Blips: Intercapital Dilemma

Source: Big E versus Little e
Author: Josh Ling
Site: Medium

In December I wrote up a list of horrible video game buzzwords and "eSports" was included, in part because of its try-hard intercaps. That said, any hate I had was mostly due to the term, not necessarily what it stands for. Still, I found it pretty interesting to read this article by Josh Ling wherein he researches the etymology of "eSports" and why it's written so many different ways. The principal contenders are "eSports" and "esports," but there are plenty of others involving hyphens and spaces and creative capitalization. Thinking about "esports" as on a similar terminological path as "email," made me a lot more comfortable just ditching all of the caps for just simply "esports." I mean, Ling's Wikipedia link writes it that way, so it must be correct, right?

Actually, it's not a right or wrong issue, but, as Ling explains, a signifier of how long a game or organization has been in the electronic sports scene. Older groups tend to go with "eSports" while newer ones choose "esports," which falls in line once again with the "email" timeline. It's clear that branding has a lot to do with which designation is chosen as it's an instance where a decision has to be made for the sake of messaging consistency. Ling wrote his article after the company he works for made the choice too. I think this is part of what makes some outsiders reluctant to get in on esports though; the perception being that esports is about people trying to make money while a bunch of players fight for attention on their platforms. I'm not all the way on the cynical bandwagon, but I can't fault people for thinking that and seeing "eSports" as a callous cash-in. However, at the same time as the term's evolution to drop the intercaps, esports has outgrown those initial fly-by-night operations to become something much more established. I don't know, I'm still looking at this from the outside, but for what it's worth, that's the view from here.

Blips: Girly Games

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

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

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

Blips: Energy Hogs

Source: Video Game Consoles Cost Americans $400 Million per Year — When We Aren’t Even Using Them
Author: Mandi Woodruff
Site: Yahoo Tech

At first, I wasn't surprised when I read the above statistics about the PS4 and Xbox One's gluttonous power consumption, but the more I thought about it, I wonder how they can get away with being so against the grain of the energy efficiency movement. As Mandi Woodruff notes in her report, the power usage during gaming sessions is to be expected, and runs on par with a PC, but it's the standby mode and energy drain during non-intensive tasks that's a bit bewildering. The PS4 uses 45 times the electricity of an AppleTV to run Netflix and similar video streaming apps. If console makers really want to push for their machines to be "always-on" and multi-purpose, they should really figure out ways to allow them to run at appropriately proportional power levels. Until then, all we can do is as Woodruff suggests: change your system settings to make the machine turn off when not in use and switch to a dedicated streaming box like Roku or AppleTV for simple video watching. Sheesh, even the PS2 used to have a full-stop power switch on its back. Whatever happened to those?

Blips: New York's Finest

Source: The NYU MFA Showcase was not your average student art show
Author: Dan Solberg
Site: Kill Screen

Just putting out a bit of self promotion here: I covered the recent NYU Game Center Student Showcase for Kill Screen, and I got to play a ton of inspiring games and talk to some cool people. It was my first MFA games show, and it was pretty fun. I'd definitely attend another.

Anyway, so I ended up leaving some of my personal experience with NYU Game Center out of the article because it wasn't the proper tone, but part of the meaning behind that opening line about a lot changing in two years is that it's also the length of time I've been living in New York City. My time learning my way around the boroughs and trying to build up some kind of games coverage portfolio ran parallel with the the Game Center's debut MFA class that just graduated. Throughout the past two years, I've attended a bunch of video game events (many of them Game Center related), held all over the city, and actually got a feel for what a cultural community around games can feel like. I came here for art, but what I ended up getting the most out of NYC was games, and I think that's a testament to the openness and inclusivity at work in New York's gaming scene. Not to say that video games in NYC is a homogenous entity, but there are definitely common threads.

Now I'm getting ready to leave town, head back to the Midwest and teach art. Having spent two years in New York immersed in games, and the 2.5 years prior in DC working in informal education, I've never felt more prepared to enter the austere world of collegiate art education and try my best to offer an alternative experience to my students. When I came out of art school, I hoped, like many of my classmates, that I could find work doing something, anything that was remotely connected to art, knowing that being a full-time artist is just not in the cards. I feel tremendously lucky in this regard (despite my inability to land an art museum job in NYC, though I've interviewed at most of them) that the experiences I've had have led me to be so uniquely prepared for my position this Fall. I've spent a lot my time in NYC cursing this place, but the gaming community here was always a bright spot, and it made my stay here something I truly value.

Blips: Theatrically Inclined

Source(s): At the gates of Temple Studios: Where gaming and theatre collide,  The immersed audience: how theatre is taking its cue from video games
Author(s):Tristan Jakob-Hoff, Thomas McMullan
Site(s): Eurogamer, The Guardian

Starting off the week, here are a couple articles from across the pond that center the Punchdrunk theatre group, whose recent performance, The Drowned Man, is finding common ground within the video game community. As both Jakob-Hoff and McMullan's pieces report, theatre and games actually have quite a bit in common, especially in staging/level design, making crossover function rather naturally. Punchdrunk has been putting on performances with interactive elements for years, and even inspired certain aspects of Gone Home, but The Drowned Man appears to be their most ambitious project to date.

Not only are there interactive components to The Drowned Man, but the performance takes place in a 4-story complex, with actors on different floors performing simultaneously (if I'm understanding the description correctly). So you could be opening a "prop" drawer and reading a note for additional narrative context while a soliloquy takes place above you, and another viewer is selected and pulled into a room next door for a one-on-one performance. It's the sort of show that you can't see the entirety of in just one go. And that's a key difference between working in digital and real world "theatre;" in games the action can be programmed and instanced to always make you the center of attention, and thus able to have every actor wait on your arrival to begin. But I also like the idea in live theatre that the world doesn't revolve around you; in some ways, I find there's more immersive potential in that arrangement.