Category: Videogames

Another SFist post from me is up, where I go off on a tangent about Roger Ebert’s claim that videogames are inherently inferior to real art like literature and film.

It surprised me that his comments bugged me as much as they did, considering that I don’t technically work in games anymore. And I’m as dismissive of videogames as anyone else. But I’ve always thought that I’m dismissive of them partly because of all the wasted potential. It’s not just the usual complaint that 90% of any medium is crap, although that’s definitely the case with games (probably more like 98%).

It’s that even people who would normally be the strongest advocates of the potential of games — the fans and game developers themselves — are giving up on that potential. People defend games because they’re either defending their hobby or defending their profession, but nobody can seem to agree what a game is supposed to be, exactly. Other than profitable.

People just seem to have this implicit understanding that although Michael Bay and Jerry Bruckheimer movies get the biggest audiences, movies are capable of more than just explosions and car chases; they’ve finally been accepted by most as legitimate art. Even television and comic books, which have an even higher crap-to-quality ratio than movies, get the acknowledgement that they put out something great every once in a while. But more and more, people are saying that either games are nothing more than escapist entertainment, and that that’s all they should try to be. I’m fine with escapist entertainment; I don’t think you necessarily have to have meaning to have merit. And I think that good solid game design is an accomplishment in and of itself. So what’s the problem?

The problem is that I’ve played enough games to see what can happen when you get just the right combination of game and narrative, or as Ebert’s complaint put it: player choice and authorial control. It’s the point when you realize, “ah, I use the barrels to float the ramp up into position” in Half-Life 2, or “ah, I have to put a bucket of mud over the door” in Monkey Island 2. Day of the Tentacle was full of them. They’re points where you are actually working with the authors to finish telling the story. The realization hits you like a ton of bricks; it’s “ah, Rosebud represents Kane’s loss of innocence” and “Moby Dick is Ahab’s battle with mortality and fear of the unknown,” times 100. That’s the tool that gives videogames an artistic potential that nothing else has.

And the problem with that, is that very few games are actually using that tool to make something of real resonance beyond “just” entertainment. I’ve said that Half-Life 2 is the best videogame ever made, and I still think so. But I think it works on the same level as Aliens — easily one of my top 10 favorite movies, but not exactly a profound statement on the human condition. There shouldn’t be any question that it’s art. If Fantasia qualifies as art, then so does Rez. And if The City of Lost Children is art, so is Grim Fandango.

The real question is whether games will be allowed to take that extra step to make something profound. I honestly think The Sims takes a step in that direction — it’s not just a dollhouse or even a social simulator, but it has something to say as a parody of consumerism and an abstraction of social behavior and mundane life. And somebody on a message board hit on what I couldn’t figure out about Shadows of the Colossus that made it noteworthy — it’s not just the act of solving the boss fights that’s cool, but the sense of moral ambiguity throughout the game. You have to go through all the tasks you’re given just to complete the game, but just through the atmosphere of the game and the simple set-up, you spend the entire time wondering whether you’re doing the right thing.

People keep insisting that games are still in their infancy and that’s why there hasn’t been a real stand-out that’s universally acknowledged as a masterpiece instead of just “good for a game.” Technical improvements in rendering and AI will keep coming, and they’ll go a long way towards making games better, but what really needs to happen is for more developers to realize their potential as capital-A Art, and make something that’s not just a fun diversion but actually has some relevance.

There’s another post up at SFist, which I mention only because that’s the only way they show up in the sidebar down below to your right.

Speaking of belated responses to basically inconsequential news: A couple of weeks ago there was a big stink all over the videogame section of the internets about this “lawyer” named Jack Thompson and his run-in with the guys from the webcomic “Penny Arcade.” In brief: he wrote something claiming that he’d donate $10,000 to charity if any videogame company would make a game based on his premise, which was a ridiculous story about a father whose child was killed as a result of game-inspired violence and went on a killing spree murdering game developers, publishers, and retailers. The Penny Arcade guys, to their credit, handled it reasonably well: they pointed out to the guy that they ran a charity which raises money and supplies games for sick kids, and they made a $10,000 donation to that charity in Thompson’s name. He responded with legal threats and various letters to the FBI, several webcomics and hundreds of blog articles resulted. (And when somebody did actually make the game, he responded by saying that his claim had all been “satire,” and then with a couple more threats of legal action.)

In short, everybody got what they wanted. The sleazy ambulance-chasing lawyer got the attention he wanted and kept his name in the press. The Penny Arcade guys drew more attention to their charity, which could be seen as self-serving, but was basically a potent way of getting their message across, that most of the people who play videogames are not hyper-violent, semi-autistic selfish children.

I don’t even like mentioning Thompson, because it just adds one more internet reference to him, however insignificant, to make it seem like the guy’s having more impact than he really is. He’s laughably incompetent, and his agenda is completely transparent, even if you’re not aware (as I wasn’t) of his history of grandstanding and dementia. One of the Penny Arcade guys had an unexpectedly mature take on it: he said that they were aware they should just ignore the guy instead of giving him more attention, but that it was essentially a good thing he was at the forefront of the debate. Because if they ever had anyone competent taking all the credit as leader of the anti-videogame crusade, game fans and companies would be screwed.

(Senator Joe Lieberman and SF Assemblyman Leland Yee also make occasional headlines in videogame censorship news, but usually only when it’s around election time. And when they do, it becomes apparent they have no real expertise in the issue other than knowing enough to mention Grand Theft Auto and Postal).

The problem is that there’s nobody particularly competent on the pro-videogame side of the issue, either. All we’ve got is the insistence that there’s no evidence linking game-playing to violent behavior, and the First Amendment. Which means that as soon as someone releases a study showing that there is a correlation between GTA and Columbine, then all you’ve got left is the ACLU and “I know my rights” and an argument that has parents responding, “Well yeah, but…”
Continue reading “Won’t someone think of the children?!?”

I’ve looked at the news for the new World of Warcraft expansion, and my reaction is pretty much “meh.” Of course, I’m still going to buy and play the hell out of it, but I can’t get all that excited about it. Partly because it seems like it’s most appealing to people who are either at level 60 and have run out of stuff to do (I’m not), and/or people who have played all the Warcraft games and see some recognizable back-story there (I don’t). Plus I’m just tired of Blizzard and have realized two things about the company:

1. Blizzard has dicked over enough of my friends now that they have officially become “the bad guys.”
2. You’ll only get my World of Warcraft game away from me when you pry it from my cold, dead, Wizard’s Ring of the Monkey (+10 Agility, Soulbound, required level 33)-wearing fingers.

So it’s kind of a love-hate relationship.

And that’s why articles like this one piss me off. It’s kind of old news: WoW has a program that runs when the game is running, monitoring other apps on your machine to make sure you’re not running some cheat software. One of the things it does is check the title bars of your other open applications, a commonly-used and publically-available Windows API call for years, to look for known cheat programs.

What pisses me off is that now, like with New Orleans vs. the Bush Administration, I’m finding myself siding with the bad guys (Blizzard) over the good guys (the Electronic Frontier Foundation). Now, I support the EFF (in spirit, not financially) and think it’s good to have them around. But they’ve taken what is at heart a great concept that everyone can agree with, and gone too extremist with it, much like Greenpeace, PETA, the ACLU, and NAMBLA.

From the article:

Digital rights group The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) branded The Warden “spyware” and said its use constituted “a massive invasion of privacy”.

The EFF said that it was not acceptable simply to take Blizzard’s word that it did nothing with the information it gathered. It added that the Blizzard could get away with using The Warden because information about it was buried in licence agreements that few people read.

A “massive invasion of privacy?” Please. And getting upset about what Blizzard might do with the information is what gets branded you an alarmist and conspiracy theorist. The last part is the worst, though. Anyone who’s alarmed and upset and blaming Blizzard should maybe, oh I don’t know, read the license agreements that they agreed to.

One quote from a different player of the game, who has a surprising amount of common sense for a Blizzard fan:

“If someone is afraid of the program reading sensitive information from their programs, one possible solution is simply to not run any additional programs while playing World of Warcraft,” he said, “which is certainly advisable from a performance standpoint to begin with.”

What a novel concept. If you don’t like Blizzard knowing that you’re looking at porn sites or on an AOL chat with DarkNEO2731, then just close those windows before you play the game.

Here’s the bit about the Brainiac who “discovered” the “massive invasion of privacy” by “dissasembling the code” of the program to watch in action (read: he ran a copy of WinSpy):

Writing in his blog about what he found Mr Hoglund said: “I watched The Warden sniff down the e-mail addresses of people I was communicating with on MSN, the URL of several websites that I had open at the time, and the names of all my running programs.”

Mr Hoglund noted that the text strings in title bars could easily contain credit card details or social security numbers.

Okay, complain about Blizzard all you want on your blog, yeah whatever. But let me give you some helpful advice: if you’re dealing with a bank or company that puts your credit card details in the title bar of its site, it’s time for you to stop complaining to a videogame company and start finding yourself a real bank. Sheesh.

Having to read all these tech news websites, especially where privacy rights online are concerned, just makes me realize what a bunch of whiny, paranoid bitches computer people are.

It’s way past my bedtime, but I wanted to get a post in about Shadows of the Colossus before tomorrow, when Civilization IV supposedly comes out and takes up all my attention.

I’m only two battles in, and the reviews are saying that it gets better as you go along. My initial take on it is that it’s a tremendous achievement for videogames, but it’s still not quite as good as ICO. You’ve got to compare the two, not just because the same people were behind both games, but because they’ve got the same sensibility. You’re dropped into an unfamiliar fantasy world, given some unconventional tools and shown how to use them, and then you push a story along to its conclusion.

That sounds like it could describe just about any game, but what’s remarkable about these two is that hundreds of games try to do that, but only a few actually succeed. When I started working in videogames, I was assuming and hoping that as games matured, they’d get better at telling stories. Ten years later, there’s billions of dollars in the business, but still not that level of artistic achievement. There are definitely standouts, but the hit-to-miss ratio is still even worse than comic books, much less movies. Either the story is so heavy that the game is over-simplified or reduced to something mundane and predictable, or the game mechanic is solid but it ends up being irrelevant because you’re a space marine or a dark elf.

ICO and Colossus are both original, they’re both unconventional, they both have beautiful settings and great art and sound design, and they both have a story and game mechanic that work together to further each other. Colossus, though, is just a little too gamey — it feels a little too much like a string of boss battles, instead of a story that I’m involved in.

The boss battles are really cool, though. I’d read descriptions of the fights — you climb up the body of a giant as it’s moving, trying to find its weak point — and had even seen it played at E3, but actually playing it is different. Because the interface is so simplified and what you’re doing is so weird, it doesn’t feel like a series of jumping puzzles like every other game, but that you’re actually climbing up on a big monster to kill it.

But at least so far, that’s all you do. There’s a little bit of horse-riding (which is a neat interface on its own) and using your sword to focus light to tell you where to go next (also neat), but it’s really a series of giant, moving puzzles. I used to describe ICO as “like Myst, if it ran in real-time and you actually cared what was happening.” Colossus is more impressive in a lot of ways, but it loses some of the relevance; even with its interminably long opening cutscene, I don’t really care what’s happening. I’m just waiting to see the next little bit of spectacle.

And I haven’t finished it, so this isn’t a spoiler, but I’ll bet a million bucks that the giants turn out to be good.

I couldn’t be looking forward to Civilization IV any more than I already am. Especially if they keep this screenshot of The Internet wonder.

But they’re trying to make me more excited, with their genuinely funny CivAnon ad campaign. It’s in competition with the Burger King and Geico ads, and of course Cartoon Network’s bumpers, to make me think advertisements are actually worth watching again.

My current guilty pleasure for a commercial that I can’t help but like is the one for travelocity.com. It’s the one with the gnome talking about how easy the website is to use and dispelling the myth that American appliances don’t work in European outlets. It’s the bit where he says, “Am I going to die?” Sorry, I can’t help but laugh at that.

I was having trouble telling whether my inability to find anything interesting about this year’s E3 was because a) I don’t have the patience or industry clout to see what’s going on behind closed doors; b) since I’m not actually working in videogames anymore, I’m just not that invested in it; or c) there’s really nothing that interesting about the show. After hearing some other people’s recaps, I’m inclined to think it’s the latter.

The bar has been raised pretty high, and pretty much everything you find on the show floor is fairly polished. But nothing stands out. “Katamari Damacy” is the only game I can think of that truly invented a new style of gameplay, and its release this year is a sequel. There were plenty of games that looked interesting — “Sly Cooper 3” and “Kingdom Hearts 2” for example — but of course they’re sequels too. I’ve got a feeling that whatever becomes a hit from this year’s crop of games is going to be just due to random chance. Mac and I waited around the Square-Enix booth for a while to see if they were going to release any details of “Final Fantasy XII,” but it was another behind-closed-doors trailer movie. Again, it would’ve been easier just to stay at home and download all the movies from videogame websites.

But even when I was more interested in games, I was down on E3 as just marketing nonsense. The best part has always been getting to hang out with friends after the show, and I got to do that tonight. It was a nice, fairly low-key time with friends from the Sims 2 Console team, with the reassurance that people are still passionate about making good games, and it’s just not what “drives” me anymore.

Also, Anouk described part of what is so awful about LA, something I’d forgotten because I always drive into the city. She said as you fly into LA, you can see nothing from the plane except for a perfect square, paved grid that stretches out as far as the eye can see. And that’s totally true; it’s just depressing. While it did make it relatively painless (except for traffic) to drive from place to place tonight, it does tend to suck the soul out of a person. My geekified reference is that it’s like seeing one side of a Borg cube buried in the middle of a desert.

Most exciting bit of the day was that I got to go on a mini-tour of the Disney Imagineering facilities. I had either gotten so jaded, or it’s been so long, that I’d forgotten how that’s been a lifelong dream of mine. And it’s damn cool just to be able to see it, much less to have the opportunity to work for them. I was so excited by it that I’m thinking about heading down to Disneyland tomorrow and pushing my way through all the 50th Anniversary crowds by my lonesome. I’ll see tomorrow morning if I still feel like it, or just drive back to San Francisco.

Cool! My blog’s first cliffhanger!

So yeah: the show itself. It’s tough to come up with anything to get excited about. Microsoft has a huge booth set up for the Xbox 360, but it’s fairly unremarkable. The highlight is a big game from Rare called “Kameo”, notable for having hundreds of enemies on screen at the same time, but to be honest I assumed it was running on an old-school Xbox at first. Apart from that, there’s an unforgivably cheesy “Grand Theft Auto” rip-off, a racing game, and a couple of sports games out on the floor. Nothing to get all that excited about; it seems it would’ve been better for Microsoft to milk another year out of the original console before putting all that expense into showing off a lack-luster successor.

To be fair, it’s quite possible that Microsoft were showing the good stuff in private. It’s been at least three years since I’ve been to an E3, but it seems to have outlived its usefulness to the general videogame public; it’s a lot easier just to let the press and retailers deal with the nonsense and catch all the real info online. The last show I went to was Sega’s dream year, with big, impressive displays for “Jet Set Radio” and “Space Channel 5;” this year, everything worth seeing is sequestered away from the smelly masses. The PS3, the new Zelda game, and a game based around Peter Jackson’s King Kong movie, all had semi-private showings behind closed, huge, very expensive-looking doors, each with at least an hour-long wait in line. As it is, I just kept thinking of how expensive all these displays must’ve been.

Part of it could be that this is The Year of the Handheld, and there’s more new stuff to show for the PSP, the GBA, and the Nintendo DS, but handheld games don’t lend themselves to the huge screens and excess of E3. Sony went balls-out on their booth, with a huge video screen showing off the PSP, but it’s all over the place instead of focusing on anything. There’s a platformer spin-off of “Jak and Daxter” called just “Daxter” that looks really nice, but wasn’t all that fun to actually play. Apart from that, and a version of “Animal Crossing” for the DS, none of the handheld stuff really caught my attention.

There were a couple other minor highlights: a Japanese ink-brush themed game called “Okami” for the PS2, and “Shadow of the Colossus” from the makers of ICO. Bethesda Softworks had a bunch of announcements of cool-sounding games, “Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion,” “Fallout 3,” and “Call of Cthullu” game, but they weren’t showing anything except for a non-interactive trailer for “Oblivion.” I’ll see if I can make today the “survey” day and see stuff in more depth tomorrow.

Another thing: I saw Brian Posehn again. I see that guy everywhere — the Wonder-Con, E3, and an episode of “Tom Goes to the Mayor” featuring him was just on TV. I think he’s stalking me or something.