Souris and Silvio of Invasiv Studios NYC went shooting. It was Souris' first time handling heavy metal, rifles that resemble the serious tools of infantry combat from TV and the movies. She didn't shoot as well as Silvio, she thinks, because she doesn't play first-person shooters. But she did watch Predator at some point in her life, and she had a ripe film quote to share as she sprayed bullets across the field.

The French Twist being a garrot. Getting directly to the point: in a comment posted to Jane's Manhunt entry, someone mentioned having a "scholarly" interest in the game. I discovered that I do too, in addition to merely wanting to give any game a shot. But especially as the survival/horror genre contrasts between games of Japanese and western origin. And I'm also particularly fascinated with games purporting to have some sort of plot. I think it would be interesting to play through and compare, say, Fatal Frame 2 and Manhunt: what scares on the Pacific Rim as opposed to what's supposed to give us the creeps western style.

I clicked and clicked, handing out pamphlets, canvassing door to door, and holding up a Howard Dean sign in public. In the end I recruited 159 Iowans for Dean.

Howard Dean for Iowa is a Shockwave game, made by Persuasive Games - Ian Bogost and Gonzalo Frasca. The title consists of three mini-games designed around building up Dean followers in the early Democratic primary state.

It's the arcade/action side of a real-time strategy game, resource gathering through fast clicking. But there's no resulting overview, no political resource allocation game. That would probably have overwhelmed the time and resources available. Think of Dean for Iowa as the first part of Populous, - gathering followers before the gods are able to weild their powers. Perhaps it's just a taste of what's to come - it is a game just for the Iowa caucus, after all.

The Howard Dean for Iowa game does remind us that the political process is made up of rote tasks performed by dedicated followers - the earlier in the process the better. So as a political education project, it is rudimentarily successful - recruit early and often. As a game? It's good for about ten minutes. Which ain't bad I guess. The game begs a strategic element - something to give it replay value. Having more detailed modelling of citizens and neighborhoods would have been exciting - playing politics with social networks, targeting hubs. It is the first US political promotion game I can remember playing, so for curiosity it scores points. And points for reaching out to young audiences with a young medium.

Dean for Iowa has about as much depth [of gameplay] as Frasca's September 12th, but less mystery. With the directions spelled out, you reach the limits of possibility in the play-space faster. Can't have much mystery in a recruitment tool, I suppose.

After a few rounds, my favorite mini-game was the "hold the Howard Dean sign up at the right time" game because it was the fastest. I wanted to get to the end of the caucus period. Finishing, I was rewarded with my score. And the tantalizing note, "Your recruiting results will influence future games of other players." Ultimately I was curious for more - I wanted to stop the rote tasks, and play Joe Trippi, commanding my followers in the political power pyramid. Version 2.0 - South Carolina perhaps?

Videogaming and Its Discontents on Salon.

Maybe an extreme opinion - I wanted to shake things up a little.

It was inspired in part by Bowler's Death of a Hobby article, so thank you! Thanks also to everyone I was able to interview and just bounce ideas off of - your brainpower and perspective were invaluable. Thank you so much!

We are reminded by animated holiday specials that this is a season for giving as much as it is for receiving. This year, the games industry has bestowed upon us many gifts, from Wind Waker to WarioWare, Final Fantasy XI to Final Fantasy X-2. While (most) of us exchanged good money for what the games industry gave this year, and a few of us also offered up hours of toil, I can't help but wonder, what gift would you bring if Game Industry invited you to a party? Shiny new review formats? A box of original design concepts? An open can of whoop-ass?

I've been playing an inordinate amount of Crimson Skies on Xbox Live. Though a great many gamers may be playing a great many more games than I, as far my gaming goes, I'm at this one quite a bit. To the point I'm waking up with muscle cramps in my hands and arms. A lot, you see.

For years now we in the video-game community have had to look up to the film industry as far as art is concerned. Obviously, since there are no real limitations other than the animation and modelling tools themselves, the sky's the limit as far as film is concerned when it comes to poly counts, texture resolutions, mutli-passes, etc.

We've always been picking up their scraps, as it were. Trying to squeeze in this technique here, possibly adapting that technique there. Occassionally lusting after the next generation system so we can push the envelope one more inch closer to what we see on screen, graphically.

But in a twist of fate, it would seem, the film industry has something to learn from videogames.

In the newest LotR movie: Return of the King, Peter Jackson turned to programmers to have the hordes of minions and soldiers react in real time to events happening on the battlefield.

"So each of these computerized soldiers is assessing the environment around them, drawing on a repertoire of military moves that have been taught them through motion capture - determining how they will combat the enemy, step over the terrain, deal with obstacles in front of them through their own intelligence - and there's 200,000 of them doing that."

This sounds familiar... Oh wait! It's like what I take part in everyday at my job! Motion capture animation sequences, and put them in the game engine while programmers script them to be reactions to in-game events. The only difference here is scale; we can't possibly have 200,000 characters onscreen behaving independantly. Hell, we'd be lucky to have 200,000 characters onscreen; it's a limitation of the hardware.

The only thing I found upsetting about the article explaining all of this is that there was no reference to how similar - if not downright borrowed - all of this is to video-game AI. All they've done here is re-create the wheel on a much larger scale (granted, a very impressively large scale). The only thing that's new about this is that it's in a movie, and not a video-game.

"So to create these individual agents, there was a code that was especially written and developed," Taylor says, adding that it was like being involved in a living work of science fiction.

We know, Mr. Taylor. We've been living and playing in virtual worlds of science fiction and fantasy for decades now. Perhaps you might like to join us.

Chris Hecker emailed me last week: "Masaya Matsuura sent us a copy of Mojibribbon. Doug and I are going to play it. But you need to come translate."

This is one game that won't be ported to North America or Europe. It's far too Japanese. Developed by the auteur Masaya Matsuura at his niche company NanaOn-sha (home of the inimitable Parappa the Rapper and Um Jammer Lammy), it's a game in which you write kana to the rhythm of a Japanese rap.

Yeah, it's as weird as it sounds. But more beautiful than you can imagine.

Gameplay is devastatingly simple to pick up: you use the analog stick to create words in rhythm. You move it up to ink your brush, and press down to write. If you don't have enough ink on your brush, the letter are light and hard to read; if you have too much, they letters are blotchy. If you press down too lightly you skip a letter; if you press too hard, the letters come out thick and clumsy. I've never seen a game before that made aesthetic harmony the goal of the game.

My copy of Manhunt came yesterday from Rockstar. The FedEx guy who dropped it off joked, "Well, there goes your afternoon, right?"

"Oh, right, ha ha." I signed for the package.

The package, this morning, still sits unopened on the coffee table. I stare at it with trepidation. I'm home, alone. I've turned in my article assignments and I deserve a break. The fact is, I am scared to play this game. Scared to even take it out of the package.

Can someone come over? Just let me hide my eyes on your shoulder during the bad parts, and tell me it's going to be okay.

"Raking muck in the Sims Online" is a fascinating piece on Salon about an online journalist in TSO whose account got terminated by EA. The intersection of law and the virtual is something I studied last semester with Larry Lessig and Julian Dibbell at Stanford, but I'm afraid I'm no closer to deciding what is right, if there is a right.

One factor is that the aims are very different. EA's goal is to make money, with the ancillary goals of protecting the brand, protecting the paying customers, and protecting future earnings. Ludlow, the journalist in the article, has a very different aim: he's a philosopher using the environment of TSO to experiment and gather data. For a time the two can co-exist but it's inevitable that they'll clash at some point. My question though is, capitalism (and, therefore, law) naturally rewards the owner; are there times when we ought not side with the doer, in this case Ludlow? There is no money in what he does, but that doesn't mean there is no value. In fact, there may well be value for EA in this, as well as for society. There is no good financial reward system that rewards the pursuit of knowledge, or art, even when it benefits us all.

These are problems that crop up when people begin to behave in a world as if it were free; when it fact it is paid for and therefore owned by a corporation. It's simulated freedom.

Currently I'm writing about the Simgallery project, curated by Katherine Isbister and Rainey Straus. Although I am not aware of any legal issues surrounding their situation, I wonder how copyright will work. All art created in the environment technically belongs to EA. Which isn't a problem - yet. An installation of Simgallery is slated to open on January 16th at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts as part of their Bang The Machine exhibit.

(Incidentally, I think that's not a very good name for the series. Bang the Machine is the title of a documentary about Street Fighter tournaments. It has the aggression and the suggestion of arcade that's entirely appropriate to the content. The Yerba Buena show has no arcades. Hm. I don't really get it.)

Every once in a while, somebody at GGA likes to talk about the lack of quality writing in game reviews. Call it payola. Call it 8-out-of-10 syndrome. Call it the collective identity-loss within the critical community in general.

All of this making even more remarkable David Smith's review of Manhunt at 1up.com.

From the opening of the review:

My experience with Manhunt progressed through four distinct stages, and instead of ticking off the usual bullet points about graphics, sound, control, and the like, I'd rather just describe those stages in sequence. It makes it easier to explain what Manhunt does well, and to explain the point at which I think it ultimately fails.

So my next question for all of you is, is this a step in the right direction when compared to the usual technical rundown?

"[Interaction] is the Holy Grail... the undiscovered country."

-Chris Crawford, December 11, 2003

Today, curmudgeonly game designer Chris Crawford (Mobygames bio) dropped by to give a talk at my grad program. With a swath of publishing credits and a yen for making challenging statements, Crawford is the sort of person you want to listen to, but also the sort of person you want to disagree with. Crawford hasn't played a videogame in 5 years (except for The Sims, which he played for an hour when Will Wright sent him a copy, looking for feedback), having decided there is nothing more they can teach him. He has tired of game design so much that he is now calling for the founding of a new discipline of interactive entertainment software that will "call itself something else" and have absolutely nothing to do with the games industry. Like I said, challenging statements.

What's Chris Crawford's big problem with modern game design? It's too focused on things, and not enough on people. Crawford asks us to try disecting game interactivity into its base verbs. At his talk, he disected a first-person shooter, but I'll simplify further with an example I used in an essay I wrote for this site a few months ago and analyze Asteroids. Asteroids has three verbs: turn, thrust, shoot. This is a fairly limited vocabulary of action, and not one that is terribly engaging to our humanity. Crawford dares game designers to think of a game's verbs as a job description, and if a game's verbs don't sound like an interesting job, then it's not going to be a worthwhile game. Crawford went on to say that while The Sims is, in his view, a first step in the right direction, it still fails in this regard. The Sims, he says, is about making dinner, cleaning, showering, going to the bathroom, and going to work. Hitchcock once said, "Drama is life with all the boring parts removed." The Sims might be seen, then, as life with all the interesting parts removed.

Interestingly, MMOGs don't fare any better in this regard. MMOGs make up for the fact that we don't possess the algorithmic chops to design really good interactive characters by putting us in a world with hundreds of other people. The problem again is that people are dull. The sorts of stories that we associate with the marvelous fantasy and science fiction worlds that MMOGs invite us to play in cannot happen when interaction comes largely from other people. Characters in movies and books do not act like actual people. Dialog is not just conversation. As was recently quipped, "Star Wars: Galaxies isn't Luke Skywalker's Star Wars, it's Uncle Owen's Star Wars." Crawford likened MMOGs to a window: We can stand on opposite sides of a glass window, and we'll each see each other perfectly, but the window will never give us impressionism or cubism. Even if the game designer's art, interactivity, is crude right now, like all arts, time and the right people will bring us better things than mundane reality.

Crawford exists in a space that many find uncomfortable. He has been a creative force behind many successful game projects, and he was the first person to really write about computer game design, but these days much of what he champions seems at odds with reality. Visionary? kook? Both? In any case, worth paying attention to.

by Mike Drucker

Portraying video games in art outside of video games themselves is a tricky task.

Many movies made about, based on, or even featuring games have often failed to show the human side of gaming. Games are often either portrayed as violent twitch experiences or all-encompassing virtual reality worlds without boundaries.

The written word has an even greater difficulty. Studies of games in recent history have either strayed in the territory of too technical, creating vast amounts of soulless documentation on how games play, look, and sound, or have been somewhat too human, focusing solely on how the games look and anecdotes behind their creation rather than what makes the games interesting.

Video games, the interactive art of corresponding actions to on screen visuals and audio cues, are inherently difficult to show.

But who’d have thought that it’d be a poet from Las Vegas to finally get the feeling that goes along with video games right?

“Blue Wizard is About to Die” (an obvious reference to Gauntlet 2) is poet, musician and writer Seth “Fingers” Flynn Barkan’s third book, and the first about his childhood obsession: video games.

Take-Two Interactive has agreed to remove the line "Kill all Haitians" from the game Vice City. The NY Times covers it here (free registration required). Gamespy covers it here. IGN has Take-Two's official statement and apology.

I think it's pretty clear that there is a massive, and willful, misunderstanding here. The game does not urge players of the game to kill Haitians. It's improbable that the game developers have a grudge against ethnic minorities in the United States. What's happening here is that game is engaging in very dark satire of American racism and race politics. Imagine a character in a movie saying this line - it's entirely dependent on context whether or not you believe the director or writer of the film actually agrees with such a statement. More often, they use the medium to point out how fucked up the world really is, that there can be characters in it who act and believe in this way.

The thing is, the Haitian community in the United States is discriminated against, sometimes violently, as are so many ethnic minorities. I would argue that the game exposes this blatantly, and that's what's scary to people. In post-Affirmative Action America, we don't like to have our deep-seated racial tensions thrown in our faces like that. We'd rather have a game - which after all is only entertainment, it's not supposed to make you uncomfortable or, god forbid, make you think - that presents that world as a less violent, less racist place than it really is.

There's a place for that. There's a place for optimism and eternally sunny skies. There's hope in Marioworld, in the technicolor positivity of Nintendo. There's a place for the unbridled upbeat athleticism of SSX, where a ten-year-old boy and a 19-year-old girl can compete on equal terms with the 26-year-old white male. That's great, of course! I love that. But that's a fantasy - a progressive, inspiring fantasy.

Isn't there also a place for Vice City? For the cheeky, dirty, nasty, rough-edged take on a sometimes ugly world?

When videogames truly grow up, we may be unhappy with some of the results. There will be upsetting games. There already are. But I think Take-Two is a little ahead of its time. Because they're pushing the boundaries now - even if they push them for shock value - ultimately we're all growing up because of them.

I never mentioned it before, because I was overloaded with stuff at the time I think, but I contributed an editorial article to Insert Credit a little while ago, called Room to Play.

I'm sure you've all seen Insert Credit. If you haven't, you should check it out. Lots of smart, and smart-ass, writing.

This morning, CNN reports that Japanese video game maker Taito will rerelease the all-time classic Space Invaders -- from the accompanying photograph, apparently the somewhat less classic color version -- to the United States in an arcade enclosure. Taito plans to sell the units through Namco, which retains U.S. distribution outlets, for a reported 300,000 yen. That's 24 million rupiahs. Seriously, though, it's a chunk of change. Approximately US$2,800. Immediately, you must be thinking, as I was, that Taito's marketing people have lost their pachinko balls; or they're shipping the units through Thailand, where the pressboard arcade enclosures are stuffed with special, organically grown all-natural "padding" and then ferried along to North America.

I love the idea of playing with traditional forms of feminine arts. Knitting, for example, is fascinating to me because you're converting the one-dimension of string into a two dimension textile which can then be wrapped around a three-dimensional body and then unraveled to express the fourth dimension of the passage of time.

A more pointed take along those lines is Subversive Cross Stitch. There's nothing inherent about cross-stitch that needs to be "God Bless Us Every One" or "Home Sweet Home"; in fact you can stitch up your own more appropriate slogans as you desire: "Get Lost" or "Happy Fucking Holidays."

Wintertime makes me want to do crafts. I think I'd like to make up my own crossstitch patterns. Any suggestions on how to do that? Do I just sketch it out on graph paper?

[Thanks to Audra for the link!]

Next week a 2nd century Roman 20-sided glass die goes up for auction at Christie's.

If you've got 4-6 thousand dollars to spare, I suggest you enter your bid now.

The catalog entry notes: "Several polyhedra in various materials with similar symbols are known from the Roman period. Modern scholarship has not yet established the game for which these dice were used. "

Well, I think *we* all know what game it was used for! But my question is, before the fantasy Middle Ages, in what setting did the Romans play D&D? Ancient Egypt? Biblical times? Babylonian?

[Many thanks to Stephen for the link!]

My growing dissatisfaction with the games produced by the industry has been troubling me of late. I’ve purchased three games this past month, and although they all please in the average sense, nothing is blowing me away. Prince of Persia was a sure-fire bet to be a crowd-pleaser, and while my take-away experience with it was in general a positive one, I can’t get past the negatives, nor the lack of anything truly innovative. Yes, it’s a good game. No, it doesn’t get my vote for game of the year, and I would not have given it the insanely high marks it’s been getting (as high as 9.6).

That’s not to say that the rest of you shouldn’t like it. Hell, love it. Please. Lust after the beautiful wall-striding and swinging backflip jumps off a wall to a nail-biting ledge-grab. If you enjoy their combat system, kudos to you. I want to be sitting where you’re sitting.

But the problem doesn’t lie with the game-developer, or general consumer. It’s me. I’m afraid that I’ve killed my only remaining hobby.

Read Gender Inclusive Game Design by Sheri Graner Ray today (review forthcoming; short version: worth it), and one particular chapter awakened my inner hamster and got my wheels spinning. The question burning itself into my grey matter is this: Is there a point at which a game avatar becomes sufficiently cartoony or otherwise unreal that they effectively lose their gender? Is Mario emasculated? Is Pacman actually a man? And what's up with the male lead from Final Fantasy XII?

Are there game characters that you don't think of as being gendered while playing, but, arguably do belong to one or the other?

Are there characters that make you feel particularly aware (perhaps uncomfortably so) of their gender?

I'm particularly interested in what the gamer girls feel about these questions, but I guess our resident gamer guys can answer too.

My sister has been playing a lot - and I do mean a lot of SSX3. I've played it quite a bit too. But while I'm busy buying Kaori a tiara and a teddy-bear back-pack, Anne has pumped all her hard-earned cash into attributes.

"How can you?" I say, somewhat perplexed. "Aren't you tempted to buy her new clothes?"

Anne fixes a steely gaze on me. "Listen, Zoe came from a tough background. She's used to poverty. She's not going to waste her money on accessories. She wants to win."

Roleplaying a racing game! I love it.

Hey all, I've been thinking about this a lot lately - what to do about irrelevant comments. Bascially I'd like to keep the conversations at a certain standard, and to do that sometimes we have to weed out the threads that go nowhere. Up until now I've just done this by hand, where I thought it was necessary. I hate to eliminate comments - part of the goal of the site is to have intelligent conversations, and that takes a diversity of voices.

But I'm getting pretty tired of willful sniping, personal attacks, and trolling, not to mention the damn spamming. So I've set down an experimental policy, on which I place the burden of responsibility on the editors! Thanks, guys!

This is also reprinted in the "About" section.

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