Dean Takahashi - They Go to School for This?

Dean Takahashi has written about games for The Wall Street Journal, Red Herring and the San Jose Mercury News. Most recently, he published a book about the development of the Xbox. He actually studied journalism in school, which helps explain the high calibre of publications he's written for. His work covering games is due to a mixture of timing and passion:

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Profiles in Game Journalism

Free games! Access to insider industry events! Substandard pay! Little respect! Foul-mouthed readers! Free games!

I've been asked, "How do I get started as a game journalist?"

I've emailed a few working writers covering the games industry to see how they got their start in professional video game journalism. Over the next week or two, I'll post their stories.

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Yes! We have game.

Weblogs are wonderful ways to track new ideas by the links that run between them. "have you seen this? You gotta check it out" - those moments, weblogs seem almost like chatrooms.

GGA posts generally have at least a few sentences, musings on an issue, maybe a vintage URL or two to accompany the hot links. But posts here are not so thorough as those appearing so far on "Got Game?" part of the professional weblog site Corante. For the launch week, Andrew Phelps has posted three medium-length essays incorporating links, meditating on these issues:

1. Emerging Gaming Technologies.
2. Emerging Social Phenomena Surrounding Games.
3. Emergence of Games as a Societal Medium.
4. Emergence of Games in Academia.

These are issues I'm curious about, so I'll be interested to see what Andrew comes up with. But I'll have to keep my remarks for GGA; there are no public comments permitted on Got Game. Long essays, no comments, it's like this guy has an attention span!

Brief Reiko Kodama Profile

While there are ample famous male designers in the game industry, I find it hard to name more than a handful of women who can be strongly identified with games - celebrity designers, not just celebrities. Reiko Kodama is one of them - she works at Sega's OverWorks studio in Japan, responsible for the Skies of Arcadia title on the Dreamcast, now expanded to be Eternal Arcadia on Nintendo's GameCube. The Dreamcast game, which I've almost solved, is a witty whimsical pirate adventure RPG with fun, memorable characters.

There's not much information available online in English about Ms. Kodama but she has been interviewed briefly in the Denver Post: Girls joining the industry mix, by Dave Thomas, the Post's Games Columnist. (link found on the grrlgamer.com forums).

Advantage Playing Online

In single player games, cheating affects only the longevity of play. But in online games, cheating threatens the delicate social construct of multiplayer play. If each person pursues a certain set of skills at their own pace, then it can be upsetting to see someone leap ahead or even affect the value of items and cash in the game by ruthless replicating.

A NYTimes.com piece Do Cheaters Ever Prosper? Just Ask Them examines cheating and game balancing in online multiplayer games, with glimpses into some mass-market multiplayer online fare: Rise of Nations, The Sims Online and Star Wars Galaxies.

One person's "cheating" is another person's "advantage playing." Some users argue that if games build in repetative tasks required to get ahead, then it's only fair that players should be able to use macros, software programs running on top of games to automate click-click-clicking. And still other folks point out that they are playing a conniving character who would work to succeed by any means necessary.

Cheating in shared game environments issue was covered more explicitly from a game designers point of view in a year 2000 piece "How to Hurt the Hackers: The Scoop on Internet Cheating and How You Can Combat It" from Game Developer Magazine (free registration required). There, Matt Pritchard quotes Greg Costikyan: "An online game's success or failure is largely determined by how the players are treated. In other words, the customer experience -- in this case, the player experience -- is the key driver of online success." His short version was, "Cheating undermines success." Whose success? The largest pool of shared success - the mass of players and the game creators who want them paying subscription fees.

A survey of Game Journalism Online

I'm working on a survey of game journalism online for the Online Journalism Review. Where do you get your news and *views?

Quake Casino

Think you're L33t? Care to b3t on it?

Great entry on Slashdot about a new service, based in the conveniently offshore Carribean island Curacoa, that will let you bet real money on your deathmatch. It seems legit.

I am not a gambler, so this doesn't seem interesting to me as an activity. But I can imagine for some it would provide an incredible adrenaline kick. But I don't understand one thing - when I signed up for the email notification to register, it asked me to check a box indicating that I was over eighteen. Don't you have to be over 21? - that's assuming if you're not in one of the 11 states which don't let you gamble.

Further evidence that offline and online economies converge in game space.

Game Blurring

Today, Jane was playing on a console. In the game, evening was falling, I saw a spotlight sweep the ground near her feet. "Look out!" I thought, "You'd better dodge that beam!" But then I blinked - the light came from a lighthouse; Jane was playing Animal Crossing and I was thinking of Splinter Cell.

Gamers Read Books, too!

Call for Contributers!

I'm thinking of starting a book reviews section. I haven't figured out what the format will be so anything goes, at this point. Anything vaguely game-related is up for grabs - including Science Fiction, anthropological studies, technical manuals, discussions of narrative structure, history of board games, etc.

Any books out there you'd like to share your thoughts about? Alternatively, are there books you'd like to see reviewed here?

Video Game Competition - TBA

Gamecaster, a streaming video show focusing on "e-sports", announced a national video game competition to be held in Las Vegas. When? No details yet. What venue? Uh, check back later. Which games? No information at this time.

But you can pre-register! Or, scratch that, just sign up for an email that will tell you when official registration opens.

Okay, so not as well-organized as the WCG. Still, Las Vegas is an entertaining place to visit, and while you're there you could practice your advantage player techniques.

The Politics of Voice Chat on Xbox Live

Howard of Smart Mobs sends another provocative article today:

Multiplayer online games played with text chat have been around for decades. And there have been a few games promoting voice chat - notably FireTeam and CounterStrike.

Microsoft's Xbox, eager to stay a "living room" machine and avoid keyboard and mouse has bet its online gaming on voice chat systems. And according to the BBC, Xbox live voice chat gaming is a hotbed of arbitrary personal politics:

Xbox Live seems to have reinforced national stereotypes for many people. One British gamer I came across "booted" any Americans who joined his games, while a US gamer hosting a site would remove anyone French, citing their lack of support for the war in Iraq.

But besides these sad exclusions, it appears that Xbox Live is a great way to meet other gamers, practice a foreign language skills, and have fun with online multiplayer gaming. "A Melting pot of online gaming." Yum! I want to try it.

Yes Game, No Pain

Howard sends a provocative article from CNet, examining the use of games as medical distraction:

Subjects who played a zombie-shooting action game during the experiment were able to tolerate pain a full minute longer

We knew that games had broad social applications - inuring people to deeper pain was not one of them. I guess it's a good thing to be able to take people's mind off of suffering. But there's a dark side to this revelation, if you wildly generalize and think about society at large deferring pain through games: we're all indoors, distractedly blowing shit up, while outside, there's a war going on (a common distopia). Among the juciest ideas from the 030303 conference was Greg Niemeyer's loose historical hypothesis that "Games are played by civilizations at their moment of decline."

Anyhow, here's something fun for the day: Can video games ease physical pain?

Creator of M.U.L.E. Profiled

Salon has a well-written and respectful profile of game developer Dani Bunten, co-creator of M.U.L.E., a quintessential game developer's game.

M.U.L.E. is a favorite game of Justin's, and deceptively easy to learn. Simple rules stacked up together and the unpredictability of your opponents conspire to make this a game with near-infinite variety. Is it primitive? Sure, from a graphics standpoint; but the gameplay is incredibly complex. Strategy, quick reflexes, and pure luck all play a part.

The piece is also a critique, through the lens of Bunten's career, of the last twenty years of game development history - a history which rewarded snazzy graphics over innovative game mechanics, and which left Dani Bunten, for the most part, confined to a dusty footnote in the annals.

Tim Burke on the Futures of Games

The End of an Age in Computer Gaming

Something has to be done. Computer and video games should be the 21st Century's revolutionary cultural form. Their creative energies should match their gargantuan revenues. But as games become bigger business, their imaginative horizons are falling rapidly. In the end, that will bad for both the business of gaming and the experience of it.

More great writing by Tim on his website.

Subverting Region Encoding

I have not yet heard an argument I can stand behind for region encoding. This is a completely separate issue from piracy, the arguments against which I can easily understand. But region encoding seems furiously anti-consumer to me. I have a legitimately paid-for Gamecube; I have the new Zelda game, bought with real yen in Japan. But of course I cannot play my own software product in my own hardware product player because someone has decided that I am not allowed to.

Piffle! Thanks to Freeloader by Datel, ordered from Liksang (which Justin wrote about earlier) I am right now enjoying the Japanese Zelda on my U.S. Gamecube. It's wonderful - no messy modchips which void warrantees, no soldering, no actual hardware modification, this is simply a disk which you load before you load your import game, and it changes the address and local settings of your Gamecube. It works like a charm.

And I cannot tell you what a joy the new Zelda game is. The Japanese is easier than some other games I've attempted, perhaps because the game is aimed at children. The art is fantastic.

Next up on the Freeloader list: The Japanese version of Animal Crossing (Doubutsu no Mori)!

Social Engineering in Online Games

I'm still processing Raph Koster's high speed broadband brainblast on user manipulation and management talks involving network theory, emergence, six degrees of separation and power laws. This is stuff I usually hear from webloggers. It felt like a harmonic convergence to hear one of the game industry's thought-developers using these concepts to explain experiments run with large numbers of paying game-players in massively multiplayer online games. Raph described social engineering without flinching, perhaps a concession to the audience of aspiring online game-based social engineers.

It was fast and sweeping; as Katherine's friend from Georgia Tech pointed out: truth through speed. Though he did encourage the development of small, boutique online communities, that's not the business that he is in. It was unsettling seeing his studies of social dynamics harnassed to build effective subscription-based online life simulators for multinational megacorporations.

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The Destiny of Games

I'd wanted to go to the academic summit at the Game Developers Conference because, for whatever perverse reason, I am still attracted to the academic side of any equation. The summit was mostly about how game developers and academics might work together to further mutual interests.

I won't try to summarize all the speakers' remarks, because those notes will be shortly available on the GDC webpage and in any case, I couldn't do them justice. I'll just comment on a few things which I found most compelling. The theme that resounded most of all to me was the need for communication, not only between the game industry and game academia, but also between academics, between designers and consumers, and among all of us as consumers of this relatively new cultural product. A new shared language might spark an open source grass-roots revolution in the way we think about games and gaming.

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Culture Jamming

We saw a lot of interesting talks at the 030303>Collective Play conference yesterday, but I wanted to quickly mention one Marc Davis, at SIMS (School of Information Management and Systems) at UC Berkeley. His research focuses on giving users the tools to play in a space which he calls "TVLand" - a sort of alternate virtual universe. Essentially he's creating systems for video capture and edit that would use meta data in television shows or commercials and let us easily mix and play with them. I loved his attitude that television is shared culture which belongs to us, and we have a right to play with it. Imagine applying this to video games! Definitely technology to keep an eye on.

Theatre on the Quake Stage

"'Friends' was recently renewed for a 10th and final season. Anyone puzzled by its sustained success should greatly enjoy the notion of its congenially witless characters being dispatched in such gruesome fashion."

The NY Times reports that a group of artists will take to a Quake III arena to perform an episode of "Friends".