Last week there was a bit of fallout on the internets from an article titled “The Case Against Writers in the Games Industry”. It was by a game designer named Adam Maxwell, and it basically makes the claim that having a dedicated writer on a development team is a waste; it’s always better to have another game designer who knows how to write.

It’s easy to see why it got a strong reaction; it’s written to provoke a reaction. It dredges up Roger Ebert’s old “authorial control” argument, which has already been shot full of holes for the last couple of years. It makes terrible assumptions about the role of writing and storytelling in game development. Of course, it’s also filled with so many typos, unfortunate word choices, and wacky grammar mishaps, that it’s like porn for people who love irony.

But see, here’s where the problem comes in: I agree with the conclusion of that article more than I do with those of the various rebuttals. The article, and Maxwell’s followup on his own blog, are both so full of wrong that I’m hesitant to say I agree with any of it. But having a game designer who can write well really is more valuable to a studio than someone who writes well but has no talent for, or desire to do game design.

That’s not even provocative; it’s trivially true. Even better than that would be a designer who can write and is an excellent concept artist. And better still would be a designer who can do all that and also be good at character modeling, animation, scene creation, level design, and composing music. Best of all would be someone who can do all that and make shadow clones of himself so that he could get the game finished on schedule.

In a rebuttal to that article, Ron Toland of the IGDA Game Writers’ Special Interest Group points out all of the erroneous assumptions, and describes game development as a lot of people working in concert. The designer, writer, artist, animator, composer are all equally important, each contributing his own work to the game, with the end result suffering if any part is missing.

For example: you’d be hard pressed to find anyone who seriously believes that good music isn’t important to a game. And it’s ridiculous to say that having a dedicated composer is a waste, that it’d be better handled by the game designer. Because most people understand that not everyone is equally good at making music. So why do people assume that everyone is equally good at writing?

Another rebuttal came from Kelly Wand, who talked specifically about the game mentioned in the original article. He got slightly less philosophical than the others, talking more about the industry-wide perception of writing in games. The best part is this:

[...] I find it a remarkably revealing insight as to just how derisively they view the creative process in general and the legacy of electronic entertainment in particular. It’s indifference to mediocrity, usually posed as a loaded “either-or” analogy.

That perfectly describes the reaction you get any time you try to broach the topic of storytelling in games. The complaint goes that you can either have a game or a story. It’s either The Sims or Final Fantasy, action or cut-scenes, activity or passivity, players’ fun or the writer’s ego. You hear that there are plenty of games that are perfectly fun without stories, so clearly story and writing aren’t necessary — why do you hate Tetris so much?

Except I’d say it goes past “indifference” and crosses over to open hostility to anything other than mediocrity. I would be encouraged to see more people “indifferent” to storytelling in games; at least it would mean that they’re no longer trying to undermine its importance, marginalize it, and drive it out completely. “Sure, adventure games can have stories in them, but keep it short and simple, dammit. And don’t ever, ever assume that what you’re doing is as important as the game design.”

In the “case against writers” article, Maxwell says that BioShock was “hamstrung” by its insistence on story, which to me is like saying that The Seven Samurai was hamstrung by its insistence on having so many samurai. In that presentation about writing in games I made fun of a while back, the presenter made a list of game types, to help you determine “how much story you actually need.” He listed “story-based gameplay” as its own category, even separate from role-playing games!

And with attitudes like that being so prevalent, I think even the writers are being a little short-sighted about this. Wand ends his rebuttal with the observation that people don’t have to be so fearful that writing is going to “take over” gameplay. That writing isn’t meant to be the “food” of a game; “It’s the salt.” That’s a fine analogy: modest, non-threatening, acknowledging that too much writing can ruin the end result, while at the same time emphasizing that the end result is completely unpalatable if the writing is missing or done poorly.

Wand and Toland’s rebuttals do a good job of defending the role of “game writer” as it exists now, but I think they’re overly defeatist about the potential for game writing to improve. We’re so used to the idea that game design is the master discipline in game development, and that storytelling and writing are the antithesis of interactivity, that we’re willing to argue even to get promoted to “salt.”

As long as we keep thinking of writing as this completely separate discipline, that it’s important to the game but not the “food” of the game, then both writing and game design are going to stagnate. You wouldn’t design PaRappa the Rapper or Rock Band while leaving the music to be some autonomous thing that gets added in later. You integrate it from the start. But while music-based games are still relatively rare, there are tons of games that try to tell stories. So why are we content to keep treating the writing as some separate thing, that doesn’t need to be integrated from the start?

Tons of games try to tell stories, and tons fail, or are mediocre at best. We can add better writers all we want, and we’ll still just end up with grammatically correct descriptions of the ice level, flowery and evocative descriptions of what it means to be a space marine fighting demons, and stirring speeches from our spiky-haired amnesiac hero right before he does battle against the clever-quip-spewing boss monster.

For my part, I’ve worked on more games as “just” a writer (or a writer/content programmer) than I have as a designer. And from a practical standpoint, that’s sometimes a necessity: even fairly short games can require a lot of writing, and there’s just not enough time to do double duty. But I will say that the work that I’ve been most proud of has come from designing the game as a writer would; not from saying, “and another puzzle goes here” but “this section should be interactive with a puzzle works like this because of the way these two characters interact and the way the pacing is building up to this moment.”

That’s less a statement for or against game writers, and more an interpretation of what “game design” is. “Designer” and “writer” in videogames aren’t directly analogous to movies, like we often assume they are. In movies, a screenplay isn’t just dialogue, but scene descriptions and story flow and occasionally even camera direction. You wouldn’t automatically assume a novelist would be a good screenwriter — that’s the fear most people have when they talk about writing overtaking game design, that you’re dragging the tedious elements of one medium into another where it doesn’t fit.

But you shouldn’t automatically assume the director would be a good screenwriter, either. Or that the director can plan out an entire movie, calling the screenwriter in for a couple hours every week to suggest lines for the characters to say. If a game is going to have a story at all, then the designer and the writer need to think of the game as a story.

Or don’t even bother, because we know a stupid, or poorly-integrated, or just-slapped-on-for-the-sake-of-it story when we see one. And those aren’t doing any good for the perception of writing in games.

In case there were any doubt that EA and Harmonix are trying to turn Rock Band into a whole platform instead of just a videogame franchise, the release of the Rock Band music store should put that to rest.

They did such a good job with the design of this thing, it’s almost eerie. It’s cleanly and clearly divided up by individual songs and song packs, organized by artist name, song title, genre, release date, or difficulty. Each listing gives you album art, the album name, genre, and release date, plus a breakdown of the difficulty for each performer in the band. And the biggest thing missing from the Xbox Live Marketplace version: you can listen to a preview of the song.

The only downside is that you can’t download songs in the background, so you might have to listen to the 30 second preview of “Interstate Love Song” by Stone Temple Pilots repeated over and over again while you wait for the whole song to get downloaded. That can cut down on the impulse buys — if it’s a song that you’re not exactly crazy about but want to just give it a spin (like, say, “Interstate Love Song” by Stone Temple Pilots), you might already be sick of it by the time it’s ready to play.

But the whole thing is perfectly — insidiously, even — designed to make you happy to give EA, Harmonix, and Microsoft more of your money. It’s right there in the game menu, with all the slick UI of the rest of the game, so you don’t have to interrupt the faux rockin’. Downloadable content is totally the way to go with these things; I turned up my nose at the “Rocks the 80s” expansion pack for Guitar Hero, even with the promise of “Heat of the Moment” and “The Warrior.” But if I could’ve downloaded those songs, I would’ve hit the “buy” button even before the press release got cold.

And if there were any remaining doubt that Rock Band has rendered Guitar Hero impotent, then that was put to rest by last week’s release of “The Boston Song Pack,” which is all the songs on Boston minus “Let Me Take You Home Tonight.” (”Foreplay/Long Time” was already included in Rock Band).

I’ve already said — repeatedly — that playing “More Than a Feeling” in Guitar Hero is one of those transcendent moments of videogames, where standing in front of a TV and holding a big piece of plastic can make you feel bathed in the light of awesomeness. As it turns out, being able to follow that up with “Peace of Mind” takes the whole thing up another level. (And really — the only reason “Peace of Mind” doesn’t get more credit as one of the best classic rock hooks ever is that it had the misfortune of getting put right after “More than a Feeling.”)

All that said: “More Than a Feeling” in Rock Band just isn’t as much fun to play as it was in Guitar Hero. It could be just that I played it so much in Guitar Hero that I unwittingly memorized it. But I suspect it’s more a difference in what the two games are trying to do.

Guitar Hero was unapologetically and gloriously an air guitar simulator — the notes they called out are the ones you pick when you’re describing a song’s hook and go “Bow now now now now! Doo do doooo dooo do Take a look a-head! Doo do doo doooo dooo!” So you didn’t see much of that “Instead of playing with a plastic toy, why don’t you learn how to play the real guitar?” nonsense — it’s nothing like a real guitar, it’s just about the fun of listening to a song and pretending you’re playing on stage before a crowd, without having to deal with any of that “talent” or “practice” nonsense.

My musically ignorant impression of Rock Band, though, is that they’re trying as much as possible to call out the real guitar parts of a song. (Until the sections of Nine Inch Nails tracks where your guitar inexplicably turns into a piano). Last night I played enough of “More Than a Feeling” on Medium to get 100%, but when I tried it again on Hard, I was sent crying and shamed back to the main menu. I could see and hear how the notes it was asking me to play correspond with goes on in the song’s real guitar part, but they’re not the same as what I “hear” on a casual listen of the song. Plus it was making me play chords and shit.

Either way, comparisons to “real” music are still silly, because these games aren’t about creation, but appreciation. It’s play; you’re enjoying music in a way that you don’t when you’re just listening to it from a record. Which is essentially the promise of interactive entertainment. You could say that Rock Band is better at music appreciation, because it shows you how the different parts of a song interact with each other. You could say that the original Guitar Hero is better, because it gets away from the tedium of “real” music and puts everything into the experience.

I don’t really care as long as they add more Van Halen and Pixies.

Today Telltale announced the finale of Sam & Max Season Two, titled What’s New, Beelzebub?. This is the one where everything goes completely off the rails, leaving everyone confused, horrified, and entertained. As evidenced by the last trailer:

I’m really glad we didn’t do machinima shorts for this season, because it means that time & effort could go into the games and into making these awesome trailers. I still don’t understand how they can crank these things out in just a little over a week.

I’ve already moved on to a different super double-secret project, which is a lot of fun and I’m hoping people are going to love. But I can already tell that season two of the Sam & Max games is going to go down as the coolest and most satisfying project I’ve ever worked on. And that’s saying a lot, because I’ve really lucked out on the cool jobs front.

Today at the office, Jake made the startling and unsettling discovery that Cinemark’s Front-Row Joe is not a new creation, but an ancient abomination, most likely one of the cinema-trailer Elder Gods bent on bringing about Ragnarök.

But I suspect he’s still mostly a West Coast phenomenon; the trailers I’ve been nostalgic for were much cooler. And they’re on YouTube!

Oldest is the never-forgettable high-hat of the General Cinema trailer:

Which, like all great things, was eventually bastardized with a horrifying “update” featuring inexplicably cannibalistic CG candy (I blame the California Raisins and of course that iconic HBO intro clip:)

General Cinema’s most shining moment, though, was the brief genius of the Space Ride Through the Concessions Belt, and its eternally baffling non-sequitur finale. (Popcorn… candy… throw away my trash… okay I see where you’re going with this, GC… and so the message of this film is obviously… whaaaaa?!?)

Incidentally, the Space Candy trailer was well-known enough to get a most excellent parody version on MST3k in the Teenagers from Outer Space episode.

And on the topic of 80s iconography and cool YouTube videos, here’s my new favorite video on the internet, a music video for the song “DVNO”, which is apparently by a Daft Punk-esque group called “Justice” that I never heard of. (via the Drawn! blog).

This week’s episode of “Lost” was called “Meet Kevin Johnson.” It ended on a soap opera-like cliffhanger, with Sayid making a dramatic announcement and the camera lingering on other characters giving meaningful looks at each other. And then another cliffhanger with gunplay. Which won’t be resolved until late April.

But “Battlestar Galactica” starts back up real soon to hold us over! And that kind of sums up the give and take with this episode. For every scene that delivers a “This is totally the best show on television” moment, you have to take another that makes you ask, “Whuh?” (And for every post on here about “Lost,” you have to take spoilers).

For instance:

• Michael, like everybody who watches “Lost,” hates Michael, and he tries to kill himself!
• …but fails every time, because the Island has some kind of control over him, even in Manhattan.
• Driving a car off a pier? no into a dumpster while more hatch-like music is playing on the radio!
• …and a really shockingly creepy comeback from Libby!
• …but she got like 30 seconds total screen time in this episode, which seems like a waste for flying her out to Hawaii and everything. Plus there’s still no sign of getting more of her back-story with Hurley in the institution.
• …also, Michael recovered from his suicide attempt within less than a week storytime, because of the above-mentioned Island powers..
• Big Other Tom got officially outed, posthumously, clarifying that “You’re not my type” comment to Kate in season 3 that had some people on the internet speculating he was an alien or something!
• …and they handled that pretty well, actually. It was just another aspect of his character, and they had him back to fist fights and telling Michael to “man up” instead of mincing around or becoming magically extra-sensitive or something.
• A new Dharma location, with an appropriately creepy name and a cool Lord of the Rings-esque map and the location of Ben’s secret forces!
• …leading to a betrayal that I saw coming from the first scene of the episode, when they showed Ben looking warily at the boyfriend with his arm around Alex’s waist.
• An opening scene of like 10 minutes of a bunch of characters standing around telling each other “no more secrets” and explaining in detail everything that’s going on and everyone’s secret agenda!
• …which was jaw-dropping only because this is “Lost.” On any other show, it would’ve been annoyingly clunky exposition.

But really, on the whole I was more impressed with this episode than annoyed by it. All of the episodes this season have been surprisingly solid, and this one had moments (especially when Libby was involved) that surprised me more than anything since the beginning few hatch-centric episodes of season 2.

I’d been hoping for no more than that the series would find its feet again, just so that it could limp to some sort of resolution for the various storylines, instead of imploding into an incomprehensible mess like “The X-Files” did. But this season has exceeded all my expectations, and it’s really delivering. Maybe not delivering on the answers, so much, but delivering on the potential of the premise.

The only question I remember being raised here: We saw two characters getting shot, one we don’t care about at all and one we kind of almost care about. Did they both die? And I guess a secondary question: Could they be setting it up for Alex to lead a counter-offensive against Ben and/or Jacob?

And what is the deal with Starbuck, anyway?

I’m going to write about this on the internet, since I didn’t get to complain about it to anybody today:

Despite all my best intentions, I’m a habitually tardy person. (Tardy as in not punctual, in case it means something else to the kids these days. But I probably qualify as that, too). I try to get to places on time, but then everything starts working against me, from insomnia to just plain cruel fate.

I had a meeting this morning for work, and I got about four hours of sleep last night. Which is why I was as stunned that I managed to get up in plenty of time to make it in. Sweet. It gave me an excuse to putter around in the morning for once, and still with time to spare. Hell, I could even sit back and have my Georgia boy’s breakfast in a real grown-up person’s glass instead of grabbing a can to swill down in the car.

I checked out the window, and a car was blocking my driveway. Hey, no problem! It’s kind of annoying how often it happens, but this would give me a few minutes before I had to get dressed and all that. I wouldn’t be early, but I wasn’t in danger of being late.

So then I sit back to leisurely check my e-mail, and I knock the glass off the desk. And I’ve got wood floors, so it doesn’t just break; it shatters. Actually, even “shatters” is under-selling it. You usually don’t see glass breaking like this unless it’s in slow motion and somebody is jumping through it firing two guns at once. It was epic.

For some reason, my first thought wasn’t “I better put some shoes on and clean this up,” but “I better clean this up before the cat steps on it.” I’m only mentioning that because I’m hoping my concern for my pet will somehow make me sound better when I explain the parade of idiocy that followed.

I jump up to get the vacuum cleaner — step right on a piece of glass. Hurts, but nothing too serious. I pick it out, think, “that was kind of dumb of me,” and then commence to picking up the bigger pieces.

And stepped on pieces two and three while I was doing that. That’s when I start to realize this was more serious than it looked — there was glass everywhere.

So I finally get the big stuff squared away, and take the long way around to the kitchen to get the vacuum — step on piece four. That’s the one that really hurt. It’s also the one I can’t explain — I’m going to have to commission a sophisticated computer simulation to figure out how a glass breaking can send a shard flying behind the direction of impact to end up behind a doorjamb and lie in wait for me to come walking on it.

I limp over to the kitchen and get the vacuum, then clean up all the visible pieces, and the surrounding area for good measure. I found pieces in my living room, a good 15 feet away from where the glass broke.

At no point in this process did it occur to me to put on my shoes.

Meanwhile, the cat’s waiting just outside the blast radius, looking at me like I’m an idiot. When I was putting the vacuum away, a bucket fell on my head, and then I stepped on a rake.

I get it all squared away, and I’m standing in my bedroom in my underwear, limping and bleeding, when I look at the clock and see that my meeting starts in two minutes.

Finally I was able to stop cussing and get ready for work, picked pieces of glass out of my backpack (12 feet away from ground zero), and was able to leave this cursed apartment. The person blocking my driveway had long since left, incidentally — I’m guessing the screaming coming from my apartment scared them away.

So that’s the kind of thing I mean when I say that the universe is conspiring to keep me late for things.

I’m not going to even try to think up a clever title for this one, since the game in question is so purposefully wry that adding more here would be overkill.

But it’s a good game, and it’s called World of Goo, and you can pre-order it to get a preview copy (for Windows) right now.

It’s been getting a lot of buzz for a while now, getting awards from the Independent Games Festival and mentions on videogame-related blogs all over the place. Anyone who’s even remotely interested in the idea should definitely try the pre-order/preview route, because it completely surprised me.

The concept itself — a physics-based puzzle game — would be interesting enough, but what I wasn’t expecting is the amount of variety they’d be able to get out of it. None of the levels in the first chapter are exactly the same, and it’s remarkable how they managed to take the same basic mechanic and apply it to puzzles that feel completely different.

The entire thing has an extremely slick and professional production, from the graphic design to some terrific music throughout. Best of all, the design doesn’t get in the way of the game, but is all put in the service of making it easy to pick up and start playing — you always know what you’re trying to do, and can instantly start thinking about how you’re going to do it. It’s hard to believe that this was made primarily by a 2-person studio.

Best of all, the game’s coming out for PC and Mac and Linux and the Wii. (Again, the preview copy is Windows only, but a pre-order will get you the Mac & Linux version when it’s released).

It’s an astoundingly well-produced “debut” game (at least one of the 2DBoy boys is involved in the Experimental Gameplay Project and is constantly cranking out new games), and should have every videogame fan looking forward to seeing what they can come up with next.

This week’s episode of “Lost” was called “Ji Yeon,” and it was about Sun & Jin, which means it’s another chance to get your weep on. (Warning: Every post on here about “Lost” contains spoilers).

It was pretty clear early on that they were doing a Jame Gumb-in-Silence of the Lambs style reveal, in which Jin wasn’t going to meet up with Sun. But all along I was hoping that they were building up to a reveal of two separate future timelines: one in which Sun made it off the island, and one in which Jin made it off (and had remarried). Not to second-guess the writers or anything, but I think that would’ve been a lot more poignant than the simple “Jin’s dead that’s sad the end.”

Which is still pretty sad, but considering how much the writers want to see Sun and Jin miserable, and how much they’ve been pushing time travel this year, it seems like you’d get more mileage out of a story of two lovers separated by time.

On the off-chance anybody from the production staff is doing a Google blog search on the show: You guys have my official permission to pull whatever kind of stunt or contrivance is necessary to give Sun & Jin a happy ending. Time travel, a big Dharma RESET button, the non-Oceanic 6 passengers aren’t really dead but still trapped on the island, even Sun waking up to find it was all just a dream. Whatever it takes to give those guys one break after six years.

Also this episode: we learned the shocking identity of Ben’s man on the boat! The interesting part of the subplot, of course, is what’s causing people on the boat to kill themselves by drowning or whatever it is that could make a huge bloodstain on a wall.

The new information:

• Something’s causing people on the freighter to commit suicide.
• Widmore and the people on his freighter think it was Ben who staged the “fake” Oceanic 815 wreckage at the beginning of the season.
• Assuming Juliet’s figures are correct, the “Oceanic 6″ will get off the island within five weeks.
• Did anybody else notice Sun’s TV was playing that episode of “Xpose” (the late Nikki’s TV series) at the beginning?

And questions:

• What was making that clanging noise on the boat that Desmond was complaining about? I was assuming at first that it was Morse Code, but then pretty much every person on the boat should’ve been able to understand Morse Code, not just Sayid. If it were a code, was Michael sending it, or someone interesting?
• How did Hurley get out of the psych ward to visit Sun in Korea? Or was this before he started seeing Charlie’s ghost?
• Where have I seen that guy who plays the captain before? He looks totally familiar.