Games: August 2008 Archive Page

High-profile ports columnist Jay Mariotti, who dramatically quit the Sun-Times, saying newspapers are a dying industry, seems to have fallen in love with the Web. His former old media comrades aren't buying it.

Roger Ebert:

You signed a new contract, waited until days after the newspaper had paid for your trip to Beijing at great cost, and then resigned with a two-word e-mail: "I quit.".... The fact that you saved your attack for TV only completes our portrait of you as a rat.

[...]

Newspapers are not dead, Jay, because there are still readers who want the whole story, not a sound bite. If you go to work for television, viewers may get a little weary of you shouting at them. You were a great shouter in print, that's for sure, stomping your feet when owners, coaches and players didn't agree with you. It was an entertaining show. Good luck getting one of your 1,000-word rants on the air.

Chris Deluca:

And now Mariotti says the printed page is a dinosaur. He has embraced the Internet as his new forum.

We're talking about a columnist who detested bloggers -- mainly because he was easy fodder for their biting humor. He acted as if he stood on a level above bloggers. Most of the better bloggers have the kind of wit he couldn't touch.

Are bloggers bad? Absolutely not.

But those of us who work at newspapers have one edge over the blogging world. We have access to the players, coaches, managers and front-office executives. We can talk to key figures on and off the record to get insight unavailable to others. It's a privilege most of us don't take lightly. To not use it to our advantage is a waste -- of our energy and the readers' time.

An iPhone is too expensive for my budget, but I'm still happy to see this, from Wired:

Open iPhone. Go to App Store. Download Frotz. The classic text adventures from Infocom made us all learn the shortest possible way to write responses, and this brevity of input seems perfectly suited for iPhone use.

Mark Bruno offers his version of the "Remember text adventure games? People are not only still playing them, they're writing new ones!" essay. I thought his discussion of the relationship between IF and electronic literature showed some insight.

I also discovered that while text adventure games where born into the family of computer games, they had since "grown up" and began "hanging out" with the literature crowd (though it still regularly writes home) -- which is to say that in much latter-day interactive fiction, particularly things produced since 1996, storytelling had been increasingly emphasized and the puzzles deemphasized. Not that puzzles were gone, but more and more authors of IF were trying to integrate puzzles into a coherent and compelling plot, rather than (as was often the case in earlier years) letting the story serve as an ostensible premise, but populating the thing with puzzles that had nothing to do with the plot. Now, some interactive fiction goes whole hog and abolishes puzzles altogether!

So, why continue to try to tell a story through this medium? Because making the player/reader drive the course of the story allows for some interesting effects; a skillful author can get the player/reader to identify with the protagonist in ways that simply aren't possible in static fiction (because the player/reader has a sense of complicity, to use a favorite word, in the plot that the static fiction reader lacks). Plus there are all sorts of neat things that can be done with narrative when you have a computer on your side.

While there are plenty of puzzle-centric games that also happen to be well-written (Lock and Key comes to mind), it's true that the more literary IF works have attracted more attention from critics and reviewers.

Once when I needed to entertain my daughter while we were driving somewhere, I said, "Let's pretend that, rolling along outside the window, there was a little ball that would pick up trash and boxes and trash cans, and that as it collected items it got bigger and bigger, until it was picking up houses and buildings, and that there was happy music playing that sounded like this (I hummed a bit), while hundreds of citizens called out for help that would never come."

Her little eyes got really wide.  

She was very quiet for the rest of the ride.

(Thanks for the e-card, Karissa.)