Austin Game Conference

The Austin Game Conference will be September 11-12 this year in the inimitable city of Austin. Raph Koster (Star Wars Galaxies) and Mark Jacobs (Dark Age of Camelot) will be giving keynote speeches, and a lot of other great people - Jessica Mulligan, Sheri Graner Ray, Mike McShaffry, Rich Vogel, many others - will be speaking. The focus - as you may have guessed from the glimpse of the line-up above - is online games.

Also, Machinima films will be shown at the conference. Machinima blends 3d technology, animation, and traditional film-making. More information is available on their pretty but pretty annoyingly Flash-driven official website.

We're headed to the Tokyo Game Show later that month but maybe we'll stop over in Austin to visit friends at Ion and check out the conference. See you there?

Hacker Trial: Virtual Theft

Touching on auction controversy, the Black Hat computer security conference hosted a Hacker Court:

this year they've decided to put a virtual-economic spin on the facts of the imaginary case: The defendant stands accused of hacking into a fellow MMORPG player's game account and transfering to his own the legendary "Staff of Viagra," a rare game item worth $5000 on the eBay market.

From Julian Dibbells' Play Money.

Edward Castronova testified to the value of items in a virtual economy. To read his web site, it seems he came out on the winning side - there was judged to be a real world economic impact to the hijacking of virtual goods.

Finland's Massive Assembly

I'm going to Finland this August. I want to check out the gaming scene there! Finland: home of Remedy's Max Payne and a lot of mobile game developer startups. What else?

ASSEMBLY '03 - a mega-LAN party. Friendly Finlanders have been saying there isn't that much public gaming culture in these cold northlands - people generally play PC or Xbox in their homes. So maybe that explains the occasional total outburst of widespread collective gaming to remind each other that they exist as a community. There's some stirring pictures from previous events on this page:

It looks like a rave - sitting down. I've never seen anything like it - so many screens emitting white light with bursts of neon in the darkness. From this view there are no people whose heads don't block a screen.

It's an Assembly that I am going to miss by five days. Humph. Maybe the charged particles will still be floating near the arena. Fortunately these arena-LAN events happen all over Northern Europe on a regular basis, so I should experience one some day.

What else is there to see in terms of interactive culture in Finland?

Shall We Play a Game, Mr. Kottke?

Jason Kottke (a blogger, but clearly a gamer first) describes an intriguing encounter with a computer programmed to learn from a game of 20 questions.

First, it's twenty questions. And then it's global thermal nuclear war.

Playgirl

Apparently the very brief interview I did with David Kushner has now appeared in September's Playboy, although I have yet to go pick up a copy.

(Unrelated but disturbing: this month's issue of the venerable men's magazine celebrates "the women of Starbucks." The cover features a heavily made-up brunette in a Starbucks apron and nothing else. How.... glamorous. I guess hard times have hit everybody)

A Little Romance

It's been a Bioware infestation at the Justin and Jane Gaming Palace. I got the new NWN expansion pack, Shadows of Undrentide, and it's a whole new universe of addiction. Justin picked up Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic and, uh, hasn't really put it down yet.

Both are fine adventures in the honorable Bioware tradition, where good guys are good and bad guys are delectably twisted. I managed to convince Justin to switch with me for a few hours so I could check out KOTOR, and I almost didn't let him have the controller back.

I played a female scoundrel and I tried really hard to get her to go on the Dark Side of the Force. One of the guys who joined my party is definitely a Light-side kind of guy, so it was natural that he didn't really seem to trust me very much. In fact he kept complaining when I shook people down for money or collected bounties on innocent heads. But at one point in the conversation, he said, "I'm all ears, beautiful."

My choices were:
1. "I think that's inappropriate."
2. "Beautiful? You've got to be joking."
3. "I like the sound of that."
4. "Are you flirting with me?"

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GGA Newsletter Today we are going to send out the first issue of a GGA newsletter, covering our latest articles and future plans. Sure, you're reading this web site now, keeping up on links and things. But there's an overview to this web site, a sense of history and potential. If you sign up for the GGA newsletter, you'll never have to worry that you'll miss the big picture.

Name: E-mail:

Don't sweat spam - so far, we've only emailed one newsletter in three months. Your address will remain secret in our database, which was coded by a level 6 tech.

Running with the Shadows of the Night

(GenCon Journal entry date: July 27, 2003)

An true-blue Midwestern thunderstorm is roiling outside: violent illumination followed by long rolling growling of the sky. It's blood-racing, exhilerating. The humidity in the air, heavy and warm, puts me in something of a trance - a light-as-air sensation, the edges of reality shimmering just a little bit. I've been up all night and I can still taste the cigar.

Friends of White Wolf are commited to adventure. They have something of a wild reputation - rumors of rowdy reveling gone awry, fist fights, outbursts, that sort of thing. It's true that they passionately embrace the good time. When it's time to party, they will party hard. I was swept along on this tidal wave of drink, bonhomie, and singing, and I'm still gasping for air. I think I can prove now what I've always suspected, that when bad boys are baaaad they are so good.

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Hunting Rare Dice

After fondling our collection of d20 for a few minutes, I was inspired to search the web for strange dice. I've had a pair of dice with symbols for planets and astrological signs on them. I was wondering what else there might be out there.

eM-4-Miniatures has precious dice - obsidian, gold, silver, jade. GreatHall Games has some fairly bizarre dice - dead dragons, compressed naked people. Most of the weird themed dice simply map to a regular six sided die though. I'm still looking for other non-numerical symbol-sets mapped onto dice. I found the directions of the compass. Anyone seen anything else? A bit of odd probability in your pocket!

Not Yet you Fools!

For this month's feature, we're honored to have Richard A. Bartle's thoughts on voice communication in multiplayer online games.

Not Yet, you Fools!

By Richard A. Bartle

When I first heard that the X-Box would support real-time voice communication between players, my heart sank. It didn't sink because the effect it would have on X-Box games; it sank because of the effect it would inevitably have on virtual worlds.

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Homeward

In twenty minutes I'll be downstairs getting a shuttle to the airport. I'm still working on some longer wrap-ups of GenCon. You can get a some of it over at Ogre Cave in the meantime.

Well, Indy, it's been fun, but I miss California. I've got my D&D bag and my 20-sided die and my GenCon sweatshirt and I'm coming home!

Roots

I'm having a fine old time here at GenCon exploring unplugged games, but it's hard to ignore my first love. I admit my eye and my fancy are caught by the electronic booths that are here. One game in particular that intrigues me is Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines. It's got lineage to make a racehorse jealous: sired by Troika, maker of two great games very popular in my household (Arcanum and Fallout); dammed by White Wolf, who created the award-winning pen-and-paper, and LARP-friendly World of Darkness series, and given bones by Valve Source, the amazing engine used in the stunning Half-Life 2.

"We're, uh, obviously going for the M rating," the producer demoing the game grinned. No kidding. It's dark, it's bloody, and you play as one of the creatures of the darkness. It looks gorily gorgeous.

It's slated for spring next year. Oh, yeah. Pack up the dice and bust out the mouse!

The Sound and the Flurry

It's been very pleasant in Indianapolis. The mornings have a freshness to them, a light breeze; the evenings are warm but not overly opressive. But this morning was hot, heavy, and humid; the sky was dark; the wind almost knocked me over.

It's thunderstorm weather.

As nice as everyone is here - the town was very well prepped to receive a bunch of geeks dressed in armor and corsets - still, I would hate to be stuck here because of inclement weather.

Although, I suppose I could always catch a ride to somewhere else in the Midwest!

Rockstar's Upcoming Manhunt

From Slashdot Games, a link to some Gamers.com coverage of Manhunt. GTA plus stealth gameplay plus SmashTV.

Manhunt is an upcoming title from Rockstar North, company responsible for the Grand Theft Auto series. They're a primarily Scottish development team; the GTA games played like an absurdist satire of urban American life. From this preview, their upcoming title Manhunt sounds like a cynical distopian take on a media-saturated society:

The hero -- or, at any rate, the playable character -- is James Earl Cash, a prison inmate who discovers an unpleasant life after death. His lethal injection is faked, and he finds himself in a ruined city that is the property of the Director, a wealthy dilettante who amuses himself by staging violent games of survival. "Carcer City," as it's called, is populated with wrecked buildings, roving armed gangs, and closed-circuit cameras, all of them feeding into the Director's control room. It's Mr. Cash's goal to escape the city without dying for the Director's vicarious entertainment.

They've taken the already downcast world of GTA and made an even darker playground of it. It seems to be a parable on media, urban living and violence. Here's A Clockwork Orange moment for a jaded gamer:

every weapon can be used for an automatic kill if you approach the target undetected. In a neat twist, though, the ensuing death is presented from the Director's perspective, forcing the player into his unpleasantly voyeuristic role.

There's a Valiant Entertainment stealth-promotional web site. It crashed my browser with inline streaming Quicktime videos!

Christian Gaming's No Shelf

Greetings from the Christian Game Developers' Conference. There's a few issues I'm tracking here; one of which is factionalism - reproducing denominations in the world of Christian video games. There are people here who are excited to see action-packed first person shooters based in a world of Christian faith (like N'Lightning's games). Finally there are professional-looking games that modern Christian gamers can enjoy!

But if you look on Sunday School Software's NO SHELF you'll see those games are immediately dismissed, mostly because of their gameplay model. To quote:

"Your mentor and brethren have been captured by demon possessed Roman soldiers." I wish I was making that up. Do we need a game about "demon possessed Roman soldiers" ?? I think not.

They have high standards for Christian entertainment software; maybe they're biased: they also produce Christian educational software.

Seeing internal criticism of Christian games from Christians highlights some of the perils of participating in this particular industry. I'll post more coverage of the conference next week.

Extreme Again

PeterMe says it's time for another round of California Extreme, Northern California's largest classic and contemporary arcade game expo. Jane and I went last year, and she published this article. If you're near San Jose and you've got time this weekend, July 26-27, it's worth the price of admission to get loads of free gaming in. This year they're staying open until midnight on Saturday - a recipe for delicious toasted synapses. We enjoyed some of the panels on Atari history as well, and the chance to run into many game friends.

Looks like they're going to have more discussions this year - if anyone goes, take notes and write a short story that we can post up here!

GenCon: Future of Gaming?

I posted a review of the "Futures Trends in Gaming" panel over at Ogre Cave.

P.S. I didn't get into the LARP last night - I showed up late, talked my way in without having to pay the (!gulp!) fifteen dollars, and when I got in, I couldn't get what was happening. There were lots of friendly people sitting at tables and talking about strange events, but I was lost and I dind't want to be obnoxious newbie girl. Plus I was feeling guilty because I hadn't paid, and didn't feel right about playing. So I observed for a little bit and then went back to my hotel. Yeah, I'm a total wimp.

But tonight! I'm going to check out NASCRAG, with Ben Johnson, who wrote a great article for Play this month. Maybe I'll get to play a pirate! Arrrrgh!

GGA at GenCon

It was a bit strange to walk into a games convention and not hear any noise except the excited breathing of the fans. The music doesn't melt your mind, the lights don't cause seizures. It's actually a rather civilized affair. Nintendo, EA, and Microsoft have modest booths here; it's Wizards of the Coast who have top billing, with Upper Deck Entertainment a close second.

I think I like it.

Anyway, I'm in Indianapolis, at GenCon till Monday morning. I'll be posting some updates here and some to Ogre Cave. If you're here, too, and you see me, say hello! I'm off to play some LARPs.

A Font of Videogames

Bless codeman38 - he's crafted a series of a fantastic fonts inspired by 8-bit videogames: Font Stuff from codeman38, drawn in large part from NES RPGs. Curvy! Blocky! Bubbly!

He draws on this Namco game font museum page in Japan for one font; this page is espcially cool looking, as wallpaper perhaps.

codeman38 explains how he made the fonts, crediting his inspirations and software. And he's released both Mac and PC versions for free download! Now that's good conduct - cheers.

(From the fabulous folks at boingboing)

Xbox Vote of Confidence on GameFAQs

Before today, in months of scanning, I have never seen an Xbox game listed on the front page of GameFAQs.com as one of the Top 10 FAQ pages.

GameFAQs aggregates fan-provided hints and tip-sheets for games. It's indispensible for fans of story-driven or plot-oriented titles, role-playing games, adventures. If you're trying to find a hidden house in Skies of Arcadia, you can't get past the Russian guards on the second level of Splinter Cell, or you're trying to figure out how exactly to create the optimal character for Summoner, some fan has solved the game, solved it again, and solved it a third time, taking detailed notes on the secrets and tricks they used. Not all games get this treatment, however - only games that have dedicated fans, and dedicated players hoping for hints.

Scanning the top ten requested games on GameFAQs is a good way to see what people are playing (it's how I first heard of Animal Crossing). So it's been telling that Xbox hasn't had any games that are popular in this way - Nintendo, PlayStation and PC dominate the ranks. That is, until BioWare's Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic - currently ranked the number one most popular FAQ on GameFAQs.

Jane and I are addicted, wrestling for control of the controller (actually we're under deadline and not playing it much at all. But we think about it often!). It's the first Xbox game I've seen Jane play for more than twenty minutes. Knights of the Old Republic is a great game with perfect appeal for a console role-player. The game meets the pent-up demand of gamers who haven't yet been able to harnass their Xbox for an epic adventure.

Those players won't find many hints in the GameFAQs page for SW: KNOTR, there's only a few slim user-generated FAQ files there so far. By my count, it's taken over 18 months for an Xbox title to generate an active users-helping-users community. Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic looks like a strong long-term vote of confidence in the Xbox platform. What will Bioware do next? And what platform will it be on?

Playing at Pirates

"Wait, it had Johnny Depp and Orlando Bloom? I didn't know that! I should have seen it with you!"

So said Jen, a friend who'd turned down a date to see the movie with us.

So we went - Justin, Lulu, and I - to the dignified, gilded grande dame of East Bay theatres, the Grand Lake Theatre. A few spaces in front of us in the theatre sat an entire row of young girls - aged nine, tops - dressed as pirates. Some wore scarves and eye patches. The coolest girl wore a crushed velvet brocade double-breasted coat. Clearly, this was the second - or maybe third - time they'd seen this movie. The opulent restored surroundings, the thick velvet curtains, the gaudy lights, the gorgeous wall coverings suited the baroque mood of watching a grandly epic, beautifully shot movie about scoundrels of the sea.

So how did pirates get to be so cool?

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Le Mystére de Jeanne d'Arc

Hong Kong-based Enlight Studios is making a Joan of Arc game - an action/strategy game which will allow the player to command key battles of the Hundred Years War.

As a young girl I developed a fascination for the historical figure around the same time I fell in love with horses. I saw the Bernard Shaw play performed three times, and read it several times, I amassed a great deal of biographical material on her from my school library. Needless to say, I can't wait to play this game.

The sketch of her life is familiar: when she was a teenaged girl she heard voices telling her to become the savior of France. A few years and some military victories later, she was burned at the stake by English clerics for being a witch.

That's the challenge with making a historical game - if we were awake in history class, we know the outcome. Doesn't that defy the basic concept of a videogame, which is interactivity? How do you make a compelling, interesting interactive experience while acknowledging what everyone knows, that at the end poor Joan will be killed for political reasons and then, several hundred years later, canonized as a Saint?

And yet historical recreation games, particularily military games, have longstanding appeal. There's something exciting about pitting your wits against tactical and strategic geniuses like Napoleon and Hitler that, completely independent of nasty political implications, gives the mind a satisfying exercise. With the same conditions, and the same troops, could I have won Waterloo? What if I hadn't invaded Russia in 1941?

But what I really want to understand about Joan of Arc I'm not sure can be represented in game-format. As a horse-obsessed twelve-year-old with a name that is just another English version of Jeanne, I wondered what Joan's inner life was like. What were those voices she heard, which she believed to be from God? What inner strength guided her from her simple life as a shepherd to offer her sword at the feet of France? How did she learn strategy, riding, combat? Did she ever have doubts? Did she despair? Did she ever wish to go home and be with her family again? Was she excited by battle? Did she fall in love?

I still wonder these things. And I think someday we will be able to explore these sorts of questions in an interactive format not unlike a videogame.

PlayStation Hydraulics Controller Searching the web for pictures of game controllers, I discovered that ShowTime Hydraulics sells a Playstation Hydraulics Controller that you can use to control the wild gyrations of your hopped-up car.

Rick Jones's Disappointment With Games

Cleaning out a back room in Jane's old house, I found a copy of MechCommander for the PC. I'd never played this title before, but I'd enjoyed other mech computer games. Jane had staged a clever take over of "Knights of the Old Republic" on our Xbox, so I fired it up MechCommander tonight. Old games can still be good times!

I went looking for some reviews - MobyGames is a reliable collection of user reviews for games too old to be for sale. There were three reviews for MechCommander, one of them written by Rick Jones, someone who was pretty disappointed with the game. I did a search on the MobyGames site, and I found Rick Jones is kind of a game curmudgeon: Rap Sheet - User : Rick Jones. Here's some of his one-line game summaries:

"A horribly disappointing bug jar."
"A Disgrace To The Entire Series"
"An innovative but ultimately unsatisfying game"
"The best hockey game there is, but not the best there COULD be"
"An atrocious waste of time - it's not even offensive."
"One of the most disappointing games ever published."

He reviews a wide range of games, and he's seldom satisfied. That's not to say that Rick doesn't like games; he's a fan of strategy and simulations it seems. But for a medium that's reviewed by so many boosters, it's refreshing to read a little bit of Rick Jones, who has trouble looking past the greater potential of games.

Gaming Application

Jane and I are independent workers. If we wanted Health Insurance, it was up to Jane and Justin to get it for us. A friend recommended "EHealthInsurance.com" - sounds like a permanent remnant of the e-glory days of yore.

On the site, I found a plan for $50 a month - I get two doctors visits a year, and coverage after I spend $3500 on my next catastrophic accident. I had a mile of forms to fill out on the web. Have you ever been an inpatient or an outpatient? You mean, have I ever been to a hospital? Sure. What were you there for? Uh, appendix removal. What was the name of your operating physician?

Huh? I'm supposed to remember the name of the guy who pulled out a wad of puss that was my appendix? In 1995? Har har - I barely remember the painkillers.

So I backtracked through my application one or two steps, and looked over the forms I'd already filled out. Which option had I chosen that had resulted in the difficult question? Ahh - "have you been an inpatient or outpatient." Let's try changing my answer to that question and seeing what happens with the next form. Ahah! No nagging request for the name of my appendix remover.

I realized two things from this experience - either health care insurers are cracked, or other people keep piles of paperwork about each of their injuries that I have never bothered with. And, games helped train me to understand these web forms as systems that can be manipulated, rigged to provide insurance faster. I can track the options I chose, and experiment with other variables; much like the dense array of color-coded doors you have to unlock at the end of BattleTech I: Crescent Hawk's Inception, for example.

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Starcraft Bar Mitzvah

Researching the success of Starcraft in South Korea, I came across a Frictionless Insight interview with Blizzard-VP Bill Roper. It contained this delicious quote:

"It's almost to the point that a copy of StarCraft [in Korea] is like a 13-year-old’s bar mitzvah gift: 'Today, my son, you are a Terran.'"

From Being Blizzard Entertainment - August 4, 2002. In June, Bill Roper departed Blizzard.

Galaxies Auctions - It Has Already Begun

Pehaps you can measure the popularity of an MMOG based on its auction potential. Only days after its late-June 2003 launch, users harvested Star Wars Galaxies for real-world resources: Ebay: Items matching ( galaxies ) and Player Auctions. Most of the auctions are for credits (20k credits on Bria server, etc). Some are for buildings, or accounts.

Browsing the Ebay completed SWG auctions, you can get an early sense of the market value for credits, items and characters. Below is just a sample of some of the more expensive and representative auctions; all auctions listed belowhad only one bid, unless otherwise noted:

10 July - Star Wars Galaxies 500,000 Credits Flurry - $550.00

13 July - Star Wars Galaxies 500,000 Credits Chilastra - $350.00 (12 bids)

12 July - SWG Star Wars Galaxies ST Armor Chilastra - $260.00 (18 bids)

30 June - Star Wars Galaxies Game Weaponsmith Starsider - $250.00

14 July - Star Wars Galaxies Alot Of work On Acount SWG - $197.00 (11 bids)

29 June - Star Wars Galaxies Starsider 50,000 Credits - $125.00

2 July - Starsider Star Wars Galaxies Corellia House - $75.00 (3 bids)

30 June - SWG Starwars Galaxies Bria - 50,000 Credits - $20.49 (2 bids)

29 June - SWG Star Wars Galaxies 5000 credits ANY Shard - $19.95

Star Wars Galaxies features a robust in-game auction system, which should help with the redistribution of powerful items. These early EBay auctions show there is still the desire to get ahead in the game with money instead of time, and some players are happy to trade their hours in the game for cash. Perhaps there will be a glut?

Or a crackdown - Star Wars Galaxies is a product of Sony/Verant, the same company behind EverQuest. They banned EBay auctions for in-game characters and items, based on an intellectual property claim. Somehow, PlayerAuctions.com continues brokering EverQuest goods for real-world dollars, perhaps through their own IP legal language. Some of the early Star Wars auctions contain language designed to avoid intellectual property claims against the item sales. It will be interesting to see if Verant/Sony mounts a legal claim against ongoing SWG auctions on EBay. Star Wars Galaxies' Creative Director Raph Koster has spoken on MUD-Dev about the potentially positive tradeoffs for real-world auctions of MMOG property. Perhaps Sony/Verant designed the crafting professions, item decay, and in-game bazaar with EBay in mind.

In the absence of legal action, I look forward to Edward Castronova's first SWG economic analysis, and perhaps Julian Dibbell will see about supporting himself in Star Wars.

Competitive Personalities?

I've got an assignment to track down and profile personalities in professional gaming. Between 1999 and 2001 I worked at Gamers.com, which claimed Dennis "Thresh" Fong as its Chief Gaming Officer. Dennis had won a number of Quake championships, including beating Quake designer John Carmack in a competition where the prize was a Ferrari. So we had this prize Ferrari parked in the foyer of our office!

In Korea, online gaming victors are front-page news. But who in the English language world is that famous? Do you have any professional gamers that you follow?

Taking "Mobile" to the Next Level

Perhaps file this under "Japan *is* form the future":
From the same folks who brought you the Bowlingual comes a tiny, cute little toy remote-control car that you can "drive" with your mobile phone. Perfect for the executive who has everything!

P.S. The Bowlingual, for those who don't know, is a device which attaches to the collar of your dog and translates what your dog is thinking. Although it's sold in toy stores as a toy, it's hugely popular and many dog-owners in Asia apparently swear by it.

Game Farming

I have wanted a copy of War of the Monsters for the PS2 for a while now - I demoed it at E3 2002 and had a blast knocking b-movie creatures around with friends. It seems like it would be a great game to have on the shelf, when two player brawls better suit an evening than conversation.

Even months after it's release, the game is still over $35 retail, and over $25 used. I was hoping for more like $20, especially if I buy it online and have to pay shipping.

Fortunately, Chad Paulson writes in about a new service he's constructed: GameFarmer:

Well, I just launched a service you might find useful. It is a console game price comparison engine called GameFarmer. Unlike other price comparison engines, GameFarmer focuses on video games and allows gamers to sort by new and preowned games. It also allows gamers to set price alerts when a game falls below a certain price (either new, preowned, or both).

The front page lists games that have recently dropped below that magic $20 price limit. Maybe there is some lesson here about prices gamers are willing to pay. Or perhaps games are like movies - some have extended lifecycles: the equivalent of US theatrical release, then overseas, followed by airlines/cable, then video/dvd, etcetera. It's a rare game that doesn't eventually end up in the bargain bin; if you're willing to wait long enough to get a copy. I've filled out my 20$ buy in request for War of the Monsters; we'll see if that comes to pass.

Gaming and the Military

The U.S. Air Force has decided to spend over $200,000 to help build 17 online, multiplayer Xbox gaming centers at 14 bases, both large and small, across Europe.

According to the article, the primary purpose of the gaming rooms is to connect young airmen throughout the region, especially those transiting through Europe, and give them something fun to do during their downtime. The idea for building the online gaming stations on American bases emerged from focus groups conducted with airmen in Europe.

I personally think this is a great idea and disagree with the people who think this is just wasting taxpayer money. Gaming seems to be an easy and affordable way to quickly relaxed stressed-out soldiers while at the same time keeping their combat skills honed. I feel safer knowing my country's armed troops are playing Halo in their spare time rather than cruising the local Red Light district.

In fact, with shooters being so realistic nowadays, playing games such as SOCOM, Operation Flashpoint, and America's Army, could be considered simulated tactical training. America's Army even claims that their game is "an accurate portrayal of Soldier experiences" and "provides young adults and their influencers with virtual insights about the Army."

However, while all these realistic tactical shooters are good for the military, is it good for the nation and the world as a whole to have a generation of children trained by video games to have the shooting reflexes and combat skills of a professional soldier? Are we, as Lt. Col. Dave Grossman, former West Point psychology professor, claims, "teaching our children to kill"?

I don't know. All I do know is that when one of soldiers from the article suggested to his commander that the colonels from the different bases in Europe should have a commandwide Xbox deathmatch, the commander liked the idea but replied, “I’ll have to get some training.”

Good idea, since without rigorous training, the average American teenager could probably kick a US military commander's butt at Counter-Strike.

The State of Game Culture Preservation

In a a post about video game history on Reality Panic, Jason has a link to DiGA, the Digital Games Archive. Founded in part by Andreas Lange, head of the Computer Game Museum in Berlin, DiGA intends to elevate the status of games through historical cultural preservation and advocacy. They are planning a common emulator platform, and they are pushing for the release of old games into the public domain. So far, their front page has some useful news, and there are five games in their archive.

For access to old games today, you're better off visiting Home of the Underdogs, another game culture preservation site. HoTU is a volunteer run, non-commercial, long-standing game community favorite dedicated to keeping aged or unpopular games available to the playing public online. I just posted about them here last week.

DiGA is more official-seeming, with statements of purpose, partner organizations and a public board. They yearn for legitimacy, only posting legally released commercial games. HoTU is an enthusiasts collection sprawling over thousands of pages with fun icons on them and pop-up ads. They yearn for more games, and more donations to support their bandwidth. Between them both, I'm optimistic for the future of game archiving.

Appy Polly Logies

Sorry for the server outage this weekend - should be all fixed now.

Jane and I have been in Japan for a week now. We're on a 33k bps wireless connection, so it's not much for websurfing or multimedia exploration.

It's a warm and wet July, I'm not so comfortable in my jeans. But it's been wildly stimulating - since friends from Tokion introduced us to the young men behind Continue Magazine we've had hours of good conversation about worldwide game culture here in Tokyo. We had a videocamera along for all of it. After we return to the states later this week, we will begin to edit and digest it for articles and posts to GGA.

The Choice to Cheat

I wrote an opinion piece about Xbox live in the June/July issue of Xbox Nation magazine. I said the online game architecture had promise, but the social experience was limited, curtailed. Over the phone Andre Vrignaud from Microsoft promised me there would be enhanced community tools, so you could more easily find friends and stick with them. I came away wondering if the closed network architecture of Xbox Live wasn't a hinderance - limiting the pool of available online players to those owning Xboxes, and curtailing innovation that might come from non-sanctioned community tool development. Vrignaud responded to my skepticism by arguing passionately for the importance of encrypted communications and secure tamper-free game sessions.

For PlayStation 2 online games, developers must create their own online communications and matchup systems. There's no PS2 online user accounts tied to behavior standards and anti-hooligan architecture. The Sony approach is open - they build the machine, developers make the network and community tools that suit their titles.

The most popular PS2 online game has been SOCOM, a tactical team shooter. If I'm not mistaken, SOCOM has sold about as many software copies as Xbox has sold Xbox Live kits. Immensely popular stuff.

But that popularity might be threatened if malicious players are allowed to mess with the game balance; ie, if players are allowed to cheat in human-versus-human online play. GamesIndustry.biz takes up a recent annoucement by Fire International, a game peripherals company that they are releasing a means to cheat in SOCOM for players in Europe. But enterprising fans have beat them to it in the United States - already, according to Jeff Gerstmann at GameSpot, SOCOM has become unplayable for non-cheaters.

Rampant cheating in the unencrypted, open architecture of this popular PS2 online game would appear to vindicate the technological control scheme of Xbox Live. You can't trust players, argues Microsoft, so you have to limit their choices. Xbox Live doesn't trust anything that doesn't have a credit card and a digital signature granted by Microsoft.

But the GamesIndustry article hints at another way to control cheating online - norms. With technological freedom comes social responsibility. Perhaps, GamesIndustry argues, players will boycott any company offering the means to cheat in an online game. You can see scorn and censure for online cheat-enabling in this GamePro article about the Fire International announcement.

Perhaps if there were robust reputation systems in online worlds, players could flag other players who don't follow appropriate rules of conduct. Or maybe the game system could recognize and flag cheaters. There may be people who want to cheat in online games; let them play against people want to play that way. Or is it better not to have the choice to cheat at all?

At Home with the Underdogs

I'm in Japan, with just my old Thinkpad laptop, so I can't play Star Wars Galaxies. Jane has a newer Vaio portable so she can manage single player NeverWinter Nights. In situations like this, during dark nights on long trips, I turn back to DOS games. Today I was visiting the very holy Home of the Underdogs, I was going to download Master of Magic for further play. I have a lifetime favorite title MUDS on my harddrive but I felt like a change of pace.

But to further my game studies, I should be playing old games that are new to me. Games that other people have raved about, or games that are highly rated online that I've never experienced. For example, the Koei series of ancient Asian history strategy games. So I downloaded the acclaimed title, "Romance of the Three Kingdoms." DosBox allowed me to run this 1989 game in Windows XP. But I could not handle the first moment of play - "Master Lu Bu, Please Enter Orders (0-20)." A blessed game archivist has scanned the manual for this game, so it is available on HOTU also. But I don't have the patience right now to read through a 55 page PDF to understand those 20 options and their implications. So I'm back digging through the old stock of Koei games on HOTU, looking for something to download and play at 33k bps - a game with a more modern interface for a gamer with a weakened attention span.

Gaming's Lester Bangs

Michael Goldberg sat across the table for me at a lunch with cloth napkins. He was full of energy talking about a new web site, "Addicted to Noise." It was 1995 and he wanted to use web publishing to salute and chronicle Rock and Roll. He had a guiding spirit in this undertaking - Lester Bangs. I was 20 years old. I didn't know. Who was Lester Bangs?

Only the greatest rock writer ever, Michael raved. I started rereading some of his essays last night. His writing is filled with so much passion, so much of a yearning to transmit music on paper, so much unflinching desire to see rock and roll really rock, to ditch the weak sauce, to leave behind half-baked follow-ons, to relentlessly keep a strong pulse.

Lester Bangs wrote freelance for Rolling Stone in its earliest days. And for music magazines when they were more like zines; thin pages, created and photocopied by fans of new music.

So where is the Lester Bangs of game writing? Where is a game critic who writes reviews and essays suffused with the feeling of long evenings on the couch, or hunched over in your chair attacking orcs and covenant forces and levelling up and all that goes into a long dark personal play experience? Saluting the mystic savagery of time spent in the screen.

Lester Bangs didn't profit much from his excess in prose. But he did benchmark a certain ecstacy for living in media. Maybe the inspirational critic to salute games is today toiling for some small fan sites. Maybe he or she will pass away quietly in a pile of cartridges; and I'll be reading their compilation offline in years to come. But I'd rather hear about them now - anyone got any suggestions?

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