Andrew Vestal and Nich Maragos have written a delightfully engaging, mind-bogglingly thorough piece on interactive fiction on 1up. Bill Mackenty, who sent it to me, noted that it was the best treatment he'd seen in years, and I have to agree. It's long, but worth reading every word.

No, not Kevin Costner. This has nothing much to do with the typical G+G=A fare, so I'll keep it brief:

The Department of Homeland (In)Security is considering a plan to have postal route carriers deliver antibiotics to residences and workplaces in the event of a "catastrophic biological event" (I think we can take this to mean a successful bio-terror incident). What does this mean? This means there is at least one smart individual with one good idea -- awash in a sea of dullards floating miserable strategies -- in the American terror-response bureaucracy. The US Postal Service is, and has been, a shining beacon of efficient execution in American federal institutions. Way back when, "back in the day" as you kids say, when Ross Perot offered to, for a fee, overhaul the US Postal Service, I declared, Good God! Don't let that man anywhere near the post office. There's nothing wrong with the Postal Service.

What I want to know is who this son of a bitch is. Let's make him, or her, president. Hell, let's make him God.

My life has been blasted by comics lately. I attended the Alternative Press Expo in San Francisco over the weekend, and also wound up watching the fictional documentary ("mockumentary" would be both overused, and highly inaccurate) Comic Book: The Movie, but the entirely coincidental pinnacle was Monday afternoon when comics guru Scott McCloud spoke at EA Redwood Shores' Milestone Auditorium. Some of you may be familiar with McCloud's Understanding Comics, which has garnered praise from people both in and out of the comics community. His discussion (and show-don't-tell examples) of how we use symbols and visuals to communicate has made him popular among user-interface designers, visual designers and game designers. Scott spoke about a lot of issues involving comics and gaming, but there was one idea he touched on that struck me as a really cool idea. Now I'm just trying to figure out if it's also a good idea.

If you've kept up with Scott in recent years, you know that he has long been a proponent of the web micro-payments concept, and is now on the board for the Bit-Pass micro-payment system. One of the concepts he brought up at his talk was the idea of using micro-payments for online gaming, which he analogizes to feeding quarters into the arcade machines of yore. Would you pay 25 cents for 100 credits of Bejewelled? What about a dollar for six hours on Everquest? How about a virtual penny arcade that let you play multiplayer Joust or Gauntlet II online with people from around the world? No monthly subscriptions, just pure pay-to-play.

I think there's potential here, especially in the indie and shareware markets. I don't know if I want to give you $5 dollars to play your lo-fi but innovative game whenever I want, but I might give you a quarter to play it a few times. Also, this model could help consumers warm up to the idea of buying something without getting a physical artifact, which along with the proliferation of broadband technologies, could start to give consumers the savings from not needing a box. Perhaps most importantly, it's these small market titles that don't have millions of dollars riding on them. Large publishers don't have any problem putting units on the shelves at your local EB, and they'll just keep on taking your $50 until the market moves under them.

P.S. What would a blog post that starts with an APE reference be without a webcomic link? One of my big wins from the Expo was a print version of chapter one of Monica Gallagher's spiffy webcomic "Gods and Undergrads." Go. Read.

I’m attending a class at NYU called “Writing New York” (no, there’s no ‘in’ in the title). The entire purpose of the class is to show how books, movies, music, and other artwork portray the New York City, both by people from and not from the city.

As many college classes tend to, we have a final project. While the majority of the students are likely leaning towards the analysis of either films or books, I’m trying to do a project on video games that take place in the city.

I intend to take a look at the city as a playing field. I want to look at how games view New York City, both as a quintessentially American city as well as a source of play. I especially want to concentrate on the differences between games developed outside the U.S. and games developed within.

My ultimate purpose is to show video games and how the represent the city. Is the city a hardboiled wasteland like the Max Payne games seem to say? Is it a source of American power that is to be defended, as games like Red Alert 2 or Freedom Fighters seems to say? And is Nintendo’s Mario, generally considered to be an Italian immigrant from Brooklyn, indicative of anything?

Although I appreciate the need for self research and my own ideas, I would like to extend the hand of “oh Jesus, I actually have to do this soon” to you guys. I’ve already got a strong list set up, but I’d greatly appreciate any games that either take place in New York City (including games like ‘Punch-Out’) or games whose environment is strongly influenced by New York City (like Grand Theft Auto III). And if you know, the country of origin would also be incredible.

Furthermore, if any of you have any views on how New York is portrayed in games, what that means for the city, and why a city like NYC would be used, it’d be of great interest to me.

Just wanted to point you all to an entry at MSN today that states that Women purchased more technology in 2003 than men.

I found the numbers staggering myself, but more importantly, I'm hoping that news like this means that at least some of the technology purchased last year was for gaming.

The phone rang at 9am Sunday, interrupting my sleep-in. "Hello," a low male British voice said, "I'm calling from Future Publishing in the UK - do you have time to answer a few questions?"

It was a cross-Atlantic game marketing survey. "I'm going to list a number of movies and books. Tell me if you've seen them, read them, heard of them." Then he had me assign a number value - 10 would make a "brilliant game" and 1 was not worth mention.

Goodfellas? Godfather? Donnie Brasco? Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels? A Bronx Tale? Gangs of New York? The Untouchables? The Magnificent Seven? Guns of Navarone? The Great Escape? Reservoir Dogs? Pulp Fiction? Kill Bill? La Femme Nikita? The Professional? The Good the Bad and the Ugly? Apocalypse Now? The French Connection? Thunderbirds?

The criteria seemed to be a) well-regarded b) has guns.

I gave La Femme Nikita a 9. "Why?" Because she kicks ass. Because she's complicated. Because it deals with themes of betrayal and complex motivations. The French one! I noted. As I spoke, I realized I was talking about a combination of Max Payne and Tomb Raider. It all seems so formula.

I gave Apocalypse Now a 10. "Why?" Because the movie is a beautiful mess. Because it's not much about shooting people on a river in Vietnam (there's Accolade's Gunboat for that [Gunboat: MobyGames|UnderDogs]). It's a descent into madness, an inquiry into civility. The film is based on Joseph Conrad, it's rich with questions of control and othering. So how would you ever translate all that into a game? These are questions for a great game designer.

And as I said that, I pictured a river-based shooting game with occasional cut-scenes of druggie 60s madness, native rituals and dancing girls. Sigh. It's possible to make shit out of anything.

So I tried to impress my interviewer further - the quick way to make these great works attractive as games is to retain some of the original characters. The chance to play Gregory Peck in a game? How would you do that? That idea evokes nostalgia and curiosity.

But the best game made of these works might explore some of the artistic challenges taken up by the media-makers. A Pulp Fiction game could feature two guys with cool hair killing and spilling funk wit. Or it could play with sequence, non-linearity and interlocking narrative.

"Uh-huh. Yes, so -" He read me a synopsis for a game based on the best-selling book "Day of the Triffids" (I hadn't heard of it). The line I remember from the synopsis: "This is a game about guns, vehicles, gangs, and killer plants." I guffawed. Sure - why not. Plants. Theme is only the window-dressing to make me interested in the game. Is there some gameplay innovation that's going to spark my curiosity? I took the high road with my interviewer, but secretly I was imagining myself devoting yet another weekend to ridding a bombed out earth of a terrifying infestation. Yippee! Another sixteen hours of my life spent collecting weapons for a hunt in a post-apocalypic landscape. I should just give in and tell people that's one of my favorite hobbies.

He listening patiently to my comments and followed up with an insightful question: "What word would you use to describe that game? Good or bad." Are those my two choices? "Yes."

Then he asked me what books, movies or TV shows should be turned into games. What a terrific question! I hadn't given that much thought before. I thought of a million movies and books, but it was too easy to imagine the type of game they would be. I wanted to name media that would be challenging, and perhaps beautiful, different virtual worlds for rewarding exploration. My first choice was easy:

One Hundred Years of Solitude, by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. What kind of game would that make? My interviewer hadn't heard of it - I sent him to the bookstore.

What great work would you want to see translated into a game?

I'm living without any channels right now. I have a TV with no antenna, cable, or dish only so I don't have to play Xbox in Hellen Keller mode. When I do have access to TV, I don't watch much any more that isn't news or animated. Nevertheless, when I heard that MTV has a video that uses footage from EA's recently released NFL Street, I had to check it out. For the first time in my life, I was thankful for the existance of MTV.com, which had the video: the cleverly-renamed-for-broadcast "Who Gives a What Where U From" by DJ Kay Slay.

Not to suggest that the conflux of hip-hop and videogames is anything new...

Sure enough, Kay Slay, who seems to be more of an MC than a DJ in this video, is rapping away as we cut back and forth between the usual MTV hip-hop video hoochie-mamas and fronting MCs, and in-game footage from NFL Street, in which Kay is an unlockable character. There's even a little shout-out to EA Sports during the opening IDs/props section. We also get footage of assorted rappers sitting on a couch playing NFL Street, apparently oblivious to the mass of hoochie-mamas getting down less than 10 feet behind them, but then really, what gamer can't relate to that experience?

Aside from being an excellent example of so much of what is wrong with commercial hip-hop, this is significant. The fact that hip-hop, hoochie-mamas, and videogames are allowed to be in the same sentence, let alone the same program is a sign that games and gamers have come a long way in terms of being socially acceptable. Gaming, especially sports gaming, is becoming part of MTV's "lifestyle(tm)." I'm curious if this is a fad, or if like rock-n-roll, it's here to stay.

Of course, MTV doesn't innovate, it trend-spots. When I put some more thought into it, this isn't all that surprising. "Party games" have been a growing genre for a few years now, which means that people somewhere must be playing them. Games have become more and more of a social experience since the rise of simultaneous multi-player titles, so it only makes sense that they've started to gain recognition for being "a way to have fun with friends."

Game culture purists rest easy, I'm fairly certain that it will be a long time before we see MTV sing the virtues of an up-coming Square-Enix title. Most games will remain in the domain of folks like you and I, who wouldn't be invited within a thousand yards of MTV's Spring Break, and a few kids who write romantic Soul Calibur fanfics, but that can't be helped.

So when will I get to see a thug rap video cut together with scenes from DOOM III? Machinima community? Underground hip-hop community? I'm looking at you two.

((An open letter to Naughty Dog, makers of Jak II))

Dear Naughty Dog,

Please hire new beta testers for your play balancing. I am playing Jak II and am stuck at the Destroy Eco Mines mission. It is too hard. WAY too hard. I have consulted FAQs and run through it many, many times but I still can't beat it. I think that this is your fault, not mine. Here is why:

I first heard about Singles: Flirt Up Your Life!, a The Sims-esque life simulator from German publisher Deep Silver, a few months back when I was looking into games that were trying to mine the Sims vein. Well, now Singles has graced the pages of The Sun, and has been, fittingly, farked, so we may as well talk about it.

by Kyle Hebert, guest contributor

Console gaming is big business. In November alone Sony sold over a million consoles.  That said, surely most Americans have, at some point in their life, wielded a control pad and with  joysticks and a few brightly colored buttons guided a plumber, fox, soldier through digitized terrain. Why is it then that movies and television shows can’t get it right when depicting a character playing a video game?

We’ve all seen it before: players with one thumb repeatedly mashing buttons while the other twirls the joystick mindlessly. If their machinations are to be believed then the best way to enjoy whatever game they’re playing is to watch as the character jumps around in a circle.

Some games have production values and costs on par with big budget movies. The least movies and television could do is correctly portray the industry that is nipping at its heels.

With many game companies turning their focus towards an attempt to ape Rockstar's image of a successful "violence-centric" video game archetype, and with more and more politicians harping on the increasing trend of violent video games in our marketplace, it's important to note that the trend for violent video games declined in 2003.

According to a Forbes article which hit the net today, only 11.9% of video games released in 2003 were violent, down from 13.2% in 2002. Of course, the amount of money generated by these titles also fell in a slightly more prounounced percentage, from $913 million in 2002 to $833 million in 2003, a nearly 10% decrease in total income from sales of violent video games with an M rating.

I know a lot of people here don't care for the numbers games when it comes to video game talk, but this is the hard evidence that we need to use to refute the Joe Liebermans of the world who would have the rest of society believe that our hobbies, our jobs, our very existances are becoming more violent, when in fact they are now less-so. The next time anyone brings up the violence card, play this page from Forbes as a trump.