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Robin's Eye for Fashion

Robin's put up her Cosplay photos from Tokyo Game Show 2004! The kid near the end is just the cutest. Robin points out that there was more cross-play this past year (crossdressing cosplay) and I agree. You always had women dressing like male characters - Cloud Strife from FFVII is a perenial favorite, and I am always amazed what the girls can do to their hair - but this year I saw men dressed as schoolgirls and fighting vixens.

I love the TGS maybe more than E3, because of the fanplay aspect. You just have so many eager kids and so many men and women who've spent hours dedicated to makeup and costume to recreate their favorite characters. For some, I think it's a break into a modeling career; but for others, it's sheer exuberance and love for the game.

I often wish E3 would have one day open to the public; but I think unofficial cosplayers (as opposed to the men and women payed by companies to stand around in costume) are considered too otaku, too geeky for the ultra-cool slick event that E3 tries to be. Sometimes I think the videogame industry has a little contempt for its hardest-core fans. And that's a shame.

If you can ever make it to Tokyo Game Show, you should try. This year it's running from Friday Sept. 16 to Sunday Sept. 18; tickets aren't that expensive (about ten bucks) and it's a good time.

Bad Games and the Women Who Love Them

A few weeks ago I was deeply immersed in playing Summoner, an early RPG by THQ that I bought around the same time I got my first PS2. I've finished the game, oh, maybe three times already. And I mean really finished it - completed every side quest and maxed out my characters (well, nearly). As the classic Evil Summoner FAQ eloquently describes, the game itself is a piece of shit. Badly designed, badly written (except for one mildly interesting plot twist), frustrating, and inflexible.

"God, I hate this game," I'd mutter while guiding my clumsy characters through yet another prolongued FedEx quest. "You say that all the time," my boyfriend observed. "So why do you play?"

Sex Slaves and Sacrifices? Sign Me Up!

This game looks CRAZY. I'm sure there have been a lot of other online worlds similar to Sociolotron in theme, and certainly the Sims Online was sometimes put to, er, uses the designers may not have anticipated, but this is the first dedicated adult game I've seen with this level of graphic (and I do mean graphic) sophistication.

We finally have our bona-fide porn of videogames*. That's so much better than the airbrushed soft-core disguised under a thin veneer of "gameplay". This is just pure fetish fantasy come to life, a raunchy chat room with costumes.

I am so there.

*I should add, in the U.S. Japan, of course, has been producing porny games for quite a while. But the ones I've seen have been pretty lame with almost no real interactivity.

PeaceCraft

Last week I had the good fortune to sit in with some guys working in the "Serious Games" movement. They're working on a strategy-sim to model the Israeli-Palistinian conflict. Still early in the process, but they seem sincere in their efforts.

While we were talking, I hit upon an idea that I think I'd like to see implemented. The interesting thing about war games is that the default state of a war game is peace. Think about it: what if you started up a multiplayer game of WarCraft III and none of the players built anything but workers and buildings? The natural state of the world is for the races of WarCraft to peacefully coexist (although you would eventually run out of resources), and this tranquility is shattered by player actions.

So the way you make a peace game is to create a world where the default state is conflict, and the player must act to calm the violence through a variety of means. That's the trick: you've got to show peace as something that's challenging to achieve, not a default state.

Of course, conflict is a more complicated system to model than the "peace" borne of a situation in which nothing is happening (is this truly a state of peace, or just a state of apathy?), but again WarCraft III can already model this system, since this is essentially AIs on different teams.

Once we have a game system where the player is trying to maintain peace through a series of interesting choices (the same as one would make war in a typical Real Time Strategy), we can make things more complicated. What if the player not only needs to maintain peace, but also needs to be in a dominant position over the other players? We start to get into a situation not unlike the card game Nuclear War, where jockying for position runs the risk of taking you out of the game entirely. This sounds like a game I'd want to play.

To be honest, I'd be surprised if nobody else has ever thought this before. Now that comments are working properly again, anybody know why this wouldn't work?

We Got the Cash; Why Aren't We Buying?

Madison at Tekkalogue caught Clarinda Merripen in Boston a couple weeks ago talking about women's control of the consumer dollar, including 66% of all home computer sales. So why aren't game companies taking advantage of that? She cites marketing that alienates women and unfriendly retail spaces as some of the reasons women don't want to play games.

How about high-profile "sexy" games like Merripen's own Playboy the Mansion? You don't think that contributes to the sexist image of videogames? Content is, after all, as important as marketing. You can wrap anything in a pretty box, caveat emptor, but once that box is open you're judged on what's inside.

Not that there isn't room for Playboy Bunnies somewhere in gameland. It's just unfortunate for the industry image that the most potentially objectionable games get the most press, alarming socially conscious groups across the country. But don't throw the baby out with the bathwater, as they say. Just because there are porn movies and Jean-Claude Van Damme movies doesn't mean the film industry can't make an Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Besides, I like me some good porn Van Damme action once in a while.

But we've all heard these arguments before. Women don't like crappy content filled with nothing but boobs and guns. Check. We don't like being pandered to or excluded in advertising. Check. We don't want to be treated like freaks at the Best Buy. Check. We ALL KNOW THIS. Why is this even still an issue? It ain't no mystery. The bigger question now is, why aren't marketers/game developers doing something about it? Is there something systemically wrong with the industry that prevents this very normal, not-that-hard-to-grasp feedback from reaching the people in charge? Is there some natural resistance on the part of game devlopers themselves? Are artists somehow genetically incapable of designing breasts smaller than D cup? Is all this talk of "what do women really want" merely lip service?

I think at this point we need to ask ourselves, do they really even want us to play?

Cuz that's a whole 'nother problem.

Frantically Pushing Square

The PSP apprently has a design flaw feature, which, Sony says, developers will just have to get used to. Turns out the Square button is less responsive than the other buttons. This might not be such a big deal. I mean, when do you ever use Square except when accessing the menu? It's all about X. Sometimes Triangle, as in, "Triangle out of the boring tutorial."

But with the frustrating response of the Square button, developers have a whole new range of gameplay opportunities. Go fishing! Push Square when you see a fish, and maybe you'll get lucky. What a great way to equalize skill levels, by introducing the element of chance.

Look for a lot of cramped thumbs coming your way.

Sell Sell Sell

The first-ever Advertising in Games Forum represents, I think, a sad trend. I'm not one of those anti-advertising purists. I enjoy many ads on TV, I think they have a place in our culture, and I think kids can be taught to be savvy about them.

But I can't help comparing games to other media. Product placement is a big deal in film - there are people who get upset about it. And there was at least a stir in the publishing industry when it was reported that Fay Weldon was paid an undisclosed sum by the Italian jewelry company to write "The Bulgari Connection." I wonder, was that book cheaper for Weldon fans because they were essentially reading just one big ad? Are the games going to be cheaper for the consumers if they're sponsored by Coca-Cola? Somehow I doubt it.

No one, however, bestirs herself for the cause of keeping videogames pure. I look forward, however, to the opportunity for devilish protest as we come up with clever hacks to either erase or transform brand logos. That could be fun. Virtual vandalism!

What Could Happen in the Next Hour?

Let's talk about something fun for Friday. While on tour with Dealership, we watched a lot of DVDs to pass the time during those 12-hour-drives across this vast nation. We discovered that movies are slightly less desirable for road trips, because they require sustained focus. TV shows, however - bitesized, snappily written bits fo fluff - are, like trail mix, perfect fodder for consuming on the go. "Freaks and Geeks" was awesome, and "The Simple Life" was painfully hilarious, but the one that we got really addicted to was "24".

You probably know the premise of the show: events take place in real time, over the course of twenty-four hours of a single day. Sounds somewhat unsustainable - after all, the show takes place in LA, and wouldn't you waste at least half an episode every time a character had to drive somewhere?

But this is fantasy LA, and besides, something bad always happens before the character reaches the destination, in part because the action can never slow down. Which leads to a very interesting type of show - a show that must be open-ended and flexible, that must maintain pacing, that must weave together several threads in a way that makes sense at the end - in short, a modular show, put together in blocks of well-balanced plot-bits.