Luke is My Hero

I think it's only fair play. You deserve to know why we can't give you information. Luke Smith lays it all out for you, and you can read for yourself some of the ridiculous bullshit we deal with. If Square's gonna send us something like this, well, we're gonna tell people.

What makes this insanely crazy is that their policies are about a game that has already come out in Japan. We're getting an import version (like every other game pub). BUT we're expected to adhere to their schedule of embargoes. They're trying to dictate exactly what happens and when it happens to an extent that reaches into the realm of ridiculous.

I think it's important to expose this, because maybe it'll embarrass them. God, I hope it does. And I hope it provokes some changes.

Joss Whedon at Equality Now

Equality Now--a top-flight internation women's charity--honored Joss Whedon recently and he gave a short speech that is characteristically Whedon-esque in both its brief route to the point and witty enough to be profound. Anyone creating female characters in media (yes, game developers, I'm squinting at you and pointing accusingly) should be strapped to a chair with their eyelids taped open and forced to watch this several times over.

Instead of just linking the YouTube video, I'm linking directly to the Shakespear's Sister entry as the more people reading that blog, the better the world will be.

Charlie Cleveland has a Dream

Charlie Cleveland is a young independent game developer in San Francisco. He spent years leading a team developing a Half-Life 2 mod called Natural Selection. He actually made enough money from donations to work full time on the project, but not enough money to develop his more ambitious game designs.

So what's a young independent game designer to do? Charlie took a few months to develop a casual game - hoping that the larger market and royalties will help fuel his ideas for first-person shooters and real-time strategy games. Voila: Zen of Sudoku. Charlie is transparent about the process. It's refreshing to see how someone works hard at driving his game developer dreams.

Play First, Look Later

This article (thanks GameSpot) about two major girl-gaming clans boycotting the "Miss WSVG Contest" on the grounds that its requirements basically require you have a vagina and have heard of this "video game" thing that seems to be so popular these days.

Although the boycott won't create huge waves, I think this is a really good move on the part of the Frag Dolls and the PMS Clan. So far I've had a somewhat mixed reaction to girl-oriented clans. On one hand, I appreciate women aggregating together and creating teams with a unique perspective. However, I've also found it a bit unfortunate that both the media and many of the clans themselves have (intentionally or unintentionally) made them famous for being an attractive novelty rather than a skilled group of gamers.

Regardless, I think this is a great move in the opposite direction. The more seriously these groups take themselves, the sooner we can escape from the disingenuous treatment of women by much of the gaming media, as satirized in Richard Cobbett's recent article, Writing a 'Girls in Games' Article. Yeah, it's a huge gap to be filled, but I'm glad that some groups are willing to at least try to change perceptions.

Looking for Lester Bangs

Here's another article lamenting the lack of, in this case, The Lester Bangs of videogames.

Hate to break it to you, but Lester Bangs is dead. He died in 1982. When he was alive, Rolling Stone hadn't become the boob-laden commercialized sad rag it is now with an endless parade of one-hit wonders and Britney Spears clones on the covers. The Ramones were still playing. And alive.

Maybe there is no Lester Bangs of videogames because there's no Lester Bangs of ANY medium. Not anymore.

But let's dissect the article a little more. It's very easy to say there's no Big Important Critic of videogames when videogames themselves are not as big as films or music. You simply don't get famous writing about videogames. Because if you did, surely Chuck at Esquire would have known about Clive at Wired, who wrote a review recently of Jaws Unleashed that began:

The bikini-clad swimmers have no clue what's coming.

Deep beneath the surface of the water, I glide like a cruise missile of death, quietly circling my prey and picking my angle of attack. Then I sense an opening and bam: I shoot upward, sink my teeth into one wriggling leg, and begin ripping my prey back and forth. Blood mixes with the frothy water-bubbles as the shrieking begins, and pretty soon I'm snacking on yet another resident -- oops, former resident -- of Amity Island.

He also apparently doesn't know about the whole movement under the unfortunate moniker "New Games Journalism" and all its practioners who, although you may argue over the legitimacy of their project, do in fact attempt exactly what Klosterman longs for.

The problem is, no one really cares for the stuff beyond a small group of like-minded folks who are mainly writers and developers. Gamers, for the most part, don't care to read about how a game makes you feel. Without an audience, fine writers who style themselves critics languish unread on blogs or in tiny niche websites.

But I also think he's misunderstanding what videogames are. Klosterman quotes Steven Johnson saying that videogames are more like architecture, which is a very interesting point (and when was the last time you read architecture criticism in a magazine?). But Klosterman confuses architecture with action:

But there's one (rather obvious) difference between architecture and video games: Architecture is static. I live in a building that has fourteen floors, and that's always true. I can't manipulate the floor plan of my apart¬ment or the number of bricks in the wall. What makes video-game criticism complex is that the action is almost never static. Unlike a film director or a recording artist, the game designer forfeits all autonomy over his creation—he can't dictate the emotions or motives of the characters. Every player invents the future.

Uh... yeah, sort of. But outside of a play space like Second Life, actually, no player invents anything; she merely determines the sequence of certain events, and sometimes, the quality of those events. It's a very limited sort of freedom. The architecture that Johnson's talking about is the very code of the game, which is identical for everyone. We have different reactions to it, sure, but then, we have different reactions to films as well.

The difference really is why we want to read about certain writers' reactions to films but not about their reactions to games. So the answer is, there is a Lester Bangs, there are probably hundreds of them, but no one gives a shit.

Sex on the Second Day

This is a long overdue entry, but I've still been thinking about last week's Sex in Videogames Conference. My judgement in the last post was hasty - it was only the first day after all, and on the second day, the gathering seemed to hit its stride. The initial awkwardness faded, and a comfortable confidence set in. It was such a small group of people after all - we can talk intimately about intimate subjects that way, no?

The best talk of the second day was Sheri Graner Ray's lecture on designing adult-oriented videogames with a female audience in mind. Her point was about the different ways men and women receive physiological responses from stimuli: for most men, the visual image does the trick. For most women, an emotional connection does it. So you could effectively market BloodRayne to men by stripping her down in Playboy, but for women, Graner Ray suggested putting a profile of Prince of Persia in Seventeen alongside a picture of him walking his horse along a beach.

I thought this example was particularly pertinent because, well, the Prince is a hottie. And I've always loved him. And I got a thrill out of the fact that he was talking to me, in the game. "Shall I go on?" he would say softly, so concerned and mindful of my needs. How often does that happen in a videogame?

Anyway, I'm working on a video report of the conference that should be up in the next few days. Um, when I have time to finish it!

How Can You Make Sex Boring?

Somehow, the talks I saw at the Sex in Videogames conference managed to. I'm not sure if it was just the monotonous speakers or the over-simplistic presentation, but what should have been hotly provocative and challenging was a big snoozefest - at least, the first day was. Brenda Brathwaite gave a great opening lecture and then it all sort of...ran out of steam.

Let me emphasize that I'm fully behind in general and sex in videogames. I may not play much Virtual Hotties 2, but I fully support the idea of it. I do want more sex in mainstream games, too. I've been known to ... experiment in online environments, although I haven't ever had a full-on cyber-affair. So I am eager to explore these topics, hear what other people think, what they've discovered; I want to be challanged and stimulated.

Maybe the problem is that talking about sex is much more boring than doing it? Maybe they should just have monitors and PCs set up with various sexy software running and just let us explore?

I'm going back in today - maybe there will be some interesting revelations.

Sex Games Should Make You Feel Sexy...Right?

Brenda Brathwaite's talk this morning was a shot of espresso to start off the conference. She's a relaxed, funny speaker who isn't afraid to take a tangent or a stand. She began with an overview of the important moments of the year, both good and bad: Hot Coffee (today, she noted, is the one-year-anniversary of the controversy), legislation, the GLBT WoW Incident; on the positive side, the formation of the IGDA Sex SIG and the growth of MMOEGs (that's Massively Multiplayer Online Erotic Games of course.)

There's a lot more to the talk and I'll be interviewing her later, but after the hour I was left wondering something. The game industry has tried so hard to insist that violent videogames do no make people feel violent; how do we reconcile that message with trying to make sex games that make people feel sexy?

The reason that violent videogames don't make me necessarily feel violent is because shooting enemies becomes merely a game mechanic after a while, not unlike pushing crates or whacking a mole on the head or fitting the right block into a stacked pattern; so how do we prevent sex from being merely an empty mechanic?

This goes back to the much broader question of how we can make people feel with games the way we can with films and books. But as those media have taught us, simply having a sex scene is not enough - it must be a good, compelling sex scene. Most Hollywood sex is pretty unerotic to me; to be truly hot, there has to be something - special, I'm not sure how to define it.

Hmm, I'm going to have to think about truly hot moments in film history for a moment, and for that I think I'm going to need some coffee. More later.

Women Like to Talk About Sex More Than Men

The popular belief is that men think about sex once every seven seconds, but when you look at who actually talks publicly about sex, women are overrepresented. Women are the ones who write the sex columns in magazines, the ones who study pornography academically (the leading researchers of which are women), the ones who spearhead discussion on sex in videogames - which brings me to the conference on the subject that is starting tomorrow in San Francisco.

The truth is, women are just as obsessed with sex as men, and may be more willing to admit it!

Perhaps men find it a wee bit embarrassing to spend so much time discussing sex because for them it's so obvious - boom, it's right there, no mystery about it. Or perhaps they feel there shouldn't be a mystery, and when there is, it feels like a lack of manliness. Thus we have tons of articles in popular press about how women can and should reach orgasm, but if you're a dude and can't get it up, you confide in no one but your doctor.

Women also seem more willing to investigate the effect sex has on other aspects of life, and from an early age. Popular reading material for young girls almost always deal with a sexual coming of age; boys seem to be more into books and comics full of superpowerful men who band together to overcome adversity, sometimes gorily. So maybe it's not too surprising that the keynote speakers for the Sex in Videogames conference are women: Sheri Graner Ray and Regina Lynn. Looking over the list of speakers, also, I see that this the most gender balanced videogame conference I've ever attended: a third of the invited speakers and panelists are female (compare that to less than a quarter for the Game Developer's Conference).

In any case, I'll be going to hear Sheri and Regina and Brenda Brathwaite and many others talk on Thursday and Friday, and it should be very interesting.

Spontaneous Fashion

Saturday evening I went to a local fashion show that was put on by four Berkeley stores, combining vintage and new clothes, including my favorite, remix/recycled clothes - the art of taking old clothes and hacking them to make something modern and cute and different. A really bland GAP sweater in mint green got the next cut out and then a cute soft fuzzy white collar was knitted and affixed, for example. I wish I'd taken photos but alas, I forgot my camera.

But something occurred to me as we were sitting there watching the show - most fashion shows are so orchestrated, so designed. Hair and make-up are in place, the clothes have been picked, the models all walk a certain way. Well, not in this fashion show so much - the models, many of whom were amateurs, had a lot of fun on the catwalk, improvising moves and smiling and interacting with the audience. I thought it was charming, but I wanted it to go even further...what if you could have a spontaneous fashion show? What would that look like? Like a mix of Project Runway and So You Think You Can Dance, maybe.

Project Runway is sort of the Iron Chef of apparel design: the contestants get a theme, or some kind of limitation, and they have a short time to produce an outfit. I'd make it a little looser - it would be more about styling, not designing. So you'd have a big rack of items to choose from, and your job would be to dress the model in, say, two minutes, give her a "motivation" or a story to act out, and send her out on the catwalk.

Better yet, pick out things for yourself and walk down the catwalk! If you are really crafty, you would whip up on-the-spot alterations to items. Spontaneous fashion! Could be fun.

How Free Do We Want to Be?

Ernest Adams, who sometimes jokingly refers to himself as a cantankerous old game designer, is really anything but: his speeches at the GDC are often inspirational, exciting, and stiumlating. His latest column introduces an idea he calls "Perlin's Law" after NYU's Ken Perlin, which attempts to express the tension between freedom and storytelling in a game.

The theory posits that games have a "credibility" budget which both the player and the designer can break if the story is pushed in an altogether improbable direction. It's an interesting way to think about balance.

Of course, designers have always limited the freedom of players, even in "open" games like GTA or Oblivion. But how far do you push it? It seems to me that one thing Adams doesn't talk about is how to quantify something as subjective as credibility. I'm not sure you can, outside of your own perception. Something dismissed as wildly improbable by some might actually be a real news story, as bizarre as it may be; and other folks seems to have no problem believing in stuff that I find completely crazy (uh, Scientology for example.) In the context of a game or a film this discrepancy is what causes disagreements over the quality of a piece of work.

To be clear, I'm not talking about "realism" in games; simply the internal coherence of a game world, which must seem predicatble to some extent if the player is to feel like a real player in it. Moments that break that coherence can be difficult for the player, but how does one measure how difficult?

I Want to See District 13B

I know it's going to be silly, District 13B, because it is Luc Besson's work after all, but I do admit to fondness for Yamakasi, a simplistic but well-meaning and fun-loving film about, well, yamakasi, the French phenonenon that resembles the better-known parkour, or "free-running." A wikipedia entry attempts to distinguish between the two terms, but I've heard practioners use the terms interchangeably. Practiced in the banlieu since the 80s, both disciplines involve getting from one place to another with free movement. It's hard to explain, easier to show a video, a sort of brief instruction by one considered the father of parkour - David Belle - who, incidentally, co-stars in the movie that I want to see.

The New York Times review of the film guessed that parkour was some sort of martial art, but one of the things I love most about it is that it's at heart non-violent. It's creative, it makes playful use of urban spaces that are often inhumanely designed - and transforms them into a rich, completely open playground. So, the movie takes that and adds a twist, which I'm not crazy about, but it'll still be neat I hope to see the amazing physical feats of talented practitioners.

Sweet Technology

Sometimes I start feeling disaffected with modern life and yearn to retreat to a simpler place. But then I'd be missing out on clarifying chocolate, chocolate that promises to "reduce irritation and redness."

Technology will save us, if not form ourselves, then at least from acne.