Games: December 2005 Archive Page

Subjective journalism does NOT mean glorifying the writer. Notice how, by the end of "Bow, Nigger" we know everything about the player's experiences, the thoughts, feelings and theories that emerge during the short light saber battle, but we know nothing about the author him/herself. It's subjective, but it isn't self-publicising. It isn't autobiography. Hunter S Thompson's own best work -- in my opinion -- was his political journalism in which he made monsters out of Richard Nixon, George McGovern et al, rather than himself. The modern videogame consumer doesn't need gonzo heroes acting like Loaded staffers, it needs compassionate, knowledgeable writers. --Keith Stuart --State of play: is there a role for the New Games Journalism? (Guardian GamesBlog)

I added the link in the body of the above paragraph. Obviously -- there's offensive language on the other end of that link, but if you read it, you'll see why it's there.

In the game, you listen to a story about someone's death and the events leading up to it. There are five characters in the story; your job is to rank them from most culpable for the death to least culpable. The trick is that the story should be balanced in such a way that any ordering is defensible, and thus each listener's list shows something about that listener. But that kind of balance is hard to achieve. --Adam Cadre --23,040 Bridges (adamcadre.ac)

According to the aggregated stats, there's one character who seems to be too culpable. Perhaps things will even out over time.

"We are here to demand an end to the shockingly casual placement of dangerous blades in our places of work," said Tomb Raider star Lara Croft, who estimates that she has lost more than 600,000 lives to spinning, falling, swinging, and suddenly appearing blades this year alone. "This kind of thing has been going on since the days of Pitfall Harry, and it has got to stop." --Video-Game Characters Denounce Randomly Placed Swinging Blades (The Onion (Satire))

This is an oldie.

It reminds me of Sigourney Weaver's rant against the placement of "chompers" in the bowels of the ship in Galaxy Quest.

It's true that young offenders who have committed school shootings in America have also been game players. But young people in general are more likely to be gamers ? 90 percent of boys and 40 percent of girls play. The overwhelming majority of kids who play do NOT commit antisocial acts. According to a 2001 U.S. Surgeon General's report, the strongest risk factors for school shootings centered on mental stability and the quality of home life, not media exposure. The moral panic over violent video games is doubly harmful. It has led adult authorities to be more suspicious and hostile to many kids who already feel cut off from the system. --Henry Jenkins --Reality Bytes: Eight Myths About Video Games Debunked (PBS)

Electronic-entertainment giant Take-Two Interactive, parent company of Grand Theft Auto series creator Rockstar Games, released Stacker Tuesday, a first-person vertical-crate-arranger guaranteed not to influence young people's behavior in any way. --New Video Game Designed To Have No Influence On Kids' Behavior (The Onion (Satire))

In the new world of interchangeable, interdependent entertainment modules - athlete performs four songs on soundtrack to movie based on videogame! - a football injury can have unexpected repercussions.

I'm here looking for some insight into the growing practice of adapting games into movies. There are plenty of them - Double Dragon, from Gramercy Pictures, in fall '94; Street Fighter, which Universal was to put in 2,000 theaters this Christmas; Mortal Kombat, from New Line, in spring '95. Beyond these loom movies based on Doom, the shareware phenom, and Myst, the fantasy-realm CD-ROM hit.

So far, though, insights are not exactly jumping out at me. --Scott Rosenberg --The Latest Action Heroes (Wired)

A 1995 article. Not much has changed, though the Myst movie didn't materialize.

Doctor Says Long-Term Video Game Playing Is Likely Cause

A central Iowa mother woke up over the weekend to find her daughter having a seizure.

After a trip to the emergency room, a family learned that the cause was most likely from playing video games too long, Des Moines television station KCCI reported.

Doctors said such incidents are not common, but they do happen. Certain people are prone to it because of the way their brains work. --Girl Has Seizure After 5 Hours Of Video Gaming (WTAE-TV)

The videogame marathon was not, in itself, sufficient to cause the seizure. The article does specify that some people's brains are susceptible to seizures induced by flashing lights.

Note the mom-focused anecdotal lead and the prominence given to videogames as the cause (as opposed to patterns of flashing lights, which can be distributed in other media). Theatre performances often mention whether strobe lights or other startling special effects will be used. See also the news coverage of Pokemon seizures.

Now if the story were about a guy who had a seizure after spending five straight hours of marking final exams -- that would be news I can use.

Pac Man today has been tossed into the "Retro" bin and is avoided by teens who think it lame, slow, boring and ugly. May as well call Akira Kurosawa's Ran crap because it's 20 years old, or write off all black-and-white movies because they lack "realistic" coloration, right?

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[T]oday's teens grew up in a cultural vacuum. Their parents are generally too old to have grown up with Atari and Nintendo and therefore failed to pass on any understanding of what makes a good game a good game. These kids have failed to inherit cultural or critical literacy. Just as school children must read Dickens, Hemingway and Salinger as part of a proper education, so too should a proper diet of game classics be required playing. During summer breaks and by force, if necessary. --Vladimir Cole --Hardcore today, arcade tomorrow (Joystiq)

# If neither player makes a mistake, the game is drawn (but we knew that already).
# This is an exercise in examining the objective properties of a game. There are two interesting sides to this:
# 1) The objective properties of Tic Tac Toe really matter for our enjoyment of it: It is a boring game because there are so relatively few combinations.
# 2) On the other hand, humans clearly play the game in a different way than the computer. The computer's playing style lets us make some observations about how humans play games.
# To the computer, the first move is the most complicated (takes around a second on my 2ghz machine). This is unlike human players who seldomly have any problem deciding what to do on the first move.
# The program assumes that the opponent does not make any mistakes. Humans do make mistakes, of course, so in actuality the program isn't playing optimally. --Jesper Juul --Tic Tac Toe (Half-Real)

From the website for Juul's new book. Looks good.

Art or not, games are much more than the just sums of their parts. Any idiot can write a review that simply describes a game'sfunctionality and tells you that it is technically superior to similar games that have come before it. A good writer can take the same game and evoke for the reader the experience of playing without directly explaning the minutiae of the control scheme, for instance. They can place the game into the pantheon of the medium and the wider culture it'sa part of and explain its impact, if any. This is the heart of good criticism, I feel.

Of course, this is easier for some games than others. The more derivative, generic and mediocre a game is, the harder it is to find something interesting to say about it. But the goal or the critic should always be to find that interesting angle, that evocative turn of phrase, that description of the game as experience rather than object. Anyone who is content merely describing a game and its most objectively measurable qualities (?killer graphics,? ?tight controls?) should stop writing game criticism and start writing instruction booklets or press releases.

This gets into what I consider a fundamental split of all game evaluation into two distinct types: game reviews and game critiques (Never mind that almost all outlets call every game evaluation a review, just bear with me here). In my mind, game reviews are mainly commercial tools, meant to help consumers decide whether or not a game is worth their money and time. Game critiques, on the other hand, are more concerned with the totality of a game'sdesign and what a game does to advance the state of the medium or even society as a whole. The former considers mainly whether a game is fun, the latter whether it is worthwhile. --kyleorl --It's Our Fault That Games Aren't Considered Art (VGM Watch)

I'm a bit puzzled by this: "A critic's writing should betray deep feelings of ownership for the industry they love and study and write about." That's a bit like saying drama critics should be chummy with the actors and directors whose work they evaluate. But if the author here means a game critique shouldn't be a negative, whiny rant, then I say amen.

There's a lot that could happen in between fanatical raves and petulant rants.

Maybe it's the word "industry" that troubles me. If you replaced it with "genre" I'd feel better.

Of course, novelists and dramatists and poets want to make money, too, but there are fewer technical enablers and middlemen in the "literature industry," so in literary genres, it's easier to maintain the soul-nurturing myth of the solitary author.

Computers were still huge assemblies of vacuum tubes and transistors when the German-Jewish émigré and computer scientist Joseph Weizenbaum published a paper called ?ELIZA ? A Computer Program for the Study of Natural Language Communication between Man and Machine,? in Communications of the Association for Computing Machinery 9. It was 1966, and Weizenbaum programmed ELIZA to simulate the ?active listening? psychoanalytical strategies of the Rogerian therapy in vogue at the time.

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When so many other games these days incorporate decision-tree ethics ? good or bad choices constantly influence your digital avatar'smoral and physical evolution ? Nintendogs seems to be missing the finishing touches. Ding Dong will never fully suspend disbelief as a permanent puppy, and a cheerful one at that. Nintendo personnel have recently hinted that dogs in the next iteration would have a broader range of behavioral development and would age. They should go one further and let them die. Consciousness has no stakes if it'snever-ending. For machines to become man'sbest friends, there must also be the prospect of losing those friends. --Joshua Bearman --Pass the Paddles: Man's Best Friend (LA Weekly)