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.

Blips: Gamer Chic

Source: Prêt-à-Jouer and Videogame Couture
Author: Nathan Altice
Site: Metopal

Video games and fashion might seem like oil and water, but they actually have a lot in common, especially when it comes to the cyclical nature in which they function as industries. This was the premise of Nathan Altice's presentation at this year's No Show Conference, and it's an idea that has a lot of merit. Games, and in turn games writing, focus on the cinematic elements of games, operating from the correlation of games as interactive moving pictures. It's true that games and movies have been sharing an increasingly common DNA since the advent of polygonal characters and environments, but these film-like touches tend to overshadow other correlations and dominate the conversation. Consider that both games and fashion operate on seasonal cycles based around 3 major press events, and both have a tenuous outsider status in the art world.

Altice even refuted the one argument I was going to make against his analogy toward the end of his piece: that there is no gaming couture. This is acknowledged though, and using personal games as a substitute does fit on a certain level (games not meant for wide distribution with the distinct traces of an individual auteurist (there's that film language again!) hand). However, framing games and fashion in respect to capital, it's worth noting that even the most technologically advanced new games rarely cost beyond $60 unless they come with accessories. Then again, you can't play games without a console or a PC, both of which are definitely in the range of luxury items, but then the metaphor starts to get a bit muddy.

While I think that speaking about games through the language of fashion sounds incredibly refreshing, it does require a certain level of familiarity with fashion to pull it off, one which I don't think most game designers and writers possess. Film is a much more natural parallel in this regard due to the high rate of nerd culture crossover. The exchange of ideas between film and games is obvious and explicit, and to read into fashion in games is to interpret subtexts. I'm not saying this can't change, because it certainly sounds cool, but it would definitely take a collective effort from a lot of different people.

This isn't entirely dissimilar from my approach to games through art. In fact, I use this angle to pitch myself as having a unique perspective on games at a time when we're seeing them pop up in museums more often. Few people in the video game industry seem to know the language of art, the history of art, or the contemporary dialogues of the art world, and if they do, they're not framing what they have to say through this context or other voices are drowning them out by hierarchy or sheer volume. I have to imagine it's a similar situation with fashion, and part of me thinks it just comes down to having a limited amount of time and energy to invest in different fields of interest. I might not ever be the person who writes about games from a fashion perspective, but I'd definitely love to hear from someone else who knows what they're talking about.

Blips: Indulgence

Source: Game of Thrones Characters as Video Game Consoles
Author: Dan Solberg (as Gold_Skulltulla)
Site: Giant Bomb

So, a cool thing happened earlier this week. I posted this comparison of Game of Thrones characters to video game consoles on my Giant Bomb blog, and it proved to be quite popular. It's currently received over 125,000 pageviews and about 150 comments, almost all of which are extremely positive. The ball started rolling slowly when I originally posted the piece at about 4am EST, which meant that the initial batch of viewers were probably European (i.e. some commenters addressed me as "mate"). Eventually the Giant Bomb mods took notice and liked my post enough to promote it in the Community Showcase slot on the front page. If things had stopped there I still would have been quite pleased, but it was only a matter of time until some outside sources started picking up the story.

After some tweets and retweets, Luke Plunkett reposted a couple of my comparisons on Kotaku, along with some nice words of his own. Then things really took off, and my original post was racking up around 1,000 views and hour. Also, since Kotaku has such a wide reach as a publication, reposts of their repost began popping up all over the place too. I even got a shout-out from Bill Corbett who was a writer for MST3K and voiced the robot, Crow, for a couple seasons.

Here's a list of all the citations I've been able to track down so far:

Original Giant Bomb blog, Giant Bomb User Community Showcase, Giant Bomb Community Spotlight, Kotaku, Koatku Australia, Vinny Caravella tweet, Bill Corbett tweet, Snackbar Community tweet, a ton of other tweets, Reddit Gaming, Reddit Wii U, NeoGAF, Groupthink Jezebel, Imgur, TOR, IGN forums, Winter Is Coming, GameFAQs forums, Xerq forums, High Def Digest forums, PakGamers forums, Otaku Helpers forums, Retrovia Ireland forums, Funny Junk, Video Game Lab, Gee Willikers Batman, LOL Shed, Mordicai!, Gags and Fails, Chez Geeks, Cheezburger, Randomization, P1 Luck, Garotas Nerds, and Nerd Approved.

I'd never made a "listicle" before, and genuinely thought it would be fun (it is, or at least this one was). After the initial idea came to me, I looked up whether this had ever been done before, because it seemed sort of obvious. Turns out there was a meme that got passed around before, but it was limited in scope and lacked polish, so I felt like I was in the clear. I've been listening to the Game of Thrones audiobooks after making my way through all 3 seasons of the TV show, so this stuff had saturated my mind at a certain point. I had a tentative list going for about a month or so, and then I just realized that some of the jokes I'd written wouldn't work once the new consoles were released, so I stayed up and put all of the images together, applied the finishing touches, and sent it out the door.

What a relief it was that people actually seemed to like it! I didn't expect the level of positive response that this post got, and ironically, it seemed like a bunch of people went in expecting to hate it. In fact, I think "surprised praise" is the most pervasive sentiment in the comments. Well, that and people wondering where the SNES is (note: as a character, the SNES is boooring). I wish I could have worked in a ton of jokes and Game of Thrones references that were left on the cutting room floor, but I didn't want to force anything; that's why there's no Robb or Catelyn, for one. All in all, even though it's just a list of pop culture comparisons that gives the initial impression of being "click-bait," I'm really proud of it and glad so many people gave it a chance.

Thanks everyone!

Blips: Hidden Fortress

Source: Dwarf Fortress NYC: ASCII Wallpaper, Conceptual Maps and The Landscape Of The Museum
Author: Eron Rauch
Site: Video Game Tourism

I've written about the video games in MoMA's Applied Design exhibition before, but where I focused on the interaction implementation of the playable games on display, there were other games that couldn't be touched. The way MoMA installed different kinds of controls with different games came off as experimental, and the same adjective could be applied to their strategy with the non-interactive games. A Let's Play video of The Sims, plays in place of live code, while EVE Online gets an original dual monitor video display that explains how the game functions and its immense scope. No two games seem to be given the exact same treatment, which is a bit odd considering the dry, uniform manner in which the games have been installed.

In all this, Dwarf Fortress seems to get short shrift. The ASCII mountain colony simulation game is, quite honestly, beyond me. I've watched players stumble though it, read harrowing accounts of thrilling moments from diehard players, and been "introduced" to the game through several articles aimed at the general non-gamer populace, but never had the desire to actually play it. And I think it's safe to assume that most museum visitors haven't played it either. So, the fact that the game sits in the back room as a short, audioless video loop with a bit of accompanying wall text doesn't seem to do it justice. I find it hard to imagine that anyone who hasn't played Dwarf Fortress will walk away with an appreciation for what the game does, and even less so, a desrie to go home and try it for themselves.

In the link I sourced at the top of this post, Eron Rauch dissects why he was disappointed in the installation of Dwarf Fortress in Applied Design, and offers a few suggestions for how it could be done better by taking advice from another MoMA exhibition (irony!). Even though I follow the logic of curator Paola Antonelli's decision for a sparse installation, free of material nostalgia outside of the games (code) themselves, for those unplayable displays, something else needs to exist to fill in the gaps. While this seems to have been taken into account for The Sims and EVE, Dwarf Fortress has been left to fend for itself, when we all know it's incomprehensible without a guide and a whole lot of spare time. It feels like MoMA has the answers to the questions about displaying such an unruly game, they just didn't follow though on them.

One could make the argument for the current Dwarf Fortress display at MoMA as one that avoids heavy-handed curatorial voice in favor of the work speaking for itself. After all, this is the same treatment given to the majority of works in the museum: a painting hangs on the wall with a bit of supplemental text to its side. To visitors not already in the know, this kind of display is a puzzle, it's own kind of game in a way, where the sentences, dates, imagery, materials, and everything else is taken into account as evidence in support of an eventual interpretation that the viewer can call their own (lest they be plagued by trying to figure out what the artist meant). The problem with this approach in Dwarf Fortress is that, given its unplayable display form, the amount of information the viewer has to work with is incomplete, and not enough has been done to make up the deficit.

Blips: 4 Amazing GTA V Mods You Just Have To See

Source: How to remove all misogyny and violence from Grand Theft Auto 5
Author: Jon Bois
Site: Polygon

I got a kick out of these analog mods for Grand Theft Auto V that Jon Bois came up with for Polygon. I'm particularly a fan of "You, Steve Forbes and the Endless Void," but they all have their merits. Open world PC games are certainly known for their robust modding scenes, but with GTA V only appearing on consoles (so far), there's not much of a "scene" to speak of due to closed hardware. However, Bois proves that with some posterboard, tape, and markers, you can still mod GTA V to your heart's content. And you don't even have to know anything about code!

In "Grand Theft Auto: Indianapolis," a piece of paper covers the whole TV screen except for a rectangle in the middle for the in-game car. Strip malls and chain restaurants are painted on the sides of the road, giving Indianapolis its distinct character. Although Bois chose Indianapolis (perhaps because it's easy to draw), you could draw just about any place there instead. I'm inclined to make the road recede more sharply into the horizon, and perhaps recreate the Grand Canyon level from Rad Racer instead, but you can take the whole thing off-road if you want. Find out what it's like to drive a car at the bottom of the ocean or on the moon! The world is your oyster.

Alternatively, you could just play vanilla GTA V and complete hour after hour of droll mission objectives, but where's the fun in that?

Blips: No Escape

Source: Horror and the Oculus Rift Are No Joke
Author: Patrick Klepek
Site: Giant Bomb

I'm not really into the swath of Let's Play-ers out there who record themselves playing horror games and freaking out at the jump scares, but I do like Giant Bomb's Patrick Klepek, and find that he tries to put more emphasis on the games he plays, than himself. On a recent Spookin' with Scoops stream, a semi-regular live horror game showcase, Klepek strapped on the Oculus Rift virtual reality headset and played a series of titles formatted for the device. The results were, of course, wonderful to watch, like those flashbulb photos from haunted houses that are taken right when a big jump scare happens, capturing the contorted faces of the recently terrified. On the other hand, the VR nature of the Oculus Rift seemed to amplify what would normally be decent enough scares into truly terrifying scenarios that, according to Klepek, may be too intense for some players.

I'm working on an interactive horror feature for another site right now, and played Amnesia: The Dark Descent to get some perspective. While the game was certainly scary at times, I definitely took comfort in specific coping tactics that would not be so readily available in a VR setting. First, the Oculus screen is right in your face, meaning you can't turn away and even if you close your eyes, the glow of the screen will still resonate. Even worse, with head-tracking, surround sound changes dynamically as you twist and shy away, which makes the game world feel even more like a real, constant place instead of an easily pausable rectangle. Speaking of pausing and keyboard controls in general, you can't see your hands or anything outside of the Oculus headset, meaning you would have to actively take off the contraption to look around you in real life, something typically done to reassure yourself that it's "just a game." Lastly, you also leave yourself very open to being messed with by anyone else around you.

All that said, I really want an Oculus Rift when they hit the market in their final form, and will certainly give games like Dreadhalls a shot. I might just need to lock myself in a secure, isolated room first.

Blips: Resonant Echoes

Source: Feel The Pain
Author: Peter Malamud Smith
Site: The Gameological Society

I'm just going to come out and say it: the original Metroid and Metroid Prime 2 are the best games in the franchise, and in turn, two of my all-time favorite games. Now, most Metroid games are quite good, so this isn't meant as a slam on the rest of the pack, but the majority of folks seem to put Super Metroid and the first Prime game on a pedestal above all others. So, I was quite pleased to read Peter Malamud Smith's piece where he seems to hold a similar outlier stance to my own. Super Metroid and Prime are perfect games in a way, with the rough edges sanded off and explicit, unwavering purpose in level design and pacing (Prime's late-game fetch quest notwithstanding). These games are designed with fluidly scaffolded player experience at their core. Prime 2 and Metroid however, often keep the player in the dark, sometimes quite literally, and that's part of what I like so much about them.

Sure, Metroid could have used a map, and Prime 2's Dark Samus is a dumb, lazy antagonist, but everything else about those games creates the foreboding, otherworldly atmosphere that has always seemed like the brass ring of the franchise –one which none of the other entries manage to grasp. Metroid's background is solid black, which may have been a technical limitation, but nonetheless evokes both the empty vacuum of space and the dark void of an uncharted cavern. Prime 2 has a "dark world" that is essentially poison, forcing you to dart between clean air safe-spots to survive. In fact, survival is as much a part of Prime 2 and Metroid as adventure, which makes exploration a rather tense affair.

This is not to say that Super Metroid and Prime were devoid of these atmospheric qualities, but neither game puts the player in a downright oppressive world or fosters feelings of dread quite like Metroid and specifically Prime 2. Maybe it's just a matter of personal preference as to which tone you find more appealing or memorable. While I'll always remember Super Metroid and Prime as amazing games, I'll never forget my actual experience trudging through the darkness in Metroid and Prime 2.

Blips: Who Watches the Watch_Dogs?

Source: Video Games Are Making Us Too Comfortable With the Modern Surveillance State
Author: Michael Thomsen
Site: New Republic

As I was reading Michael Thomsen's piece on video games and complacency with the surveillance state (which is dead on, by the way), I couldn't help also wondering about how quickly players also sign away their privacy when it comes to playing online. I haven't read Sony's or Microsoft's terms and conditions, and I don't know anyone who has. Even on the basic level of leaderboards, I can't play Pac-Man CE DX+ while connected online without sending my scores up to the publicly viewable cloud. Though, truth be told, I don't exactly mind if everyone can see my scores, and knowing where I rank actually motivates me to want to get better at the game, which itself is fun to play.

It can get a little creepier when the data isn't score-based though, such as the moral decisions you make in The Walking Dead. Even though your personal playthrough information is not shared publicly, it is collected and then shown anonymously in aggregate. Again, I found this feature to ultimately enhance the gameplay experience by adding a subtle social element to an otherwise solitary game that actually plays on that game's core themes, but it takes a certain confidence in a developer and a platform to trust that your information won't be exploited.

Still, I wonder if an opt in/opt out information sharing choice should be part of the future for games. It's true that, even on the new consoles, you can always just unplug the system if you want to be disconnected, but this is a tedious and extreme measure to have to take for what could be a simple question with a "no, thanks" option. Unfortunately, I don't see these changes being implemented because the amount of players who actually seem to care about these concerns are an all-too-small minority. So, not only do games reinforce a necessity of national surveillance with simplified cause and effect scenarios, but their players are also perfectly happy with companies monitoring their progress in those very games. Instead of "we need your information to keep you safe," it's "we need your information to make better games." For now, video games haven't betrayed players' trust (Kinect paranoia aside), but I still think it would be reassuring of them if they would just ask next time.

Blips: Bloody Good Tune

Source: All You Need Is Blood
Author: Derrick Sanskrit
Site: The Gameological Society

Yes, this is pretty much just an excuse to embed one of my favorite video game tunes of all time: Kenichi Matsubara's "Bloody Tears," which was originally part of the background music for Castlevania II: Simon's Quest on the NES. I even had a ridiculous remix of the track as my ringtone for several years. "Bloody Tears" has appeared in just about every Castlevania game that has come since, solidifying it as a series icon almost as much as having the Belmonts perpetually hunting Dracula. What's maybe most surprising is that my favorite arrangement of the track is the original 8-bit one. Simple yet effective, I suppose.

As Derrick Sanskrit says in his post, "Bloody Tears" is perfect adventuring music. It has a propulsive beat and a dramatic orchestral flair to it, that is common in a lot of video game scores, but not usually done this well. I think the chiptune nature of the song actually helps it here, keeping it from becoming to overwrought with excessive production. While I love some of the wicked guitar shredding that has become a part of more recent Castlevania music, and am aware that you can't use chiptune music in your game without looking nostalgic, I think the limited palette actually makes the arrangement more impressive. Hmm, now I'm sort of in the mood for some good ol' vampire whippin'!

Blips: Compare Contrast

Source: Please Stop Comparing Real Life To Video Games
Author: Mike Fahey
Site: Kotaku

Ever since reviews of the movie 300 started drawing comparisons to video games, I've been interested in the concept of relating video games to something outside of themselves, like movies or real life. The thing is, when the shorthand of "like a video game" doesn't in itself say much of anything, the comparison requires too much explanation to be worth actually using as shorthand. Well, that is unless you don't mind making unfair or uninformed assertions about what games are and what people do when they play them. How is 300 like a video game? I've read all of the reviews and watched the film myself with that question in mind and I still don't really know. My best guess is that they think that 300 looks like Dynasty Warriors with Spartans. I'd get that, but no one says as much.

As Mike Fahey points out in the article that had me thinking about this again, there are plenty of comparisons to video games that are apt, but in many cases "video game" is just a stand-in for a fictional world with its own set of rules. I'm sure you've heard some iteration of "Life's not like a video game; you can't just hit the reset button." But similarly, life's not like a book; you can't just skip the chapters you don't like. Or, life's not like basketball; you can't just call timeout. Making a comparison to the way video games are mechanically used is such a dull comparison to make. You know, school is like a video game, if you really work at it you'll probably perform better.

Furthermore, video games are an increasingly diverse medium where making broad assumptions about what games are just comes off as ignorant of the actual situation. Oh, maybe comparing things to video game is like a video game; you're operating in your own little reality.

Blips: Distant Boundaries

Source: Far Lands
Author: Timothy Hughes
Site: Unwinnable

Timothy Hughes' first piece for Unwinnable is a fascinating examination of the physical boundaries of virtual worlds, particularly focused on Minecraft's Far Lands. As someone who's never really touched Minecraft, but enjoys hearing the stories about all the crazy stuff that happens there, the Far Lands might be my new favorite. Basically, the world of Minecraft is procedurally generated as you move around the environment, making the horizon ostensibly infinite. Apparently there is a hard limitation of around 7 times the surface of the Earth, which is, well, stupid huge. Anyway, the Far Lands supposedly exist a 35-day walk from a given spawn point, and are an area where the game's code becomes unstable and visually glitchy. As someone who really appreciates a good glitch, I'm way into this.

For the rest of the article, Hughes talks about the outer reaches of games and why so many people set out to find them. I'm totally guilty of this too having walked out to sea in Proteus, and scoured the far corners of Xenoblade Chronicles' gigantic world. As Hughes lists, there are a number of different reasons for doing this, but where he sees a childlike petulance to go against the games rules, I see play and the game's code placing restrictions on what kind of play is acceptable. Not that all developers should build infinite landscapes for their games, but whether a world continues on forever, builds in a natural barrier, or puts up an invisible wall will change the player's perception of that world differently. In all cases, the discovery of physical barriers in games is disappointing to players. They thought they could do something a moment before, and then the game authoritatively says "no." I think it's worth it to make the collateral damage of that discovery as minimal as possible.

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