the resolution the way you would with a static image.

With the popularity of the blocky aesthetic thanks to Minecraft, now might be the perfect time to revive voxels though. If they were used to their own stylistic ends instead of replicating the direction that polygons have gone, I imagine some pretty unique creative stuff could be made. Maybe it would be too technical for your average player to really understand or care about, but I say it's worth a shot, and will definitely be on the lookout for voxel-based games from here on out.

:image credit Arda Kutlu:

Blips: Buyers Market

Source: Trying to Make Galleries Relevant, One JPEG at a Time
Author: Laura C. Mallonee
Site: Hyperallergic

In a nice critical article by Laura C. Mallonee for Hyperallergic, she offers a critique of the Send Me The JPEG art exhibition at New York's Winkleman Gallery. The piece details some of the growing frustrations in the art world as the art marketplace has become increasingly digitized. Basically, people are buying and selling art without ever seeing the work in person, which lowers patronage numbers at galleries and has the potential to disenfranchise artists looking to make work that won't be traded about like a commodified stock option. Mallonee even mentions that many artists have sought asylum in other fields that promise wide audiences are more willing to engage in the works on display, including video games.

While games certainly seem more culturally relevant than most gallery art these days (I say this as an artist myself), they have their own problems with transitioning to digital distribution models. The art that is being ignored in galleries often requires a physical presence with the work to attain a true understanding of it. Sometimes installations stimulate multiple senses, and texture and scale never translate well in digital images. Video games on the other hand, have always been digital material, but with physical casings and controllers. The elimination of cartridges and discs in favor of direct downloads makes sense on financial and material levels. However, while many players have no love loss for the large gaming retail chains like Gamestop or piles of decrepit game cases, it's questionable whether the same level of value is still attributed to games when they become purely digital applications (see the Xbox One DRM debacle).

The annual Steam Summer Sale just wrapped up this past weekend, and I, like many people, bought a few games. Now, I love that a digital marketplace like Steam has these kinds of sales because they seem to financially benefit all involved: players can buy more games for less cash, developers can see dramatically increased sales numbers, and Valve, the company that runs Steam, takes a cut and ensures that you'll engage in their service when you come back to play the games you just bought. The story happening in the background of this shopping spree is that people are buying loads of games that they'll never actually play. These players (or shoppers, I should say) have what's called a "pile of shame," referring to the giant list of games that they own that will never be touched.

I've personally bought 3 Humble Indie Bundles containing 5-8 games each for a grand total of less than $10. I've played maybe one fifth of those games. Digital distribution for games may allow for cheaper prices, but it also puts those games in the same marketplace category as candy bars in the checkout isle of the grocery store. Games that cost $1 are impulse buys, and though the video game industry has never really been ashamed of its capitalist marketplace foundation, I can't help but wonder if the non-monetary value of individual games hasn't decreased in equal measure.

Blips: A Gran ol' Time

Source: Report: Gran Turismo Movie in Development
Author: Mike McWhertor
Site: Polygon

If you haven't heard, there's a film in the works based on Polyphony Digital's Playstation-exclusive racing simulation franchise, Gran Turismo. Many folks were puzzled by this, seeing as Gran Turismo is full of real world cars, a bunch of real world racing courses, is not affiliated with any official racing leagues, and, perhaps most damningly, features no characters. The movie rights were sold based on a recognizable car-centric brand, and pretty much nothing else. It reminds me of when that Asteroids movie was in the works. Who would you have cast as the triangle?

I actually find the prospect of a blank page for the story somewhat exciting, though it's easy to envision the lowest-common-denominator plot that's likely to form for Gran Turismo, should the project ever get off the ground (few of these game-to-film adaptations do). I think it would be cool to have a movie about professional racecar driving without having to throw in street racing or science fiction tropes. Still, I can't help but picture a bland product at the end of this, so I thought of a few ideas to spice up this would-be movie, while staying true to Gran Turismo's roots.

- Jazz: You can't have Gran Turismo without jazz. Maybe the lead character's mentor could prescribe sage advice while laying down some hot pop organ melodies. There has to at least be jazzy drum breaks during pit-stop montages. Or how about a sultry downtempo number when characters are weighing the benefits of different shock absorbers in the parts shop?

- License Tests: Getting acceptable medals in license tests is kind of the worst part of Gran Turismo, but it's also a definitive section of the game. They wouldn't need to be shown in full, but maybe the protagonist has to practice cornering in a Mini Cooper or something.

- A-Spec: At least once, instead of a character referring to someone's racing performance as "cool," they should call it "totally A-Spec." GT3 fans will get the reference, and it sounds better than "that's so HD Concept."

- Engine Sounds: Polyphony is famous for their attention to detail, recording engine sounds for every car in the game based on their real-world models. This accuracy should be carried over, but as an Easter egg, swap the engine rumbles of two of the cars and see if anyone cares.

- Mazda Miata: At some point, our hero has to buy a Miata because for some reason it's the only accepted car in the Roadster race. He/she sells the car immediately after.

Blips: Virtual Reality, Real Headaches

Source: Falling, flying, and headaches: the physical and unique demands of development in virtual reality
Author: Ben Kuchera
Site: Penny Arcade Report

No one said developing games to use the Oculus Rift virtual reality headset would be easy, but turns out it's a bit more physically taxing than standard flatscreen monitor development. In a report by Ben Kuchera that made me slightly nauseous just by reading it, he speaks with the team behind AaaaaAAaaaAAAaaAAAAaAAAAA!!! for the Awesome, which is easiest to understand as a first-person skydiving game. You fall through the air and maneuver yourself through various targets as you go to score points.

Now imagine having to fine tune that experience to minimize the amount of cases where players feel ill playing the game. This means that developers have to undergo all of those headache-inducing bugs and design flaws themselves. Just thinking about a bug where you're falling and then one of your eye-views just begins spinning uncontrollably is enough to make me never want to play a VR game before it's finished lest I find myself strapped inside some Clockwork Orange reeducation machine. Luckily the developers of AaaaaAAaaaAAAaaAAAAaAAAAA!!! for the Awesome are taking precautions and take days off from working on the VR when the physical demands of the task become too much. Why do I feel like crunch time at big studios is about to get a whole lot more stressful?

Meta-Mega-Retro: Kavinsky (Mac/iOS) Review

There is no shortage of nostalgia-mining, 80s-pop-culture-referencing, neon-soaked video games these days. From Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon to Hotline Miami to Double Dragon Neon, many new games are taking their cues from 1980s film, music, and games themselves and repackaging those design choices into new experiences of varying quality and originality. Now, French electro music producer Kavinsky has entered the fray with his own self-titled game, featuring a mixture of brawling and driving segments, largely composed of the same "80s" tropes that have come before.

Kavinsky's music and the fictional character of Kavinsky, a Ferrari-driving zombie from 1986, already pull heavily from 80s aesthetics, so adapting that premise into video game form makes a certain kind of logical sense. Kavinsky the game has a handful of levels (it's available for free) that alternate between Stretts of Rage-style beat 'em up stages and timed driving segments where you're outrunning thugs or cops. In fact, the Kavinksy mythos already draws so heavily from decades-old material that as a game, it's difficult to distinguish original ideas from all the well-worn references.

Before the Kavinsky game existed, the producer's music videos shed some light on his character's backstory through short vignettes of dramatic action: a car accident, a chase, a staredown, an escape, a revival. In the game, those individual shots are drawn out into levels that mostly just reinforce the original thrills through repetition, which in turn makes them less thrilling over time. Kavinsky the game is also sillier than the music videos which portray themselves with the self-seriousness that actual 80s action movies and games did. Is it impossible to use tropes from the 80s in earnest without a wink and nod to make fun of their own premise? I don't know, but that said, my favorite thing about Kavinsky is one of the sillier parts of the game: cigarettes and beer are health pick-ups and they look an awful lot like Marlboros and Budweisers for which official licenses have certainly not been acquired. Smoking to gain health is funny because it's ironic and also stereotypically French. It's a gag about Kavinsky the character, not a joke told in reference to a bygone decade.

To enjoy your time with Kavinsky is to seek out those small touches, because everything else only adds up to a reskinned version of the games it's referencing. The brawler levels are basically Final Fight stages, down to the named mohawk-donning street toughs. Unfortunately Kavinsky does not control as well as Cody did back in '89. Each punch slides Kavinsky forward, often forcing you to gradually turn as you go to keep him in line. There is also no blocking, jumping, or any real strategy needed beyond mashing the punch button until the bad guys fall down. There's no reason to use the slower kick move at all except in tandem with "punch" to trigger a furious supermove when you have a full combo meter.

The driving levels are typical point-to-point time challenges in the vein of Rad Racer, right down to the red Ferrari and the Grand Canyon track. The difference is, Kavinsky isn't about racing, it's just about going. There's very little to detrimentally crash into and no need to acknowledge the brake pedal. In fact, Kavinsky's car auto-accelerates by default, making it feel less like you're "one with the car" and more like you're trying your best to keep a possessed, squirrelly vehicle pointing in the right direction. The Ferrari's neon blue trim and streaking tail lights end up looking way more badass than you actually feel behind the wheel.

Ultimately, even if Kavinsky comes off a bit loose, disjointed, and indebted to it's 80s callbacks, it succeeds at evoking the spirit of its namesake in video game form. In 2010, another French producer, Danger, released a trailer for his latest EP, showing the intro to a 16-bit video game created just for the promotion. As far as I know, that game does not actually exist, but that didn't stop me from guessing how it would play and wishing I could get my hands on it. The fact that a playable Kavinsky game exists is a cool thing in and of itself. Kavinsky may not be a standout example of fighting or driving mechanics, but it is a fun concept carried out to thorough execution.

--
Notes on the iOS version of Kavinsky: The brawling portions of the game use an on-screen joystick and buttons, and the driving levels use tilt controls by default. Both of these control schemes are less than ideal and make simple movements in the game frustrating. There are also two additional levels in the touchscreen versions of the game where you defend your parked Ferrari from waves of thugs. These stages use augmented reality, pulling the live images from your mobile device's camera to create the "ground" for the level to take place upon. Unfortunately my iPhone requires me to hold it in the bottom corners in order to use the on-screen joystick, putting my left hand's fingers in front of the camera. When the game looses sight of the original "ground" image, it stops the game and waits for you to find it again. Maybe these levels would work on devices that have a different location for their camera, but in my case, they were more-or-less unplayable. If possible, I'd recommend playing Kavinsky on a computer instead.

Blips: You Have No Choice

Source: A Player Obeys
Author: Sam Barsanti
Site: The Gameological Society

I only played the original Bioshock for the first time a couple months ago and never got around to writing anything about it, so I was delighted to see Sam Barsanti's new interpretation of the game's contentious final act. This post and Barsanti's are full of spoilers by the way. To summarize Barsanti's take on the last third of Bioshock, after Andrew Ryan's dying tirade about the differences between "men" and "slaves," the game pushes you through a string of tired video game objectives (fetch quest, escort mission, etc) that, when presented in succession, call greater attention to Bioshock as a video game than it had prior. These game-y portions aren't executed with the same level of quality and openness that Bioshock seemed to have before the Ryan plot twist. Despite your character being released from mind control, your path feels narrower and duller than ever. Barsanti sees this as Bioshock commenting on the perceived freedom through choice in video games, and cynically telling the player "you have no choice."

For the most part, I can get behind this interpretation, but I question the necessity of those video game-y missions to be below-par experiences. I think it says something pretty damning about video game players that the parts that would make us step back and acknowledge the medium we're engaging with are some form of laborious punishment. Do the game-y parts have to be the parts that are terrible? In fairness I don't think the last section of Bioshock is all bad (I actually like how Fontaine turns into a living statue of Greek Titan Atlas in the final boss fight), but that escort mission was one heck of a slog. I like to think that Bioshock could have made the same point about the lack of freedom and choice in games while still offering fluid, unbroken versions of those video game tropes. Then again, maybe the disappointment is integral to driving home the frustration about perceived choice versus actual choice.

If nothing else, I'd argue that players always have a choice when it feels like a game is exploiting their time and energy: they can stop playing it.

Blips: All Stretched Out

Source: Lioness gets funded on Kickstarter with 3 weeks to go, refuses stretch goals
Author: Mike Suszek
Site: Joystiq

Kickstarter stories are a dime a dozen these days, so it's worth noting when crowd-funding game developers eschew the typical fundraising narrative. In the case of a game called Lioness, which has exceeded its $7,000 target several weeks before its deadline, devs Zak Ayles and Phillip Lanzbom have decided to not implement fundraising stretch goals. Stretch goals for games typically include additional content for a game that expands or opens up an opportunity for greater detail than the original target funding would allow. The Lioness creators have decided stretch goals are not for them, saying, "We disagree with the idea that there's any direct correlation between quality and scope in a project like this. When you force a game or film past its own scope and design it just begins to cannibalize its own narrative and vision by stretching it until it breaks."

With this statement, Ayles and Lanzbom are effectively calling for other game devs seeking Kickstarter funding to pitch the complete game they actually want to make and set the budget up front as the target amount. In the short time since Kickstarter has exploded in the game funding scene, it has evolved it's own ecosystem of rules and practices. Some people claim that you should ask for less than you actually need for a game in hopes of over-funding a project, bringing the total funding amount to the level actually needed.These kinds of tactics can feel a bit slimy, so it's refreshing to see a developers be clear and honest about what they can and can't do with more money than they originally asked for. While this may make them less Kickstarter savvy, it does make me want to support Lioness and whatever they do after that all the more.

Retro Blips: Critical Void

Source: The Lester Bangs of Video Games
Author: Chuck Klosterman
Site: Esquire

As a companion to yesterday's article on the fabled Roger Ebert of video games, I saw this 2006 piece by Chuck Klosterman floating around wherein he laments the lack of video game criticism on the level of music critic Lester Bangs, in the press, and even in game enthusiast publications. I read plenty of video game magazines and websites at the time, and in 2006, Klosterman was absolutely right. In the major publications and outlets there really wasn't in-depth criticism being written that  took into account the new language of video games, but instead writers picked apart games by commercially evaluative elements in the service of consumer advice. As much as we continue to need purchase recommendations, there was an absence of criticism.

While it's telling that many in the video game community still feel a lack of mainstream cultural acceptance for games, the criticism side of things has certainly come a long way. No longer is real game criticism bound to the academic world, but personal blogs and columns have picked up the slack that hadn't been widely produced before. Heck, there's even criticism happening on big-time sites like Gamespot on a regular basis, and the New York Times publishes Kotaku reviews every so often. In many cases these reviews serve dual purposes: offering a critical approach to the meaning expressed by a game, while also explicitly letting readers know if the critic think a game is worth playing via some kind of scoring system. It's not a perfect system, but it is an improved one.

The reason Warren Spector's recent piece felt out of touch to me is because it reads like it was written in 2006, when such critique would have been more accurate to the situation at the time. There is great criticism being written in 2013, and a relatively decent amount at that. It is still underexposed, but the tides seem to be slowly turning in its favor. It's great that The New Inquiry has published a Games issue, but the next step is the have games criticism show up as a part of general cultural criticism more frequently instead of being cordoned off into a game category.

Sadly, it's also quite difficult to make a living writing about games, and especially so for writing criticism. I sincerely hope re/Action reaches its crowd-funding goal (please consider donating), but at this point they have a lot of ground to make up in the closing weeks. Klosterman closed out his piece speculating that is a Lester Bangs figure would emerge in the video game criticism space, that person would likely strike it rich. Well, maybe no one has truly met those aspirations yet, but at this point the whole "get rich" part of the equation seems more like a fantasy.

Blips: The ______ (name) of ______ (medium).

Source: Chasing the Dragon
Author: John Teti
Site: The Gameological Society

It's great that the gaming press is as reflective as they are, consistently examining aspects of their practice and coming up with new ways forward. Sometimes this works out for the best as with recent changes to comment moderation policies on both Kotaku and IGN, at least partly spurred by Samantha Allen's open letter about issues in gaming forums and comments. Other times we end up with Warren Spector pushing for a Roger Ebert of video games. John Teti dismantles Spector's remarks in a thorough essay for Gameological that claims video games don't need their own Roger Ebert.

The crux of Teti's argument centers around the fact that Spector is looking to the past for answers without acknowledging how technological shifts have fundamentally altered the landscape for publishing criticism. Spector wants game criticism in general interest print magazines and newspapers where, in a best case scenario, folks who don't normally read about games can see stories and gradually warm up to them. At the very least, Spector's stance is that having games writing visibly present on newsstands and magazine racks along with other "culturally accepted" media like movies and books, that more people will begin to view games in a similar light. As Teti makes clear, this is a backwards perspective. He notes how TV criticism has found a newly resonant form in online episode breakdowns, posted within 24 hours of the original airing. It's debatable whether this is ultimately the best form for TV criticism to take, but it has undoubtedly found an audience that was not satisfied with the old ways.

It's worth noting that Ebert has a pervasive body of film criticism outside of newsprint too, having written numerous books, produced and starred in his own TV show, and published numerous writings online, including his work for the Chicago Sun-Times. In fact, it's his work outside of newsprint that made Ebert a household name.

Tet's strongest point may be in examining how "cultural acceptance" is measured through old media standards like award shows and film festivals. It's not just that technology has pushed criticism to evolve into new forms, it's that "mainstream culture" does not exist that way it used to. To appeal to the mainstream is to appeal to whom exactly? That Spector cites French New Wave cinephile journal Cahiers du Cinema as an example of a magazine that would be mainstream critique is beyond absurd. There used to be a ton of videogame magazines in the 90s, if that's what you're looking for. For the record, I'm not opposed to seeing more games criticism in print mags and newspapers; I think it would have a positive impact, but would in no way produce game crit's Roger Ebert.

John Teti's full essay is worth checking out. I know I'll definitely think twice about writing the words "cultural acceptance" from now on.

Blips: Let's Talk Later

Source: Poor Community Spirit
Author: Stephen Beirne
Site: re/Action

I'm really digging the latest piece over on re/Action by Stephen Beirne on the classist nature of gaming's critical discourse and the concept of avoiding spoilers. Even though the prices of games have come down in indie categories, popular, big-budget games are still $50-$60. What is cheap and expensive is all a matter of perspective, but there are a great number of people who love to play games who can't afford these games at their initial launch prices and rely on used copies or sale prices to bring games into an affordable range. Yet, the discussions around games are most fervent initially after a game's release, and if a game is lucky it will spur discussion for a few weeks after. For example Bioshock Infinite held critics' attentions for about three weeks past its release, but most games are lucky to get that level of focus for a day or two.

This leads to folks who can't afford games at launch having to wade through minefields of spoilers, minor or otherwise, in order to be involved in critical discussion in any way. What ends up happening is that if these people end up purchasing and playing a game a few months later, their experience is colored by critics and commenters, not of their own making as those very critics and commenters had the privilege of experiencing. It may just be the way business happens, but it's worth understanding the consequences and who does and does not have a voice in critical discourse.

If there's one thing I'd have liked to see more of in Beirne's piece, it's ideas for solutions or improvements. He does acknowledge that indie games are now offered at more affordable prices than their big-budget cousins, so that lowers the barrier to entry for certain games. What about those blockbuster titles though? The zeitgeist moves so quickly, it can be difficult to keep up. After all, the reason there's so much discussion about games at release is because so many people are engaging with the same material at the same time. Think of it like a book club, but one where the market determines which book you're reading next instead of group vote. To tell the truth, I don't really have any ideas for solving this problem. Perhaps something like the Vintage Game Club could be of use for this purpose. I'd love to hear other people's suggestions too. Until then, I'm going to start playing Uncharted 2.

Blips: Free-to-Play and the New Harpoon

Source: Chasing the Whale: Examining the ethics of free-to-play games
Author: Mike Rose
Site: Gamasutra

In an expansive report for Gamasutra, Mike Rose researches the ethical implications of free-to-play financing models for games, and how they thrive off of whales: individuals who spend hundreds or even thousands of dollars on these games. While the majority of F2P players never pay a penny for their time in those games, a very small percentage of players pick up the slack by spending what from the outside appears to be an unhealthy amount of money. Do these types of games exploit individuals most susceptible to these kind of addictions? How closely are F2P models tied to gambling? What are developers doing to acknowledge this issue?

Rose's piece doesn't have firm answers for all of these questions because it is an area that has received little research and not all F2P games use the same approach. The most unethical business models seem to be the ones derisively referred to as pay-to-win. These games are free upfront, but delevopers have carefully constructed walls that push players to pay for virtual items that will increase their performance and get them past the blockade. In competitive games, pay-to-win strategies are often seen as unfair in that players who spend more money will trump players who might exhibit more skill, but haven't made certain performance-enhancing purchases. Other F2P games like the super popular League of Legends and DOTA 2, strive for a level playing field where virtual goods are only purchased for aesthetics and have no direct impact on performance.

Still the question remains, how ethical is it to make the majority of your company's money through the addiction of a select few players, some of which play and spend to the detriment of their quality of life? No one seems to want the government to get involved, so hopefully the industry can refine their practices on their own. As pointed out in Rose's article, players are already shifting in droves to more balanced playfields that eschew pay-to-win models, but until developers put a cap on how much their willing to let players spend on virtual goods, or intervene when players exhibit signs of addiction, there's still a lot of work to do.

Blips: Interactive Reading

Source: Scenes of Emancipation: On Jacques Ranciere's Aisthesis
Author: Jonathon Kyle Sturgeon
Site: The American Reader

In an excerpt from the most recent issue of The American Reader, Jonathon Kyle Sturgeon introduces a republishing of the final chapter in philosopher Jacques Ranciere's latest book Aisthesis. Sturgeon write as an advocate for the act of reading amidst claims that the the written word is less relevant due to the implied passivity of reading as compared to the interactive nature of new media. As Sturgeon points out, this line of logic severely undersells the act of reading, which is quite interactive through mental stimulation, as well as the surrounding critical discourse that has stemmed from reading through the ages.

What does this have to do with games? Well, I bring up this essay as a sort of cautionary tale for game advocates who would tout the sort of interactivity that games offer as a sign of progress or superiority. In reality, the problem with many games is that while basic button-pressing, stick-pushing interactivity keeps your thumbs busy and may make you feel like you're a part of the game world, it can also be a shallow form of interactivity; the equivalent of scanning a line of text with your eyes and turning a page with your fingertips. The shape that this interactivity takes only establishes the medium of a particular work and little else of any intellectual or emotional depth.

Too many games are just about turning pages without the thought-provoking stories that can make being an active reader so rewarding.

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.

RIP Ryan Davis, 1979 - 2013

Today it was announced on Giant Bomb that their Senior Editor, Ryan Davis, 34, passed away this weekend.

I never met Ryan Davis in person, or really spoke with him directly beside a rudimentary private message about merchandise shipping, but because of his significant presence on Giant Bomb (the top link on my sidebar for good reason) over the years, it feels like I've spent hundreds of hours with him. Ryan hosted the weekly Giant Bombcast podcast as well as several of the site's regular and semi-regular livestream programs. He had a great talent for moderating discussions and impeccable comic timing. He knew when to let guests speak and when to move things along. Giant Bomb is founded on its editorial personalities, and the report between Ryan Davis and fellow co-founder Jeff Gerstmann was unmatched in the industry, providing more laugh-til-it-hurts moments than I can count. He knew when a bad joke was the good kind of bad, the kind where you can wring the awkwardness out of the room for comedic effect. Ryan was a genuine entertainer.

Through Ryan Davis' work on Giant Bomb I've become a believer in the dialogue as one of the most interesting, accessible ways of providing coverage, critique, and humor about games. Giant Bomb formats the majority of their content as conversations, be they interviews, panels, or editor-to-editor talks. Ryan was most often at the center of this conversational structure, delegating questions and taking the lead as needed. He had a quick, biting wit that could turn any conversation in a new direction, and usually for the better. Ryan Davis played a significant role in changing how I think about game journalism, and how to be more forward-thinking about where it needs to go. I also know a lot more about bees, hummingbirds, mattresses, and a million other random tangents that would never enter discussion on another video game website without Ryan at the helm.

Ryan Davis' death is a tremendous loss for the industry. My heart goes out to his family and friends.

Blips: "Video" Games

Source: Hyper Mode: Videogame The Movie
Author: Maddy Myers
Site: Paste

The video game / film comparison topic has been making the rounds again in the wake of The Last of Us. I've already highlighted a handful of essays on the debate, but today Paste ran a piece by Maddy Myers that put an interesting spin on the issue by considering gameplay narrative in light of YouTube videos that compile cutscenes from games and present them as "movies." Myers points to cyberpunk action game Remember Me as an example of a game that, despite its other problems, managed to fuse cinematics and interactivity with its hacking scenes in a way that incorporates the strengths of both simultaneously. It's telling that these YouTube "movie" editors included these hacking sequences despite the fact that they're actually "gameplay."

Myers also makes a strong point against quantifying gameplay as a measure of game-ness. Just because those hacking scenes in Remember Me don't involve direct character and camera control the way the action portions do, doesn't diminish they're value as part of a game. Expansive control and choice in games are not interesting systems in themselves, and neither are linear, cinematically driven quick-time events. The game is the framework that holds everything together and turns those systems into worthwhile experiences, or doesn't. There's something to playing games, even ones dominated by non-interactive cutscenes that you don't get from watching them in video form. The different parts inform one another as part of a unified experience, making cutscene compilations inherently out of context.

Blips: Oldies All Day

Source: Play MoMA's Latest Video Game Acquisitions Online
Author: Mostafa Heddaya
Site: Hyperallergic

The Museum of Modern Art is proceeding further with their video game acquisitions, now picking u a handful of early classics along with Minecraft. I'm a little embarassed to admit that I've never played some of these revered titles, even though I'm well aware of their legacies. Thankfully, Mostafa Heddaya over at Hyperallergic has compiled a list of sites where you can play these games online. Sure, it's no the same as using the true original controllers and arcade cabinets, but at least you can hold onto your quarters.

I love the sound design in these old games. They make such great use of different kinds of noise to intense effect. Vector graphics pioneer Tempest is probably my favorite of the group. When you complete a level, the camera zooms in through the opening in the center of the stage with this great, building whoosh sound. Yars Revenge has amazing noise-y sounds too. They also serve as an audible complement to the scrambled rainbow of pixelated mess that acts as a kind of force-field dividing the screen. Next time I'm given the chance to play these games on original hardware, I'll definitely take advantage of the opportunity. Until then, at least they're freely accessible as Flash games.