Cyberculture: April 2007 Archive Page

A large focus of the book is the internal machinations of game production, and the demands it places on a writer. For example, a basic shooter may only require a few weeks of work on the writer?s behalf for the basic story, while a full-blown RPG could have the writer coming back time and again to rewrite dialogue to match the flow of the game.

Ince throughout the book emphasizes the use of interactive fiction and we get the impression this is his preference. He even goes as far as to say Half-Life 2 is not the best example of good story exposition, as the player neither takes part in dialogue, or is required to pay attention to it, lessening its importance. --Logan Booker --Writing for Video Games (Atomic)

A review of Steve Ince's Writing for Video Games.

The vast majority of gamers know life is not a Doom level - these rules are merely simplifications and abstractions that streamline very complex actions for smoother gameplay. We know when someone is shot in the head they do not lose 20 hitpoints. Games are not an excuse for their worldview, but rather a useful metaphor that allows us to jump into their heads for awhile.

One thing that kept striking me while playing is that Dylan and Eric, despite being younger, seem much more self-aware than what we've learned about Cho. Most of the dialogue in the game is taken verbatim from their writings, recordings, and police reports, and I buy it as a legitimate and thoughtful glimpse into their pseudo-nihilistic mindset at the time of the attacks. Perhaps this ability to reflect comes from having a sounding board in each other, whereas Cho was a loner. The result was the same pointless carnage, of course. But it does convince me that they knew what they were doing was wrong in every possible, concievable sense of the word. Perhaps that makes them all the more evil, and truly worthy of hell, if it exists, despite their lower body count. --Mike Duncan --Super Columbine Massacre (Bad Rhetoric)

Some good commentary on a game that was easy to win (in that it wasn't technically difficult to rack up points and be victorious in battle after battle) but very hard to play (in that I had to overcome emotional resistance to the fact that I was expected to make the plot progress by gunning down icons representing high school students and teachers).

I've been meaning to write down more thoughts on this game, and I guess reading this post was all the prompting I needed.

An early sequence in which we are supposed to sneak through the school and plant bombs without being caught was quite annoying. For no good reason, the game refused to let players save anywhere but the parking lot. That mean that if you got caught in the hall, you had to start that sequence over. If you planted one bomb and then got caught, you had to start over. If you planted both bombs but didn't make it out to the parking lot without being chased by a hall monitor, you had to start over.

After the bombs don't go off, I had a moment of relief -- even though I knew exactly what was supposed to happen next. I was supposed to start killing.

I had to take a break -- I was on a train ride to a conference where, I delivered a talk that used this game as a reference point. Even though it was a minor reference, I didn't feel right talking about the game without finishing it, so I went back to it.

When I targeted someone in the parking lot and approached, expecting the fight sequence to kick in, instead I got an encounter with a kid that Eric and Dylan apparently knew well enough to spare.

That was a masterful stroke on the part of the designer, Danny Ledonne. I don't know whether it's possible to target someone else first, but for a moment, because I was ready to kill this simulated character, but the game spared my target. For a moment, I felt like I was a worse person than the real killers whose steps I had been retracing, since I made the choice to kill someone they chose to spare.

And once I got back inside the school, this time armed with weapons and able to save the game wherever the hell I wanted, I understood why the opening level was so tedious and pointless. It made me hate the hall monitors for making me go back and play the bomb-planting sequence over again dozens of times.

While those two design choices made me want to keep playing in order to see how the game would screw with my emotions again, assaulting the people in the various rooms quickly became tedious. The students rarely ever fight back, and when the occasional jock throws a punch, the damage is minimal. But every so often, instead of the same old battle sequence, the game would deliver a brief exchange of dialog or even a full-blown flashback.

I didn't want to empathize with the player-characters, but I found myself going "awwww" in sympathy when a girl doesn't pick up the phone or return a call from Eric Harris; then when the flashback ended, the game went into the usual combat sequence, jerking me out of a sympathetic reverie into the cold realization that the backstory only fueled the hatred of the real killers.

A rather unlikely scenario has Eric and Dylan rescuing a kid who is being beaten up in the bathroom. I don't think there is an option to target this kid along with his tormentors. Once the tormentors are gone, the kid offers you a heath powerup and leaves. I find it hard to believe that anyone would beat up a kid in the bathroom while gunfire is going off in the hall, but the sequence does argue that Eric and Dylan saw themselves as heroes of some sort; still, my willing suspension of disbelief didn't quite cover this vignette.

The extended sequence in hell also got tedious; the boys are separated at first, and for the first time the enemies are capable of doing some real damage, so I felt a sense of accomplishment when I reached the checkpoint that reunited the boys. From then on, survival was simply a matter of learning which enemies to target first when they attack in groups, and occasionally running past enemies to search for treasure chests in which more powerful weapons and other powerups are lurking. It was an easy matter wiping out the enemies on the way back.

The monotony of the hell sequence was occasionally broken up by visits to other parts of hell, where for instance one can meet icons of various historical figures and figures from pop culture (such as an alien or JonBenet Ramsey) who have a few thoughtful words to exchange (and, for some strange reason, video game characters). It wasn't always clear to me why these characters were in hell, or why if the killers denied the existence of God they would expect a traditional hell with fiery rivers and demons, or why Satan seems perfectly happy that Eric and Dylan just wasted most of the inhabitants of hell, why John Lennon doesn't seem to mind playing "Imagine" ("No hell below us... above us only sky") while he's depicted in a very traditional hell, or why for that matter the pop culture figures in the other regions of hell are not supposed to be targets for the killer's rage.

Once I understood that the tedium Ledonnne imposed during the early High School levels had a payback, I guess I got my hopes up.

I guess I'm saying that I wanted more story interspersed with the action.

There is a final payoff of sorts, where Satan gives you a flying dragon that you can use to move to any part of the huge Hell level, but since I had methodically swept through every enemy on my quest to finish the game, there was very little for me to do except fly to all four corners of the screen and pick up a couple of necessary inventory items. Being able to fly around hell seemed like such a paltry victory. I guess it was too much to ask for the demons to unite and lead an assault on heaven, a la Paradise Lost.

After the game proper is over, an extended series of non-interactive cut scenes delivers Ledonne's final message.

I interpreted the sequence in which a parade of speakers walks up to a podium on the steps of Columbine High School as Ledonne's attempt to quote from multiple authorities and survivors who got it all wrong.

A final sequence (was it really final? I'd have to check my saved games one more time to be sure of the sequence) showing slides of the killers looking like ordinary boys made me sick. I thought it pushed too hard for a sympathetic response; every one of their victims deserved such a respectful and detailed slideshow, and I would have spent hours watching it in order to atone for and exorcise the feeling of complicity with which the game left me.

Contestants had to stand with their hands behind their backs until a bell sounded and a message appeared on an overhead screen. The winner was judged on whoever's message -- checked for exact punctuation -- reached the judges first.

The text tests ranged from "faster than a speeding bullet..." and "what we do in life echoes in eternity" to the less poetic "OMG, nd 2 talk asap," which for those over 30 means "Oh my God, need to talk as soon as possible." --FYI, 13yo skool grl is nu US txt mssg chmpN (Yahoo! AFP (will expire))

Make the logo as big as you can
Make the logo bigger, yeah!
That logo isn't big enough
So make the logo bigger
Bigger, bigger, make it big!
Make the logo bigger! --Make the Logo Bigger (Burn Back)

Awesome heavy metal spoof of a naive request that web designers hear from their clients all the time.

Displaying the client's static logo is not the the best use of the user's screen real estate.

On my "Newbie Web Author Checklist," item 5 includes the following:

Get rid of wasted space at the top of the page, and move the content up higher on the page. Shrink that logo and move that long-winded mission statement to an internal page; use the space you recovered to tell me what's new on your site, so I won't have to hunt for what you're so eager to share.

While many teens post their first name and photos on their profiles, they rarely post information on public profiles they believe would help strangers actually locate them such as their full name, home phone number or cell phone number.

At the same time, nearly two-thirds of teens with profiles (63%) believe that a motivated person could eventually identify them from the information they publicly provide on their profiles. --Lenhart and Madden --Teens, Privacy and Online Social Networks (Pew Internet & American Life Project)

Rumours that Chiang, 23, was the mass murderer swept across the world after links to his gun-obsessed blogs were posted on social networking website Facebook and similar sites. More than 180,000 people visited his sites, with many noting the similarities between him and the man described in accounts of the Virginia Tech tragedy.

Some went so far as to jump to a conclusion. "Early 20s, Asian man, vtech student. Fits the bill," wrote one commenter on one of Chiang's blogs. Another simply wrote: "Why why why why why?"

His blogs are decorated with a multitude of photos of Chiang posing with semi-automatic weapons and Russian rifles and training at a marine camp. His last post before the killings showed him proudly standing alongside his collection of 14 Russian Mosin Nagant M44 weapons. --Kenneth Nguyen --Judged by the internet (The Age)

I asked my journalism students today... if they heard gunfire on campus, would they pull out their cell phone camera and head towards it, hoping to get a scoop?

I told them they should get to safety.

When I learned that the young man who was identified as the shooter was an English major, the whole incident became suddenly more real. It shouldn't have -- the human tragedy would not be less heartrending if the student had chosen different coursework. So now, on top of all the other emotions that I'm feeling as I contemplate the event, I feel guilt.

My journalism students are doing next week's podcasts on local reaction to the massacre.

Gamers like me have spent years railing against ill-informed parents and politicians who've blamed games for making kids violent, unimaginative, fat or worse. But now we're in a weird position: We're the first generation that is young enough to have grown up playing games, but old enough to have kids.

So it turns out that, whoops, now we've got to make sober calls about what sort of entertainment is good or bad for our children. And what, precisely, are we deciding? --Clive Thompson --You Grew Up Playing Shoot'em-Up Games. Why Can't Your Kids? (Wired)

The Mercury News posted an Associated Press package that included a video news story, accounts from witnesses and a disturbing home-made cell phone video that recorded dozens of gun shots and angry and disturbed screaming, presumably from the gunman.

Perhaps most troublesome was that whoever was shooting the cell phone video, actually moved toward the gunfire instead of away from it. Some obvious advice: It's not worth it. Do not endanger your life for a YouTube moment.

News coverage aside, technology potentially played a key role in informing those most at risk. The way school administrators used their digital tools may even have saved lives. --Mike Cassidy --Digital tools were potential life savers during Va. Tech massacre (MercuryNews)

My brother is a Va Tech alumnus. At the University of Virginia we enjoyed a friendly rivalry with our larger land-grant sibling.

This time of year I have lots of papers to mark and lots of stressed students who need attention; further, three days this week I'm leaving early to attend to family business (today was a birthday party for both my kids, Wednesday I always leave early so I can watch the kids while my wife prepares for her night class, and Friday my son will be in an art show), so I haven't been following this as closely as I really wanted to.

Someone else will write a thoughtful analysis of the Wikipedia and Wikinews articles on the events, and someone else will track what the Va Tech students were saying to each other on MySpace and Facebook while the Va Tech authorities wondered how to get in touch with students and what they should say.

I'm glad my kids don't mind being hugged and kissed in public, since I was doing a lot of that today.

Update: the Roanoke Times has been covering the event on its breaking news blog, changing the title to reflect recent developments, adding time-stamped items to the top of the page.

I may be nostalgic, but I'm not stupid. Today's technologically superior, multi-million dollar monstrosities are, in almost every way, superior to anything that even the most creative guy could do in his basement on an old TI. But, without the full spectrum of gaming to be measured against, the games of the day really did more to inspire and amaze on a more regular basis than today's demographic targeted, designed by committee with corporate oversight games. --The Lost Art of Innocence (Gamers with Jobs)

Although the CRPG has certainly suffered its share of ups and downs over the decades, history shows that when things are at their bleakest, there is always a new company poised to spring onto the scene with an amazing new title that brings every true CRPG fan back to the table. Perhaps we're at such a point now; major CRPG titles have slowed to a trickle, and some critics seem all but convinced that online games like Blizzard's World of Warcraft are the logical heirs of the "oldskool" CRPG. However, rather than trace the lineage of games like World of Warcraft or EverQuest back to CRPG classics like Ultima or Wizardry, I see them more as the descendents of another genre called the "MUD," or the multi-user dungeon. --Matt Barton --The History of Computer Role-Playing Games Part III: The Platinum and Modern Ages (1994-2004) (Gamasutra)

A well-done piece. I always crave more analysis from overview pieces, but it was still great to see so many familiar games (and hear assessments about the games I wanted to buy but decided not to, for one reason or another.

CITY COUNCIL is based on an actual city council meeting I covered while working for a small twice-a-week newspaper early in my career. Some of the items here have been fictionally enhanced for educational purposes. And, of course, some names have been changed to protect the foolish.

Even as an assistant editor at this small paper I knew that someday I wanted to teach journalism and I had the feeling after the meeting that the notes from this particular meeting would come in handy some day, so I filed them away. Coincidentally, my solution to writing this story was to write eight of them. The editor was out of town and I was the only one who had to make a decision on what to run in the paper. So I wrote eight separate stories on different aspects of the meeting.

Alas, the poor journalism student in my newswriting classes these days does not have that option. Instead, my students must write one mega-story that covers the whole meeting. I use it as a kind of final exam in my newswriting classes. --Rich Cameron --City Council (rcameron.com)

Only nominally interactive, which is especially notable when you are faced with all the questions that you can possibly ask each source. Still, it looks like a good tool for teaching accuracy, cross-referencing, and news judgment.

It's a stretch to call this a "game" but I'll file it there anyway becasue I don't have a separate category for "simulations."

MySpace vs. Facebook (Jerz's Literacy Weblog)

I just searched Google News for MySpace and Facebook, and was surprised at the difference in what I found. Of the first seven MySpace hits, five emphasized criminal acts, and two were PR-driven pieces.

Of the first seven hits on Facebook, only one involved legal worries (in an item that also included MySpace in the title), two items seemed PR-driven, and the other four were news features that included references to Facebook organically (through a profile of the Facebook founder, or a high school paper article about the online community).

Facebook is still owned by its boy-geek founder, while MySpace was recently bought out by Rupert Murdoch's NewsCorporation (which also owns Fox, TV Guide, and HarperCollins). Of course this is not a scientific survey, but MySpace was referred to over 12,000 times in Google's news database, while Facebook appeared only about 3000 times. Given that MySpace has about 80% of the social networking market share, and Facebook has only about 10%, Facebook is getting proportionately more positive press (though the coverage is not as broad, with an article in a high school paper happening to hold the top spot when I did my search this morning.)

Here are the first seven MySpace posts.

1. Court Reverses Penalty Over MySpace Post
2. Man Gets 10 Years For MySpace Assault
3. Teen Kegger Pictures in Myspace Page Lands in Arrests
4. Police: Mom solicited kidnappers on MySpace
5. MySpace Launches Dedicated Video Community for Theatrical Trailer ...
6. CBS is totally hip, and down with the Myspace
7. UMD Asks Athletes To Stop Using Facebook, MySpace

Here are the first Facebook hits (I've grouped the duplicates).

1. Students forge friendships with future college classmates on Facebook
2. UMD Asks Athletes To Stop Using Facebook, MySpace
   UMD Asks Athletes to Stop Using Facebook, MySpace Web Sites
3. OtherEgo Launches - Myspace, Youtube, Facebook in One Place
4. Online Business Community Makes Appeal to LinkedIn, MySpace ...
5. Class of '11 unites around T-shirt
6. The kid who turned down $1 billion!
7. Let's all be friends

The News Limited story suggested that net-savvy types were giving up on blogging and turning their attention to MySpace. The owner of Myspace is, of course, News Limited. Also conveniently not disclosed was the fact that, according to the Gartner report, use of MySpace has been falling steadily during the past year.

[...]

Jorn Barger says "lazy and sensational" journalists have dismissed blogs as mere diaries, neglecting the social benefit of collecting a network of links to information sources -- archiving and drawing connections between items that would otherwise be scattered and soon-forgotten. Peter Merholz reckons most blogs should probably have a readership of about five people but thinks there's nothing wrong with that. --Dan Silkstone --The blogs that ate cyberspace (The Age)

Students at the George Mason University School of Law received a double whammy last week: First, Dean Daniel D. Polsby sent an e-mail informing them of a "special town hall meeting" scheduled for Monday where they could meet a candidate for a tenure-track job -- a 22-year-old candidate who had once posted online class notes containing a racial epithet while a law student at Harvard in 2002. Then the next day, Polsby canceled the meeting, writing that the controversial would-be professor "is no longer a candidate." --Andy Guess --Words He Can't Escape (Inside Higher Ed)

Yet another example of the power of words -- especially words posted online. I'm often amazed at how frequently students believe that something that they post online won't or shouldn't be found by an audience wider than their original intended readers.

Colleges and universities must inform students about the particular dangers they face online. But if schools actively monitor their students' online activities and students are aware of this policy, they may have a duty of care that includes preventing any illegal acts committed as a result of information posted online.

Thus, schools should inform their students about the potential dangers of using social networking Web sites, but should also be careful not to become liable if the students engage in illegal behavior. --Sheldon Steinbach and Lynn Deavers --The Brave New World of MySpace and Facebook (Inside Higher Ed)