CHRISZAMANILLO.COM

Whoa, but that’s a lot of words! Our Critical Distance update is full of good stuff today, people, so let’s get right into it.

Firstly, The Mary Sue’s Becky Chambers discusses what she dubs the ‘Hey Sweetheart Scenario‘, using Dragon Age as an example of a game whose NPCs treat a female player character as something to be taken aback by. Says Chambers,

If you, as a game writer, are tasked with creating a story in which the player feels like a bonafide hero, then what purpose does it serve to point out that my heroine is going to have to work twice as hard to be taken seriously, purely because of her gender? That’s a feeling I already have in the real world, and it’s not one that I want to experience within a game. If you’ve actually got something to say about gender norms within the narrative of a game, then say it. Tacking it on just because it’s what you’re used to takes away from the integrity of the story and kicks female players right back to an uncomfortable reality.

In contrast to this, Ben Chapman at the Pixels or Death blog has some fascinating insight into gender in the world of Mass Effect in his piece ‘Dispatches From the Villain, Fem Shep‘. While he admits that he plays his male Shepard as a hero and his female Shepard as a borderline sociopath, he is amazed that his own “accidental misogyny” is not supported by the game world: “… scarcely anyone calls my Fem Shep ‘a bitch’. There are virtually no derogatory remarks belittling my capability to fight on account of my virtual boobs. No one makes a sarcastic remark about “my gender” and driving ability when I accidentally ramp the M35 Mako upside down into a crater.”

At Nightmare Mode, Mattie Brice frankly shares her experience of growing into a transgender identity through the lens of Katawa Shoujo’s Hanako. Brice says, “I saw her do something that triggered a muscle memory from my past: She covers her face.”

Paul Tassi, contributing to Forbes, has some things to say about piracy and the entertainment industry in his article ‘Lies, Damned Lies and Piracy‘:

I would argue that releasing crappy movies has a far greater effect on the film industry bottom line than piracy ever could. Similar things happen when a hyped TV show bombs or an anticipated game is a letdown. Companies don’t rise and fall due to piracy, but they do based on the quality of the products they release.

The point I’m trying to make is that piracy is not this mammoth specter killing the entire entertainment industry like they would have you believe. I am not saying that there has never been a dollar or job lost because of it, nor am I encouraging the illegal practice in the least, but the natural ebbs and flows of the industry with big hits and misses are far more significant than miniscule piracy loses among a specific, young, tech-savvy group who knows how to get their media for free.

Over at VG 24/7, Patrick Garratt tours Finland, with some excellent and quality reporting on what he learns of the Finnish development scene.

The Border House has picked up an intelligent analysis of ‘Analogue: A Hate Story’ by our own lead curator Kris Ligman, in which she touches upon topics such as games-as-fun, its modelling on Korean history, and its relation to the Star Trek series.

Additionally, Critical Distance contributor Eric Swain is at it again with an examination of Driver: San Francisco, this time looking at it alongside the movie Drive. Most memorable is his comparison of how the two works are firmly anchored in the act of driving:

Ryan Gosling’s character is solely defined as a person by his most potent ability: driving. He has no name, no past, and all the human contact that he has is filtered through driving. The dates that he goes out on? They’re night drives. The business ventures that serve as his main means of human contact? They are his job at a garage and stock car racing. He meets his “love interest” by helping her with her car. In an action video game, the protagonist is solely defined by the verb that the player uses to interact with the game. In the case of Driver: San Francisco and John Tanner, that verb is “drive.”

At Kotaku, Kate Cox looks at the David Jaffe’s blundering self-promotion of his newest game, Twisted Metal, asking us: ‘Does David Jaffe Really Recommend His New Game As A Sexual Aid?‘ Says Cox,

The part that Jaffe seems to misunderstand is that someone doesn’t need to be waxing a handlebar moustache and tying young ladies to railroad tracks to make a sexist or misogynist statement. Most trouble doesn’t actually come from villains and it doesn’t come from people who actively stand around shouting, “I hate women.” It comes from thoughtlessness.

By framing his statement as “let her win and she’ll give you a blowjob,” Jaffe’s said a few things he may or may not have meant to. The first is that only straight men could possibly develop an independent interest in playing his game. The second is that the best way for a man to get what he wants is to come up with some underhanded trickery to apply. The last is that a girl or woman couldn’t actually win a co-op match on her own.

Patricia Hernandez also made a splash at Kotaku this week with an epic-length piece called ‘The Rules of Religion, And Why The Next One Might Just Be A Game‘. She looks at a handful of games as well as the possible gamification of religion, but most striking to me, personally, was her retelling of his own family’s attitudes towards religion, as well as the sweetly self-aware acknowledgement of her Kotaku debut. It’s a long piece, but fully worth it when you reach the final few paragraphs.

Over at Gameranx, Brendan Keogh doesn’t believe that Skyrim is cold:

I was told that Skyrim was a harsh, desolate region, whose terrifying weather chiseled the toughest men and women in all of Tamriel. But then I walk its mountains and cities and I see adults and children alike strolling through a blizzard in sleeveless attire, not even flinching. My character swims in arctic conditions and doesn’t even gasp. I’ve come across bandit camps that are bedrolls completely exposed to the elements beside a campfire that couldn’t possibly be burning without an unhealthy dose of napalm. There is a whole heap of snow in Skyrim but there is no cold.

Also at Gameranx, John Vanderhoef looks at the trope of the male main character and his female companion in ‘The Princess and the Knight: Companion Games and Missed Opportunities‘.

There’s something about L.A. Noire that lends itself to incredibly intricate and pensive writing, and Daniel Golding’s post on it at his Crikey blog Game On is no exception. Though Golding calls it a “review” and admits that it’s only eight months late, to him, this “slowness” becomes an integral part of the game itself:

Reviewing a videogame within a week of its release can force you to overlook its subtleties and emphasise aspects that, with time, reveal themselves as far more important than apparent at first blush. Yet leave it too long and you risk falling into the cracks, the familiarity of a videogame massaging over the faults. Each game may have a rhythm, but so does every player, critics included. I am stuck in the spaces between L.A. Noire’s four-note musical motif.

But by now, I know L.A. Noire, and I know that it’s worth playing, worth watching, and worth spending time with. It’s worth thinking about. It’s worth contemplating.

And finally, the hot issue of the week was studio Double Fine’s Kickstarter venture to fund a new point-and-click adventure game, which at the time of writing has raised ,659,095 of its 0,000 goal. No, really.

Craig Wilson of Split Screen presents ‘A Double Fine Audit‘, speculating what say fans will have in the development of a game they funded. Wilson writes,

What alarmed me was how willingly people donated given how little details had been made available. Sure there’s the usual tiered list of donation gifts and a funny video but Double Fine promise involvement in the development process. But outside of the documentary what does that mean? What does my money actually buy me? To what extent, as a financial stakeholder, am I actively involved?

On the other hand, Seb Wuepper at Gameranx asks passionately, ‘Are You People Insane?‘ Addressing the controversy around Double Fine’s crowdfunding, he says,

This seems like another case of gamer entitlement. The reasons escape me, since the downsides of this approach to funding seem minimal at best. If the worst happens, gamers are out by a mere at the least. Which at this point seems highly unlikely since the project is already funded with more than a month to go. Make no mistake, this is not a risky investment. It’s a—for the lack of a better term—preorder for a highly passionate company producing what’s seen as a niche product.

Finally, Rowan Kaiser sits between the two as he writes ‘Double Fine’s Kickstarter Effect: What Happens Next?‘ Despite his expressing satisfaction that an older genre is given some attention, he outlines a number of reasons why he is “highly skeptical that this will create meaningful change within the industry”.

And that’s every last drop of the gaming goodness we have for you today. If you have any delicious recommendations for next week’s post, please do send them via email or Twitter.

Critical Distance

The time has come, ladies and ladykins, for you to blog for your life! It’s RuPaul’s This Week in Videogame Blogging!

We start off the week with a soft focus lens on the past, when the men were men and the games were ineffable. First, Jack McNamee at The Machination turns the spotlight on indie title Yume Nikki, whose obtuse nature is both nostalgic and a major selling point:

The moment you fully understand a game is the moment it loses the magic. You should never be able to get your head around an ideal game. Nevertheless, you should explore it, and make discoveries. By experimenting with these discoveries, you can use them to make more discoveries – never finding everything, but slowly building small islands of knowledge.

In a similar vein, Tevin Thompson challenges us to “Save Zelda“, saying the franchise’s “spirit of wonder, of potential secrets on every screen” has been diminishing with every sequel. Michael Abbott at The Brainy Gamer concurs, saying games as a whole have simultaneously grown easier to beat and harder to control. In doing so, Abbott brings up an argument left unaddressed by either McNamee or Thompson:

What role do accessibility and complexity play in these numbers? Are we making traditional games easier in hopes of attracting players that will never come? When we make these games more welcoming to newcomers by decreasing difficulty, adding help systems, etc., are we focusing on the wrong things?

From gameplay to story, several authors this week brought us narratologist realness.

Rich Stanton thinks sexual relationships in games need a facelift. And Tyler Jinks provides a clear and useful breakdown on the difference between a player-character and a player-avatar.

Meanwhile, Robert Walker proves that bigger is not always better with “The World is a Character Too!“: “Creating a world that is large is not the same as creating a world that feels large, and yet, one of these takes much more effort on the part of your artists and other talent.”

Nightmare Mode’s Tom Auxier, looking to harmonize structure and content, says that the boss fight can be saved– by using the device intelligently in the context of your game’s story. Using Fable II’s final boss as an example, Auxier writes:

Were he a long, classical boss fight we would have triumphed: we would have won. Winning makes us feel good; it validates our revenge. Instead, Lucien takes one measly button press to go down. He dies before we can even process that we’ve killed him, before we can savor proving our mastery in the way of the classical boss fight, and that creates a very different reaction in the player. The revenge you pursued, that cost the lives of thousands of people and, more importantly, your beloved dog has consumed you utterly. In that one moment you can see plainly your failures over the past dozen hours of game.

And it’s brilliant. It’s a very modern boss fight, not challenge of mastery but instead punctuation.

Speaking of narratology and the recent lumps it’s taken from bloggers who don’t quite believe the Narratology-Ludology War is dead, Tadhg Kelly provides us with useful roundup of the recent discussion and adds his own commentary:

“What Is A Game Mechanic? Nobody knows. Or rather, everybody knows what they mean when they use the term, but nobody agrees.”

But two divas stole the stage by lending a musical flare to the debate. Gus Mastrapa thinks we should treat story in games as the score of a film. Kirk Hamilton goes one further and says that all games are music– and story are the lyrics.

Speaking of an awesome set of tunes, the International House of Mojo has a six-part retrospective on Grim Fandango, ending with an interview with Tim Schafer. The feature goes into some detail about the design of the game and the trajectory of its designer.

On the subject of design, Philtron Rejmer argues that games don’t involve choice at all: “Video games are like a series of multiple choice questions where every choice either lets you go to the next question, or forces you to repeat the current question until you figure out the correct choice. Actual multiple choice tests have more agency than this.”

As gamers we all have a choice, including the kind of culture we build for ourselves. That is the subject of the most recent Border House podcast, in which Mattie Brice sits down with guests Anna and Kim about the creation of safe spaces and community moderation. This comes at an apt time, as Anna Anthropy posts a strongly-worded critique of transphobic language in a recent Kotaku feature on Dani Bunten:

transphobia is rampant in games culture: it’s dangerous to all transgendered people and all women. it’s dangerous to everyone who participates in this culture. [...] to perpetuate incorrect myths about trans people and our identities is grossly irresponsible for a site like kotaku.

A couple articles this week sought to find the science in science fiction, a genre near and dear to the game world. Sebastian Alvarado kicks things off with the first part in a series analyzing the treatment of nanotechnology in Metal Gear Solid. Kyle Munkittrick, meanwhile, addressed a nongamer audience in effusively praising Mass Effect’s rich SF setting, which not only measures up to the likes of Star Trek and Star Wars but introduces players to a cosmicist philosophy:

Mass Effect is the first blockbuster franchise in the postmodern era to directly confront a godless, meaningless universe indifferent to humanity. Amid the entertaining game play, the interspecies romance, and entertaining characters, cosmological questions about the value of existence influence every decision.

Seb Wuepper, writing for Gameranx, voices his dissenting opinion of the franchise, wondering aloud if we’ve all simply forgotten the “total thematic collapse of the franchise” present in the second game.

Wuepper might be throwin’ shade, but Patrick Stafford is serving up nothing but the T, criticizing game journalists who contributed to the Double Fine Kickstarter campaign in an essay in no small way reminiscent of AJ Glasser’s “No Cheering in the Press Box”: “There is a distinct difference between advocacy and participation.”

But we are all fans, or we wouldn’t be game bloggers, would we? If you can’t love yourself, how in the hell are you gonna love somebody else? That’s the argument Rob of Mersey Remakes puts forward when he takes a more positive view of fandom, in particular calling out a rather critical Eurogamer article for its accusations of “fan entitlement”:

This isn’t the entitled generation. This is the generation where more people are more supportive of more things and they’re more supportive in the most wonderful of ways. There is no X-Factor generation, there’s just people and people are, mainly, pretty damn fucking good and do amazing things at the drop of a hat. [...] Being a fan is not just a case of sitting in a chair as the Eurogamer piece would have you believe, it’s a case of going out there and earning the money to buy the product, to support the developers, the publishers and whoever else has their skin in the game. It is the decision to choose us, to choose what we make, over something else.

Got a nightcap ready? If you don’t, you should really be reading Kate Cox’s trip through the feathery world of Hatoful Boyfriend. I’m not saying anything else. Just read it, honey.

(This week’s theme owes itself largely to RuPaul’s Drag Race, but also the always-fierce Denis Farr’s Pokedrag series. If you aren’t reading it already, you should definitely see about fixing that!)

Now, before you sashay away, remember to tweet and email us your hottest blog posts, reviews, critiques, commentaries, podcasts and smackdowns. We want it all, darlin’.

Critical Distance

The Retro Gaming Roundtable is a group of retro gamers who gather their written musings on a single topic bi-weekly. I am thankful to NintendoLegend for allowing me to join such a wonderful group of people and such a diverse set of voices. This week’s…
2D Reviews

I can’t think of a clever intro. It’s This Week In Video Game Blogging.

The recently released Katawa Shoujo has garnered a lot of attention for how it came into existence and for it being a quality experience, something no one could have seen coming. Our own Kris Ligman says that Katawa Shoujo could be accused of many things, but cynicism is not one of them. And given where it came from, that is something. Know Your Meme, meanwhile, is heading off comments about the people saying “I’ll never meet a girl like that” countering with “You’re doing it wrong.”

Michael Peterson at Project Ballad writes extensively on Persona 3 and how the game presents the concept of free will.

Richard Clark writes a response at Christ and Pop Culture about one person’s reaction to Settlers of Catan who said the game is “fundamentally antithetical to Christian vision and existence.” Clark responds: “Perhaps the #1 rule of approaching a game rightly is as follows: take it seriously, but keep your perspective.”

Lana Polansky writes a review of Oíche Mhaith for KillScreen - it’s an indie game about a girl in an abusive home, and how it conveys the utter destruction of a little girl.

Matthew Schanuel, the Ontological Geek, examines Deus Ex: Human Revolution from the perspective of its mythic roots, borrowing from both the story of Icarus and Genesis.

Matthew Armstrong at The Misanthropic Gamer has just finished Castlevania: Lords of Shadow. He writes about how the game has granted him “a new appreciation for Castlevania’s current state of affairs in today’s gaming landscape.” He thinks the fact it does not stick to formula should not be held against it.

Petros of Sparta at A Blog of Random Things, writes “What I would have changed: Twilight Princess.” Going over what was fundamentally off about the game and how it could have been great and innovative instead of the stagnant entry of the series.

Eric Schwarz of the Critical Missive blog is back again, this time writing about Rage and multiple design missteps it takes.

Rowan Kaiser in his weekly Joystiq column on role-playing games turns his eye to the two most recent Fallout entries, comparing the different rhythms to the quest structures in Fallout 3 and Fallout: New Vegas. The former is based on free form explorations whereas the latter was more stringent in its hub based structure. Meanwhile, at Insult Swordfighting, Mitch Krpata types out a series of “Rejected Endings to Fallout: New Vegas.”

Guest Blogger Apple Cider Mage posts “Let’s get rid of ’slut plate’ forever” at The Border House. It isn’t about the skimpy armor of World or Warcraft, but the term itself.

Speaking of World of Warcraft, John Brindle of the Brindle Brothers talks about the moral psychopathy that Blizzard has continually displayed. They know they have a moral obligation to their community, but don’t seem quite capable or knowledgeable on how to execute their intentions.

From one company to another, Benjamin Jackson writes a piece entitled “The Zynga Abyss” for the Atlantic about games that treat players like rats in the Skinner Box, requiring little creativity. In a similar vein we have Jamin Warren at KillScreen focusing on Zynga’s practice of cloning games and the multiple factors that allow people to get away with it. Finally, Ian Bogost weighs in at Gamasutra comparing the Tiny Tower/Dream Tower cloning scandal to the myth of Bellerophon and Pegasus. Unpacking that essay could require an essay itself.

Shifting away from the specific toward more overarching themes, we have Pippin Barr giving a talk on what games are, how the boundaries are limiting and thankfully how they are now being pushed against. For some reason though, the video goes dark 17 minutes in.

At The Wall Street Journal, Conor Dougherty published a piece on the way some players are changing the way they experience games with pacifist runs. And Eric Lockaby talks about how critics and gamers are “Pretentious as Shit” when it comes to their snootiness towards difficulty and accessibility in games. Though I agree with the sentiment, I think ‘pretentious’ is the wrong word. Replace each instance with ‘jackass’ and it’s much more on the mark.

Joel Jordon from The Game Manifesto believes games are like music. He extols the inherent rhythm to a game’s actions, and sees similar qualities present in games from Dance Dance Revolution to Resident Evil 4 and Rayman Origins.

Alan Williamson of the SplitScreen blog looks at a quick history of cheating in games from the early cheatcode to modern hacking, to the publishers cheating gamers out of legitimately purchased content. To quote Williamson: “It’s hard for the modern gamer to be a cheater, but easy for them to feel cheated.”

On a similar subject, John Walker at Rock Paper Shotgun muses on the question of “Do we own our Steam games?” and discusses the issues around digital ownership that have yet to legally be answered.

We end with a few more responses to Raph Koster’s post “Narrative is not a mechanic“: Chuck Jordan questions whether Koster’s assertions are based in the fundamentals of what narrative and games are, or merely how it’s been done so far. And Mattie Brice in her PopMatters column outright contradicts him saying “Narrative Is a Game Mechanic.”

Witty closing remark. Hyperlinks to email and Twitter for submissions. Warm farewell!

Critical Distance

Welcome to the second month of Blogs of the Round Table, and thanks again to everyone who participated in January’s great discussions. Don’t forget that you’re more than welcome to post a response or addition to someone else’s Round Table entry, and in the past that’s been some of the most interesting stuff to come out of this little exercise. But seeing as it’s February now, that means it’s time for a new topic to inspire out collective blogging imaginations. This month Michael Abbott of The Brainy Gamer has kindly given us our topic for the month, and he’s chosen…

LOVE.

How do games communicate love? Can they? Do they? Can we find something approaching love in our relationships to games? When we say we love a game, what does that really mean? I’m interested in the the capacity of programming, silicon, and input/output devices to convey or impart feelings we can truly characterize as love. I’m guessing each of us has a story…and maybe for some, the answer is simply no.

Love! I don’t get enough of it / All I get is these vampires and blood suckers… ahem. I don’t know about you, but I’m extremely excited about this topic and although a double bout of tonsillitis kept me from contributing last month, be sure I’ll be doing my best to get a post in this time. The topic actually reminds me of many of the things the Digital Romance Lab have been interested in, and you can check out their blog here. As always, questions, comments, and links to your own responses to the theme can be left here in the comments, sent in via twitter to @critdistance with the #BoRT hashtag, or you can send us a plain ol’ email.

Critical Distance

Welcome to the first Blogs of the Round Table round-up post for 2012, first let’s remind ourselves of the theme we’re talking about this month.

Being Other:

Games, like most media, have the ability to let us explore what it’s like to be someone other than ourselves. While this experience may only encompass a character’s external circumstances–exploring alien worlds, serving with a military elite, casting spells and swinging broadswords–it’s most powerful when it allow us to identify with a character who is fundamentally different than ourselves–a different gender, sexuality, race, class, or religion. This official re-launch of the Blogs of the Round Table asks you to talk about a game experience that allowed you to experience being other than you are and how that impacted you–for better or for worse. Conversely, discuss why games haven’t provided this experience for you and why.

So, we’ve got our theme, and we’ve got a few entrants already. We’ve also got a handy dandy iframe code (care of Darius Kazemi) for you to embed in your BoRT posts, allowing for everyone at home to jump from post to post via an easy drop down menu. To do that, just past this code somewhere in your post:

<iframe src="http://www.tinysubversions.com/bort.html?month=January12" frameborder="0" width="600" height="20"></iframe>

Which should then look like this:

And as you can see it working up there, each entry for the month is listed! Huzzah! (NB: The list has to be updated manually, so there will be some lag between submitting posts and being added to the drop menu).

So what’ve we got so far?

At Nightmare Mode, Aaron Myles talks about ‘Mass Outbreaks of Xenophobia and Inbreeding: A stroll through the ghettoes of San Andreas’.

David Carlton does some musing on the theme of the Blogs of the Round Table itself, as well as raising the point that there are very few games in which he identifies with the protagonist.

Tami Baribeau at The Border House writes that ‘In games, I’m always someone I’m not because I’m fat’, with a particularly illuminating story of a former coworker who encountered online incredulity that they would create a ‘fat’ avatar.

Adam Burch at Thus Spoke Pi writes about the collision between Brave New World’s ‘feelies’ and a story about an acquaintance of his experiencing the effects of racism.

Amanda Lange at Second Truth writes about her experience role-playing as a straight man in ‘On Gettin Ladies…In Games‘.

Matt Kopas wrote this piece for The Borderhouse Blog which he admits wasn’t written with the theme explicitly in mind, but which still fits well enough under the heading – it’s on ‘Gameplay, Genderplay‘.

At Nonfiction Gaming, Eric Howell writes about empathising with the characters he played in both Mass Effect and Bastion in his contribution, ‘Choosing to Be the Other‘.

Patrick Stafford writes about ‘Roleplaying games and the fundamental problem of sympathetic characters‘ on his blog The Problem With Story, talking about how the more constrained characters of Mass Effect and Deus Ex: Human Revolution gave him more of a sense of empathy and connection than the blank slate of Fallout 3.

Rainer Sigl at the delightfully named ‘Video Game Tourism’ blog explains that ‘Being a criminal psychopath sucks – but what did you expect?‘.  So apparently it can suck to be ‘other’ when that ‘other’ is a murderous psychopath. Who knew?!

Mark Serrels at Kotaku Australia has a touching and poignant piece on meeting his daughter for the first time (in the sims) and how it made him feel and think about potential childrearing in his real life.

At Second Quest, Richard Goodness wrote about ‘Role-Playing a Pervert in Silent Hill: Shattered Memories‘. I’m just going to grab this little excerpt to whet the appetite: “…Shattered Memories gave me a very weird, disturbing little glimpse of what sex addiction feels like.”

Yolanda Green at the Althogether blog wrote about what playing a role means in an RPG.

At The Ludi Bin, Rachel Helps talks about ‘Punching a Woman in Assassin’s Creed‘ which was for her a rather novel experience: “It’s hard to describe what it feels like to be a powerful man, but I think playing Assassin’s Creed helped me see why it’s a fantasy for some people.”

At Digital Ephemera, Dan Cox wrote about ‘One Soldier in a War‘ and the distinction between first and third person perspective, the value of ‘life’ and what happens when he stands around looking at butterflies in Call of Duty.

The Arcadian Rhythms blog has a double-header, with thoughts from the sites’ bloggers AJ and Shaun. AJ didn’t find he identified with many game protagonists, and talked about Dead Rising’s Frank West as an excellent example of an unsympathetic protagonist that doesn’t diminish the game. Shaun wonders “if the theme itself overestimates the extent to which videogames are structurally capable of genuinely conveying an experience other than one’s own” and then goes off into some quite interesting territory.

And the final post of the month goes to Denis Farr, blogging at the Border House about ‘Mayday; Or, How I Learned to Love Grace Jones‘. It’s a great story about the classic N64 game Goldeneye, self expression and fighting the power.

That’s it for the January Round Table! Thanks again to everyone who contributed this month, we’ll be back soon with another great theme for February real soon.

Critical Distance

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A Virtual Game Writer Interview

Game Writer Central received this request for a few words across the ocean, and I thought it might be of interest to all:

I’m a student studying Internet & Business Technologies at Sheffield Hallam University and I’m currently in my final year. My final year project revolves around video game writing as a game design medium and it’s place in the computer games Industry. More specifically, I’m looking into the troubles of games writers attempting to get into the industry, and the trending lack of a writers talent’s, and in some cases, writers being excluded completely.

Stevie, thanks for writing…! Here are your answers, below. Questions in italics.

Are the requirements and or challenges of getting into the games development industry as a writer or even a designer more difficult than before?

I’d say yes. Games are no longer marginalized as the domain of pimply-faced teens, and the games themselves are more immediate and life-like than ever before. As a result, the industry has more hopefuls knocking on its doors and more students seriously pursuing it as a career, instead of falling into it by accident.

How would you say the life of a writer and the challenges that come with the job (or benefits) 15 years ago differ from today?

That is a wide-open question, all right. In many ways, game design and game writing is returning to its roots with the mobile revolution. Once again, it’s possible for a little one- or two-person team to change the world from their garage. But the game industry as a whole is getting more diverse and concomitantly more fractured, with all the different platforms and delivery media. More than ever, it seems to me it helps to be open to new fields and challenges, and well-versed in the eternal truths of storytelling. No matter what new devices hit the market, a good story is a good story.

What are your opinions on the industry today, do you think writers are neglected? have they always been? should there be a solid position in every creative team for a writer, especially with such large budgets nowadays?

It depends on your perspective. As with Hollywood, gaming is more sensitive than ever to large fan bases outside of their medium. We’ve seen games like Strongbad, Sam & Max, and Penny Arcade that really sprung from a writer’s head well before ever hitting an interactive form. But unlike Hollywood, the game industry isn’t really script-dependent and many games — heck, the majority of games — go out the door with story and dialogue flaws that would be universally panned by movie critics.

Sometimes this is because of budget, but just as often it’s because of the tremendous egos of producers and designers who never bother to have a professional check their work. It’s the same kind of flaw that induces everyone to think they could write a bestseller, but these same people would never try to pick up a paintbrush or step on a stage without training.

I don’t think every creative team should have a dedicated writer, though. There are some people who can capably handle, say, a programmer and a writer role simultaneously, and of course there are games that don’t really have much of a storyline, like Angry Birds or most puzzle and sports games.

Do you believe social platforms online could be used productively to give writers more recognition? If not, what alternatives could help? A common topic in recent years has been that games developers are
sacrificing emotional depth and narrative for more visually appealing features, what are your thoughts on these opinions? Can games fare better with the correct creative writing input regardless of visuals?

I do believe that social platforms could lead to recognition, but I don’t see it happening. What’s lacking isn’t information or tools — it’s the sheer disinterest in the way a game is made. When people start to care more about screenwriters than the actors who speak their lines or the directors who manage film projects, then perhaps we’ll have an environment where game writers will get their due.

Big-name writers could change things, I think. If Clive Barker’s Jericho hadn’t bombed, then maybe he’d have been at the vanguard of a new writer-driven game segment. Game writers get less credit than screenwriters, and often it’s difficult to figure out who wrote what on a game. If gamers demanded better accountability on that, I’m fairly sure we’d see a change because it’s not hard to reformat the credits. However, it’s a rarest of rare days when you see a designer or writer top-billed on a game as was the case with American McGee’s Alice.

I do think that blockbuster games can overlook the writing, but often gamers are quick to pick up on the weakness. Writing is comparatively cheap and any producer who slights it is really running a very competitive and expensive race while blind to the project’s flaws. There’s no doubt in my mind that better writing would make a lot of game SKUs more valued and more saleable.

In fact, I’d argue that slapdash, rote game writing and design is one of the primary reasons why games are not considered an art form today. It has the potential, but no one can seriously point to some of the generic sequelized shooters on the market today and call them art.

game writer central

So you may remember a certain campaign run about this time two years ago to fly me all the way from the other side of the world to GDC in San Francisco. Well, this year David Carlton & co. have teamed up to send rising star Mattie Brice to GDC and I can’t think of a better candidate for it at the present. Below is friend of Critical Distance Brendan Keogh’s post explaining why you might like to contribute to the campaign, and any assistance is greatly appreciated.

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There are a lot of excellent writers writing lots of excellent things about videogames. You already know this. Across blogs there is a vastly diverse collection of writers looking at games from all different kinds of angles and making all different kinds of insights.

But on the bigger, professional sites, everybody seems just too agreeable. It’s not that people aren’t writing good articles or are saying things that are uninteresting, but, simply, there are just too many of us from similar backgrounds saying similar things while the dissenters, saying equally interesting things, are stuck on blogs.

Slowly but surely this is changing. It has to change if videogame criticism is to advance and mature. We need more writers approaching more videogames from more perspectives. And, more importantly, we need these writers to have exposure and actually be read.

This is why I am super excited that there is a fundraising effort to get Mattie Brice to GDC this year. Mattie appeared out of nowhere in 2010 and is now writing for a range of places. She’s all over Popmatters; She writes candidly about sexuality and games for Nightmare Mode; and she’s even had the intestinal fortitude to take on Kotaku’s cesspit comment sections head on.

I don’t always agree with what she writes, and sometimes her forward-gazing optimism just outright frustrates me. But this is why games journalism/criticism/whatever needs her and those writers like her: she is saying interesting things that many of us wouldn’t or won’t say. She is starting interesting discussions and debates.

GDC is the biggest annual event in the game’s industry and is exactly the place any budding game’s writer needs to be if they want to “Make It” as a games journalist. 2010 was the first year I went to GDC and in the eleven months since I have written for Edge, Paste, Ars Technica, and a whole heap of other amazing outlets I could never have imagined writing for a year ago.

If we can help get Mattie there this year, I don’t doubt she will have just as many opportunities out of it as I did, if not more. She has already marched confidently onto a stack of mainstream websites with very alternative views, and attending GDC will only help bring her alternative, interesting writing to larger and larger readerships.

So this is why you should chip in a few dollars and help get Mattie to GDC. Do it for games journalism/criticism. Help expand the angles and voices and articles and topics that people are writing and reading about. Games criticism needs more dissenters, and there are few writing at present with as much potential as Mattie.

Critical Distance

What time is it? … What year?

…

No… Then we don’t have much time left! We HAVE to release This Week in Videogame Blogging before it’s too late!

Let’s hit the ground running. We start with Jim Rossignol, interviewing Jim Rossignol, with such hard-hitting investigative journalism as:

RPS’s Jim Rossignol: How much are you charging for this deathtrap?

Jim Rossignol: . I wanted to charge 00, but I realise that people need distracting from the basic horror of their existence. I mean we’re all definitely going to die, quite grotesquely in some cases, and anything that can be done to get people to think about colours and pleasant noises instead of the infinite abyss of their own doom is worth doing, I would say.

For a weightier interview, sure to be good reading material while the irradiated Earth cools, we go to Hardcore Gaming 101 and John Szczepaniak’s interview with Agness Kaku, translator for Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty and the Katamari Damacy franchise. Here is a sample before you head into the vault:

It’s like a molasses [game design has] been caught in all this time. I think in the early days the medium was quite limited, so the language you used, whether it was graphics or game control, or just the actual text, was in line with that. All was kind of good. But very quickly the medium outstripped the language, and in the meantime it’s just continued to gabble in this stuff grabbed from poor movies. Or just arbitrarily stuck-in comic book pieces. I don’t know when it’s going to get out of this. I’m sure some people have experimented, but as long as everyone sits around… A polite way to say it is a mutual congratulations society. As long as this keeps going on it’s not going to get better guys, it’s really not.

Our mutated descendants might not have much use for football when they’re trapped in the still-warm subterranean tunnels near the Earth’s core, but in case we do, two pieces this week have turned their attention to the intersection of sports and games. The first, from Scott Juster, remarks on how much more like sports than board games videogames happened to be. The latter, from the ever-erudite Tom Bissell, suggests that if there is art in games, there is art in sports games as well:

Whatever art is, it must be, in some way, beautiful. Acts of physical beauty performed within rule-set confines are not art, but acts of mental beauty performed within only slightly less rule-set confines (like, say, a sonnet) are. Is that really how we’re going to play this? It doesn’t sit right. Here’s what I just realized: A world in which sport at its best is not seen as some kind of art is a world that doesn’t deserve any art.

Eric Schwarz attempts to take a fine-toothed comb to that infamously nebulous term ‘immersion.’ Sentient machines intent upon enslaving mankind in perpetual simulacra, take note.

And now for a moment, we refer back to a simpler time, a happier time… last week, when Raph Koster asserted that narrative was not a game mechanic. He clarifies further this week: “Narrative Isn’t Usually Content Either“. This may leave some games depending heavily upon what Koster deems “feedback” in a curious position. Take Mafia, or as Joel Goodwin likes to call it, “The Don of Cutscenes“.

And when they excavate our servers from the ruins of bomb-blasted wreckage, I hope it’s Drew Millard’s portrait on 50 Cent, man, icon and game avatar that they uncover first.

[At] the end of the day, he’ll go home to a five-million-dollar mansion and sleep in a hyperbaric chamber fueled by crisp, non-consecutive twenties and the tears of a unicorn. If life is a videogame, 50 Cent has already beaten it. So why does he keep playing?

Alien paleontologists may be more perplexed by Eric Swain’s fixation on the dynamics of Driver: San Francisco, although those of us who hang on to survival in those first lean years after the end might take some comfort in the game’s campy genre logic. But what are they to make of Kirk Battle’s eerie precognition, writing about the wastelands of Bastion and New Vegas?

Clint Hocking coined the term “ludonarrative dissonance” to describe when what you’re doing in the game doesn’t really reflect what the story says is going on. Over the years, this has proved to be a bit of an impossible standard. Inevitably, game mechanics assert themselves, and the game’s story becomes less important as a motivator compared to gaining a level or grabbing that next powerful item. Fallout: New Vegas doesn’t so much solve this problem as it doesn’t really care. [...] Bastion, as the smaller game, has a different solution. It lets the narrator completely diverge from the player and makes its points with that dissonance.

And, who knows? Perhaps rebuilt civilization will have a proper appreciation for Okami, such as that of Jeffrey Matulef’s retrospective and Johannes Koski’s studies on its localization.

Future generations and/or slavers might also appreciate the nuance we game bloggers had in appraising our own cultural creations. Such as Nick Dinicola’s critique of Arkham City, which he argues shows The Man Bat at his most static. Or Bill Coberly, asserting that Catherine’s portrayal of sexuality and relationships only appears mature next to the alternative:

It is infuriating to constantly talk about the potential for greatness in this medium and play game after game after game which retries the same broken formulae and wallows in the same muck. I can thus understand the desire to seize on anything that seems at all different, anything which tries even a little bit to engage with mature themes. I know I’m guilty of this sort of behavior.

But if anything survives the ruins of our self-destruction, it must be the art. Van Gogh. Banksy. Tracey Lien, who proves once and for all that game journalism can be impressionist painting too.

Soberingly, there might not be time to preserve Suikoden II, especially as it appears likely the Apocalypse will arrive before Konami and Sony get around to putting it on PSN. But perhaps we’ll keep it in our hearts. Jason Schreier will surely keep it in his.

Yes; even as we near the almost-certain twilight of our existence before the Cetacean Uprising, many authors this week also looked to the origins and trajectories of this medium of ours. Rowan Kaiser pays tribute to the origin of the open world system, Ultima, while Lisa Foiles suggests one of gaming’s “literary masterpieces” has been with us for years.

Others cast their gaze further. Sebastian Wuepper contends that gamers must consider “The Outside Perspective“, but have his objections come in time? Or will we be remembered in the same ways as soap opera fans, as John Vanderhoef describes?

[What] we think of as distinctions between legitimate and illegitimate culture, between Mad Men and General Hospital, between Citizen Kane and Call of Duty, is actually just a way to legitimize power of one group over another. And this works in ways beyond class. Taste distinctions are also formed around categories of gender, race, and age, among others.

No, says Rowan Kaiser, the future will not care for our culture or community; they’ll care about our games.

Yes, the business of gaming matters in terms of making more games. Yes, review scores matter in terms of encouraging more honest discussion of video games and possibly making them better. Yes, issues of inclusion on fan sites are related to issues of inclusion in the industry generally. They’re all related, and that’s important to keep in mind. But that these things are related to one another does not mean that they are the same as one another.

Sometimes it’s worth taking a step back and remembering this. Gaming is about the games, and it has to be, otherwise it’s not gaming. Chasing arguments based on perceived intent is a good way to get into arguments, but it’s also tiring and frustrating. It’s not like there’s not plenty to discuss already.

Such as zombie plans. Or, for instance, that many writers cannot simply forget the role communities play in how they engage with their games. Keza MacDonald of IGN: “You may think, so what? Why should sex in videogames matter any more for gay people than straight? But this visibility actually is important, for the same reason as having believable and relatable female characters is important.” Fox Van Allen of Joystiq: “this incident [of implicit and explicit homophobia and transphobia in WoW] should serve as a powerful wake-up call to a company that makes millions of dollars in yearly revenue from the gay community.” (Trigger warning for phobic slurs in the second link.)

My time… it’s almost out. Please, before I go, run your favorite games through the Bechdel Test! Posterity, if there is any, will thank you!

But readers, there is one more article I want you all to see, the one which brought me back in time with only a photo and a mission… This one, by Jenn Frank, “On Death, Motherhood and Creatures“:

One day, when I was visiting my adoptive mother in Texas, I sat at the old computer and shuffled through old floppy disks. I was looking for things I had written as a teenager; I had saved all those stories to disks too.

And this was how I found all of these labeled disks, one after another: a name and a date. A name, a date. A name, a date.

I realized these were all Norns [the A-life in Creatures].

I thought about what I had done to these creatures. I thought about how I had wanted to save them.

I was not looking at save dates. I was looking at epitaphs. I was looking at headstones. This was not suspended animation at all. I had made coffins.

I had been paralyzed by my own fear of mortality, and so, one at a time, I’d paralyzed my Norns.

I had not saved them from their own too-short lives. It was exactly the opposite: I was so frightened of watching them die, I had murdered them instead.

Please, readers… the future, it’s in your hands now.

We will see you next week, if the Calamity can be stopped! Send all zombie plans and your favorite game blogging posts to us here via email or Twitter. And remember, Martha, I hate pears.

Critical Distance

There are still many films for me to see from this year, but of the ones I did see, these were my picks. Mostly I hope the list helps you see something in a film you didn’t, or introduces to a film you might want…
2D Reviews