Yesterday I heard a pair of stories related to gaming air back-to-back on NPR. I’m an avid NPR listener, and in general I give it a lot of credit for very fair reporting on tech culture in general and games in particular. It’s probably the only MSM source where I can hear a gaming story and think that the reporter is anywhere close to “getting it.”
So it was today with a piece looking at two graduates of USC’s interactive media program and co-founders of thatgamecompany, Kellee Santiago and Jenova Chen. The pair helmed the latest darling of the art game crowd, Flower. The story was less about Flower and more about how universities are now turning out a generation of game designers. A taste:
Those games studies classes were also where [Santiago] met Chen, who had come to the U.S. from Shanghai with the intention of studying computer science. He’d made games as a hobby when he was a teenager, but by the time he got to USC, he was disenchanted with them.
“Even though we grew up with games, at the same time, the gamers are actually outgrowing the games,” he says. “Very few games have actually achieved those qualities that would be interesting to an adult.”
Right after that, NPR finished out the hour with a spoken essay by Peter Sagal, host of the network’s cool news quiz show “Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me.” Sagal reminisces about growing up reading sci-fi novels and getting lost in virtual worlds. Aaaand then – you guessed it – he rips on the idea of virtual words that exist as code rather than written words. Here’s how it ends:
Today, you turn up your PC, put on your headphones, sign up for Lord of the Rings Online, and just, you know, go there. You can spend your whole life talking and playing with and beating up imaginary people, and from all accounts, many do.
Let me say, from the experience of years, that I’m not sure this is good for us. Real people — maybe you’ve heard this — are slightly more difficult to handle than imaginary people. Even more than Balrogs; and Balrogs, as everybody knows, are a pain. I’m raising children now — a challenge, by the way, on which J.R.R. Tolkien sheds no light at all — and I see them drawn to the flickering, dimly lit holes leading from our house to the other worlds — the TVs and movies and computer games — and I can understand the almost overwhelming urge to crawl through. But I also wonder if, like me, when they grow up and have to say farewell to childish things, they’ll have nothing real to let go of.
Let me say that I understand the concern, in general, with kids and too much screen time. I think any rational person who plays games can see that viewpoint, especially those who do have kids (though I don’t). But for Sagal to wax poetic about his beloved imaginary world while dissing another form of the same thing just because he doesn’t have the same attachment to it seems … a little weird. To be clear: he’s not lamenting that people today aren’t reading, or that science fiction isn’t what it used to be, or that a game doesn’t have the same narrative power as a novel. All Sagal’s doing, if I’m reading it right, is getting nostalgic and launching into the old “kids today …” speil.
What’s the point? Did he have some deadline to meet with this story? Maybe NPR’s editors had this thing in their back pocket and were just waiting for a chance to use it as a counterbalance to a gaming/tech story at some point?
I’m not writing to ding Sagal as much I thought his piece brings up a broader point. It’s so funny to me that attitudes like this still seemingly carry so much weight. We live in a computerized age. There’s no turning back; and while it’s only natural for us to wonder about consequences this strikes me as a classic example of wringing hands just for the sake of it.
Despite the needle moving in a pretty positive direction overall the last couple of years, games in particular still seem to stick in the craw for some reason. There’s a long tail of hand-wringing here that other pieces of the digital age don’t seem to experience. Take a look at the backlash a few years ago against MySpace and Facebook. I’ll bet you know a half dozen people who told you two years ago that Facebook was a waste of time, and yet now they have a profile with nearly 100 friends and take one of those dumb “Which 80s Band Are You?” quizzes every other day. Right now the target of choice is Twitter. Pulitzer Prize-winning newspaper columnist Leonard Pitts and the (supposedly) progressive Web site Alternet both had Twitter in their crosshairs in the last few weeks. The verdict in both cases: Twitter’s a banal waste of time that no one with a life should be messing with. …Sound familiar?
Yet I’ll be willing to bet that in two years we won’t see that kind of attitude about Twitter. But for games, the stigma persists, some 30 years on. This is why I don’t believe in the “give it time” argument from the people who say games today are what rock music was in the ’50s or what movies were in the early 1900s. Those mediums didn’t take this long to reach a point of wider acceptance, and they came of age in a time when the culture moved at a much slower pace. It’s on us, the community, to evangelize or die on the digital vine.
And honestly, it’s not about acceptance or validation. Really. Validation is for the insecure. Acceptance is for 12-steppers. So those probably aren’t the right words. It’s just about getting to a point where the culture is off our back about this shit. I don’t know what the word for that is. I just know we aren’t there yet.
I’ve been playing a fair amount of Peggle lately now that PopCap’s version of Plinko on steriods via Lisa Frank has been released on Xbox Live Arcade. It’s my first time really playing through the game. I have the iPod version, but the tiny screen isn’t the best vehicle for the game so I didn’t stick with it.
That’s despite Peggle’s well-documented addiction factor — it’s a hardcore wolf in casual sheep’s clothing. (Clive Thompson wrote a nice piece about this last week for Wired.) With a controller in hand and a big screen to let the rainbow colors pop, I’ve been having fun and fully hooked. But there’s another factor at play for me, one that’s very small but interestingly crucial.
It’s the sound. Specifically, the sound the pegs make as the ball lights them up in succession during each turn. Each time a peg is lit, the sound creeps up in pitch just a hair. And when you get a really good bounce, and you string them together for a great turn, the sound becomes music to your ears. Add in the choir-like “baaah” when the ball lands in the bucket (giving you a free ball) and you’ve got a super-satisfying sonic sequence. I’m telling you, ratcheting up those sounds is as gratifying as the number score I get out of a good turn. There’s something about it that connects with my gaming lizard brain and lights up the synapses that control the “aww, yeah” and “just one more go” parts of it.
It’s such a tiny little thing that I almost feel silly writing about it. But it’s definitely there, at least for this player. I probably wouldn’t even have noticed it if I hadn’t been listening to a podcast with the game sound turned off. I felt like something was different, missing. It didn’t break anything — it was just kind of like tasting a recipe that didn’t quite have enough of that one ingredient, maybe garlic or cumin. Not a deal-breaker, but it lacked a little something. When I turned the sound back on, there it was.
Bink. Bink. … Bink. Bink. Bink … … Bink, Bink, bink, bin bin bin bi bi bi bi bi … BAAAAH!
I have no idea if the PopCap folks knew just what they were doing when they decided to do this. We talk a lot about highly-technical and realistic sound design in games — the erie groans of Rapture’s walls holding back the sea in Bioshock, the cinema-like mix of Uncharted, the synesthesia of Rez. But great sound design can come in small packages, too; so tiny you might not even notice at first, even while it grabs hold of your subconscious and doesn’t let go.
I spent some time this weekend playing a pretty nifty little game based on Greek mythology. No, not God of War — it’s Don’t Look Back, a Flash game by Terry Cavanaugh hosted on social/casual gaming portal Kongregate. Cavanaugh takes the story of Orpheus and Eurydice and retells it using basic inputs and extremely basic, Atari 2600-style graphics.
And it works – quite well, in fact. You begin standing and staring over a solitary grave in the rain. This being a platformer, you immediately head to the right and pick up a weapon, a gun. (Like I said, it’s based on the myth.) You’ll head down, down, down until you defeat Hades and meet a ghost, presumably of a dead lover. The game never tells you – there is no text, which is one of Don’t Look Back’s strengths. The ghost follows you back the other direction all the way to the grave at the beginning – on the one condition that you not turn around and look at her. The ending is somewhat left open to interpretation, which is unfortunately something we don’t often see in games. There’s a conversation about the meaning going on in a thread at the Kongregate forums.
The stripped-down visuals and simple but effective music and sound effects create a surprisingly imposing atmosphere as you descend into the depths of the Underworld. The enemies, even the massive Hades, are a single color: a flat shade of light red set against a backdrop of darker red and black environments. It makes Passage look like a next-gen thrill ride.
But the low barrier to entry is one of the best things Don’t Look Back, and games like it, have going for it. There’s no cost to buy the game, no expensive box to buy (well, OK, a computer, but who doesn’t have one of those?) and anyone with a few minutes and the will to play to the end can experience it and discuss what’s going on with the narrative.
But you won’t find much of the gaming cognoscenti talking about games like Don’t Look Back. You hear all about artsy/indie titles like Flower and Braid, and rightly so. They’re great games. And admittedly, Don’t Look Back doesn’t begin to approach the ambition of those games; not narratively and certainly not technically. Not even close.
But here’s the thing. One reason the Web is full of chatter about games like Flower and Braid is because gamers want badly for their beloved medium to be validated. We have crushing expectations when it comes to this stuff. But those games exist in walled gardens to which relatively few people will have access. I mean, one of the biggest storylines about Flower was the fact that this little ol’ downloadable game was what finally convinced Chris Sullentrop to drop 400 bucks on a PS3. So if we gamers, the enthusiast press and the gaming blogosphere are so bent on pushing things out to a wider audience, why are we always seemingly looking inward and highlighting games all of us are already playing — but that no one outside the walled garden can touch?
On Friday morning, the blogosphere, Twittersphere and media-fishbowl-sphere were buzzing about the epic smackdown that Jon Stewart gave CNBC madman Jim Cramer on their face-to-face interview on the Daily Show following a week of back-and-forth jabs between them. Some media pundits and friends in my own Twitter feed wondered why it took a comedian to say what the MSM couldn’t. It’s the old question: who’s watching the watchdogs?
At the same time this morning, another media story was brewing in game land – a post on the 2K message boards about a Game Informer story previewing the hotly anticipated Bioshock 2 seemed to reveal a load of new information about the game. Web sites and blogs quickly posted news stories on the details. Some pointed out that this was essentially still speculation. But then! Someone else from 2K got on the forum and retracted what they’d said, and everyone else had to roll back what they’d said, too. Which then led some to ask, who’s going to take these sites to task? Where’s the responsible journalism?
I’m sure it’s going to give some in game land to another reason to lament game journalism. But I’m thinking, what journalism, really? We’re talking about covering an entertainment medium. Do you really think these outlets are going to sit idly by while juicy details pour out of some other corner of the Web but not their own? Doubt it. We’re talking about a media environment where tagging an item as rumor – and then just reporting it anyway – passes as the height of ethical action. We’re talking about an environment where news that’s 12 hours old is as stale as a licensed movie tie-in game. The audience for this kind of info has largely grown up with the Web and message board culture, and they expect to know NOW.
I’m all for accountability — and I’ll admit I’m just kind of challenging the conventional wisdom here — but, what’s with the shaking of heads over this? Reviews should feature honest opinions free from the influence of advertisers, but the news side of the industry is just too wedded to the culture of the Internet to think that media outlets are going to altogether avoid stepping on a few of these kinds of landmines. We’re not talking about covering the White House or Wall Street here. And hell, those guys get it wrong all the time anyway. See: Daily Show link above.
I want to be clear about other thing here — I’m not trying to cop to the “It’s just a game, lulz” defense. I’m not one of those people. True journalism does happen. What I’m saying is that for this particular instance I don’t see a way for the enthusiast press to get themselves out of the corner they’re painted into. They’ve partly painted that corner themselves, but the audience is also to blame. Gamers aren’t going to stop clicking on links that promise rumors anytime soon, nor should they. Am I wrong in thinking that rumors and speculation are one of the basic tenets of tech journalism? Should we block out all those Apple rumors? Might as well close down the Internet.
Last week Iroquois Pliskin wrote about the need for journalists — and their real-world, diggin’-up-facts, ask-the-right-questions skills — in game journalism. What he’s asking for is a little different than the (now worn-out) call for “new games journalism” to rise up and smote the likes of your typical reviewers and their 10-point scales dead at their keyboards. What Iroquois wants to see more of are the folks who cover the industry the way a competent and insightful business reporter would cover any other multi-billion dollar industry. That takes chops — chops that the people who usually land jobs as gaming “journalists” don’t really have. Those people usually come from the retail ranks of EB, while someone with the proper chops is more likely to come out the Carter School at NYU.
That’s not to say the chops can’t be gained. Believe me, a degree means next to nothing in journalism, probably moreso than any other so-called profession. It’s all about experience, hunger, and most important, curiosity. And it’s getting better all the time in gaming. On an industry conference call day my Twitter feed is filled with updates from pros covering the financial side of things (hit Iroquois’ post for some great links).
But the question is one of audience. This is still an entertainment medium. Even if there’s huge money behind it, I’m not so sure most of the people who typically read gaming news want to know about a publisher’s debt-to-income ratio. To be sure, there are those who do, and I would imagine that group would include developers, retailers, gaming Web site editors and the hard-core geeks who are a bit more well-informed than the average forum lurker. We’re talking about insiders, basically. A niche within a niche. Is that audience big enough to justify the more reporting-intensive (read: costly and more time-consuming) work that such journalism requires? I would hope so, but that may not be realistic. Not when whole newspapers are closing shop. (Lots more to come – go? – in 2009, methinks.)
Look at another huge, multi-billion dollar entertainment industry: major-league sports. In today’s world, sports are covered wall-to-wall across every medium. But for the most part, sports journalism still consists of covering the games on the field. Sports radio isn’t that different than the guys on your favorite gaming podcast who talk about what they’ve been playing. Occassionally there will be something in sports that requires more reporting and honest evaluation, such as public financing for stadiums. And very occasionally a story will come along that turns the industry on its ear, as with steroids in baseball. That story was largely broken apart by two newspaper reporters who did a hell of a good job with some in-depth reporting. But that’s rare. Most sports fans, and I’m one, just want to know the game day information even if they are deeply interested in a few of the major “news” topics in the sporting world. If you’re a sports fan, ask yourself this: would you rather watch SportsCenter or Outside the Lines? Would you rather check Deadspin, or read the latest book excerpt in Sports Illustrated?
There is another component to all this that’s getting better, but still not there yet: covering the personalities who make the games we love. Reporters who cover movies have this down to a science. But there are a lot of roadblocks to that kind of coverage in gaming today. The “stars” of a game aren’t real, and it takes a team of hundreds to make the blockbuster titles that grab headlines and rock the NPD charts. The emergence of star developers like Hideo Kojima, Cliff Bleszinski, Ken Levine, and interesting indie devs like Jonathan Blow are making this style of journalism more feasible. But in my opinion we still need more devs step up to the plate and be willing to open up to the press. Then we’ll need reporters with feature-writing chops to step up and make the most of it. I think the potential audience for that kind of reporting might be bigger than the audience interested in the nuts-and-bolts industry side of things. Put those together with some smart criticism and you’ll have a mix that a mainstream audience could eat up.
Which leads me to this: Is there an outlet that’s currently doing all three really well?
Why is this Slate story by Leigh Alexander interesting? Not just because it does a good job of breaking down a ridiculously offensive game and rightly categorizing it more as porn than videogame, but because it’s not reactionary in the least. You’d expect that from a writer who regularly covers the industry, as Alexander does. But for it to appear in a major media outlet, even one as progressive as Slate? Just a few years ago (a dark, dark era referenced in the opening lines of the piece) we would never have arrived at such a point of honest discussion because the discourse would have been railroaded by the collective jerking of knees and gnashing of teeth. Not a new trend in the least, but I’m grateful for every corner we turn.
I’m really intrigued by the east-west divide that’s going on in game development right now. For the first time in … well, petty much ever, Japanese devs have acknowledged that their Western counterparts are on par with their own work, and in many ways surpass it. I think the give-and-take that’s begun between east and west is a little bit like what happened between American and English rock bands in the 1950s and ’60s. I hope to be writing more about that going forward.
For now, I wanted to simply post a quote from Capcom producer Morgan Gray from a recent Edge story previewing Dark Void. The Edge piece gives a little bit of insight on how Capcom superstar dev and head of R&D Keiji Inafune guided the guys at Airtight Studios in their development arc when it comes to pacing and characterization. I’m not particularly interested in Dark Void itself, but I am really interested in how Capcom is bolstering its development by using more western devs these days. Here’s the quote that got my attention. I think it’s revealing of the way Capcom thinks about going after the tastes of different players in different places: it’s not necessarily only about art style or gameplay design, it also has a lot to do with distilling the personality of the thing to its core and then letting that quality come through unhindered.
“Sometimes, when we play a Japanese game experience, we’re at a disadvantage of them being exclusively Japanese in their aesthetic, and the narrative style that completely suffers the cultural transition. When you think about a game’s personality, what you’re really talking about is that the game and its universe really know what they are. Halo has it, Half-Life has it, even though Gordon Freeman is pretty one-dimensional. Even Gears. Even a bad game is served by knowing what it wants rather than being schizophrenic.”
-Morgan Gray, Capcom producer
Right now I’m listen to the new podcast by freelance journalist Robert Ashley called A Life Well Wasted. The structure is a blatant rip-off of Chicago Public Radio’s This American Life, but hey, that’s just fine because TAL is a damn fantastic show. Most gaming podcasts are almost all the same: geeks talk about what they’ve been playing, argue about retail sales numbers, drink alcohol or maybe some energy drinks, and read e-mails from other geeks who don’t have radio shows. I love that stuff, but there’s only room for a few of those.
But ALWW seems like it’s attempting to explore the culture and community of gaming, which is so interesting and yet so unknown to a wider audience. The first episode features a great topic: a look back at what it was like to work at Electronic Gaming Monthly the once-loved and now-defunct gaming mag that almost every gamer over the age of 25 grew up with (*tear*). As someone who bailed on the print media industry after studying journalism in college and working at a daily newspaper for seven years, I can identify with the gloom these guys talk about living with every day at work. I don’t blame any of the current crop of game writers jumping ship to the development side — it’s a smart move and a way to continue to be involved with something they love. I just can’t be cycnical about it.
A Life Well Wasted is on iTunes, too. Just finished the first episode as I type this. It’s really refreshing.
Look! It’s a market! You know, the kind with competition where companies vie for comsumer dollars with lower prices and better service! How quaint.
Best Buy, TRU and Amazon have all made noise about entering the used game market within a matter of days of each other this week. That’s great news for consumers, as many have noted. Other than the mom-and-pop style stores and regional chains that seem to be drying up the last few years (and likely will do so even more rapidly in this economy), the ONLY choice many people for used games at retail in some places is Gamestop. Oh, and GS made $8.8 million in sales in 2008, a 24-percent increase over 2007. Don’t think they made that much cash on the thin margins of new retail games do you?
My question is, will this lead more people selling and buying used games? The idea with this competition is that consumers will get a few more dollars per trade in (to intice you to sell to a particular store) and pay a few dollars less per used game purchase (to intice you to buy from said store and not a competitor). Will a few more people wait a little longer to buy that used game? Will those ‘fews’ add up to ‘lots?’ How might that affect an industry that seemingly lives and dies on first-week sales? Might it even bring down new game prices? Wouldn’t that be bad for publishers and developers?
Look, I ain’t no economist, I’m just thinking/typing out loud here. These moves are being universally praised (and I welcome more choice) but there are often unintended consequences of things that look good on the surface. Regardless, if these services take off the real loser is Gamestop. They’ve got other retailers grabbing at their pie and digital distribution (nascent as it is) chomping at their ankles. And isn’t it just crazy that one of the biggest forces working against publishers’ profit margins is one and the same as arguably the biggest force driving their profits? In what other industry does that situation exist?
As an aside, check out developer David Jaffe’s vid about used game sales. To be fair, his comment that this stuff is “none of the consumers’ business” was a poor choice of words, and his idea was taken out of context by a few blogs. His point was that consumers don’t factor directly into the decisions about the way games are sold, other than gravitating toward whatever is the best deal for them — as consumers always have done. The market then adapts, or at least it should, accordingly.
This week Nintendo trickled out some information to the starving masses about its upcoming revival of NES classic Punch Out! While the return of familiar characters like Little Mac and King Hippo was good news, the peice of info most gamers latched onto was the revelation that the game will sport the same d-pad and two-button control mechanics as its 8-bit counterpart (there’s waggle, too, of course).
Now, I’ll admit I like the idea, and Nintendo is wise to include it. But doesn’t the fact that gamers are latching onto this detail show how out of touch the “core” group is with the audience with which the Wii is connecting? How many of these new players are even going to realize, let alone want to try, playing the game with old-school controls? Maybe a few of the lapsed crowd that Nintendo intentionally targeted with the Wii will give it a shot, but my guess is the vast majority of players, especially kids, will be swinging away.
