Hit Self-Destruct

Cadmium

2009-07-31T23:20:00.000+12:00

PASSAIC, NEW JERSEY
1947

The cigarette hanging taut between her lips, she struck a match on the restaurant’s matchbook and lit up. No explanation for the day’s events could possibly placate Abbey right now. May the eighth, 1947, was their ninth wedding anniversary, and it was supposed to be a remembrance and celebration of the love between the two of them. Nothing could be further from where she was tonight.
  They had left the restaurant early, before dessert, because Nathan had decided abruptly that he wanted to check on something at the office. Nathan already worked weekends, and was late home every day, and in Abbey’s strong opinion this was to the detriment of their entire family. Whatever he was working on this week – and who cared, it wasn’t like he was curing cancer – it was clearly something that was more important to him than his wife or his two children. Bringing Abbey here, today, was a complete insult. While she stood under the streetlight by the car, Nathan searched for the key that opened his office door, at a leisurely pace that was annoying. This was supposed to be something special. There wasn’t any time left to make this a good day.

Abbey flicked embers and ash into the gutter and Nathan finally unlocked the double doors. “Come in, okay?” he called from the top of the stairs. “It’s cold.”
  “It’s not that cold.” It was really cold. “I want to wait out here. Are you going to be long?”
  “It isn’t safe for you to be out here by yourself,” Nathan said. “Come inside; you shouldn’t be alone.”

Nathan’s extended absences were a problem. That Abbey didn’t ‘get’ the nature of his work made it all the worse. His job had been too technical, too dull for her when he’d attempted to explain it on their first date. She’d tried to understand, but it wasn’t meant for her. And she never understood what on earth could be so important that he needed to constantly stay late into the night and neglect his family. What was so important that it was worth his wife falling asleep every night alone, and his children only seeing him a couple of times a week?

Abbey pulled her coat around her and walked stiffly up the stairs. Nathan held the door for her to enter the building.
  “I don’t like it when you smoke,” he said, stepping inside and closing the door behind him.
  “Why not?” She took another drag and tried to make it look indignant, if that was something you could express with a cigarette.
  “It makes your clothes smell. It makes me not want to be around you.”
  Abbey shrugged as she exhaled.
  “I’ll be a minute,” said Nathan, and set off down the hall. Abbey waited by the doors, and looked through the small window to the street outside. She breathed in again.

Abbey’s younger sister Bethany was baby-sitting the children, and Abbey found some solace in not having to worry about how they were doing. Bethany was fun; she had been fun since she was born and had never lost the ability to get people to like her. Abbey’s sons liked her more than they liked Abbey. Bethany had her own apartment in Manhattan, and kept the details of her life private from her sister. When Abbey had married and become pregnant in a fit of excitement, it immediately made her boring in Bethany’s eyes; as if Abbey would be scandalised by anything that Bethany could reveal about herself.

Abbey stabbed her cigarette out on the nearest wall, the clicking of her heels against the floor echoing down the hall as she left her post. At the restaurant earlier, she’d introduced a leading question into the conversation.
  What you would be if you could be anything in the world? I mean, what would you really want to be if you weren’t already who you are?
  She had been thinking about what she used to do before she’d decided to have a normal life instead. She tried creative things throughout her early twenties, and as she explored them in her spare time, she hoped that she could one day make a living at it. She did think that she was talented.
  Abbey had given up doing what she loved in order to fall in love. At her young age, giving her hand away was both the responsible thing to do and the exciting thing to do. The responsibility part took over fast.
  Abbey knew it had been thrilling to wear an engagement ring for the first time, and that she’d shown it off, rotating her fingers in every possible direction and watching it reflect under every available source of light. At 35, dulled and circling the band idly around her finger, she could not remember what it was like to feel that way.
  She didn’t remember the person she was in 1938. What had she wanted to be when she was twenty? What had she wanted to be when she had married him? What hadn’t she been for the last nine years?
  “A writer,” she had said at dinner. “I want to be a journalist.”
  “Well,” said Nathan, “that was predictable.”

Nathan had asked her what she would write about, and Abbey had difficulty coming up with an answer. At the end of the hall, Abbey looked back to the windows set in the double doors, and saw the streetlight outside faltering.
  She opened to the door to Nathan’s office, which for some maddening reason didn’t have the lights on even though Nathan was sitting right there at his desk amidst rows of television sets.
  “Nathan,” she said, and thought about everything that she could say, and something that she might say that would fix everything, “I want to go home.”
  “Let me do one more thing,” Nathan said, getting up from his desk and switching on one of the televisions. “Watch this, this is interesting.”
  “You’re showing me a television set.”
  Nathan knelt down to make sure the cables were properly connected.
  “Come on, let’s...” She watched him not pay attention. “Nathan, I don’t think I – ”
  “Wait,” he said, and the monitor sparked into life; spawning green dots of light arranged in a pattern across the spherical monitor. It looked to Abbey like a targeting device; like something she imagined would be standard issue on a submarine. Nathan stood up and twisted one of the monitor’s dials. The lights jumped across the screen.
  Abbey took a step closer. “What was that?”
  “See this?” he said, pointing to an overlay sheet placed across the monitor. It looked like graph paper, with a crude sketch of an airplane in the middle. “I’m trying to hit that.”
  “What are you talking about?”
  “These dials,” Nathan said, pointing to the deck of controls assembled underneath the monitor, “determine the angle and speed of the missile. You don’t see the trajectory until you turn the third dial. That launches the missile along the path that you’ve set.”
  “I don’t see a missile.”
  “This dot. Think of it as a missile.” Nathan pointed to the lower right corner of the screen. “You start here. You’re trying to hit the plane here, in the center. Watch.” The dot jutted out in a path across the monitor, where it soared over the airplane by half an inch.
  “It moved. You moved that,” Abbey insisted, as though she’d caught him at something. “Did you make this?”
  “The goal is to hit the plane.” Nathan aimed again, controlling for the speed and height of his shot, and they watched his shot rise and fall in a parabola underneath the target.
  “Why can’t you shoot in a straight line?” asked Abbey.
  “Because that would be too easy.”
  She looked at him, confused.
  “You’re not supposed to just be able to hit it,” he said, turning to her. “You have to take care, and you have to develop some skill. If you don’t, then there isn’t any point otherwise. The idea is that it’s a game. The idea is to make it a challenge. It can’t move in a straight line, it needs to be made a little bit difficult, because then there’s something at the end for you to win. Pretend as if this is real.”
  “Why is it fun when you can’t even hit it, twice?”
  “Because you get better at it.”
  Abbey looked back at the expectant light show. “I can’t believe you made this.”
  “Do you want to try?” he asked.
  “What?” She shook her head. “No. No. Nathan, I don’t know how.”
  “Come on. Put your hands here.”
  “Where?”
  “On the dials.”
  Abbey tentatively stepped up to the monitor and placed each of her hands on the dials under the screen.
  “The left one,” said Nathan, pointing from over her shoulder, “controls the angle.”
  Abbey turned the dial clockwise in minute increments without any idea of what she was doing. “Nathan, no, I can’t do this.”
  “It’s fine,” he said, “just picture it. Imagine that it’s the war.” Nathan laid his left hand over Abbey’s, and she tensed up at the contact.
  “Move, okay? We’re aiming now,” he said.
  “Okay,” Abbey said, concentrating, “go up. Let’s go up.”
  “Move up?”
  “Yeah.”
  The dial turned, and she imagined the path of the missile tracing upwards across the target.
  “No,” said Abbey, quickly, “no, you just had it.”
  “What?”
  “Go down. A little bit.”
  “How far? Now?”
  “Yes -- don’t – stop!” She laughed. “Alright, now, now!”
  “Now?”
  “Yes! Go now!”
  The shot launched out of the corner and as she watched the trajectory her throat clenched. The missile inched closer, bearing down on the center of the screen, and at the moment that it struck the airplane, the picture jarred out of focus. The reverberations withdrew, and the spot where the missile had collided changed into an expanding circle that grew by sudden degrees before receding. Abbey’s hands went limp.
  The monitor flickered and reset. In the dark, the lights shone on her face: green light poised to touch green light, inviting her to start again.

Nathan slipped his hands off hers and stepped back from the monitor. “That’s all,” he said. “I’m ready to leave now.”
  “Wait,” Abbey grabbed his hand. “Tell me how it works.”

40 Pages, Black & White

2009-07-27T22:00:00.002+12:00

SEPTEMBER 2004
(CITY OF BOOKS)

“Looking over our table of contents, you might get the impression that we're just another in a string of gaming publications, albeit on a smaller scale”.

At some point, someone would have read that in the magazine section of Powell’s City of Books, the world’s largest independent bookstore, located in Portland, Oregon, and not have been sure what to think. The Journal of the Compugraphical Video Entertainment Medium (translation: it’s about video games) set out its editorial mission as exploring and recording the maturations of the video game medium.

To an extent, it appeared every inch of a proper enthusiast publication: a review of the recently released blockbuster Doom 3 headlined the issue, and a feature article about game stories expounded upon “the schism between gameplay and narrative.”

Contrasting with the academic language were the magazine’s 40 A5-sized and cheaply photocopied pages. The cover illustration depicted a severely stressed-out and unhealthy-looking young man with glasses and a scraggly beard, hunched in front of a computer monitor, which touted that he had just scored a hundred points. “Let’s have some fun!” a caption enthused.

The editorial page ended with six illegible signatures, yet, conspicuously, none of the reviews or interviews credited any writers. The contact page pointed readers to an email address, unhelpfully: “theinternet@digiverse.net”. The issue’s last article was the only one to carry a byline, only because it was by its nature a more personal entry: a travelogue detailing the writer and his girlfriend’s Japan vacation. The policy of anonymity was still so overwhelmingly in effect that the author of the piece spelled his last name entirely in lowercase, as if to diminish it. “By Steven gaynor", it said, and what still wasn’t clear about Steven Gaynor was that he had made the whole thing.

JULY 2009
(HANDBOOK)

Portland, Oregon is the kind of place that allows writers of its travel guidebooks to let their hair down a little. A place where they can depart from the reserved standard, sometimes even between pages of the same book, and affect a jokey casualness that mirrors the city’s colourful character.

Writers transition from genuflecting at the steely majesty of Mt Rushmore to Portland -- young, independent, artsy, and liberal – like it’s their late show. From a cross-section of three guidebooks dedicated to Portland, you find some adjectives (and some nouns -- anything goes in Portland, aka “P-Town”) frequently used to reflect the city’s lively, offbeat character. Lively and offbeat are two of the words. The others are: awesome, chill, vital, hipster, activist, vegetarian, friendly, zany, vibrant, good vibes, laidback, ultra-green, eco-friendly, idealist, politically charged, bustling, trendy, chic, leisurely, mellow, hangout, Gore-Tex, funky. “Radical leftist agenda” comes up at least once, and allegedly applies to everything created in Portland.

For all Portland's eclecticism, the one subject missing from its guidebooks is video games. None of these books mention video games at all. Portland wasn't a game industry city – unlike, say, nearby Seattle, or San Francisco, or Austin.

This was important to Steve Gaynor, who lived in Portland in 2004, and wrote about games for two local publications before moving across the country to become a video game level designer. Steve and his girlfriend, Rachel Jacks, who held a degree in biochemistry from the University of Oregon and in 2004 worked as a research assistant at Oregon Health Sciences University, both liked Portland. But Steve also liked games, and had wanted to become involved with that industry, and obviously there’s nothing in any of Portland’s guidebooks about how you do that.

There’s nothing about how to have a serious conversation about games when nobody around you is into them; nothing about how you take apart and analyse a game from a critical or mechanical perspective; nothing about how you learn the skills of a game designer; how, with no practical experience, you would put together a portfolio and get yourself noticed; nothing about how to get into the video game industry. What do you do when the guidebook doesn’t tell you where you want to go?

AUGUST 2004
(FIRST ISSUE)

Twenty-two and unemployed following a nine-month stint at a Circuit City, Steve Gaynor was a Portland State University senior who’d arrived there by way of Clearwater, Florida and a brief stopover at the University of Oregon in Eugene.

In choosing his classes at PSU, Steve had never thought in terms of a major; gravitating instead to cultural subjects he already had an interest in: film, Japanese, English, and an art school summer course on making independent comics. In his final two years, Steve had to decide on something to graduate in, and committed to an art degree, with a concentration in Sculpture, not that he thought he would become a professional sculptor. When considering his future career, he kept going back to what was in his notebook.

Steve kept a notebook that he would fill with ideas for the great alternative comics that he was going to one day write and draw. Flipping through the notebook from back to front, it progressively became, page by page, a repository of ideas for video games. The significance of this had not even occurred to Steve until the transformation was well in effect.

He had always played games, but it wasn’t until recently that he saw they had become his main creative focus. “I was making comics because I loved to draw, not because I loved comics inherently,” he says. If there was one medium whose possibility he was intrigued by, it was video games. The notebook, now packed with concepts for games or thoughts about them, testified to this.

Nobody Steve knew was all that interested in games, certainly not on the theoretical level that he had begun to think about. Rachel wasn’t prejudiced towards games, but just preferred other things. When she and Steve were living in Eugene they had played Animal Crossing for almost a year straight and seen the entire rotation of the game’s seasons. “I guess when I played [that,]” says Rachel, “[it was] more about the social interaction than the game itself. It’s just an alternative way to spend time with Steven. Animal Crossing was cute and fun and maybe I would have played it without the social aspect, but again I think the interaction was key. And eventually I lost interest because there were simply other things I’d rather do.”

“My other friends,” says Steve, “all just thought that it was a quirk of my personality that I was really into video games. ‘A funny thing about that guy is he really likes video games’, or whatever.”

Informed by the critical writing he had done in college, Steve was inclined to present his opinions as academic-style essays, investigating “the theoretical bullshit side: what does playing a game mean?” The little professional games criticism that he was aware of – mainstream, consumer-focused publications like Gamespot and Electronic Gaming Monthly – definitely weren’t the kind of writing that he had in mind.

There was no outlet Steve knew of for essays on video games in the established style of film and literary critique, and with the occasional license to be funny and ironic. If there wasn’t an established website or magazine he could write for, then, well, fuck it, it was Portland, after all, and he could make one himself.

Steve had ideas to share and wanted to learn what actual game developers thought about the medium. The best way to achieve that, he felt, was to organise his thoughts into a form that someone else could read and interact with. He could have put it online, but Steve wasn’t internet-savvy, and besides, “it took three or four guys to make a website.”

Music, literature, indie comics and art zines were nothing new to Portland –they were available in stacks at record stores, book stores and coffee houses because the demand for them existed – but there was nothing similar that covered video games. In 2004, “a zine felt outdated, but also indie-cred/grassroots.” While Steve was studying and writing about the Northern European Renaissance, Flemish paintings, abstract expressionism and minimalism, he turned in an essay on the newest Doom game. The notebook became The Journal.

The full title: The Journal of the Compugraphic Video Entertainment Medium. Self-conscious about highbrow video game writing being perceived as pretentious, Steve saddled his creation with an intentionally cumbersome title and a lo-fi production to take the air out of the whole thing. Given the limited resources available to him, though, there was never any doubt that if this was something he was going to do, he was going to do it alone, on a non-existent budget, and photocopy it at the nearest Kinko’s. He also enjoyed the high concept of a very serious academic journal that was run off a Xerox printer.

For the first issue, he’d managed to secure an interview with Greg Kasavin, the executive editor of the website Gamespot, which Steve was inclined to choose as it seemed like “the most reputable game review site. It was of a consistent quality, and [Kasavin] was serious about his job.” He’d fired off an email to Kasavin, who may have been swayed into accepting the interview request out of nostalgia, as he’d made a zine with his friends in high school.

Steve and Kasavin exchanged emails about what was next for the medium, and about when Kasavin first considered turning his enthusiasm for games into a career. Steve asked if, in Kasavin’s press job, he ever formed relationships with game designers. Kasavin replied that he tried not to, for the sake of objectivity. He went on to volunteer that if he wasn’t writing about games, he’d “ideally be helping to make them.” His ultimate goal, he said, was to get into game design.

Steve had conceived a three-part series on the challenges inherent in writing non-interactive stories for interactive media, and included the first part in his debut issue along with a feature about the graphic adventure games he fondly remembered from the 90s, some of which, like Sam & Max Hit The Road, he’d played with Rachel.

Every piece of content was produced in a vacuum; Steve unaware of similar writing that may or may not have existed. This naiveté informed the grave idealism of issue one’s opening statement: “We at The Journal are interested in what games can do next to move forward as a medium. Is the introduction of stronger narrative and believable characters with which audiences can identify the surest method of drawing in more players and stimulating them to explore further the possibilities of gaming? Will it be advancements in interactivity, artificial intelligence, and user-dictated experience, the development of open-ended worlds and unpredictable occurrences, that will push games to their next logical step? Is illusionistic realism the goal, or even necessary or desirable in games? Is innovation the key, or do people need something familiar to anchor their experience to, and how best can these concepts coexist? How do we foster a medium so that it can reach out to all cultures?”

As ambitious as that sounded, The Journal’s true editorial purpose was not so scholarly. “The main reason that I made the zine,” Steve says, “was to send it to game developers and trick them into talking to me.”

Steve was genuinely interested in the thought process of a game developer, and wanted a print zine because a copy could be mailed to them. He thought that if he sent a copy off to a game developer’s office along with a covering letter and a request to interview them, it would be taken more seriously than some guy with a Geocities site and a Hotmail account.

Even with The Journal being a print publication, Steve still didn’t feel that it looked official enough. He decided to close the introduction that he’d written with the names of a fictitious editorial board. In a “gambit for credibility”, Steve ran a Google image search for the word ‘signature’ and found a United Nations peace agreement for a minor Eastern European conflict. He hadn’t heard of the accord or the countries. All the five signatures were unintelligible so he copied and pasted those over to his zine, adding his own signature to the gang of possibly long-dead dignitaries.

Photocopies ran five cents per side; the entire print run costing Steve around 75 dollars. When he mailed a dozen copies to game studios in Massachusetts, Washington, California and Denmark it pushed him closer to a hundred dollars total out of pocket.

Steve had approached Backspace, a local coffee bar/internet café/art gallery, checking that it was okay to distribute copies of The Journal on their premises. The store ended up with an advertisement on the issue’s back cover out of the deal; enticing Journal readers with an hour of free internet with the purchase of any medium size espresso drink. He passed out more copies at Reading Frenzy, an alternative press store, and a retro arcade and bar called Ground Kontrol, where he doesn’t remember asking anyone if it was alright, and just offloaded a few issues on their free publications table.

At Powell’s City of Books, about ten blocks from Steve and Rachel’s 11th Avenue apartment, Steve needed the manager’s agreement to stock issues of The Journal in their zine rack. Powell’s were wary of giving it away for free – it could imply worthlessness – and imposed a dollar cover price. Steve was cut in on 50% of these sales, though he didn’t care if he got paid or not. This was about what it cost to produce an issue, and, he says, “I’d rather have people reading them than make my dollar back.”

Steve concluded the introduction with this: “As for our part, we can't wait to see what's next for games, and we know we're not alone in that.” In the months following the issue’s release, Steve would check in at the stores to see how his project was faring in the free market. Every once in a while, a copy was missing from the shelves.

DECEMBER 2004
(SECOND ISSUE)

A Backspace staffer told Steve that the entertainment editor of the Portland Mercury, the local alternative weekly, was looking for someone to write freelance about games. Steve called the editor, Erik Henriksen, and walked over a copy of the first issue, to his office, levelling that there was nobody else actually involved in the project.

Henriksen was sufficiently impressed, and as quickly as that, Steve Gaynor became “a mildly professional video game writer,” earning about 50 dollars for the occasional 300-word column on gaming culture.

The second issue of The Journal tackled the subjects of women, art and politics all vis a vis video games. Steve called it the “issues issue”. The cover, another Gaynor original, portrayed a latte-sipping French beatnik, obviously replete with beret, perusing a copy of the Cahiers du Compugraphique. “C’est la vie!” exclaimed the caption in a jaunty font.

Steve’s art classes crossed over into his avocation with an opinion piece on video game art design that excoriated the generic look of western fantasy role-playing games. For added value, Steve included a foldout poster that graphed the lineage of modern game genres, charting all the cultural influences between The Sims, Full Throttle and Max Payne, amongst many others.

The Story of Games series continued: “[Games] are one of the only modern media that can transfix viewers young and old -- I know I've been playing since before I can remember, and can't imagine ever stopping -- and therefore the potential to affect impressionable minds throughout their formative years and into their later life is enormous. Games are the greatest sugar pill of our day -- they can keep people's attention endlessly with pure play, opening up to a payload of subversive intent they might not even realize they're receiving. Mine is the first generation that's grown up with games from day one, but the upcoming generation will be the first where sophisticated, cinematic, convincing gaming is considered the norm. What will games say to them?”

The Journal, overall, combined this kind of thoughtfulness with uncompromisingly harsh reviews of games that failed the idealism. Steve pared The Sims 2 down to its questionably consumerist themes, and marginalised the critical darling Half-Life 2 for being an uninspired reprise of an already-established aesthetic.

Greg Kasavin was the only person from the gaming press that Steve had wanted to talk to: with one completed issue on hand, he’d sent out that issue and interview requests to designers at some of his favourite game studios. These included Rockstar Games, of Grand Theft Auto, IO Interactive of Hitman and Peter Molyneux at Lionhead Games, then working on an ambitious RPG called Fable. Craig Hubbard of Monolith Productions, the creative lead on the Shogo and No One Lives Forever games and Ken Levine of Irrational Studios were also on the list. Levine had credits on System Shock 2, and Thief, two games that had helped solidifed the ‘immersive simulation’ sub-genre that was the province of only a few developers. Levine was now working on BioShock, recently revealed to be an adventure through an abandoned World War II lab recently put back into operation for some advanced genetic experiments.

“I tried to read some of the issues,” says Rachel, “but there were too many references that I just didn’t understand. I don’t remember if I got through a whole issue.” Rachel had other things to focus on. She was wrapping up her time at the lab, and had begun applying to graduate schools, with the ultimate ambition of getting a Ph.D. and becoming the head of her own lab. Checking ranked lists of biology and biochemistry schools, Rachel narrowed her options down to about ten schools on the West Coast. Whatever she chose, however, would take her out of Portland. “She was moving with a purpose”, Steve says, and not doing anything that tied him down, “I was cool to go along.”

While Rachel may not have related to the content of The Journal, she liked that Steve was doing it. In general, Steve didn’t talk much with people about the zine; not knowing anyone who cared about games in the way that he did except for five members of the United Nations.

Steve and Rachel’s friends responded more positively to his writing for the Portland Mercury, since it was an established publication that they’d already heard of or read. Additionally, unlike The Journal, the Mercury job got Steve invited to a couple of company parties, with room for a few plus-ones. “The zine was targeted more at myself; [here] the intent was more to bring something interesting about games to the attention of the general readership of the Mercury, which was in the thousands. Like, here’s some cool games that you might not have heard of, and even if you’re not huge into video games you might think they’re weird or interesting. Or, here’s some controversy about a law to ban violent games. More a general interest kind of thing.” That column referred to the then Republican Senator from Pennsylvania, Rick Santorum, as a “conservative shitbag”, and obviously in Portland that line was less controversial than it was conventional wisdom.

With The Journal, Steve was starting to get industry responses – sort of. An email from the Rockstar offices in Edinburgh politely informed Steve that he had sent his request to the wrong Rockstar office, and he should contact the New York headquarters.

On the other hand, Jacob Andersen, a co-founder of Denmark’s IO Interactive was happy to talk to Steve, and so he scored his first developer interview. Steve and Andersen chatted about the role of the company’s first game, Hitman: Codename 47, in popularising non-linear, emergent mission structure, stealth action and ragdoll physics, and touched on the concept of a non-character avatar.

Sometimes these industry figures threw in an endearing comment about their complimentary issue of The Journal, but Steve was aware that this didn’t technically make them readers. Steve had only heard from one legitimate reader, via email. It was someone in Portland named Harry who actually really liked the zine but wondered why there weren’t any bylines.

With the second issue done, Steve shipped out some more copies, including one to the offices of Tim Schafer’s Double Fine Studios in San Francisco. Shortly thereafter, “an email from tim@doublefine or whatever flipped my fucking mind.” Schafer wrote to say that the zine was cool, thanked him for sending it, and let him know that they’d put his foldout video game genealogy poster up in their kitchen. Steve replied saying thanks, and reminded him about the initial interview request.

A woman called Steve at home one day – he can’t remember if she was a receptionist or PR representative, but whoever it was, she was from Irrational Games in Boston, Massachusetts, and she was telling him that Ken Levine was interested in doing an interview. Steve was a fan of Irrational’s System Shock 2 and was intrigued by their ‘spiritual successor’ BioShock, and he sent through some questions.

Steve stayed in occasional contact with Irrational’s offices, waiting to hear back from Levine, but there never ended up being a good time for the interview. Tim Schafer's reply to Steve's email, when it arrived, carefully referred him to the PR people at Double Fine's publisher.

“I learned a lot about channels of communication,” says Steve, “calling people weekly, sending them emails and getting the polite deferment. It’s disappointing but it taught me about how that stuff works. They’re not going to say, ‘oh, he’s too busy with real work so we’re going to cancel this.’ Instead, they say ‘oh, we’ll get back to you,’ until you stop calling. Which is standard across any kind of industry that involves important people and receptionists.”

Regardless of how successful the discussions might have been, his contact with the developers effectively demythologised them in Steve’s eyes. It had only recently even occurred to him that “normal people that you could theoretically meet and talk to make these games I play.” Game developers weren’t wildly different from him, he thought – in fact, he could do that.

FEBRUARY 2005
(MOD TOOLS AND GRAD SCHOOLS)

Throughout the winter, Rachel interviewed at graduate schools across the West Coast. When she went up for a weekend interview in Seattle, a four-hour out of state drive, Steve made the trip with her. “The weekends are pretty intense,” says Rachel, “with wining and dining, sightseeing, and the all-important interviews where you meet with faculty members you might be interested in working with.”

That same weekend there happened to be a free seminar at a nearby convention center on, of all things, how to get into video game development. The panel was comprised of hiring managers, contract artists and producers. The sessions, Steve remembers, “touched on the qualities developers look for when hiring, how to put together a good CV, a Q&A forum with the panel, and so on.”

Steve realised by now that he wanted to be involved with games. As early as thirteen, he had made game maps in the Duke Nukem 3D level editor, creating his own textures and art in Microsoft Paint. He’d graduated to using the Quake editor years later, and beyond all the partly-formed stabs at game production, there were the creative ideas in his notebook and the critical theory in The Journal. “I was doing all that writing,” Steve knew, “because I wanted to be involved in making them. I wanted to be in the shoes of the kind of person who at that time I was just trying to talk to.”

One of the seminar speakers summed up the lesson of the event in a one-liner that stuck with Steve: “Make cool shit, and show it off to anyone and everyone.” It was a basic sentiment, Steve thought, and maybe it was something he could have figured out on its own, but it clearly meant something to these industry people in the auditorium who hired game designers, and for that reason, it meant something to him, too. “I came to the very explicit decision that I was going to open up a level editor, make levels, send them to companies and try and get hired as a game designer.” He considered that he could use his work on The Journal and the Mercury as a portfolio to transition into a role at gaming press sites like Gamespot or 1UP, but he knew that would only be an indirect route to where he actually wanted to end up.

Another print run of The Journal was going to cost him another hundred bucks, albeit offset by what he was making writing for the Mercury. The total could be halved if he didn’t send any copies out to developers this time. Most of his interview leads had fizzled, although he had Craig Hubbard of Monolith lined up for the third issue.

The illustration that graced the latest cover of The Journal may have been inspired by the fine art courses Steve was taking: a goofy-looking, bow-legged cowboy attempting to lasso a galloping computer desk. “YEE-HAW!” read the subtitle. The slapstick image was a nod to the ongoing conflict in the pages of The Journal between sincerity and self-consciousness, and despite Steve’s commitment to game design, still hadn’t really been resolved.

In previous issues, Steve had rarely discussed specific games at length, and to rectify this, decided to make issue three more of a “reviews issue”, catching up with all the games neglected by The Journal over the past six months. In preparation, Steve checked online for more information about the games that he was going to write up. He was trying to find out if there were any essays or critical thought that already existed about these games, as well as screenshots that he could lift and copy into the Word template. In searching, Steve stumbled across more intelligent game writing than he had ever known about. Other websites were discussing the same themes that The Journal was, in a similarly academic tone that lacked the self-deflating deflection, and were making whole-hearted stabs at commercial success. There was even somebody else doing a zine, a writer named Jeremy Parish. Steve included the addresses of all these websites in the third issue, indicating that if you liked The Journal you ought to check out this list of recommended reading.

That there was, after all, a preponderance of existing game critique seemed to take a little bit of the imperative out of what he was doing with The Journal. If other writers were expressing the kind of ideas that he had about games, in more widely read forums, he found there to be less urgency in saying what he thought.

From day one, Steve had intended for the Story of Games series to be the core theory writing in the zine, and now that he had carried those articles to their natural conclusion it seemed like the most appropriate time to bring The Journal to an end.

Reflecting upon The Journal, he declared it an exercise in diminishing returns. “For being as lo-fi as it was, it was still a lot of work without a lot of… I mean, I got that freelance gig off it, and I talked to some cool people, but I’d already done that stuff, and there wasn’t a lot coming back and I didn’t already have a sweet interview lined up for issue four.”

Steve was proud that he had gotten some industry figures to give him their time and reply to some of his questions, but figured that he had exhausted most of his academic thinking about games. He went into issue three knowing that it would be the last. “Three is a nice, classic number.”

The conclusion of Steve’s free-time project didn’t hurt as much as it might have, because something else had already taken its place. Steve didn’t want to pursue game criticism or game reviewing, nor anything to do with fine art – it was game development. He was convinced of this.

He wanted to help create games, not simply write about the games made by other people, and in that goal he had something new to motivate him. He had already become occupied with learning how to build levels in game editors, and with his attention so swiftly drawn to other things, The Journal passed from his life without incident. “I thought, alright, I’m done with this.”

In what would be The Journal’s final interview, Steve had asked Craig Hubbard about the evolutions of his experience at Monolith. “I've gone from navigating by a mostly intuitive understanding of games”, Hubbard replied, “to developing formalized theories of design and structure that eliminate a lot of guesswork. Like everything, though, the more you know about something, the more you realize there is to learn."

APRIL 2005
(FINAL ISSUE)

“What if I think I’m going to [make games], but I’m not actually 100% sure? What if I think I want to do it but then I don’t actually enjoy the act of doing it?” For comparison’s sake, Steve had once wanted badly to externalise his thoughts about video games, but stopped after about eight months and three zine issues.

As Rachel was finding a new school, Steve was getting ready to leave one. He was doing his final year of sculpture concentration with a professor named Harrell Fletcher, who was an actively practising conceptual artist. He knew that Steve was not considering contemporary art as any kind of career, but was supportive of what Steve did care about. Fletcher assigned Steve a final exam that was tailored towards his interests.

“Game designers,” Steve had learned, “were the people that were shaping the games in the way that meant the most to me. They were devising what happened in the games. My interest was not in how the games looked, or sounded, or in how sweet the technology was, but in the dynamics of what I did and how the world responded. That’s a game designer’s job.”

“My final project was to spend seven days in my apartment doing nothing but – literally the entire time I was awake – using a level editor to make a video game level and find out how it worked.”

“You’re not going to come to class,” Fletcher told him, “you’re not going to get out and do anything, you’re just going to get up in the morning and you’re going to work on this thing and then you’re going to go to bed at night.”

It was important to test Steve’s resolve, and he knew this not least because he was beginning to doubt some of his own recent decisions. He was wrong about The Journal, for one thing. “I still wanted to write about games and I had ideas for articles in the back of my head.” Only now he had no outlet for those ideas, and with Rachel waiting to hear back from grad schools, he’d soon be leaving behind both the Mercury job and Portland itself.

Since he’d never made any kind of game for an audience before, it was easy to wonder about how concrete his commitment to making games really was. Steve’s goal of being a level designer was nice in theory but his skill and resolve were unproven. If the rigours of this college test were any reasonable measure for how a life in game development was going to go, then it wasn’t going to be all that relaxing from here on out.

Seven days, ten hours a day. Steve had chosen to work with the level editor for Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory. Using its Unreal engine, he wanted to figure out how to set up a world, or more accurately, an obstacle course that the player could navigate using all of the spy character’s moves: mantling over ledges, climbing up ladders and moving hand over hand across a pipe.

The level Steve was putting together was comprised of abstract geometry: he didn’t concern himself with graphics. The level was based around a spiral construction. A ramp twisted up and around a central column, with chain link fences and sewerage pipes blocking the path. The player was supposed to manoeuvre through these to the top of the tower, where he’d zipline back to the beginning. The goals for the project were small, but Steve thought that they could therefore be reasonably completed in a week of ten-hour days.

Steve wasn’t working in a medium that was technically considered fine art – yet – but this didn’t mean that he hadn’t sufficiently learned about or analysed conventional forms of art. He’d discerned enough to decide that he did not want to be involved with it professionally. “Contemporary fine art has so little relevance to the vast majority of the populace. There’s a very small group of people who make art and a very small group of people who consume art and it’s all really expensive. In the past, fine art was an actual communications medium, ‘cause there wasn’t photography or hundreds or thousands of reporters all over the world taking pictures and sending them back to publications that anyone could read. A painting was actually trying to depict two people, an event or a concept, something that they couldn’t otherwise have knowledge of, and it was important. And even in the 19th century, people in France would go to the Salon and it was a huge cultural event to see the art that was being displayed by young artists.

“Television and film and the internet [make] depiction of concepts and places so ubiquitous. Fine art is nothing more than expensive entertainment for a very small audience, and it’s just entertainment. That’s what art school taught me: art is not important. In this day and age, [fine] art is entertainment for people who have very specific tastes, who are really into the kind of imagery that certain artists make, or in trying to figure out what encoded messages are in this artistic piece about the war in Afghanistan, or whatever, and I’m interested in entertainment but not that kind of entertainment.

“It actually helped to legitimise, in my mind, the idea of working with something like video games, because even… the finest of fine art in this day and age is just entertainment, like any other thing that you can decide to spend your money on. It helped encourage me and think of what I wanted to do as being more valid.” The education of Steve Gaynor had either brought fine art down to the cultural niche of video games, or it had elevated video games to the mainstream respect afforded to fine art.

At the end of the week not only had Steve finished his project – in his Splinter Cell level, you could successfully control the spy, hop a fence, plant a bomb and win the game – but something far more significant had occurred. “I was still really excited about it – like, yep, this is what I want to be doing.”

Steve brought in his level to class, and demonstrated his process to the room of art students, contrasting screenshots of the level editor with the finished product. “None of the other people in the class were into the games they way I was, but they found it interesting…. I [compared] what part of the level looks like when you’re building it compared to when you’re going through it. There was general interest, just [for] the fact that I had committed to it and that I had something tangible to show for it.” The reaction of his classmates wasn’t what was really important, nor was the grade that he received. (It was an A.)

Having put theory into practice, Steve had some measure of internal validation about how he would fare in game design. He’d gone through the same test with producing The Journal, and even after that ceased to be, he knew he wasn’t through with writing about games either.

The thing about The Journal, says Steve, was that “it was always supposed to be ironic, deprecating. Overblown. Self-important. I was pretending that I was doing something with an enormous amount of gravity, just to, on some level, temper the fact that I was doing something completely sincere and serious.” Despite the cover art juxtapositions, there had never really been much of an internal conflict: Steve had meant every pretentious word, and was only cautious about whether anyone else would acknowledge that this sort of thing could be taken seriously. He was joking that he didn’t really mean it, but yes he did.

While Steve was handing out the final issue of The Journal at Powell’s and Backspace and all his usual distributors, Rachel decided where she wanted to get her Ph.D.: she’d accepted an offer from the University of California, San Francisco. Rachel had chosen UCSF because its biomedical science graduate programs were consistently ranked in the nationwide top three, and the particulars of the program appealed more to the medically oriented research that she was interested in.

San Francisco also happened to be a game development city. Unlike Portland, it was a place where Steve could feasibly get hired in a game development role. This was no coincidence: Rachel had been considering all along “whether San Francisco would be a good place for Steven to find a job in the video game industry, and obviously it was.” For Steve, whether to move or not was a no-brainer. “Everything that was important me was going to be in San Francisco.” They moved two weeks after Steve’s graduation day.

JULY 2009
(HOW TO GET INTO THE VIDEO GAME INDUSTRY)

If The Journal had a legacy, if it had been at all meaningful, it was as personal catharsis rather than serving as popular entertainment for an audience. “I went from vaguely thinking games were interesting and not knowing exactly why,” says Steve, “to having drilled down on some of those and examined why I cared.

“Any time that there’s something that you think a lot about but you haven’t actually expressed in any structured way, it just is a nebulous ball of interest that you have, but once you start to formalise it… you’re forcing yourself to put your thoughts into a structure and re-examine them.”

Consider all the possible ways of getting into the video game industry. Making a local video game zine seems like a far less obvious path than, say, becoming a tester – and Steve did that too, which likely contributed more directly to his eventually becoming a level designer. A level designer working, by massive coincidence, on sequels to titles made by the same people he’d interviewed for The Journal (or tried to).

The Journal, though, was not irrelevant. The challenges of internet technology no longer a deterrent, Steve transferred his video game writing and criticism for The Journal and the Portland Mercury to two web outlets, one entirely his own and one, shorter-lived, that he worked on with others. The latter got him a press pass to the annual Game Developers Conference, held in – where else – San Francisco. At the conference he met Tim Schafer, who casually greeted him with “oh, hey, Steve” and shook his hand. At the same conference, people recognised him for the writing that he’d done for his personal blog. They were impressed or at least interested by his thoughts on video games, and, crucially, they were in a position to hire him.

His goal of talking to a game designer became the most blasé, normal interaction of his everyday life. It was no longer this idealistic quest to contact a kind of person who only theoretically existed: the people who made games were now the furthest thing from unreachable. Steve Gaynor was one of them.

And between all the money that Steve had spent on The Journal and what he’d earned writing for the Mercury, he was, in the end, up by twenty dollars. That part was nice, as well.

A Fight To Remember

2009-07-23T21:00:00.000+12:00

He is a sunken and bare chested young man who wears eyeshadow, styles his hair like a skunk ("skunk wave") and has a mustache tattooed on his face. His name is Ghat. This is you.

You are introduced to Ghat immediately after Zeno Clash begins. Ghat is fleeing his home city after having done something truly weird. He's killed his Father-Mother (which is what you think it is, but worse) and now he has to escape before he gets iced by a bipedal pig, dual wielding fish-mounted pistols. With his horned girlfriend in tow, Ghat is running away from the surreal and towards the even stranger things that wait outside the walls. He might think that he's running away from the circus, but he's pretty much only crossing from the freak tent to the bearded lady's caravan.

Interspersed in this sequence is a tutorial that teaches you at length how to punch and how to block, like that was the part that needed an explanation.

Zeno Clash is a first-person brawler that operates as a linear tour through arenas stacked with multiple opponents. It takes the first part of its name from its fictional setting of Zenozoik. Zenozoik is a deliberate reference to the Cenozoic era, the age of mammals: whales, sabretoothed tigers, elephants with hammers, hermaphroditic creation myths, and multi-species families decked out in metal helmets, peacock feathers and probosces. Ghat's sister wears a wicker hat and an exoskeleton blouse, his brother looks like the kind of creature that would wash up on a New Jersey beach, destined to appear on a shocking tabloid cover.

The world of Zeno Clash is like an entire game in the style of Star Wars' Mos Eisley cantina: a montage of aliens, puppets and makeup-caked actors; all completely unique designs and all quickly bypassed, never lingering upon their inherent strangeness and never venturing any backstory. To play Zeno Clash is to be exposed to condensed and casual absurdity in such a short span of time before you get to process it.

If the game ever explains its characters, it's in the succinct and thought-provoking detail of a Twilight Zone parable. One creature wants to be invisible, which he achieves by ripping out people's eyes. Another is a dome-headed hulk walking in a straight line across the world until a rock gets in his way and he dies. Those two make sense, kind of, but how about the bounty hunter who can summon an army of parachutist squirrels with kegs of dynamite strapped to their backs? Never underestimate Zeno Clash's penchant for the inexplicable. The story is fairly simple, the plot basic enough to follow, but its systems of genetics and biology are altogether something else.

The story is, more accurately, a loose framework that allows the player to witness and murder concept art. You and Ghat head out into the desert, see and hit some things and then return. Neither Ghat nor his girlfriend ever appear all that perplexed by their crazy encounters, probably because none of it is any stranger than what they grew up with. So you get that there is no real baseline for what is "normal" in Zenozoik.

Zeno Clash being an independently-developed PC game written in English by non-native English speakers -- Chilean, in this case -- and there's the occasional piece of suspect translation. It'd be shocking if there wasn't, at this point. These instances invite you to guess about how daunting Zeno Clash is really supposed to be: whether some details are simply being unfortunately lost in translation, or that it is, actually, all this weird.

Is it surrealist for surrealism's sake, or is it a fictional universe that makes perfect sense to a development team lead by three Chilean brothers? Zenozoik and its inhabitants very plausibly could have been the kind of fictional place collaboratively designed by three brothers growing up together, manifesting itself in the short stories and ballpoint-drawn comics of sixteen-year-olds before achieving public legitimacy as a downloadable video game.

Is there anything behind the Zeno Clash weirdness? Propelled through Zeno Clash's series of arenas, you can consider the possible allegorical or metaphorical implications, the artistic intentions, rationalise events as poignant or significant, and then you break some dude's nose and save the philosophy for later. Herein lies the answer.

Ghat's confused because he murdered somebody and left home, and we're confused because what the fuck is this place. How do we both work through our separate anxieties? We fight. At no point do you care less about what Zeno Clash might "mean" than when you're grabbing the nearest, sharpest stick and bringing it down upon the head of a bloodied woolly mammoth.

It's remarkable how a game like this can be so complicated and so simple at the same time. The Zeno is abstract and inscrutable, and the Clash; you've played this before. Zeno Clash would be more intimidating if the impenetrable fiction accessorized with impenetrable gameplay, i.e. if it played like something from the Myst series. Instead, this game is at once familiar and unfamiliar. The mechanics are as traditional as the fiction is alien, and ultimately you can cut through the pervasive oddities because, you will find, you speak the only language that matters.

Zeno Clash is a really conventional game in a lot of ways. The movements are simple: you lock onto enemies and circle them, clicking a button for a basic attack, holding it for a powered attack, and pressing another button to block. There are combinations of these three moves that deploy some more sophisticated techniques, and you can figure out when to time your blocks, how to break someone else's block and when to grab enemies and throw them into one another... or you could just press that basic attack button over and over again, clicking insistently as you beat your enemies into boring, effective submission.

Zeno Clash intentionally evokes the spirit of classic fighting games with sliding versus screens that announce your opponents before you do battle. It doesn't even need to do this if it wants to draw the comparison. To anyone who's played those games, Zeno Clash is immediately recognisable. The similarity is not about aesthetics, it's about feeling. Zeno Clash is like every fighting game, it has the same repertoires and taps into the same emotional responses.

Like every fighting game, Zeno Clash will, from time to time, compel in you a sense of absolute brutality. These are the moments where you really, genuinely want to beat the shit out of something. This is when you get thrown to the floor by a gargantuan boss character, and you hammer the keys to try and speed up or bypass the animation for Ghat getting back on his feet. That animation wastes so much of your time, and the other guy is still throwing punches while you're not even permitted to mouselook.

These are the moments where you're totally thrashed and reduced to the lowest fraction of your health bar, but you are fully aware that you've never got so far before. This is when you are so absolutely fixated on destroying something, and you click the mouse three times which translates into punching the guy onto his knees, uppercutting his face and kicking him in his stomach, and every contact wound is so satisfying because at that moment you have never been so close to victory.

These are the moments where you just made it, after too many times when you didn't. This is the feeling of finally beating a game's greatest challenge when you already have so little health your character should be dead. This isn't triumph, or pride, even if you think that's how you're supposed to feel. This is pure adrenaline, this is rage, that leaves you panting over a virtual corpse. It takes you that place where you are you are mentally ready to bash in the teeth of a moleman. You'd really do it. This is a feeling dissipates in a second when the next enemy pings you in the head with a crossbow, and then you repeat forever if necessary.

A lack of quicksave in a game can result in a different style of play. In Shadow of the Colossus, needing to deliver the takedown in one unbroken take turns boss fights into improvised art. You have to hit all your marks, all your steps: leaping from horses, across wings, being thrown around by the wind and clutching tightly to the surface as you're dragged underwater. Performing it is something spectacular. That's about precision, that's about grace.

Zeno Clash is another kind of desperation. The fights have no progression, no separate stages. There aren't any dance steps to learn except the first one: tear this guy apart, now. Smash this thing in the face with a mallet. Zeno Clash is messy.

The visuals are like no game before it, and the mechanics are like every game. It's a style of gameplay memorable to anyone who's played video games. The world is strange, the characters are stranger, but you know how to interact with it. And that doesn't necessarily make half of the game disappointing -- it's a balance. The familiar and the unfamiliar. You've been trained how to navigate this place.

You've been here before. You remember what it's like to see an enemy coming at you, you remember how to think, how to act, how to respond. This is you. This is the last thirty seconds of a Street Fighter match when you're down to no health. This is rapidly button-matching your way through quick-time events in God of War and coating the the controller in sweat. This is being the last person alive on your Counter-Strike team. This is the part of Shadow of the Colossus when you do bring the sword down, again and again, swinging around wildly as you clutch to a patch of fur. It doesn't matter that this time it looks weird. This is home.

Maybe it's too bad that a game with such a strong visual imagination is entirely about kicking people in the face.

But violence is your compass. You'd be lost without it.

A Trilogy In Seven Parts

2009-07-18T11:00:00.005+12:00

1.

MITCH KRPATA: I ran into a former college professor, who's a pretty highly regarded poet and essayist. He asked me what I was up to, I said "writing about video games," and he looked at me like I had a huge booger hanging out of my nose.

Does anybody grow up wanting to be a game journalist anymore? Did they ever? It definitely seems like it was more of a possibility then and less of one now.

In retrospect, I think that game journalism throughout the eighties and most of the nineties was about appealing directly to the imagination of twelve-year-old boys. The staff of gaming magazines didn't call themselves journalists but gaming experts, who could master the most difficult of titles and had access to all the latest tips, tricks and secrets. So that made them eminently qualified to write for a magazine. They knew your favourite hot new games inside and out, and in that way they like a better quality of person, at least to the male adolescent brain. This was how you validated your drastically uncool hobby: you could, one day, get paid to play and write about video games.

Since then, the internet has made it far easier for anyone to broadcast an opinion worldwide, and consequently far less prestigious to do so. Publishers and developers are able to bypass the press almost entirely. There's a far greater volume of games writing available and much of it is bad (not that it was very good back then) and gets ripped apart by the internet with a little too much schadenfreude -- devaluing the entire profession by association. Gamers distill articles and personalities down to pro/con biases and polemically champion/diminish the source. Developers declare negative reviews of their games to be "irresponsible journalism". The ostensibly "smart" critics eulogise gaming journalism every time someone at Kotaku makes a typo. Also, print is dead. From the outside, being a gaming journalist doesn't look like such a fun thing to be anymore.

Late last year, Cliff Bleszinski was profiled in The New Yorker. One of the more bizarre moments in that article comes when Bleszinski takes the author for a joyride in his Lamborghini and proclaims that "One of my jobs in life is to make this" -- referring to game development -- "look a little cooler." He's even wearing sunglasses when he says this. Presumably he then goes on to draw alongside a convertible filled with college girls at a red light and rev his engine.

Bleszinski, in that moment -- the real moment, not the one I made up, although that too -- is still the little kid on the playground reading EGM and thinking how impossibly cool it would be if you got to play, make or write about games for a living. Fast cars and sunglasses are the kind of game industry career fantasy that's attractive to that kid. It's about self-consciously attaching glamour to a profession and a medium that is fundamentally not that sexy.

If it's not cool to be a game journalist anymore, it should be, and for one reason alone. The writing is better than ever. The bad writing is still bad, and there may be more of it, but the good writing is better than at any other point in history. Take a look at the standard of publishing in 1989: this isn't even a contest. Today's best print journalists, industry analysts and reviewers are sharper, more intelligent, more erudite. They write what they honestly think instead of getting hung up on cheat codes and exclamation points and marketing cycles, and so maybe this means professional games writing doesn't ensorcell preteens like it once did, and it doesn't instill the same kind of blind enthusiasm and devotion in its audience anymore. But if it's not so focussed on appealing to kids, then it can start appealing to adults instead. It has started.

Initially I thought I would talk examples of writing I liked, then decided I'd rather talk to the writers that I like. From most of the professional game journalists that I spoke with, I learned that journalists talk about what they like about games journalism with the reluctance of clinical depressives asked to talk about what they like about themselves. And it occurs to me that portraying game journalists and journalism in a light that's not relentlessly sarcastic is also very uncool on my part.

Nonetheless.

2.

SIMON PARKIN: There are lots of reasons to write about videogames for money: videogames and money, for instance. Of course, in time you discover that neither the money nor the videogames are usually any good but even so, for the passionate adolescent gamer (which is still how most videogame journalists enter the field), the perks of free games and exclusive access can be persuasive.

But these perks don’t sustain or nourish over the long-term, which is probably why so few game journalists remain in the job past thirty-five. As with any vocation, true job satisfaction comes from doing enjoyable work and doing it well. In terms of writing about videogames, that can be the moment you describe a game world or system in a way that puts into words what readers were feeling but unable to articulate themselves, or the moment that you make some fresh analysis that frames the discussion in a new way.

But for all good journalists, no matter what their field, the height of professional satisfaction is surely found in rooting out an interesting story and telling it in an interesting way to an interested readership. This is a rare opportunity in game journalism because so much of our story-writing is PR-led, writers acting as mere conduits for publishers, passing preset information from developer to consumer. As such, most of the stories the gaming press deals in aren’t really stories at all.

Indeed, the tussle to be the first to publish a list of developer facts is as undignified as it is un-enduring. Once Wikipedia has been filled with the details of your latest Final Fantasy, Metal Gear or Halo interview, what value is left in the remaining husk of your work? There may be a certain frisson in being the first to report on a new title in a beloved franchise, but that story would have broken with or without you, in much the same way. The realization of that reality brings with it little to pull you from your bed each day.

So, for me, the times when I’ve felt most fulfilled in this industry have been those times I’ve been able to write a story about a game that’s somehow enduring, usually by exploring the humanity behind or within a product, or the culture that surrounds it. It’s in writing something of value that, in one way or another, might not have appeared if it weren’t for your seeking it out and writing it down.

By way of illustration, last year I had the chance to interview the maker of an obscure Japanese-only Sega Dreamcast title, Segagaga. It’s a videogame about a console-maker on the verge of collapse, made by a console-maker on the verge of collapse. Released in 2001, on almost the exact same day the Dreamcast was discontinued and Sega began their withdrawal from the console manufacturing business, it offers its player the chance to rewrite history. A kind of business-RPG, you’re charged with turning Sega’s ailing fortunes around, making the console side of its business a success and taking the company to the top of the industry.

The idea that a Japanese company whose hardware division was in terminal decline should fund a game in which players were offered the chance to address the very same issues its executives were wrestling with is unprecedented. That the game even exists illustrates why many people hold the Sega of that era so dearly, and yet very little is known about the game’s gestation in Japan or the West.

In interviewing Tez Okano, the man who single-handedly came up with the concept and managed to shepherd it through a difficult and underfunded development to release, I had the chance to tell a fascinating story that touches on all manner of issues pertinent to the industry today.

Okano-san was extremely chatty, in a way that Japanese interviewees rarely are, and the strong flavour of his anecdotes turned a good story into a great one: things that I can in no way take credit for. Nevertheless, it was, in very real terms, a neat story that might have remained untold without my telling it. I wish I could do that more often.

3.

NICK BRECKON: My story isn't so much a story about my career as it is about the guy that gave me it.

I'd originally planned to write about one of the many life-changing events from the course of my storied tenure at Shacknews, but there were almost too many to choose from. For instance, there was that great one-liner from line 16 of my BlizzCon 07 liveblog--a real classic. There's the time I snuck in a short nap during Hideo Kojima's keynote address. And then the infamous free food; the Banjo Kazooie pre-release event was a career highlight in that respect.

Yeah, I've been to a lot of places and gladly eaten a lot of shit in the last two years, but if I had to pick the first and greatest moment that made me think a career in games journalism was worthwhile, it'd be the secondhand recollection of a story that Chris Remo once told me.

It's no complicated or scandalous tale, but as a newcomer to the field at the time it was told, it was incredibly instructive. Hopefully he doesn't mind me retelling this. I didn't ask him. For the sake of the story, let's pretend I asked him.

It goes like this: Chris had played an early version of Castle Crashers at some conference--I believe it was GDC 2006--and sort of hated it. Maybe he didn't totally hate it, but for the sake of the story, let's say he thought it was complete garbage.

Chris being Chris, he doesn't beat around the bush and flat-out tells The Behemoth guys what he thinks. "Your game is complete garbage," he probably said, and likely went on to detail its many flaws and shortcomings. A few slaps were exchanged, possibly.

Chris previews the game again at Comic-Con 2007, and it's undergone a complete redesign. He writes the game up again, gives it a favorable preview. Then, sometime later on, The Behemoth guys tell him that his original critique was a significant factor in their decision to refashion the game. And that's the story.

Now, if he'd told me that story today, I probably would have thought it was just a neat thing. But back then, a few months into the job, it was somewhat revelatory. I wouldn't say that particular event changed the way I approached game journalism in any tangible way, but it certainly opened my eyes to a broader context for our work.

The face of games journalism is so focused on serving the consumer audience that the idea of actual game developers caring about anything I wrote hadn't much occurred to me. That story gave a weight to the words that I hadn't known to measure beforehand; made me realize that the articles I wrote had the potential for greater impact than a few idle comments. More importantly, it proved the value of staying truly honest, a policy I've tried very hard to follow.

It's no mini-hamburger, but it was a good lesson to learn, and stories like that have certainly helped me become more comfortable in my role as a game journalist.

Come to think of it, I never did play Castle Crashers. Bonus lesson: you don't really have to play the games you write about. Man, that story was just full of lessons.

4.

Jason Rohrer, the counterculture indie "art game" developer behind Passage, Between and Gravitation, gets called a sellout for signing with a creative advertising agency. The agency's name is Tool, which invites obvious condemnations of artistic betrayal. Why would a developer ever be labeled a sellout for anything other than a fanboy's reasons? In Rohrer's case, it's because we know him. We learned who he was and what his values were when Jason Fagone wrote about him in Esquire, and then when he was profiled, as a follow-up of sorts, in Robert Ashley's outstanding and sorely irregular A Life Well Wasted podcast.

Rohrer supports himself, his wife and their two children on $14,500 a year -- an income sourced from Paypal donations and a two-year patronage from one of the guys who made Bink Video. Rohrer outlines his environmentally-conscious lifestyle on his website. In Ashley's podcast, Rohrer notes that he's stuck to his sustainable ideals, bought a cheap house that's also no good, but that he's starting to be troubled by how a life of making art games for no money is going to send his kids to college.

"The house is also really musty and damp, and my wife has asthma," he says, "and it's gotten worse and worse as we've lived there longer and longer... we can sell our house for $50,000, maybe. And then where are we going to get another house? Because housing prices have gone up everywhere.... We're facing... how idealism kind of hits reality, and then you are sort of stuck in this situation where, what's worse: me making a game for the iPhone or my wife, eventually, taking ten years off her life because of asthma, you know?"

"The answer seems fairly obvious," Ashley observes.

A narrative is forming around Rohrer's public life, and it's not about how he progresses as a game designer or what studio he works for or how much his games sell. It's not even about whether he proves that games can be art, really. The story is about his crazy ideals and how long he can remain true to them. Rohrer wonders, in A Life Well Wasted, what will happen if he ventures into commercial game development: will he be able to keep spending $14,000 a year, or will his lifestyle adjust to match his new salary?

Rohrer doesn't want to give up his values, or is reluctant to. This seems insane to everyone listening to the podcast, given the conservative extremes of his choices, and that his wife's health and children's futures are at stake. I believe that his situation, abstracted enough, is understandable to anyone. Rohrer's dilemma is about fundamentally compromising the person that he wants to be. He doesn't want to abandon his ideals and become the kind of person who considers ideals to be exclusively the province of young. He's been living his dream for years, and because he's held onto it for as long as he has, it's ridiculous to think that it's simply impossible to make it work -- he just hasn't figured out how to do it, long-term. If he has to compromise, he's probably never going to get back to how he wants to live his life. That's what "selling out" means -- not earning a paycheck, developing games for the Xbox 360 or selling Passage on the iPhone for a dollar. There's so much inherent drama to the Jason Rohrer story, and all of it without mentioning what's noteworthy about his games.

This is a transitional period for gaming journalism. You're starting to get biographies written about people in the game industry, completely separate from their roles as creative directors or programmers. As referenced earlier, Tom Bissell rode in a car with CliffyB. John Seabrook shadowed Will Wright, David Kushner reconstructed the history of Carmack and Romero. These pieces are the exceptions to feature writing about games. As an audience, we still don't know much about developers' lives beyond the games that they produce. Is it just hard to find subjects who are suitably fascinating, or is it easier for non-game journalists to look beyond the reasons why the games are interesting, and write about the people instead?

Still, nobody would have ever thought to write about Jason Rohrer if he didn't make games. People aren't interesting to people who don't know them until they produce some great work, at which point journalists are able to look back and find out what made them interesting in the first place.

Rohrer is an interesting person by any standard. More interesting than his games, arguably, and the downside of that is that when his life becomes public in magazine profiles, he opens himself up to being called a sellout for making a deal with an advertising company.

For allegories, art games, parables, whatever they are: Rohrer's games are actually very simple and easily understood. They are ideas and emotions expressed entirely through gameplay mechanics. Melancholia, aging, separation, loss. That's surely a challenge to communicate as a developer, but not to understand as a player. Rohrer's games are no less laudable as achievements for this, but they all click for you at a certain point and then they're effectively over. You understand the intent, you get the message. There is nothing to be gained from playing it a second time. You're not going to learn anything interesting after they click for you.

You get the point. His games click. But the thing about Jason Rohrer, the person, is that he never will.

5.

MITCH KRPATA: I always wanted to be a writer, and this is where I think I have a decent chance to make a mark, moreso than if I were pursuing fiction or something. With games, I feel like I have a chance to say something nobody's ever said before. (Not that I actually have done that. But the possibility is there!)

Plus, seeing your name in print never gets old. Even though blogging is awesome, and it's where most of the best games writing is happening these days, being published on dead trees is thrilling and empowering and legitimizing and lots of other participles. If you're working in new media, it's easy to disparage traditional print media, but I think deep down everybody craves that validation.

The money's nice, too. Which is not to say the money is good, it's a pittance for the amount of work it takes -- barely more than minimum wage, if you do the math -- but what could be better than getting paid for your hobby? I'd be playing video games with my spare time anyway.

6.

KIERON GILLEN: I can't really choose one moment. If there wasn't a promise of a resplendent, transforming, beatific moment every few weeks, I doubt I'd have stuck it out for a month, let alone the decade-and-a-half I've put in. There's a mass of shit you have to swallow, but there's chocolate mixed in that slurry. As a chocoholic, I have to gag it all down. I've no choice.

Let's go with the first professional review I wrote. I was approached in a nightclub by the DJ, who was also a staff writer for the immortal Amiga Power. He asked me if I'd be interested in writing for them, as my writing had caught the editor's eye. Well, yes.

I wander into the office, and have an audience. I get lobbed the A500 version of UFO and a bank note from hell. That is, my soul being bought, right then. And I laughed then, and I laughed now, because it's leavened with the sense that there may have been something actually Faustian in that moment. And - hey - fuck it. It's not as if I was using my soul anyway.

So I go and review the game. It's an amazing game, but the conversion is ludicrously terrible. I mainly play it on a friend's Amiga in the Student residence, getting enough play then going off to write it. I crouch with a notebook, in the corner of a room where a guy's hitting on my friends, with the pair of them smoking magic mushrooms as I scribble out the piece ("There are no more heroes". Which, as far as first lines paid for money goes, at least was in character). I hand in the review.

Forward a month, the morning after another nightclub trip, but 200 miles away. Grabbing a copy from the shelves and flicking through and seeing myself immortalised in ink.

I've never quite got over that buzz. The moment of creation, the moment of contact, the moment when you realise that stuff you loved - and I loved games journalism like I loved few things - IS NOW BEING DONE BY YOU. You are becoming what you desired, stepping over into the mirror. It's not like being God. It's like being Christ, and ascending. You know there's a chance you're doing to other people's brains what other people did to yours.

You know it's pointless. You know it's the most important thing in the world. It's all you've ever wanted. It's amazing. I recommend it to anyone who's functionally insane.

7.

CHRIS REMO: When a few like-minded internet friends and I founded the never-fully-defined game site Idle Thumbs, we were practically giddy. We weren't very involved with the games industry on a professional level at the time, and, as with Idle Thumbs itself, all of our prior journalism activities had been done on a volunteer basis. The already surprisingly small industry seemed even smaller to us than it does now. But because that meant we occupied a slightly larger part of it, I think our potential impact seemed lager.

We had innumerable disagreements about what exactly Idle Thumbs was "supposed" to be (disagreements that led to eventual dysfunction on staff) but we were all of similar mind that it was to represent a more human, less by-the-numbers approach to games writing. Kieron Gillen's infamous manifesto on The New Games Journalism had coincidentally been published within weeks of Idle Thumbs' public launch. We twittered excitedly about it on the staff forum; we had different opinions, but the fact that somebody else of a certain stature had similar complaints about the old games journalism, and suggested doing something about it, made us feel like we were part of some zeitgeist.

Given all of that, it's no surprise that, while we did make the annual trek to E3, some of us were far more excited about the Game Developers Conference, where the creative energy is palpable as developers from all over the world gather to say really grand things about the future of game design. (It remains my favorite event of the year.) Being able to attend GDC and meet some of the developers we had often discussed -- we sat down for a long talk with Andrew Stern and Michael Mateas, the pair behind Thumbs favorite Façade, and I met Tim Schafer on the streets of San Jose after the Game Developers Choice Awards while dorkily wearing a Full Throttle shirt -- made the extremely small thing we were doing feel much more real.

That feeling came to a head, for me at least, a couple of months later when I wrote I Kill You... a ranting editorial expressing my frustration with the seemingly regressive nature of games and emotion and their obsession with violence over all other forms of human interaction. It's the kind of piece that I don't think I could write now, as a "professional" game journalist -- at least not as easily as I did back then, when I had no idea if lots of other people had already made the same point, or whether I was making it well. It had a certain naivete that came with being an impassioned volunteer journalist, and that I sometimes miss.

The article was linked by a number of designers and commentators more clever and respected than I, and it all came to a head when it was included in the August 2004 edition of the International Game Developers Association -- an email list to which I was of course subscribed. To all of us on staff, this was a bigger deal than it really was, particularly so for me. At that moment, it felt like everything we were trying to do (and we still didn't exactly agree on what that was, but that was okay) was somehow working, that the right people were seeing what we were doing, that we were having an impact.

I don't remember how long that wonderfully amateur sensation, crystallized by that IGDA link, lasted, but to me it somehow justified all of the time and money and travel and debate and effort we were spending on a non-profit, but extremely earnest, endeavor. And it still does.

Repeat Forever If Necessary

2009-07-12T17:04:00.000+12:00

In a lifetime of playing video games, I never wanted to make them. In the last three years, I've made friends with video game developers, but never once have I asked them why they wanted to do that for a living. Instead of asking them now, I came up with my own explanation for why it's so wonderful to create video games. I.e., from the mind of someone who doesn't understand what's so great about making video games. This rationale, I'm sure, falls somewhere between arrogant, saccharine and inaccurate. You'll miss all this when I'm gone.

If you're writing a story, linearity and non-interactivity have obvious benefits. Games by their nature are an interactive medium and it's hard telling a story with fixed themes, plot events, characters and atmospheric elements while letting the player change all of those at their leisure. It's hard to create contingencies that anticipate everything the player might want to do, obviously, but maybe the writer likes what they wrote, thinks it's important to the game overall, and isn't going to let anyone screw around with it. Even a small and relatively logical design choice like having the wasteland of Fallout 3 be bleak annoys certain players so much that they'll only play it with a mod that turns the skies blue, peaceful and postcard-happy.

In making a video game you have to sacrifice authorship to some degree. Most single-player games, which try and relay scripted stories, compromise -- they convey the plot is conveyed entirely via cutscenes, for instance -- and there's nothing inherently inspiring about a compromise. If that's the approach you're going to take, why not make a novel or film instead? You won't be cresting the wave of new media but you retain creative control where it matters. These are the drawbacks, but think about what you get in return for putting your efforts into making a game.

According to the most classic definition possible, games are not stories or narratives. They are rulesets designed to live in perpetuity and whose potential can never be exhausted. Individual instances of the game can be won or lost, but the game itself never ends.

Rules are important but they aren’t interesting by themselves. The individual fascination comes from who the players happen to be, and the social dynamics that result from whoever occupies those positions. In sports, the players are more famous than the designers. I can name a dozen baseball players before I can tell you who was baseball’s creative director.

Games -- in every permutation except for those games more preoccupied with relating a fixed story in a single-player environment -- are most valuable as a framework for social interaction than as a narrative. Challenge isn’t even that important. The kind of drama that will really resonate with players results not from the villain's secret plan, but which teams are playing against each other, what the odds are, and who do you know that’s a fan of this team over the other.

This is true of sports, card games, board games and some video games. It’s certainly the case with multiplayer games or party games. Games depend on people as a resource, and so long as there are interesting people around, the game in question will stay relevant and important. Counter-Strike today is less about shooting fictional terrorists and more about an ad-hoc team of “professional” Counter-Strike players/college dropouts touring Texas in a van. World of Warcraft can be less about gryphons or gold than which players end up getting married or murdered in real life. Real interpersonal tensions emerge in your fake rock band and someone genuinely surprises you by having an amazing singing voice. Even Donkey Kong can experience a relative cultural renaissance when it becomes identified with the personal sagas of Billy Mitchell and Steve Wiebe rather than Jumpman.

Games remain important as long as there are people to play them. Games at their most successfully mainstream are also the most vacant of authorship. There are people who think Call of Duty is the nerdiest thing ever but will not blink at joining in a game of Rock Band. Games can be about creating opportunities for players to leave their fingerprints all over the experience.

Games can become personal in a way that appreciating a masterful narrative is not. It's harder for an audience to take ownership of that. If I ever have children, I bet that in their lifetimes that they are much more likely to play Tetris than Heavy Rain. And as gratifying as it can be to have someone laugh at your jokes, isn’t it more satisfying to create something that stands for eternity?

Think about what that’s worth. This might not be the primary reason why people make games, but what a reason!

Most single-player video games are not like this. The variability that they do offer is severely limited. Games are the only medium that replicates the conventional styles of storytelling of film or prose and then tries to make them infinitely repeatable. Rarely are these attempts at immortality elegant. Video games will scatter moments of possible variation throughout a preordained story just to claim that the game has a lifespan longer than any single player’s interest.

Increasingly, games are rendered in such high fidelity and at such great expense that it’s not cost-effective to deliver choices that can have a truly significant impact on the direction of the story. There’s no obvious reason to go back through these games because, despite what it promises, nothing of consequence will be very different.

The ethical dilemma that is the beating heart of BioShock, for instance – whether to redeem the little sisters’ souls or redeem them for prizes – barely affects the game except for the 30-second cutscene that you see before the credits. You can choose from a handful of avatars in Far Cry 2, and this will change a few of the characters that appear. But it doesn’t affect at all the story that is being told or that the resident militants will fire upon your Irish terrorist as readily as they will upon your Israeli terrorist.

Even if the particular choices are significant, how many players will truly appreciate the variety? Deus Ex can be played as a super-intelligent hacker or as a double-fisted, heavy artillery linebacker, but whatever approach I chose the first time, I chose because I liked it more. I’m not going to vary my play style away from what I actually enjoy just because it’s a theoretically possible to do so. It’s great that I get to play the way that I would prefer, but that doesn’t entice me to try it another way.

Replayability in single-player games is an exploration in limitation. But single-player games that tell linear stories don’t need to be infinitely repeatable to be powerful. I do wish that games that want to be more like interactive stories would offer less choice in most cases. Once a player discovers how little the “choices” in Far Cry 2 or Grand Theft Auto IV differ from one another, it can’t possibly improve anyone’s opinion of the game. I would rather that the games which want to tell a fixed story were more confident in doing so – instead of pretending that the players have more influence than the developer is actually willing to relinquish.

Metal Gear Solid's cutscene-to-gameplay balance is famously out of proportion with what is expected of a typical video game. This video game has always wanted to be far more like a movie than like Scrabble, and given the series’ verbosity, its choice of format is probably not all that beneficial to the game in question. There’s a lot to criticise about Metal Gear Solid, and Hideo Kojima could probably stand to bring in his brother-in-law to edit his screenplays, but there’s no reason that the kind of narrative model Metal Gear Solid uses shouldn’t exist. Even if it means calling it an interactive story instead of a game. Call it a ractive, I’m ready for that now. Call it anything that doesn’t make the developers feel obliged to intersperse inconsequential agency in their long cinematic to be legitimate.

I don't know why Hideo Kojima wants to make video games. I don't know why developers place such an emphasis on replayability when it usually means so little, unless it's there as review insurance, implemented out of expectation. But this is an exploration in my limitations now.

Release Date

2009-07-06T21:02:00.001+12:00

Sometimes it can be fun when nobody's paying any attention. Take the first six months of Hit Self-Destruct, when I'd do things like invert every colour on the front page for one day without any explanation, or imply that I was ending the site forever. If I had stopped doing Hit Self-Destruct back in those days, I would have lied about the reason. I'd say that I was giving it up to realise my dream of being a community manager or having my own MTV show. Now, though, chastened by the existence of an actual readership, it doesn't seem appropriate to say anything other than Hit Self-Destruct is actually ending, this month, five posts from now.

There's no community manager job and there's no MTV show. There's no obvious change in circumstances that would force me to stop doing this, and I'm not giving it up so that I can do something else. Hit Self-Destruct was always something that would end eventually, and this is the ending.

Registering "Hit Self-Destruct" -- third choice of name -- in October 2007, I went in with no expectations or any sense of obligation, other than that I had accumulated enough thoughts about video games that could be exorcised in about four decent blog posts. There's a lot that has been surprising about how Hit Self-Destruct has turned out since then. Certainly, one of those things is that writing about video games on the internet for free could be one of the more fulfilling things I've ever done. And given that, the biggest surprise of all is that I'd ever want to stop doing it.

I never did Hit Self-Destruct full time; never even got to think about video games full time. Very few of the other demands on my time are as important to me as Hit Self-Destruct, but I can't quit any of those. I can't give Hit Self-Destruct as much time as it deserves (or its readers deserve), and so I can't make it as good as I want it to be anymore. This is a depressing reason to stop doing something, but, on the other hand, it allows me to leave at a point where the body of work here is still fairly consistent.

I think that I've probably accomplished about as much with Hit Self-Destruct as I reasonably can. If I kept going, I do not believe that the posts would get any better, or that there would be any more of them. Under those circumstances, I'd rather not do Hit Self-Destruct at all than see it slow to even more a crawl, past the point where anyone even cares if it's still going or not. This is how it ends, then.

There are five posts left until Hit Self-Destruct is done. I won't be done, at least I hope not. I have no idea what I'm going to do after those five posts. It won't be Hit Self-Destruct and it won't be a regular blog about video games, but after writing for this site every day of my life for almost two years, I now can't imagine ever not writing something, or not wanting an audience for it. This was so much fun to do, and thank you for that part. No more MTV jokes: if you were a Hit Self-Destruct reader that makes you a good friend of mine. I appreciate your attention and hope that you'll consider giving it again to whatever I come up with next.

Whenever that will be. I don't know what I'll do until then; I might play a video game. Or maybe I'll try something else.

Move Over Once

2009-06-30T20:25:00.004+12:00

It should be to nobody's surprise that the Beatles are still extremely capable of making people very excited. At least, the concept of the Beatles. For instance, personally speaking, the cinematic trailer for The Beatles: Rock Band revealed at E3 last month was immediately more interesting and exciting than pretty much any other game displayed at the show.

The animated trailer, less than three minutes long, doesn't say anything new, but is so completely charming and evocative of the entire legacy of the Beatles. The source material that it draws upon is incredibly strong.

It immediately puts into perspective the Beatles' extraordinary cultural relevance and creative power, and Rock Band, wielding these, shames every other action game with a convoluted plot about Russian warlords. It's not really fair. It's almost like cheating outright. A video game about the music of the Beatles versus a sequel where you still mostly shoot people, but this time it has a "very dark story." How can the Beatles still not automatically trump everything else, unless you are a huge fan of cover systems or anime backflips?

The Beatles: Rock Band, because of, presumably, a multi-million dollar deal, is able to draw on a massive and important cultural cachet. Unlike every other game at E3 which seemed to reiterate upon the comparatively narrow history and inventions of video games.

This is all exciting, then, but also, for a couple of reasons, sad.

First of all, none of the above enthusiasm for The Beatles: Rock Band really has anything to do with the game in question. It's entirely in the presentation, and compared to the new Modern Warfare, Uncharted, Splinter Cell, whatever, The Beatles: Rock Band is going to be the less mechanically interesting of them all. The fictional layer is fascinating, but it's the same game that you have been playing for four years and buying five times a year.

The inverse credit arrangement -- first, 'The Beatles'; second, 'Rock Band' -- is probably a contractual stipulation, and historical precedent for loser acts like Green Day to argue for top billing when they get their own Guitar Hero game in 2015. (Steve McQueen dropped out of starring in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid because he couldn't get credited first on the poster. Welcome to the future of video games.) But the positions are also accurate: the notion of a Rock Band game isn't as attractive as it used to be, and the Beatles are going to carry this game's weight.

And it's sad because all of this music is at least forty years old, and so to a certain extent the excitement is based on nostalgia. Which means either that the video game industry has yet to come up with anything on the same level as the Beatles -- probably true -- or that nothing in your own life is currently as exciting to you as the music that your parents listened to.

The E3 situation reminds me of the Beatles' last live appearance in 1969, the spontaneous rooftop concert in London, because the Beatles were so obviously cooler than anything else that was going on that day. They brought everything to a halt.

Except there was that one guy, the very proper British gentleman who says that, "this type of music is alright in its place, and it's quite enjoyable." That part is a completely transparent lie. "But I think it's a bit of an imposition to actually disrupt all of the business in this area." Then he either calls the police or is glad when they break up the party. And, you know, is the last live appearance of the Beatles worth less historically than whatever typing he had to do that day?

I can appreciate his point: deadlines don't go away just because someone is playing rock music pretty loud. The man's problem is stodginess rather than outright anhedonia, but if you can't get excited about the Beatles playing on a roof after not appearing live in years, what can you get excited about?

Imagine how much the sophisticated young sixties radicals on the street hated that guy. Also imagine him transplanted 40 years into the future onto the E3 show floor and besieged by game journalists who sneer at his conservatism and tell him go play M.U.L.E.

The Beatles' music is now the same age as that guy, but instead of being relegated to the past, it's part of the future. Rock Band is the future of how we experience music, haven't you heard? Or maybe it's not, and that's a hyperbolic dot-com era kind of claim unsubstantiated by the fact that not very much has really happened since Rock Band and Guitar Hero were invented.

If Rock Band is the future of music, what would that mean for the future? That kids' first exposure to rock music will be in the form of a Rock Band challenge, rather than on the Ed Sullivan show or in English dance halls or whatever? They're never going to experience an album as a complete entity, they're not going to be buying anything in a store, and they're not going to be able have songs stuck in their head without 3D guitar charts also scrolling down across their minds.

The cool mod kids who loved the Beatles in 1969 have become the old man who thinks that "this type of music is quite enjoyable in its place", and don't understand what a video game is, and resent how their grandchildren think of music. But regardless of whether Rock Band exists or not, teenagers still aren't going to be buying vinyl en masse -- or whatever a 40 year old's romantic conception of how music should be experienced it is. Everything will change anyway.

It might be too bad if kids who are capable of producing great music but no more than three chords get dissatisfied with actual guitar playing and give up. If Rock Band and Guitar Hero ever get to be satisfaction enough for would-be musicians, and they never produce any recorded material, that isn't a turn for the better. Of course, there's no evidence of that yet, and I guess we've got to wait at least another generation.

Things change. The primary relevance of the Beatles changed all the time. They've gone from being a teenage girl's wet dream to acid-tripping weirdos to a litigation factory and now to video game business leaders.

There are generational shifts in progress all the time, and only when we notice them does it make us uncomfortable. There were people for whom early, early, I Want To Hold Your Hand-era Beatles was something dangerous, and they wouldn't have wanted to surrender their experiential or moral ground, even though, in retrospect, it seems like the easiest thing in the world to let happen.

A generational shift makes your experiences obsolete and little more than a novelty to your children. I can't tell whether Rock Band is an important change or a change at all. But do you just go with it because you as a person in the 21st century would have told that British gentleman in 1969 the same thing? Because you would have told him not to call the police, and just live with it even if he isn't excited about it, since it's so obviously the right thing to do?

Who knows. That's what makes it so exciting, though, right? Or does it?

Prometheus Unlocked

2009-06-19T22:39:00.003+12:00

For thirty seconds at the end of 2008 I considered putting together a list of my favourite games of that year. I found it difficult, however, to rank games by quality, because the titles I remembered the most fondly, or that produced the most personally affecting experience -- if either of those are an acceptable definition of "favourite" -- were not necessarily the games that I had enjoyed the most. The games I felt closest to that year were the ones that I had written about.

That could mean that it was a good game, or a mediocre one or something that didn't even come out that year. Neverwinter Nights 2, for example, fulfills the last two categories. Honestly, that clunky anachronism still means more to me than, say, World of Goo, a game that I like far better. 'Cause I wrote about Neverwinter Nights, and then, somehow, it feels like it's mine.

Having never been a professional game critic, I was never under the obligation to turn in a thousand uninspiring words about an uninspiring product. I never had to review a game that I didn't care a little about. The game might have even been okay, but for whatever reason, all you can ever do is limply summarise the kind of thing it was, and then agree that it's about as good as everyone said it is already. I think if I was a game journalist at this point in my life, I'd be the guy who walked into my editor's office a week after being assigned to review Infamous or Prototype (I only barely know the difference, but I can say with all confidence that whatever the difference is, it doesn't matter) and announce that there's no sparks between me and this game, I'm not feeling it creatively, and so I'm taking myself off the review. Fortunately that isn't my profession, because I would get fired so hard.

I only know what it's like to write about games that excite me, and for that reason, those are the games that stick around in memory. Some games are personally inspiring, an extremely unpredictable quality. There are some games, regardless of how much you like them on their own merits, that put a thought in your head. They make you think that you have the capacity to say something about them that has never been said. I can't underestimate how good that makes a person feel.

You like the ideas inherent in this game, you like its successes, or the potential that it implies in its failures. It makes you feel something new about video games. It doesn't matter how good a game it is, it can excite you in any case: about the medium and about discussing the medium. If you feel, truly, that you have something important to say, then you want to write it out regardless of whether you're being paid or whether anybody's reading it. Even if it's not important to some wider discourse, it's important to you, at least temporarily. Some games make you feel like that, and a handful made me feel like that over the last year. It's really something special, not least because you can't force it. You can't will inspiration into existence.

This brand of adrenaline can and often does manifest itself by a reviewer ripping a really terrible game to shreds in an entertaining, linkbait manner. That same enthusiasm can be more subtle, though, and I like it when it's more positive. Even a mediocre game can make you feel good about games in general, and make you feel good about things other than your ability to diminish someone else's work. You want, really, to talk about games in a way that feels like you're making a real contribution to a discussion less tangible than your review. You want what you write to be valuable, and there isn't the potential for that in every game that you play.

This is a weird relationship that develops between games and critics. It's a whole extra level on which to like a game. You get seriously sentimental about it. It's an extra echelon of appreciation, unlocked. I didn't know that I could feel this way.

The reverse of this is: are you only playing games looking for material to write about? They're more worthwhile if you can get that extra measure of enjoyment out of them. I.e., what are you going to do for me, video game? You'd better be more than just fun. You'd better be intellectually exhilarating on a very personal level, otherwise I'm wasting my time.

This is what four and a half years of writing about games for an audience has done to me, I think. What happened to just being able to play a video game like a normal person!

I can't simply "play video games" any more. I approach every game with a different, unusually eager perspective. In many ways, though, the feeling I get from writing about a video game is far better than the feeling I get from only playing it.

It ignites something in you, a sense of temporary purpose that makes you feel more talented and capable than usual. That's something special. It makes you -- the critic, the reviewer -- happy in a very self-centered and unsustainable kind of way that's completely at the expense of the game itself. It's a strange, egocentric relationship, but then again, what are these games meant for if not gratification? The joy of being driven to write about a game that everyone else finds unremarkable is what lifts that game out of mediocrity for you.

To this day, over a year after writing about it, I think back on Neverwinter Nights 2 with sincere and warm affection. Games like that, which I would consider mediocre and not appealing to me at all, still inspired me to say something, and that's where I found it meaningful. It was never fun for me on the terms that it proposed, but I genuinely engaged with it and am glad that I played it. It's a very condescending kind of compliment. I bet the developers can't wait to thank me.

The fact is, you develop a personal connection with games like that; the games that motivated you to write an impassioned editorial and post it on a section of the internet that you know nobody reads. The games you write about, you get inside them. You think about them so much more than anything else; you explore their strengths and their weaknesses because you care. You incorporate those games into your avocation and they become the stories that you covered.

The games you write about, the games you really cared about: they're really a part of you. This is why I can't rank games objectively anymore. Neverwinter Nights 2 is a part of my life. Neverwinter Nights 2 is part of my life? Get it out, please!

I can make jokes like that because, you know, I really do love it.

Deserters

2009-06-14T15:14:00.000+12:00

Barring some truly unexpected change in circumstances, games like Call of Duty 4 and STALKER are the closest I’ll ever get to a shootout in Chernobyl. Video games have trained me for that eventuality, though, and if I ever end up in the Red Forest or squatting by this ferris wheel with an MP5, I know exactly what I’ll do.

This is Call of Duty 4, and I’ve carried my crippled superior officer to this extraction point in Pripyat. I put the Captain down by the ferris wheel, where we’re supposed to wait for a helicopter to arrive and get us out of there. Until then we need to hold our ground against the approaching Soviet 1st Respawn Division.

The Captain checks out the buildings across the courtyard and instructs me in a level whisper to lay some claymores around the area, then find some cover and take up a sniping position. He starts a timer.

I nod stoically and walk past him, past the ferris wheel, past all the cars, up the steps, back the way we came, into the previous level, until I get to this little corner of an apartment complex where I sit down and hide. Back at the ferris wheel, I start to hear gunshots, explosions and an orchestral score climaxing. The Captain barks over the radio that we are heavily outnumbered. I look at the red dots on the minimap: yeah, definitely.

The chopper takes six and a half minutes to arrive. Six and a half minutes sitting under the sliding window of someone’s abandoned apartment is a long time to think.

To begin with, I notice that I’m speaking in the first person as I go through this story in my head. The reason, I think, is that my character, Price, would never do what I'm doing. Lieutenant Price so absolutely would not desert his comrades at a critical point in battle that, accordingly, the game refuses to recognise it. Captain MacMillan, crippled, abandoned and under fire, keeps calling to me to hold on, hold on for just one more minute, as if I was right there with him. Clearly I've thrown Call of Duty 4 into denial. In this game that’s so scripted and so linear, for the first time I’m calling the shots.

I think about how much I’ve disengaged from the fiction of this game. I’m willing to disregard so much about this heroic fantasy by taking advantage of a cheap exploit.

My Gamertag ought to be scarlet-lettered for what I did, but the game has no idea. This is embarrassing, to a degree; clearly I’m not very hardcore. I’m no Price, for example. But I have lived this exact moment before, multiple times. I’ve tried taking shelter, I’ve tried planting explosives, but no matter what I do, in seconds grenades are landing at my feet, bullets are hitting me in the back and dogs are leaping at my face. I liked Call of Duty 4 and I wanted to continue, but I couldn’t last one more minute in Pripyat.

I’ve been in this kind of place before, in other games, and this is how I know instinctively that a setpiece like this is so far beyond my ability and what the game has required from me to date. It's clear that the only way I can beat a mission like this, with its sparingly-issued checkpoints, is to spend almost the length of the full game on it, being shot in all the same places, hearing all the same soundbites, trying out little variations to come unbearably close to the finish line only to fail once again.

I'm at a loss to explain Call of Duty 4's difficulty spike. The heightened pressure builds tension, sure, but unless a player implausibly succeeds on their first attempt, the ensuing repetition and frustration erases it completely. This is not an issue with challenging games generally, but the incongruity of suddenly raising the bar so unusually high and out of nowhere to ratchet up in complexity.

My heart’s not in it, and so I cheat. I’ve cheated before and I know that if Call of Duty 4 has a second mission like this, I won’t hesitate for a second to bail out – and probably wouldn't try as hard to complete it as I might have otherwise. I've established a precedent whereby the rules hold no meaning for me, and my investment in the game’s fiction is pretty much gone. I deliberately screwed up my lines, but nobody noticed. This isn’t real anymore. Right now, the narrative, the atmosphere, the fiction are all losing their power over me. This isn't Pripyat and I'm not Captain Price -- this is just a video game and I'm trying to get through it any way I can.

In this case, I’ve outsmarted the game, and in doing so, I’ve disengaged from it. This game is beneath me now, 'cause I’m not going to give it the courtesy of playing by its rules. I think that this is much the same thing as when I turn down the volume on a video game and instead listen to music or the radio as I play. Even in a game like Far Cry 2 that places a premium on immersion, I’ll do this. It can’t otherwise keep my interest for the 40-hour investment that it asks of me. At these points, I’ve decided that it’s not necessary – or that I’m bored – of the environment and the story. The game becomes nothing more than background entertainment. I tune out the surrounding texture and reduce the gameplay to a series of entirely mechanical and plainly geometric challenges à la the Mirror's Edge time trials.

The change in soundtrack is about gradually being less and less enthralled by a game. Here, in Call of Duty 4, it feels like my hand is forced. I violated reality because of a difficulty spike, and because I’m not good enough to handle it. I broke up with the game, but I don’t believe that it was entirely my fault. I thought about how much I was going to lose if I committed to my cowardice; and conversely how much I cared about investing seriously in the world and fiction of this particular game. Maybe I'll have a change of heart and a genuinely heroic moment, maybe I'll storm into the fray with guns blazing.

No, I won’t. After six and a half minutes, the helicopter lands and I crawl out of my hiding place. Picking up the Captain and carrying him into the ‘copter, everyone treats me like I’m a war hero who stuck by his allies and survived against impossible odds. It sounds good, what they’re saying. Maybe next time I’ll try to live up to this kind of praise. Then again, I seriously doubt it.

Dying Is Easy, Comedy Is Hard

2009-06-07T18:53:00.010+12:00

I. The worst thing about being a lifelong fan of video games, he considered, was not knowing any other lifelong fans. He was deeply immersed in gaming culture but couldn't share this enthusiasm or knowledge with anyone around him. He could reel off a thousand gaming references that would sail right over people's heads, as if it had come out of Little Jacob's mouth. Like that, for example, they wouldn't get that.

This was too bad because he was convinced some of the thoughts he had about video games were hilarious. He could come up with great video game-related jokes, but nobody could truly appreciate their brilliance.

For instance, he had recently started dating a girl named Jennifer, and coincidentally his last serious girlfriend had also been called Jennifer. Thus, this new girlfriend was the 'next Jen'. Though he was the only one who understood this reference, he liked to say it all the time. It made him laugh when he first realised the connection, and he got very excited about furthering the comic association: in what other ways was his girlfriend like a new console generation?

He decided that, appropriately, this new Jen was definitely a lot prettier than her predecessor. More responsive, and she sounded nicer, too, so it was definitely an upgrade on those fronts. She had enhanced... fidelity? No, strike that, that didn't work. Tighter controls? Well, that sounded weird. Whatever, it was enough to say that the new Jen was shinier and more attractive. On the flipside, however, some might say that the last Jen was actually a lot deeper, a little smarter and this new Jennifer was a little too accessible, maybe a bit easier. None of this was actually terribly accurate to the women in question but it was the only way that the joke would work. Meanwhile, Jennifer wished that this guy wouldn't talk about video games or his ex-girlfriend quite so much.

II. When Jennifer heard him stumble drunk into her apartment at 3 a.m., audibly trip over something in the kitchen and pass out on her couch, she knew that the weekend had officially begun. When she heard him yelling at her roommate to shove it, she knew also that she would soon have to start looking for a new roommate.

Jennifer stood over him in her nightgown looking unimpressed and stated that clearly he had a drinking problem. He said that he didn't have a drinking problem; he just couldn't drink without throwing up. This made him giggle. Jennifer called him a blackout drinker. This was a term that the last Jen had also been fond of using and she cited it numerous times when she broke up with him.

"You are killing yourself," they both had said. He protested that he's in control of it and besides, it's not like he's into harder stuff. It's not like he does cocaine, he said. Not like he shoots up. Not like he does rails. He cracked up at this. "I don't shoot rails. I'm not a rail shooter. A rail shooter! Ha ha! House of the Dead!"

While Jennifer remained impassive, he laughed and laughed, convulsing and clutching his sides, until he fell off the couch and vomited all over himself.

III. With great reluctance, he voluntarily admitted himself into a rehab center. This decision came after a very serious conversation with his family and coworkers. Jennifer was out of the picture at this point but had temporarily resurfaced to strongly agree that he needed to seek treatment.

Checking into the clinic, they took his iPhone, his DS and his PSP. Among the things that the staff mentioned was that he would have to start attending Alcoholics Anonymous meetings. He also knew it by its shorthand: AA.

This got him going. He knew, obviously, that there were triple-A games, expensive, commercial titles. He'd even read in somebody's blog post about 'single-A' games, indie titles with smaller teams and budgets but resembled those big-budget titles with reduced scope. But nobody had ever thought about what a double-A game might be, and this was obviously it.

What would you do in an AA game, he wondered. This was potentially a rich area for comedy. There'd be a lot of dialogue, he guessed, confessional stuff from NPCs and the overall quest would be less about saving the world and more about saving yourself. Of course, there would be twelve levels.

There was so much potential and as he began to explain this entire concept he looked at all the grave faces around him, realised where he was, and none of it seemed very funny anymore.

Game Development And Other Excuses

2009-05-31T20:12:00.005+12:00

When the team was crunching, the developer worked weekends and twelve-hour days. His wife was usually asleep by the time he got home, and his absences became a point of contention with her. One morning as he left for the office, she pointed out how they never saw each other anymore and that these long hours had ceased to be acceptable and were now totally ridiculous and a strain on their marriage. The designer acknowledged her points, but knowing she was unfamiliar with the game industry, explained the concept of crunch mode. Eighty-hour work weeks were necessary to meet milestones and ship dates, and besides, they were part of the culture. It's how the industry works, he said, crunching is the only way that you can make a video game. She grudgingly accepted his argument.

Two weeks later, the designer packed his bags for E3. His wife stood in the hallway, and mentioned again how uncomfortable it made her that he was going to be hanging out with 20-year-old lingerie models. She knew they would be sharing a booth all day, maybe going out for drinks afterward, and they were probably going to be all flirty. He said patiently that he got where she was coming from, and if it was up to him things would be different, but the booth babes were simply one of those game industry traditions. They'd actually tried not having the girls last year, and it didn't work. She sighed. The spectacle and the glitz are important, he said, it's the only way you can sell a game.

Three weeks later, his wife awoke at three a.m. to the screech of metal tearing through metal. Outside, she saw, their car had plowed into the side of their neighbours' SUV. The designer's wife hurried to the window, where she saw a brick of cocaine in the passenger seat and a cheerleader passed out across the back seat. The designer looked up at her with wired, bloodshot eyes. Let me explain this, he said, all this stuff is just part of the game industry. This is literally the only way you can make a video game.

Rise Of The Machines

2009-05-29T19:29:00.000+12:00

[This post contains ending spoilers for Grand Theft Auto IV.]

Death is permanent and, in all works of fiction, predetermined. Except in video games, where most of the time it is neither. Niko Bellic probably never felt so bad as when, hours after resolving to abstain from a lifestyle of crime and extreme violence, his would-be girlfriend/chance at a more fulfilling existence Kate McReary is gunned down in a mafia drive-by. As Niko emphasizes loudly and often to her killers, Kate never did anything to hurt anyone. Where's the meaning in her death? What's Niko Bellic to do but exact revenge and move on?

Then again, Grand Theft Auto IV being a video game, Niko could also send himself back in time to try and prevent Kate's death. He does this -- or you, the player do it -- by reloading a save game, erasing recent events so you can reevaluate your options and pursue the optimal outcome with mechanical efficiency.

Niko knows what death is. He's died a hundred times in the last 50 hours, and after each death he is resurrected outside a nearby hospital. How can death have any meaning when it's so trivial and reversible? Niko doesn't have time to consider the theological implications, though, because he's trying to save a girlfriend.

Kate's death traces back to a decision made at a narrative intersection. Take Mission B over Mission A, and this sets in motion a chain of events that lead to Kate's death. Easily solved, then: take Mission A instead. What happens now, however, is that cousin Roman Bellic takes Kate's place. Roman is murdered in the exact same scene and in the exact same manner.

From there, Niko's story turns out to be remarkably similar and imbued with the same measure of grief as if Kate had died. Nothing really changes and Niko feels just as bad. What meaning can Roman's death possibly have if it's functionally interchangeable with Kate's? Is this an indicator of the inescapable karmic retribution that Niko has coming to him? Maybe it's a sobering lesson about the consequences of messing with the time stream. Obviously it's neither.

When Niko is before this crossroads, Kate and Roman are pulling him in opposite directions. Roman wants him to take Mission A because it'll make Niko a wealthy man and help Roman provide for his new wife, thus bringing them both closer to the American dream. Kate urges Niko against that same mission because it would compromise his principles. Whichever mission Niko picks, he'll gain favour with a certain character over the other and then watch them die. What's happening here, really, what this rare moment of narrative branching is all about, is polling the player as to which character they feel more strongly about so they can be killed for the maximum emotional effect. A random spray of gunfire just so happens to kill the person the player recently indicated that they cared about more.

It's a choice rendered meaningless. The identity of the murder victim might not be predetermined but the future is set either way: whatever happens, the player will arrive at a moment where they're supposed ot feel sad and aggrieved. What appeared to be human tragedy is really total calculation. If Niko was searching for the meaning in Kate's death -- well, there it is, precisely. Kate and Roman aren't people, but robots built by Tragedy Systems.

Grand Theft Auto IV tells its story through a linear and non-interactive instance that is separate from a wide, unguided sandbox. Essentially, it's like a movie stapled to a video game. Unsurprisingly this is not an airtight approach.

The player has sporadic moments of agency in what is otherwise an extremely controlled and authored story. Every moment is the choice whether to kill a character or not, or kill one character over another. Some of these deaths, when they concern relatively important characters, certainly seem like they should have more of an impact than they actually do.

Your choice of who lives and who dies creates an alternate reality, but that choice was carefully set up so that the outcome would only be marginally different no matter what you pick. Some dialogue is altered but it's all essentially the same. When you kill one of the McReary brothers, Kate and Packie McReary will refer to their dead "brother" as often as possible without ever mentioning his name, and the McReary you let live barely shows up again.

The game doesn't actually have the bandwidth to support and maintain alternate realities. It can't sustain the level of fidelity and production that it wants if it's going to be truly reactive to the player's choices. No matter which mission you take and at which time, you always begin and end in the same place. No matter whether Kate or Roman dies, it all ends up the same. And if that was always going to be the case you wonder what was the point of ever pretending that the player could influence the story otherwise.

The power of the story is diminished when every consequence is marginalized and ignored for practical reasons. Rockstar's carefully crafted and strictly controlled mobster epic becomes a soap opera where it isn't important to the story whether or not two major characters live or die. When you see your input briefly recognised and then whitewashed, all it does is highlight the limitations. The story of Grand Theft Auto IV is like a robot that rapidly dismantles and assimilates your choices into the pre-written and unchanging framework.

The human player is granted, in this virtual world, effective immortality and time-traveling ability. Video games train players to think like this. Setbacks and deaths do not matter because you can rewind the clock in search for the path through the game most to your liking. You're looking for efficiencies, but this time, so is the machine, and you can't beat it at its own game.

Over and Under

2009-05-23T12:16:00.010+12:00

JACKSON, WYOMING
DECEMBER 1986

FRIDAY NIGHT

Donna Kelly had forgotten her gloves. Keeping her hands in her pockets, she couldn’t get at the plastic cup of vodka pinned between her knees, and this in turn meant she wasn’t able to move her legs. She was huddled in the back of her boyfriend’s parked truck and pretty much trapped there. Twenty feet away, Ellie Marshall struggled to light a cigarette, which was harder than usual in the snow and while wearing mittens.
   “Get ready for this, Donna. This is a great idea.”
   Todd was referring to her current assignment for Journalism class and not getting drunk in a forest in the middle of winter, although that was his idea too. Donna smiled encouragingly.
   “I think this is really ambitious. You could interview the guys on our football team, and ask them, you know, what it’s like being in the team. And if they’re excited about their next game. Maybe even talk to the coach, find out what their strategies are.”
   “I don’t know if I have it in me to be that ambitious.”
   Todd shrugged and returned to the ad hoc circle formed by the two cars. In the center, Eric stoked the diminishing fire with a stick, and then lost interest and retired to a deck chair with Maggie. Ellie was still not having any luck with her cigarette.
   Donna shifted her weight as much as she could without spilling all over herself. “Do you guys know Tim Hathaway?”
   Maggie lifted her head from Eric’s chest. “That guy?”
   Todd asked who Tim Hathaway was.
   “Some dork,” said Maggie.
   “He seems weird,” Ellie added, slipping the unlit cigarette back into her pocket. “He like never talks to anyone. He’s a creep.”
   Donna winced. “We got assigned together. That’s my partner.”
   “For Journalism class?” asked Ellie. Donna nodded. “Oh, sucks.”
   “Yeah, we have to write something together.”
   Maggie laughed. “What are you and Tim Hathaway going to write about?”
   “You know what, actually? I guess he really wants us to interview some guy who makes computer games.”
   “Oh, lame,” said Ellie, who was giving the cigarette another try.
   “No way, that’s totally awesome,” said Eric, suddenly coming to life. “The Robotron at the bowling alley, I have the high score on that.” Maggie looked at Eric as if she never knew this side of him existed. “Honestly, that’s actually a really difficult thing.”
   “I don’t even know what I’m going to do,” said Donna. “This just sounds so dumb.”
   “It isn’t a big deal, it’s just one assignment,” Ellie said, cupping her hands around her mouth and flicking the lighter repeatedly.
   “The thing that’s so hard about Robotron is how fast those tank waves get.”
   “Nobody cares.” Ellie breathed out smoke.
   “You’re probably right,” said Donna. “I mean, we’ll see.” She locked eyes with Todd and nodded at her legs. “Can you get this?”
   Todd pried the cup from her knees. Braving the cold, Donna removed a bare hand from her jacket pocket and took the vodka back from Todd.
   “This is for computer games,” she intoned with mock gravity, and downed it in one shot.

SATURDAY

“Guess what, Todd,” said Donna, reading aloud in the passenger seat, “the President says that Lieutenant Colonel North is a national hero and that this whole thing boils down to a great irresponsibility on the part of the press!” Donna rolled the magazine up tight and waved it at Todd’s face. “Bull-shit, bullshit!” she sang.
   Tim Hathaway’s house was far enough away that Donna wanted a ride. It was also below freezing outdoors. Todd was leaning forward and squinting down the road.
   “You need glasses,” Donna said.
   “I don’t want glasses.”
   “What can you see right now?”
   Todd inched his face closer to the windshield. “The mountains.”
   “Whatever.”
   “I see fine.”
   Donna nodded. “Todd, look out!”
   Todd jumped and the truck swerved.
   “Just kidding,” Donna said quickly.
   She unwrapped her issue of Time, with its ominous-looking photo of the White House on the cover, and flipped back through the pages.
   “God, can I tell you that I am so excited to finally get to vote? I don’t think I even know what a polling booth looks like. It’s exciting, you know?”
   “Yeah, cool.”
   “The best thing about getting to live in New York is that my first vote is actually going to matter. Whether it ends up being Senator Biden or Gary Hart, whoever wins the primary, if I vote and help volunteer then I really might turn the state for them, you know? No way could I do that here.”
   “Yeah.”
   Donna glanced over her shoulder. “Do you know who you’re going to vote for yet? I mean personally I want Biden.”
   “What happens next time, does George Bush run for president?”
   “Yes.”
   “Yeah… maybe that guy.”
   Donna read over another article for several minutes in silence, then tilted her head at the ceiling. “I like Biden ‘cause you get the sense that he really cares about the issues, like, when he was arguing with Shultz about apartheid. That’s what you want to be doing. Apartheid, civil rights,” and she waved the magazine again, “this thing… you know? Hey, pull over, it’s up here.
   “Anyway,” and she stopped to laugh, “I have to go write about Dungeons and Dragons or whatever.”
   “This is a nice place,” said Todd, parking outside Tim Hathaway’s house and squinting out at the two-story building that was already adorned with Christmas lights.
   “I guess,” said Donna, not looking as she took off her seatbelt. “Kiss.” They leaned over the handbrake and kissed briefly, then Donna flashed a smile at Todd and hopped out of the truck.
   “Have a good time,” Todd called after her.
   “As if.”

***

“Your mom is nice.” Donna was sitting in a dining room chair that had been temporarily relocated to Tim Hathaway’s bedroom, where she was extremely surprised to have one day ended up. Tim’s mother had answered the front door and in the spirit of hospitality had immediately shoved a glass of Coke into Donna’s hands.
   Donna had been aware of Tim Hathaway’s existence for three years but she had never even spoken to him until Friday. His room was covered in movie posters and Star Wars action figures posed in extravagant battle scenes and his bookshelves were overflowing with fantasy and science fiction paperbacks. Donna noted that, unsettlingly, both Tim and Todd had a poster hanging in the exact same position over their bed. Todd’s poster was of Debbie Harry; Tim, Harrison Ford.
   “Whatever, I guess so,” said Tim. “Do you want me to tell you about this guy?”
   “Yeah. Why not.”
   “Okay, so his name is Peter Bissette, he’s a programmer and he makes these like, role-playing-games. They’re like these huge adventures. He’s done this whole series, and they’re really awesome games and they’re really successful. He’s really successful, they sell really well. He has made hundreds of thousands of dollars.”
   “How successful can he be if he still lives in Jackson?”
   “What’s so great about these games is….” Tim thought it over. “Their stories are so good. They’re influential; they’re like the best stories in any game. What you do is start as this hero character, you can pick a fighter or a mage, and you explore this huge world that has dungeons and caves and stores, and you collect equipment and weapons and you can upgrade your character. The point is to defeat this really evil guy, you know, like kind of a scourge, and you can talk to some townspeople and in the end you win the game by killing the bad guy.”
   Tim seemed not to appreciate Donna’s absent expression.
   “Well, okay, look, it’s hard to explain, because you don’t play games. These are like epic… stories. You get to escape from real life. You get to be this hero who fights monsters and saves people and saves the world because he vanquishes this ultimate evil. It’s like, uh, Lord of the Rings, like this epic fantasy thing. Like Arthurian mythology. The legends of King Arthur. Do you know that?”
   Donna laughed sharply. “How stupid do you think I am?”
   “You don’t know computer games. You don’t play them.”
   “I still know what a story is. Jesus. It just sounds, like, generic.”
   “Yeah, if it’s so generic why is it so successful?” Tim grabbed a Ziploc bag from his desk and held it up for Donna. It contained a page of cardboard with an illustration of a dragon and the word ‘Darkforge’ printed on it in large Gothic lettering. In smaller type, it said ‘A Fantasy Role-Playing Game by Peter Bissette.’
   “This is the first Darkforge game.” Tim carefully put it back on the desk and identified to the left his greater collection; alphabetically-arranged boxes on his his bookshelf. “Darkforge II: Return to Castle Keep, Darkforge III: The Wizard of the West, Darkforge IV: Winds of Chaos. Darkforge V: Battlemage.”
   “They sound stunning.”
   “He has his own company. Omega Software. Peter Bissette is rich from making all these games. He’s been doing this for years. He’s a veteran of computer games. He makes more money than my dad. It’s a big deal.”
   “Yeahhh….” Donna nodded slowly.
   “Just because you don’t get it, because you don’t understand… I’m not making this up! He is really popular. Okay, read this.”
   Tim pulled a magazine from the top of a precipitously balanced stack on his desk and handed it to Donna. She looked at the cover. ‘Computer Gaming World: The Journal of Computer Gaming.’ It boasted the second dragon illustration she had seen that day.
   “What page am I looking for?” she said, flicking through the black and white magazine.
   “I don’t know what page number. The page about Darkforge.”
   Donna flipped through the magazine until she spotted her third dragon picture. “‘Darkforge IV: Winds of Chaos.’” She gave Tim a look and kept reading. “‘As you begin your quest, you are merely an ordinary blacksmith, who assumes the mantle of a great destiny.’ I’m going to skip ahead here. ‘Be warned: Darkforge IV is indeed an arduous journey, fraught with peril and diabolical traps. Make sure you’re well prepared with healing potions, and stack your party with spellcasters. The dungeons are often treacherous. While there may be a lot to take in, all you need to know can be discovered in the game’s three manuals.’ Last paragraph. ‘In conclusion, Darkforge IV is a triumph that proves once and for all that the magic of Darkforge I was no fluke. As far as we’re concerned, Peter Bissette’s tales of valor keep getting better and bissetter.’ Fuck off.”
   Donna threw the magazine at Tim’s bed sheet, which was decorated with cartoon and comic book characters. She was reluctant to discover exactly which intellectual property.
   “The address of Omega Software, on the game box,” said Tim, “is in Jackson. And I looked in the phone book and there’s a Peter Bissette in Teton Pines. He is a legend and he lives right here! We could talk to him!”
   Donna sunk her head into her hands, pinning strands of hair back from her face. “I want a good grade, Tim,” she mumbled through her fingers, “I want to go to college so bad. Are we really going to write a profile on someone who makes computer games in his garage? Who would care?”
   “I love these games,” said Tim. “I want to meet this guy.”
   Donna leaned back in resignation. “Whatever. It’s only high school. Do whatever you want.”

***

“Oh, man. It’s ringing!” This was the happiest Donna had ever seen Tim Hathaway, not that she had many points of reference.
   “Okay,” said Donna, clasping her hands together as if in prayer, “don’t say that you’re excited to talk to him. Don’t say that this is your first interview ever. Don’t say you’re nervous. Don’t say how big a fan you are. Please don’t try and pitch him any game ideas.”
   “Yeah, yeah, yeah.” Tim was almost giddy. He started wrapping the phone cord around his finger.
   “Oh my God.”
   “It’s – hello? Can I speak to Mr. Bissette?”
   “Oh my God.”
   “Peter Bissette? From Darkforge? Oh my God!”
   Donna threw her hands over her eyes. “Tim, I am mortified.”
   “My name is Tim Hathaway, I’m a senior at Jackson Hole High School. I really love all your games; I’ve played all of them. Even Sorcerer’s Skies.”
   Donna mouthed the words ‘what the fuck’.
   “Yeah, they’re great. I’m studying Journalism at high school and I was calling because I have an assignment to interview somebody and I’d really like to interview you about your company and your games. Right. Yeah, just for class. That’s right.” Tim laughed. “Yeah. Like I said, I’m a big fan. That would be so great. Yeah? Okay, thank you so much. Thank you, Mr. Bissette. Thanks. I’ll talk to you soon. Okay, bye.”
   After hanging up, Tim launched his arms in the air, triumphant. “Yes! Oh, wow, I’ve never been that nervous!”
   “Alright,” said Donna, “you handled that decently. When are we going to talk to him?”
   “Oh,” Tim’s arms fell, “I forgot to ask that. I’ll call him back.”

***

“My guy is made up of nine… nine blocks. He’s like a Lego man. What is this?”
   Donna was playing Darkforge – II, III or IV, she had no idea which – and the game consisted of nothing but squares arranged into shapes that only vaguely resembled castles and forests. By pressing the arrow keys, she could move a little stick figure around the screen like a piece on a chess board.
   “Where’s the story part?”
   Tim was on the couch, reading a Computer Gaming World issue. “Go to the village, talk to some merchants.”
   “What village? Wait! Tim! Someone’s attacking me! How do I fight this guy?”
   “You type, you type.”
   “Type what?”
   An amorphous creature rammed into Donna’s character repeatedly until the screen went black. YOU HAVE DIED, it told her in capital letters.
   “Okay, so I got killed by something that looks like my guy, but green.”
   “Yeah, probably an orc, they can be trouble.”
   “This said it was a goblin.”
   Tim looked over the pages of his magazine. “You got killed by a goblin?”
   “I don’t understand this at all.”
   “Reload a game; it takes some practice.”
   “Fine.” Donna loaded one of Tim’s save games, and her character was standing on a beach. When she pressed the right arrow key, the man on the screen moved into the water and was eaten by a crocodile. “What!”
   YOU HAVE DIED.
   “Oh, you’re gonna kill me, huh?” Donna ejected the floppy disk and pulled it out by its edge. “I’m going to take this disk and put it in the microwave! What do you think about that?”
   “Don’t do that!”
   Donna threw the disk at Tim, who dropped the magazine and tipped off the couch to catch it.
   “This costs like fifty bucks!”
   “No it doesn’t.” Donna got up and retrieved her jacket. “Anyway, you’re right, I definitely see now how fun that game is. Say bye to your mom for me, I gotta go.”
   Tim got back up and secured the disk safely away in its box. “See you on Monday.”
   “You have any plans tonight?”
   “Not really.”
   “SNL is on tonight, do you ever watch that show?”
   “Is that the show with the fat guy who killed himself?
   “Yeah, that was a couple of years ago, actually.”
   “Well, enjoy that.”
   “I think I will.”

THAT NIGHT

Over the last year, the forest by the Palisades Reservoir had emerged as the favorite drinking hangout for Donna and her friends. Todd claimed that since part of the Palisades was technically in Idaho, it was outside the jurisdiction of the town and county police. Regardless, Donna had never been too enamored of it: it was dark, it was dirty, and in the winter, one would think, it would be prohibitively cold. She was not happy to be back there that night.
   “Come on,” Todd urged her, “this is our spot.”
   “This is our spot in summer.”
   “Eric seems fine.”
   “Eric doesn’t even know where he is.”
   Eric, Maggie and Ellie were sitting in his car with the doors open, sorting through cassette tapes.
   “Donna,” Ellie called from the backseat, “which would you rather hear, Van Halen or Devo?”
   “I don’t care!”
   “She said Van Halen.”
   “No she didn’t; overruled,” said Eric, and stuck in a Devo tape.
   Ellie groaned. “I wish I had a boyfriend who could beat the shit out of you. And then would take me to a Van Halen show, and get the guys in Van Halen to beat the shit out of you.”
   “You should have a boyfriend,” said Maggie, addressing Ellie from over the shoulder of the passenger seat. “It’s about time already. Tell me who you want to go out with, seriously, name anybody. I will make them ask you out.”
   “God, I don’t know. Shane is cute.”
   “Oh please. Shane is afraid of girls.”
   “You should go out with Tim Hathaway,” Donna suggested. “I think he has a crush on you.”
   Ellie rolled her eyes. “Okay, yeah, oh, Tim, Tim Hathaway, I’m so hot for you right now. Show me what you look like behind those… glasses. Oh, God, Tim.” Donna cracked up.
   “Tim Hathaway,” Maggie laughed. “‘Sorry, I can’t fuck you, Ellie, cause I’m a total faggot!’ Tim Hathaway, please.”
   Donna shifted her gaze down to her boots. The woods truly were awful sometimes.

***

When it got too cold for Donna and Ellie, they climbed into the back seat of Eric’s car and closed the doors. Ellie kept a hand over her half-empty bottle of Miller Lite to stop it from spilling over. Donna was laughing hysterically, mostly because she knew she was out of control, and this was funnier than whatever joke had caused her to laugh in the first place.
   “Ellie! I am fucking wasted! I’m writing about video games! Holy shit!” Donna collapsed in a fit of giggles and fell over onto Ellie’s lap.
   “Come on, get off,” said Ellie, gently prying her head off her legs and restoring Donna to an upright position. “This is important, I have to sell you tomething. I mean tell you something.”
   Donna fell back into her seat, and pointed at Ellie’s beer. “Are you going to finish that?”
   “Donna.”
   “I’m just saying. I’m ready to go all night.”
   “Donna, Todd wants to marry you.”
   She didn’t say anything for a second. “What?”
   Ellie nodded, and Donna’s buzz died instantly.
   “No, no, no,” Donna said, “I’m going to New York.”
   “Not yet. Not for sure.”
   Donna watched Ellie closely, hoping for any indication of insincerity.    “Seriously? What? Did he say something to you?”
   “You cannot say I told.”
   Donna broke off her stare and pressed her temple against the ice-cold window. Ellie lowered her voice to a whisper despite the two of them being the only ones in the car.
   “Are you pregnant?”
   “No!”
   “I think he’s really serious,” Ellie said, “he says he wants to propose to you with his class ring.”
   “Nnnnghhh.” Donna rubbed her eyes with her palms. “Oh, God, he would do that.” She lowered her head between her knees and ran her hands through her hair. “I can’t get married, Ellie.” She looked up and shook her head. “Ellie, I absolutely can’t.”
   “Okay.”
   “I need that,” Donna said, taking Ellie’s beer and emptying it in one gulp.
   “Do you want to talk about it?”
   After a while, she said, “You know what? He says I don’t know video games. Well, I know Atari Football, and that thing doesn’t look like anything. It’s random lines and blobs on a screen and it could literally be anything they say it is. You can’t tell what’s going on. That’s supposed to be football? Who would want to play that?”

SUNDAY

The best part of getting back home is that Donna wouldn’t run into any of her friends while wearing her church clothes. The combination of pressed white blouse and gray blazer and skirt had been bought and chosen for Donna by her parents, without any consultation. Normally, Donna dressed as casually as she could, and wearing this around her friends made her feel stiff. In church, she diligently avoided eye contact with anyone she might care about.
   In private, Donna had to admit that this outfit gave her a thrill. On Sundays, she got to look like a lawyer. Alone in her bedroom in front of the mirror, she felt ready to testify before the Supreme Court or deliver a national security briefing to the President. If Donna kept the company of smart and stylish thirty-year-olds who were deeply dedicated to their important jobs, then she might not feel so out of place all dressed up.
   Donna’s father knocked on her bedroom door to tell her she had a phone call downstairs. Dreading Todd’s voice on the other line, Donna answered the phone in a falsetto that she hoped could be mistaken for her pre-pubescent brother.
   “Hello…”
   “Hey, Donna, it’s Tim.”
   “Tim? How did you get my number?”
   “The phone book.”
   “Oh, well aren’t you just the, the, the king of the phone book?”
   “I was calling all day.”
   “It’s Sunday. I was at church.”
   “Oh, you do that?”
   “Well, you know, my parents are. Catholic.”
   “Okay. Whatever.”
   Whatever. She rolled her eyes.
   Tim asked if she wanted to go over some questions for Peter Bissette, and Donna declined. Hanging up on Tim, she decided that she was already spending way too much time thinking about computer games than she really should.

MONDAY

Donna had told her journalism teacher it was imperative that she and her assignment partner Tim Hathaway did some research over at the school library, but this was a lie to get out of class. In reality, Donna and Tim were sitting outside the school building on a park bench. It was colder outside, but Donna adamantly preferred the prettiness of snow falling on concrete to the oil heaters and chewing gum-embedded carpet of her classroom.
   As Tim scribbled on notepaper, Donna was reading her paperback copy of The Final Days. The book was Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward’s follow-up to All the President’s Men; a reconstruction of the end of Richard Nixon’s presidency, stitched together from hundreds of first-person interviews. Donna was envious of books like this.
   After twenty pages, Donna peered at Tim’s work. What he was writing on his sheet of lined paper was not a list of questions for Peter Bissette but a top-down drawing of an elaborate fantasy dungeon.
   “What are you doing?” Donna threw the book down on the table. “You’re supposed to be writing questions!”
   “I’m the only one who has to write questions?”
   “Well, what the hell am I going to ask about? I don’t know anything about games. Is that gonna be your question? ‘What do you think of this map I drew?’”
   Tim sighed. “Fine, I didn’t know I was supposed to write questions.”
   Donna watched Tim turn over a new page and write ‘QUESTIONS FOR PETER BISSETTE’ and then nothing else.
   “Can I ask you something personal?” she said.
   “Uh-huh.”
   “I don’t know you very well. Do you get picked on here?”
   Tim hesitated before saying yes.
   “Don’t you at least have friends who like the same games that you do?”
   “I don’t know anyone who wants to make games.” Tim flipped back to his dungeon picture. “I want to do this. But I don’t know anyone else who actually cares.”
   Donna lowered her voice to a whisper even though there was nothing else around other than elk. “You want to know a secret? I don’t like it here either.”
   “Yeah?”
   “I have an application in to Columbia University, in New York. I want to get a journalism degree.”
   “When do you hear back from them?”
   “In March, maybe February.” Donna wound the cross around her neck, twisting the silver chain around itself. “If I don’t get accepted, Tim, I don’t even know. I can’t do the kind of writing that I want to do here. I want to do investigative stuff, human dramas, go to war zones… who would even pay me to do that in Jackson? The war zone here is a basketball player pushing you into a locker.” She released her grip on the necklace and sent it spinning in a circle.
   Tim gave her a guidance counselor-esque once-over. “I don’t know; I don’t know you very well. I think there are probably some things you could do here, but you could also marry somebody rich and not have to worry about anything.”
   “You know what I’m finding out? You’re really kind of mean sometimes.”

***

Since learning about Todd’s intended proposal, Donna had become extremely reluctant to hang out with him so much, but on the other hand he owned a car and would give her a ride home from school. Todd watched Donna get in the passenger seat and dig through her bag past The Final Days and issues of Time magazine until she found her scarf and tied it around her neck.
   “You are so smart,” he said.
   Donna smiled warmly but not as confidently as she once might have.
   “You’re the smartest girl I know,” said Todd, “I think after you graduate you could work at the paper or something.”
   She giggled. “Oh, gosh, don’t say that unless you really mean it,” she deadpanned.
   “I’m serious, I think you are that good.”
   Donna turned to Todd, expecting him to try and kiss her, but instead he met her eyes with an unusual intensity that was less lustful than it was brutally earnest. For the first time, she saw what was fundamentally sweet and decent about her boyfriend, and it made her look away.

THAT NIGHT

After having dinner, Donna watched television in the living room when the phone rang. She reached over the arm of the couch to pick up the receiver.
   “Hello?”
   “‘What an exciting time to be playing computer games! With one spectacular game after the next, Peter Bissette has proven himself one of the most vivid and vital storytellers in computer games today. His Darkforge series continuously reinvents the fantasy role-playing genre in surprising and compelling ways. Each entry features a host of unprecedented technical and creative innovations. As games enter the new decade there should be no doubt that it’ll be the likes of Peter Bissette at the reins of change. Yonder, to the city of Darkforge!’”
   “Who is this?”
   “Hi, Donna, it’s Tim.”
   “Is that something from Computer Gaming World?”
   “Yeah, it’s a letter to the editor.”
   “Who wrote it, you?”
   “Yes.”
   “What do you want, Tim?”
   “Do you understand that I’m not making this up? That Peter Bissette is really talented and successful?”
   Donna sighed. “Whatever. I believe you. Read me some more fake quotes.”
   “More and more people are playing games. You don’t think so, but games are going to end up being so popular. They’re going to be so important and you are going to look so stupid just because you don’t see it now. This guy is at the forefront of all this. He’s already done so much to influence the way that games are made, and he’s going be incredibly important in the future. I want to make games because of Peter Bissette. I don’t understand why you wouldn’t want to talk to a guy like that just because it’s games.”
   Donna played with the phone cord. “Tim, I’m going to talk to him. I’m going to be there with you. But can you understand why I’m not as excited about it as you?
   “Fine. See you tomorrow.”
   “Bye, Tim.”

***

Donna sat at the kitchen table across from her parents, who were reviewing the financial aid forms that she’d procured for Columbia. Her father held a lit cigarette in his hand, and without moving her head Donna surreptitiously breathed in the smoke while trying to hide it beneath a veneer of vague repulsion.
   “I don’t know, Donna,” said Elaine Kelly, who was perusing her daughter’s admission paperwork, “there are going to be so many tests, and living in New York, by yourself...”
   Her parents had called the meeting. Donna bit at her nails and shrugged. “I’m not worried about the difficulty,” she said, “this is where I want to go.”
   “You need to understand how much money is involved,” said Robert Kelly. “We’re going to help you pay for it where we can, but if you go then you’re going to be in debt for a long time.”
   “I know, Dad, but this is really what I want to do. It gives me so many more opportunities than if I go to UW.”
   “Donna,” said Elaine, “it wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world if you don’t get in. It would be so much work.”
   “Before you make up your mind,” said Robert, “I want you to think carefully about your future. You need to know that this is really what you want.”
   Donna could not believe her parents. She threw up her hands in exasperation. “I have made up my mind! I know that this is what I want! New York!” she said, tapping the paper on the table, “this is what I want!”
   Her parents looked back at her with clearly evident reservations. “Why do you think that I can’t do this?” she said. “What do you think is wrong with me?”

***

An hour later, sprawled out on the living room couch cradling the phone against her head and examining her backlit toes against the ceiling light, Donna called Tim Hathaway.
   “Everything I know about games,” she said, “everything that you’ve shown me, tells me that they are really stupid.”
   “Donna, why are you calling me?”
   “Let me finish my point, jackass. I think games are dumb. Honestly, there it is. But maybe, okay, maybe I am wrong. Maybe it’s just me. Maybe I am not seeing it, and they are actually better or smarter than I think.”
   “They definitely are. Do you want to try Darkforge III?”
   “No, I’m not going to try Darkforge III, Tim, it’s idiotic. I’m trying to tell you that I am giving you the benefit of the doubt. I’m giving games the benefit of the doubt, or at least trusting you that they might go somewhere worthwhile one day. Like even appeal to someone like me.”
   “Like, what, a game where you shop for clothes?”
   “No, I mean a game with a story that isn’t horrible.”
   “Darkforge is an epic saga, Donna.”
   “But,” said Donna, ignoring him, “even right now, when games are really juvenile, there’s still a person behind them. I think that could be something. If he genuinely is a pioneer and is actually talented in his field, then that’s interesting to me.”
   “Good. I’m glad you get it.”
   “Have you come up with any questions yet?”
   “Uh, technically no.”
   “I have one.” There was a single sentence written in Donna’s notebook. “‘Where do you see yourself in ten years?’”

TUESDAY

When she woke up, Donna Kelly had it all figured out. This was the story of a self-made man, who fought against expectations and circumstances to become an important voice in a field that attracted little attention, for various reasons fair and unfair. He persevered despite being largely unrecognized and changed the way things were done in his business. When Donna saw Tim at school that day, she greeted him with a warm smile that made Tim suspect that she was high. Donna thought that she might be too.

***

Donna and Tim didn’t have journalism period on Tuesdays. They did have English class together, though their seats were diagonally opposite and therefore not conducive to private conversations. Donna threw an eraser at Tim’s head.
   Tim looked back angrily, but of course it was Donna, and his face softened.
   Donna leaned over her desk as far as she could and whispered urgently. “I still don’t know anything about video games.”
   Tim glanced over each shoulder then hissed back, “Computer games or cartridge games?”
   “Either one, Tim; it doesn’t matter.”
   “Okay, so what?”
   “So let’s hang out soon, ‘cause I think I need like a crash course in games before the interview.”
   Tim was a little taken aback. “Sure.”
   “Tomorrow, okay? I’m busy today.”
   “Yeah, we’ll do something tomorrow.”
   “Cool.” Donna returned to the correct posture. The girl sitting to her left was looking Donna over with a raised eyebrow. “Get over yourself,” Donna said to her.

THAT NIGHT

There was nothing exceptional about Barbara Marshall’s cooking – she had prepared spaghetti and meatballs – but Donna was always happy to be the guest of Ellie’s family. It meant sitting at a dinner table with Ellie, for one thing, rather then with Donna’s younger brother who liked to fart loudly.
   Barbara watched Donna stir the sauce on her plate. “I hear that you’re reading The Great Gatsby for English.”
   “Mom,” Ellie pleaded.
   “What, honey? I’m just asking Donna a question.”
   “Yeah,” said Donna, “we are, sure. We just started.”
   “Tell me, what do you think?”
   “It’s really great,” said Donna, who was trying to obscure the fact that she had a mouthful of food. “I’m only halfway through but it’s one of my favorite books so far.”
   “Eleanor won’t even read it. She says it’s boring.” Barbara let the point rest and returned to her dinner.
   “Mom!”
   “You do, honey.”
   “Mom, it’s so old.”
   “Well, Donna doesn’t seem to mind it.”
   “You haven’t even read it, Mom.’’
   “It wasn’t assigned to me, honey.”
   Donna glanced back and forth between mother and daughter. “Oh, uh, we’re in different classes, so we have different teachers, maybe that might be important.”
   “You might be right,” said Barbara, and they ate for a minute in silence. “You know, I think it’s very impressive that you’ve applied to Columbia.”
   “Thank you, Mrs. Marshall.”
   “That’s magnificent. Have you decided what you’re going to major in?”
   “Oh, I’m really interested in journalism.”
   “Good for you. You want to be on TV, I bet?”
   “No, actually, I want to be the editor-in-chief of Time. Or Newsweek.”
   “Oh, my.” Barbara smiled. “That’s great. What a wonderful goal.”
   Donna nodded, and, after a moment without conversation, Barbara laid down her fork and leaned towards Donna again. “What are you girls studying at the moment? Eleanor hardly lets me know about anything that she’s up to.”
   “Uh,” said Donna, sipping a glass of water, “I’m doing this interview for journalism class. With a guy, who, uh, makes computer games.”
   “Oh, really? As in… Richard, what is that game called? Space Invaders?”
   “Sort of,” said Donna, “sort of like Space Invaders, except there’s supposed to be this real story behind them.”
   “Interesting; what kind of story?”
   “I mean… you select a character, and you’re supposed to go around killing the minions of a dark lord, going through dungeons and collecting treasure, you know. And I think that you have to find a magic orb through which the ghost of wizard is cursing the land. Then you destroy it and save the world.”
   Donna swallowed her food to a silent dining room.
   “It’s like a really dynamic art form, you know?”

***

Donna sat cross-legged on Ellie’s bedroom floor, writing furiously in her notebook while Ellie flipped through her record collection. “What do you want to listen to?”
   “Hmm?” Donna slowly drew her gaze away from the page. “Oh, nothing, actually. I can’t write when music is playing. I get distracted.”
   “Are you doing your homework?”
   “It’s going really well. I’m like so engaged right now.”
   “What-ever.” Ellie dropped backwards onto her bed. “What am I supposed to do?” Donna made no sign that she’d even heard. “Maybe I could read the Great Gatsby, which you love so much.”
   Donna kept writing.
   “No, that’s fine,” said Ellie. “Because we can definitely still hang out and listen to music when you leave and go to New York City.”
   “Tell me what you think of this,” said Donna, holding up her notepad before her face and reading aloud. “‘Imagine what it’s like to aspire to artistic success in a field that nobody you know even knows exists. What is it like to be enraptured by a singular creative vision? What’s it like to pursue your dream so doggedly because the only thing that will persuade the world of the value of your life’s work is to see the final result? What’s it like to be a genius, what’s it like to be ignored? Peter Bissette has the answers.’”
   “Who is Peter Bissette?”
   “Ex – exactly.”

WEDNESDAY

It was still weird for her to see Tim Hathaway outside of school and outside of school hours. It was like he had no existence apart from the context of her experience. Donna realized she had conceived of a philosophical puzzle, and quickly discarded it.
   “Come on, do it already,” he said.
   Donna critically examined her reflection in the storefront window of Valley Books, and adjusted her headband by a quarter-inch.
   “I’m gonna do it. Calm down.”
   “I don’t see you doing it.”
   Donna flipped Tim the finger and walked into the bookstore. She was the only customer and the eyes of the store clerk, who was, under these circumstances, heartbreakingly cute, made her feel extremely self-conscious. Her legs grew heavier and made her uncomfortably aware of her own movements.
   She reached the magazine section and went back and forth between Computer Gaming World and PC Magazine. Finally, she chose the former; the devil she knew. The cover promised ‘100 Games Rated’ and had a picture of a human head that was attached to wires or something. Donna felt it was pretty embarrassing on its own, and felt worse when she took it to the counter. She expected the guy to eye her suspiciously and ask to see her geek ID.
   As she placed the magazine on the counter and the clerk rang it up, she realized she was about to make an idiot out of herself, but that was slightly better than chickening out in front of Tim Hathaway.
   “This is my favorite magazine, I buy it every month,” she announced. “I love playing games on my Atari 5200. I think this magazine has all the best strategies and tips. I can’t wait to get back home and raid an awesome dungeon. I think I want to kill the big dinosaur.”
   Tim had been watching through the window. After leaving the store, Donna smacked him with the magazine. “You owe me two bucks for that at least.”
   “That was good.” Tim cracked up.
   “You take this fucking thing,” said Donna, handing him her purchase in its paper bag. “I don’t want it.”
   “You keep it. You earned it.”
   “It’s my turn now. I dare you to… kick that car.” Donna pointed at the silver Chevrolet Citation parked beside them.
   “What? No.”
   While Tim’s head was turned, Donna shoved him into the car and the alarm began to wail. Tim panicked, and Donna laughed, seized his hand, and ran.

***

Teton Bowl, the bowling alley, would have been of little appeal to Donna and Tim today if not for the fact that it also housed a dozen arcade cabinets in the alcove by the front doors. Donna was holding a plastic handgun that was plugged in to the cabinet and whose movements registered on the screen. She was playing called something called ‘Duck Hunt’, and as ducks flew from left to right, she depressed the trigger rapidly. Eventually she hit something and the virtual duck exploded in an array of bright red dots.
   "Oh, Tim, this is really gross."
   Tim was watching over her shoulder, silently evaluating her performance. "What would you rather shoot?"
   "I guess monsters… or Nazis."
   "Sorry, you can only shoot ducks."
   "Or you, I would rather shoot you." With a smile, Donna turned the gun at Tim’s temple. “Boom.”
   After her patience wore thin with duck hunting, Donna shuffled over to the neighboring cabinet, Robotron, and put in her quarters. Robotron had two joysticks, which puzzled her. The game began with about fifty objects on screen. Donna yanked around the joysticks wildly.
   “Tim, which one am I?”
   Icons started exploding independent of Donna’s action and the cabinet shrieked at her.
   “Tim, which one am I?”
   Tim appeared to examine the screen deeply, but Donna was met with a GAME OVER screen. “Whatever. Fuck that.”
   “Look at that,” said Tim, dripping with contempt and indicating the list of Robotron high scores. “Check out the idiot who has the high score on this.” Whoever had secured the number one score had entered his name as A-S-S.
   “Yeah…” said Donna, “how immature, right?”

***

Tim – or, more often, his parents – bought all his games from a department store, the same store to which he had now brought Donna. Tim had referred to the trip as a pilgrimage and Donna had threatened to punch him. Standing together in the computer game aisle, Tim traced his finger across the shelves and identified each title’s own historic achievement in the gaming medium. Each title seemed to be a milestone, or a sequel to a milestone. From left to right, Tim narrated: color graphics, musical score, interactive dialogue, party system, real-time combat, first-person viewpoint, 3D objects, text parser, mouse interface, isometric view.
   “So all you need to do to be revolutionary is to tilt the camera on its side?”
   Tim snorted. “There’s a lot more to it than that.”
   “Oh, gosh,” said Donna, “imagine a game where, uh, you could push around objects and they would bounce around like they do in real life. You could drop boxes on… seesaws, or something. Look at me: I innovated.”
   Tim shook his head. “You don’t get it.”
   “Sorry, okay. I do want to know about all this. Tell me more about some games.”
   “No, I don’t want to now.”
   She grabbed his shoulder and with all the theatrical huskiness she could manage, whispered: “Please, Tim, I have to know. I have to know all about computer games.”
   He sighed. “Well, this one is Space Quest. It’s new and it’s supposed to be amazing. I put it on my Christmas list.”
   “Space Quest? What is that, like King’s Quest in space?”
   Tim paused. “Yeah. I guess so.”
   Donna considered this by herself for a minute. “I think I’m ready to interview this guy.”

THURSDAY

Peter Bissette lived in Teton Pines, which was about a thirty-minute drive from Tim Hathaway’s house near the hospital. It was after school and Donna sat in the car with her father, waiting for Tim to appear.
   “I don’t like the idea of you hanging out with him,” said Robert Kelly. “You know what happens to those Dungeons and Dragons freaks.”
   “No, tell me all about it, Dad,” said Donna, checking her watch. Tim was five minutes late, and the interview was supposed to start at four thirty.
   “That one kid in Michigan crawled into a sewer tunnel and blew his brains out. These kids get so messed up by elves and fairies that they kill themselves, Donna.”
   “Yeah, is that what happens?”
   “Don’t get smart with me.”
   “Sorry.”
   “I don’t want you getting mixed up in the occult. It feels like I’m the only one who cares enough to look out for you.”
   “Dad, Tim is… he is a sweet, normal, quiet guy who just is into some geeky things. He is literally like the furthest thing from dangerous. I know you don’t believe me, but he does not dress up and worship Satan.”
   The rear door opened and Tim slid into the backseat. He was wearing a green hooded cloak over a black raincoat and brown tunic, and knee-high leather boots that looked like they belonged to a prostitute.
   “Hi, Donna.”
   Donna, her neck craned, could not collect herself enough to shut her gaping mouth.
   “What are you wearing.”
   “This is my Strider costume.”
   Donna stared.
   “From Lord of the Rings?” he added.
   “Is that what you are wearing?”
   Tim nodded casually. “Are we going or what?”
   Donna sputtered and pointed out the window. “Tim – get back in your house and get dressed!”
   “No, he’ll love this!”
   Donna spun back to her seat. Her father looked at her with more silent judgment than she had ever seen him summon in a single expression. She realized she was blushing. “Oh my God.”
   “Okay then,” said Robert, “let’s go.” He started the car and pulled onto the road.
   Tim threw a fist in the air. “Excelsior!”
   Donna sank down as far as she could below her window. “Oh my God.”

***

Peter Bissette’s house was less of a palace than Donna had been expecting. It was a decent, two-story, one-garage thing that certainly didn’t scream ‘game programmer’; whatever that screamed. Robert Kelly seemed underwhelmed by it too, and even Tim looked momentarily disappointed. Probably, Donna thought, Tim was hoping for a Scottish castle replete with moat and family crest.
   All three of them got out of the car at once, to Donna’s sudden alarm. “Dad, it’s really okay,” she said, “you don’t have to walk us to the door. You can wait in the car.”
   “Absolutely not.”
   Tim skipped up the driveway steps, his cloak flapping in the breeze, and rang the doorbell.
   “Are you gonna take notes?” he asked Donna.
   “What?”
   “We don’t have a tape recorder, are you taking notes?”
   “Uh…”
   “Come on, he’s about to answer the door!”
   “I’ll take notes if you make sure to ask the questions that I prepared…”
   “Yeah yeah yeah. Fine. I will.”
   Donna gave him a look and then the door opened. When she saw Peter Bissette her first thought – based on his patchy, almost invisible stubble – was that he had not shaved in a couple of days. It then occurred to her that it was more like he hadn’t shaved in a couple of months and this was the best he could do. Peter Bissette was young. Donna had a fake driver’s license on which she claimed to be twenty-two, and at seventeen years old she could pass for older than Peter Bissette looked.
   Bissette was a skinny guy in jeans and a sweater. His hair came down to his shoulders and he wore glasses and a necklace with some unidentifiable fantasy thing on the end of it.
   “Hey, are you Tim?” He spoke in a kind of nasal register, to Donna’s utter lack of surprise.
   “Yeah,” Tim said, and shook Bissette’s hand. “It’s so awesome to meet you.”
   “You too, man.”
   “Oh,” said Tim, “this is my friend Donna.” Donna gave him a wary half-smile and Bissette nodded enthusiastically.
   “I’m Donna’s father. Robert Kelly.” Donna wanted to die.
   “Cool, nice to meet you, man.” They shook hands.
   “How old are you?” asked Robert.
   “I’m twenty-four.”
   Donna was stunned. “Twenty-four?”
   “Well, come on in, let’s get started.” Bissette held open the door and Tim leapt inside. Robert Kelly put a hand on Donna’s shoulder and whispered: “I will be right outside if you need me.”
   Donna, who was beginning to doubt the entire enterprise, nodded and then cautiously stepped inside the Bissette house.

***

There was an actual sword hanging over the archway before Peter Bissette’s living room. If it fell, it would kill somebody.
   “Whoa,” said Tim, “a sword!”
   “That’s a replica of a twelfth-century French crusader sword,” said Bissette with pride, “it’s the type that the Order of the Knights Templar would carry as they went into battle, or protected pilgrims.”
   “Outstanding,” said Tim.
   Donna watched the sword carefully as she passed under it. “This guy is a fucking dork,” she muttered to herself.
   The living room was adorned with medieval tapestries and paintings. Donna knew that the details of these could make for cute journalistic details if only she could bring herself to look at any of them. The surroundings were of an entirely different, embarrassing culture, and her only touchstone was Tim Hathaway, who was completely enraptured by the setting. Tim seemed orgasmic. The whole thing was making Donna’s skin crawl.
   Peter Bissette flopped down on one of his couches; Tim and Donna sat on another.
   “I bought this house in ’83,” said Bissette. “I have some office space in town as well; that’s Omega Software, technically. We’ve got about four guys working out of there at the moment.”
   “We didn’t have to interview you at home,” said Donna. “That would have been interesting, seeing you at work.”
   “I usually don’t go into the office until later. I get in at maybe seven, eight.” Donna thought this was awfully slack.
   “We might as well start getting into some questions,” said Tim. “Donna is going to take notes.” Donna took out her notepad and pen slowly.
   “Sounds good. Do you two want anything to drink?”
   “No, we’re okay,” said Tim. He had a sheet of paper prepared with his questions. “Let’s start at the beginning. How did you get into making games?”
   “Oh, wow. Well, I always loved computers. I learned how to program in BASIC, if you can believe that, that really dates me, but I learned how to program in BASIC when I was in high school. I grew up in Idaho and our high school had one computer in it, and I would stay after school and learn how to use that machine. I taught myself how to program in BASIC on that computer. Finally I convinced my parents to buy an Apple II and I would learn how to program games that I could play on that. My goal was pretty much to try and get a Dungeons & Dragons game running on the Apple II, looking to my own D&D campaign for inspiration. I made a couple prototypes before arriving at something that better resembled a full-length game.
   “Eventually I got the attention of a publisher in California and they liked what I had done, and so they ended up putting out what became Darkforge I.”
   Donna’s wrist was already starting to cramp. “Wait,” she said, “how old were you when this happened?”
   “Darkforge I was published in 1981, I would have been nineteen.”
   “That seems extremely young.”
   “Mm, it’s about normal, I think.”
   “Something I’ve always wanted to ask,” said Tim, “is about why the name of the series is still Darkforge when you only actually get to go to the principality of Darkforge in the first game.”
   Bissette laughed. “That’s a good question. I couldn’t use it as a location anymore since in the first game Darkforge was obviously obliterated.”
   “Obviously,” Tim said.
   “Obviously,” Donna said.
   “Darkforge itself is the product of a dark magic blight upon the valley, so once you vanquish that in the first game, it disappears and you can’t set foot there again. It was something of a dilemma whether to keep titling the subsequent games as Darkforge or not, but I think that many of the themes of Darkforge I transfer to those later games, so there is a sense of continuity. The theme of good versus evil is very important in the Darkforge universe, for instance. And I really wanted to keep working in that world. I love the mythology. You’ll see that many of the elements and characters of Darkforge I are present in the later games: altars, teleportation orbs, centaurs, the darkspawn, you know.”
   Donna raised her hand. “How do you spell ‘centaur’?”
   “C-E-N-T-A-U-R,” Tim recited a little impatiently.
   “I really think of the Darkforge series occurring as three separate trilogies,” said Bisette, “culminating in a cycle of nine games. And all trilogies are circular, I believe, and perhaps towards the end of the cycle you will see a return to Darkforge.”
   “Awesome,” said Tim.
   “But for now the Darkforge series will probably continue to be set in the land of Kiera Anlokh, which – “
   “How do you spell that.”
   “K-I-E-R-A, A-N-L-O-K-H.”
   “Plus, you’ll know this, Tim, but there are certain dark sorcerers and nemeses which continue to plague your hero across games.”
   “Of course: Mordach.”
   “That’s right. And expect his bastard scion, Aduln’ric, to make a return appearance.”
   “How do you spell the name of the bastard scion?”
   Tim audibly sighed. “It’s A-D-U-L-N – apostrophe – R-I-C.”
   Donna nodded dutifully and wrote down F-U-C-K, Y-O-U.
   “While I have you here,” said Tim, “I really should ask you about some strategies or tips for keeping your characters alive.”
   Donna looked at them both and to her horror they were completely engaged.
   “Well, you should be mapping the dungeons on graph paper, if you aren’t doing that already. Also remember to stock up with supplies before you head out, or carry one or two teleportation potions at all times. If you do that you shouldn’t be in much danger of exhaustion.”
   “But sometimes it’s the combat itself that is so difficult. If you come across a pack of two or more lizardfolk – which you did in Darkforge III, all the time – you’re really in a lot of trouble. I just wanted to know if you could give me any strategies on getting the most out of those encounters.”
   “That ties into something I implemented in Darkforge IV, namely the ability to reason with monsters and talk your way out of a fight. Even lizardfolk. There’s no dishonor in retreating from a fight, or parting with a little bit of gold, to avoid a battle you’re not sure you can win.”
   “Okay, and what about improving your stats? I mean, talking to enemies will only work if you have a high enough charisma, and in the Darkforge games, it’s strength that is so important. What’s the smartest balance to go for there?”
   Left behind at the word ‘lizardfolk’, Donna switched from the lines of the paper to a marginalia drawing of a stick figure being run down by a car.
   “You definitely have to be smart about what you’re putting character points into, no question, or you'll be torn apart by the lizardfolk. But there are a few unique items in each game which I consciously put in there as a stat booster, that might help even things out somewhat.”
   Bissette continued. “In one of the dungeons in Darkforge III – if memory serves, right off the Valhalla Coast – there’s a magic amulet which is permanent plus-three charisma. That’s a great help in resisting the harpies, especially.”
   “I found that! I did.”
   “What else… I suppose there’s the enchanted bow of Illrath, that’s in Darkforge III also. It’s only of help if you’re playing as a ranger, of course, but it’s a great help. Plus-two dexterity, I believe.”
   “I found that one, too! It’s in the Black Forest.”
   “That’s right,” Bissette smiled, “you’re quite the adventurer.”
   “Gosh.”
   Donna, who had stopped taking notes, looked at Bissette brightly and expectantly like he was supposed to call on her with her question next.
   “There’s also – and this is in Darkforge IV now – a mystic dagger that once belonged to Mordach himself which is found near the end of the game in Castle Nyella. That dagger is worth about plus-three agility.”
   “I didn’t know about that! Can you make sure you write that down, Donna?”
   Donna drew a picture of a stick figure being hanged.
   “I’m interested to hear that you think it’s too hard, though,” said Bissette. “I’ve received some letters that are expressing some of the same sentiments. I’m always interested to hear what players are thinking, and I definitely want to keep those thoughts in mind when making Darkforge VI.”
   “Darkforge VI?!”
   “‘Stronghold of the Fallen’. We should be putting that out in about September of next year. I’m really excited about it, there’s a lot of advancements we’re making that should be really interesting to see. We’re hoping to implement a real-time clock in there that will move between day and night, and there’s going to be a system to travel across the world using faster transportation, perhaps a series of teleportation gates or caravan. The key to a good Darkforge game, I think, is taking advantage of new technologies and really pushing the envelope.”
   Donna checked her watch. It had to be wrong, she thought.
   “Can I ask you one more question?” Tim retrieved a sheet of paper from his pocket and unfolded it on Bissette’s coffee table. “What do you think of my map?” It was the same elaborate dungeon that Tim had been drawing days ago.
   “Hmm…” Bissette leaned in closer, examined it. “Interesting loot placement.”
   Tim was delighted. “Really?”
   “I would reroute this corridor here,” said Bissette, indicating a point on the map, “so that it leads directly into this monster room you have. You don’t want to deplete players’ resources too much.”
   “Can I ask a question?” Both men looked at Donna. “Where do you see yourself in ten years?”
   “Which one of us are you talking to?” asked Tim. “Oh, right.”
   “In ten years? I hope still making these games, doing what I love.”
   “Fantastic,” said Donna, and slammed her notebook shut.

***

It had taken ten minutes to pry Tim away from the Bissette house. He had concealed a copy of the first Darkforge game in his backpack and insisted on getting Peter Bissette to sign and personalize it. When he finally returned to the car, he was insatiable.
   “I can’t believe I have a signed copy of Darkforge. Oh, wow.”
   “Did it go well?” Robert Kelly asked his daughter.
   “It went so well!” said Tim. “Oh, wow.”
   Donna stared out her window and did not respond. Robert started the car and when they reached Tim Hathaway’s home, thirty minutes later, Donna hadn’t said a word.

***

Tim thanked Donna’s father for the ride, left the car and braved the chill back to his house. Tapping her fingers on the dashboard in silence, she yanked open her door, asked her father to wait and followed Tim up the steps. She slipped inside right after Tim and she closed the door.
   “What’s going on?” he asked. “Do you want to go upstairs?”
   “I fucking do not. Tim, I am so pissed at you right now. You totally steamrolled me. You didn’t ask a single one of my questions.”
   Tim was looking a little rattled and started to say something.
   “But – but!” interrupted Donna, “who even cares, because what a boring guy that was! That was so fucking stupid! You lied to me; you made me think he was interesting. God help you if that’s the closest thing you have to a pioneer.”
   “I didn’t like your questions,” snapped Tim, “nobody cares about this bleeding heart, human drama thing, it’s pretentious. I like his games, it’s not important what his childhood was like. Maybe you want to know about that, but the questions I asked are what’s interesting to people like me who actually play games!”
   “That’s what you want to talk about? How to find the secret dungeons?”
   “Yes, because that actually means something to me.”
   “Oh, good.” Donna pulled her notebook from her coat pocket, tore out her aborted transcript and dropped the pages on the floor. “Here’s your investigative exposé. Shove it up your ass.”
   Donna opened the door, then stopped, turned back around and jabbed a finger at Tim. “This guy just copied Dungeons & Dragons and then kept doing it for six years. How can you even be inspired by something that lazy? Computer games are not going to be as successful as you think they are if they’re going to be stories about, what, what, fucking monsters with magic powers? But you don’t even care, do you? I was wrong. It’s not that games are misunderstood, it’s not that they’re really going somewhere, it’s not that people don’t take them seriously; they’re just bad. They’re actually no good. Do you have any idea how discouraging that is?”
   Tim crossed his arms and looked away.
   “Jesus!” said Donna as she stepped outside, “you think you know somebody.”

FRIDAY

School was a blur. At every desk and in every classroom, Donna never wrote a single thing down and was lucky never to have a teacher call on her once. At the end of the day, she slumped at a table by the parking lot opposite Eric. He was absorbed in a magazine and she watched him turn the pages and marveled at how easy it was to lose oneself in something.
   “Can I ask you a question?” she said. Her head was resting on the table and she looked up at him with curiosity.
   “Okay,” he said, “if I get to ask you a question after that. This magazine has a quiz that tells you whether you are a ‘wild girl.’”
   “If you could ask any question to the person who designed Robotron, what would it be?”
   “I don’t know who made Robotron.”
   “Well, if you knew.”
   “I guess…” Eric put down the magazine and seemed to think about it.
   “What have you always wanted to know?”
   “I guess… I’d like to know why he made the grunt waves so difficult.”
   “Really. Anything else?”
   “Hmm. No, that’s it.”
   Donna let her head roll sideways on the table, and she felt as though she could fall asleep right there in the snow. “I’ll give this to you, you are an idiot, but you definitely have the high score on Robotron.”
   Eric was about to refer back to the quiz and inquire as to Donna’s body piercing proclivities when Todd slid into the seat next to him.
   “Hey. Hey. Are we doing anything tonight?”
   “Yeah, we’re going out to the woods again.”
   “Awesome. Are you coming, Donna?”
   Donna pushed back from the table. “No! I will go out with you in the cold and in the snow and I will get drunk on your shitty beer but I refuse to keep doing it in a goddamn forest! For once in my life let me keep some of my fucking dignity and get trashed in an actual house. Just for one night and then, then, Eric, you can go back to tipping cows or whatever it is you do.”
   Eric looked thoughtful again. “Did you know that it’s basically impossible to tip a cow? I mean I’ve tried. Even sober I’ve tried. More than once.”
   Donna glared at him. “Don’t talk to me anymore.”

***

This was not necessarily the classier option. Dance music sounded horribly distorted when heard via a cassette deck and then through the walls of Maggie’s house. Donna and Ellie had ended up outside, leaning against the wall and sitting in what had until recently been a flowerbed. Donna swung a beer back and forth in her gloved hands. It was her sixth.
   “Am I a bad person if I hate being from here?” She took another swig. Ellie had fallen asleep – or was close to it – on her shoulder.
   “I hate that this place is going to be identified with me forever. I’m already thinking like I live in New York. I care more about what happens there. I can tell you the names of every New York senator and I don’t even know who represents me.
   “And you look at me like New York is beneath you, like it’s pretentious and it’s full of drug addicts or whatever. But I would rather die in New York with a needle in my arm than live here for the rest of my life.
   “I don’t know if there’s a typical kind of Jackson person, but whoever that is, I don’t like them. If I talk about Columbia or politics or editing Time, they look at me so patronizingly. No one gives a shit. People think I have dreams and that’s just something you do when you’re young. They act like it’s idealistic to be ambitious. They act like I owe this town something. Fuck them. Give me someone or somewhere that does believe in me. I don’t want to stay here. What do I get if I do?
   “I have all these ideas but there isn’t the money or the resources to do them here. And nobody will ever pay attention to them because there are only ten people here who will ever read it! No one in the world would ever think to care because nothing worthwhile ever came out of Jackson. If I stay here, then I get forgotten. Ellie, I am so scared.”
   Ellie drowsily lifted her head from Donna’s shoulder. Staring at Donna with tired, glassy eyes, she parted her lips slightly. Donna waited for her to speak, and then Ellie turned sharply and threw up in the bushes.
   Donna brushed the hair back from her eyes as Ellie continued to puke. “Fair enough.”

SATURDAY

When Donna drank, she had a habit of waking up earlier than usual the next morning. Five thirty was a lousy time to feel completely alert, but she couldn’t even pretend to herself that she might fall back into sleep, and decided not to bother.
   While it was still dark outside, Donna washed her hair, got dressed then headed downstairs to make her own breakfast for the first time in six months. Sipping coffee at the kitchen table, watching the sun come up alone, she felt like she owned this house. Donna was unexpectedly proud of having accomplished something before dawn. This, she considered, should be what being an adult is like.
   Donna had nothing to do. She had no plans with either Todd or Ellie, and the only thing that demanded her attention were the scholarship and student loan forms waiting incomplete on her bedroom desk. In the interests of continuing her sudden rush of maturity, Donna chose to put on her coat, gloves and boots, walk outside and run up and down the street.
   In minutes, a dozen houses down, her cheeks were stinging from the cold, but she was okay with it. When she ran, the adrenaline made her loopy and hyped her up about the idea of engaging in an elaborate workout regime. She thought about being a kick boxer, and in the absence of any gym equipment in the street, she kicked somebody’s mailbox.
   It occurred to her now, gloved hands clutching above her knees, crouched over and taking a breath, that she was going to fail her assignment. Failing a journalism assignment – a profile piece, no less – probably would not reflect so well on her considering she was applying to study at a Journalism school. Donna turned back to her house.
   At noon, Donna picked up the phone in the living room.
   “Hello?”
   “Hi, Mr. Bissette, this is Donna Kelly from Jackson Hole High School.”
   “Oh, Donna, hi. How are you?”
   “Yeah, listen, I was hoping that I could do kind of a follow-up interview with you. I’ve got some more questions that I need to ask for our assignment.” She drummed a ballpoint pen on the couch arm.
   “Sure, that’s okay. Do you and Tim want to come over again?”
   “Actually, Tim is away for the weekend with his parents, but he asked if I could do it. And it’d be easier to do it over the phone, if you don’t mind.” She flinched.
   “That’s fine.”
   “Great, what’s a good time for you?”
   “We could do it today. Call me later, will you? Like ten.”
   “P.M.? What time do you get up in the morning, Peter?”
   “Call me back, I’m going to get back to sleep.”
   Donna hung up, and breathed out.

***

The day had gone from being Donna’s to command to seeing her wracked with anxiety and pacing around her living room. Her parents and her brother had left for a Christmas dinner party; to her delight, Donna was able to defer using the finally legitimate excuse that she had homework.
   Donna wrote new questions in her notebook, reviewed them, read them out loud, anticipated an answer, screwed up the pages and started again. She repeated this for most of the day, stopping only for quick meals, and by the evening her nervous energy dissipated. The effects of getting up early took their toll and, lying on her couch surrounded by loose pieces of lined paper, she drifted off.
   The phone rang harshly. Donna woke in the dark and with bleary eyes checked her watch: quarter to ten. Realizing she had fallen asleep, she filed a quick mental note of self-recrimination and made a grab for the phone. In her haste, she didn’t wonder why Peter Bissette would have her phone number.
   “Hello? This is Donna.”
   “Hey, it’s me.”
   Donna sighed. “Hey, Todd.”
   “What are you doing right now?
   “Todd, thanks for calling, but I really need to use the phone.”
   “Come on, I want to take you out tonight. I’ll pick you up in half an hour. Everyone’s Christmas lights are on, we’ll drive past them.”
   “Todd, I appreciate it, I’d do it any other day, but I’m busy right now.”
   “It feels like I’m always asking you to hang out.”
   “Maybe you do. It doesn’t mean anything.”
   “Do you care about being with me at all?”
   Donna rolled her eyes and got up off the couch, the receiver in her hand. “Oh, God, do you really want to talk about this?”
   “Yeah. I think we should.”
   “Honestly, you picked like the worst possible time. Why don’t we make a date, seriously, for tomorrow or something and we can go over your concerns for as long as you like.”
   “Is that a good time? How about after you leave and I can call you long-distance? You know you never even asked me if you should move away. You just said that you were leaving.”
   “Why should I ask you? You don’t own me.”
   “Donna… I love you, you know?”
   Donna was less impressed than she thought she might have been to hear that.
   “I try so hard to make you happy. That’s all I want to do.”
   “Okay, Todd, but I’m obviously not happy here and if you loved me then you would see that. If you’re serious about us why don’t you come to New York with me?”
   “I can’t. You know I can’t. This is where my friends are. This is where my family is.”
   “Well, I am not staying here,” Donna snapped, “and clearly you don’t know what I want. You don’t care that I want to be a journalist. You don’t even think I’m good at it. I want that. I don’t want to be your housewife. I don’t want to spend my twenties drinking in the woods, I don’t want a job here, I don’t want to have kids here, I don’t want to change the things that I want to be with you.”
   “But you are like the only thing that I want. You are important. To me. I don’t know how to make you happy but I want to be with you.”
   She stopped, and didn’t speak. Donna didn’t know why she was angry, and why she was shaking.
   “Well,” she said, “that’s not good enough for me.”
   Todd didn’t respond, and Donna was about to say something else, when he answered, “Okay”, and hung up.
   The skin around her eyes began to burn and she threw herself face-first on the couch and screamed into the cushion.

***

Ten minutes later, she dialed Peter Bissette’s number. It was pitch black out now, and Donna had the living room lit only by the nearby desk lamp.
   “Hi, is this Donna?”
   “Yeah, hi.”
   Donna was sitting on the end of the couch, having hastily composed herself and wiped her eyes. Her notebook was open in her lap and she held a pen in her free hand.
   “Ready when you are,” he said.
   “What are you doing at ten o’clock at night?” she wondered, almost incidentally.
   “Doing some programming.”
   “Really? On a Saturday? Don’t you go off the clock at some point?”
   “I don’t think of it as work so much. I enjoy doing this.”
   “What do you enjoy about programming?”
   “Hmm. I like to put things together. I like assembling all these separate pieces in creative combinations and seeing if they work. I enjoy getting to solve all these little puzzles that come up. Creating things, that’s what I enjoy about it. Being an architect.”
   “Alright. Can I ask you my first question?”
   “Go for it.”
   “Why do you make games?”
   “That’s an interesting question. Part of it has to do with what I just told you about, programming. I like to think that I’d program even if I wasn’t making games. But I also enjoy the creative process, and playing around in fantasy universes. That’s such a rich area to me; I think it’s endlessly fascinating. And I’ve always enjoyed playing games, in the first place, going back to board games, and I’ve found being on this side of things is more fun.”
   “Is that what you were thinking when you made your first game?”
   “No, I don’t think so, necessarily. I never meant to end up doing this. Making games was not my intention when I started out, I didn’t even really appreciate that it was something you could do for a living. When I made my first game it was for myself. I enjoyed doing it but I didn’t expect that people would ever pay attention to it. When they did, I think things started to change and I became more aware of game design as a potential career path. If people didn’t like Darkforge, or didn’t play it, then I don’t think I would have ended up doing games. It just would not have occurred to me. Programming, sure, but this specifically was very much a lucky accident, I believe.”
   “This isn’t meant to be an offensive question,” said Donna, “but can you tell me what was so good about Darkforge?”
   Bissette laughed. “You don’t play computer games at all, do you?”
   “No, I don’t. I’ve seen them, a little bit, but they’re not my thing.”
   “Can I ask you a question, then? Why are you so interested in them?”
   “I’m interested in my subject. It’s important that I know about the things that you care about, or I can’t write the piece well.”
   “This isn’t meant to be an offensive question either, but isn’t this ‘piece’ like a high school assignment?”
   “Yeah, but you know how you love programming? This is what I love. This is what I want to do.”
   “You want to be a journalist?”
   “Absolutely.”
   “What would you write about if you could?”
   “I want to be a reporter. I want to travel and write about everything that happens in the world. I want to report on wars and politics and civil rights and make a record of everything that really mattered. I like interesting personalities. I want to find those people and talk to them and tell their stories because I think they mean something. That’s what I love and I can’t imagine being satisfied doing anything else.”
   “Sounds good.”
   “That’s what I’ve wanted to do ever since I was fifteen. And I think, uh, that I’m really not going to get a chance to do much of it until I move to New York next year. I’m going to Columbia University. Do you like living in Jackson?”
   “Not really.”
   “Jackson is so boring to me. It’s too limited. And this is… I’m frustrated. Do you know? All I want is one opportunity to show that I can do this kind of writing, to show that I am actually talented at this. I need to write something amazing. People don’t believe me when I say I can write that way, or write well. My family doesn’t care about this, and my friends don’t give a shit. If I can’t prove it to them, if I can’t be successful at this, then I don’t think they’re ever going to understand.” She paused. “I’m sorry. Why is Darkforge so good?”
   “I think it was largely the technology. It was, in part, incredibly innovative: it had tiled graphics, separate screens for dialogue and combat, moral alignments that led to varying interactions. It might be hard to understand but nobody was doing that at the time. That was because no one could get that to work on a computer. Do you appreciate that it’s literally something no one has ever seen before? And to know that you created it?”
   “Yes.”
   “That’s what I did. And I was nineteen, so I had a more ambitious vision for the technology than I might have with more experience and a better grasp of how things work.”
   “Then I think it’s good that you got started young.”
   “It might have been. But almost everyone gets into the business around that time. I’m not especially young for a computer game designer. Computer games are a very new thing and there aren’t a lot of rules to getting your foot in the door. It was great to be twenty years old and making as much money and being as famous and highly regarded as I was then.
   “But I think, because technology ages so fast, as soon as I’d done Darkforge, someone else came up with another game that was as revolutionary and certain features would make Darkforge obsolete. Then someone else would come up with another innovation and someone else, and someone else…. I’m still making money, and people are playing my games. I find, however, that I’ve never been able to come up with as important an idea as the ones I had four years ago.
   “I’m trying harder than I ever have. The technology is more challenging. The business is more challenging. I’m working harder. I’m working with other people, and so I get to put together games that would be too big for one person to make. And they look better, and they have more features, but I don’t think that in the future anyone will point to these newer games and say that they’re as meaningful or influential as the first two. I’m trying my best, but I’d have to agree with them. I think that I was more full of purpose when I was twenty.
   “This only occurred to me very recently. I have to admit that because of when I started I might have done the best work of my career when I was twenty. That was when I made my contribution. I suppose I assumed I would have longer than that. Where can I go from here that’s valuable? You asked me where I want to be in ten years. Sometimes I wish I was ten years younger instead.”
   “But... it sucks now.”
   “I think you could become a very talented journalist. You might be one already. But don’t think that when people recognize you that it will be the end of your problems. It doesn’t suddenly get easier after that. You can never know how long you have. Creativity is not predictable.”
   Donna had stopped writing long ago. “I won’t accept that.”
   “You might have to.”
   “No,” she said firmly. “I have hope. I believe in myself. I know that I can be good at this.”
   “Then I wish you the best. I really do.”
   Donna let the pen drop to the floor. “Thank you. I’m gonna go now.”
   “Good luck on your project.”
   “You too,” she said, and put the phone down.
   She flipped backwards through every page of her notebook, accelerating to the beat of her heart and taking in every line. All the questions for Peter Bissette, the pages that were stained by tears, where the interview pages used to be, the notes she’d made on the arcade and the department store, her first pass at an intro, sarcastic commentary on her visit to Tim’s house, where do you see yourself in ten years, and then arrived at the first page: ‘Assignment: write about a local personality. 500 words.’
   Looking at the notebook, she wondered how she could possibly put it all together, and then smacked herself in the forehead with it. It felt like too much work, but that thought made her fiercely want to try.
   Through the window she could see the Christmas lights on her neighbor’s house, which were blinking in time with a tune that wasn’t playing. She lay down on the couch, pulled a blanket around herself and watched the light show until late into the night.

SUNDAY

Hanging in Donna’s bedroom, above her dresser, was a map of the Manhattan subway. She liked, sometimes, to select two random points on the grid and work out the most efficient route between them. It might better prepare her for New York once she got there, but Donna was never thinking ahead like that, she simply liked to immerse herself in the street and station names.
   Donna traced her finger across the glass, as, with her free hand, she blow-dried her hair. Years ago, her father had gone to New York City for a conference and when he returned he found that he still had this map in his luggage, having forgotten to throw it out at the airport. Donna had framed it.
   Donna had slept in and missed her family leave for church, so she had been informed via a terse note written by her mother and left by her sleeping form on the living room couch. They must have assumed that she was drunk or something, and for all her sobriety, Donna somehow felt hungover.
   It was late, she knew, but Donna was still reasonably well put-together; her hair was dry and make-up was thinly applied. If she hurried, she could still make it to the church.
   As soon as this thought came to her, she bolted out of her bedroom, stopping at the door to pull on her winter jacket and tightly fasten her boots. She grabbed her keys from the rack and dashed outside, letting the wind slam the door behind her. She knew that she really didn’t have to expend so much effort on something that she cared about relatively little, but she wanted to do it anyway.

Hit Self-Esteem

2009-05-19T20:27:00.002+12:00

What is Braid about?

This is a contentious question. The game itself is not clear. It never suggests a particular interpretation or even the existence of a single allegorical meaning. Competing theories abound, and creator Jonathan Blow won't talk about any of them except to imply that these are all somewhat off-base or only partially correct.

It's a contentious game. Some consider the story to be pretentious, some consider the whole thing pretentious, some consider it the wrong kind of pretentious. Additionally, Jonathan Blow appears to read everything that is written about Braid on the internet, so you can imagine him looking over your breakthrough analysis and shaking his head dismissively.

If anyone continues to discuss what Braid might be about, it's because the subject is still largely unresolved. The story in itself is a puzzle, and if Braid does nothing else it reminds you how good it feels to solve the impossible.

Behind two doors is a scrap of a painting that you need to collect. The doors are both locked, and there's only one key in the area. This key will open either door, but you can only use it once. If you do the logical thing and unlock the first door, of course you cannot then progress. How frustrating is this? You can't solve it by dexterity. In fact, you cannot solve this by any realistic method. In Braid, though, our world works differently.

Braid is not a test of reflexes but of your capacity to rewire your brain to think about the rules of time and physics in entirely unfamiliar ways. Every challenge has specific parameters to observe and unique rules to learn, and is solvable only by these special criteria. Braid needs you to narrow your vision and concentrate. It's like a Magic Eye picture if you could only see the image by scientifically deducing the process by which an autostereogram works, instead of just marveling that you made a dolphin appear.

Unlocking both doors is completely beyond normal human ability, but, you think, what if -- and then, in ten seconds, you've mentally rearranged every element and every contradiction of the puzzle into a configuration which briefly made a flash of absolute sense. You've reconstructed time and space to suit your temporary purposes, and who wouldn't feel smart for doing that?

That's your eureka moment -- one of about thirty. This kind of gratification is not a reward for one particularly difficult problem in the game. You get this emotional feedback rationed out in evenly-paced doses. This could probably be addictive if each high wasn't also so hard to achieve. Braid is an emotional pendulum that swings between frustrated worthlessness and being hyper-impressed with your own cleverness.

Braid creates circumstances which facilitate feelings of momentary genius. Playing Braid, I relate to high school dorks who select steroid-abusing vigilantes as their in-game avatars, except I am role-playing as a smart person. The captain of the debate team or something. The game does its absolute best to ensure you get to feel this way about yourself. There are no variable difficulty levels or in-game hint system. You either solve it and feel good, or you don't. Or you cheat, and Jonathan Blow tries to head that impulse off at the pass. "Some of the puzzles will be hard", he writes in his high-concept official walkthrough. "But when you manage to solve those hard puzzles, you will feel very good about it. The game will feel very rewarding. Don't rob yourself of that feeling by reading a walkthrough!"

It's a plea for preserving the sanctity of experience. What would change if you did use a walkthrough? There'd be no such sense of accomplishment, you wouldn't feel smart, and in attempting a solution you would never make a mistake and see the consequences. If you cheat, you miss a lot of what is special about Braid.

All of this is relevant because Braid concerns a character who appears to be an actual genius. It's tricky to say who 'Tim' is, exactly, since that's like answering what the game is about. Here's something that he could be, though, at least in one reality: a scientist on the Manhattan Project and working through a series of epiphanies and micro-discoveries that lead to his creation of the atomic bomb, or whatever Pandora's Box that's supposed to represent.

Tim is tightly focused on this scientific pursuit to the detriment of his relationship. He is so involved with his work that he doesn't see (or can't see, or doesn't care about) the potential harm to others that his invention might incur. Neither does he recognise the adverse effects that his behaviour is already having on his personal life; we see him indirectly push away a loved one. His obsession diminishes his humanity.

I think that there are deliberate reasons why Braid is difficult, why it's a puzzle game, and why it's a game at all. If it's all three, then it can regularly induce in the player the almost vain feeling of exceptional aptitude. Again, it's hard to say too much about what thoughts go through Tim's mind: by all external appearances he's clinical, overly rational and emotionally hollow. Maybe, though, the reason that he fixates on the challenges presented by his work, and accepts the collateral damage to his relationships, is that solving puzzles makes him feel really good. In playing Braid we feel smart too, and we might sympathise.

Developing the atomic bomb must have presented an uncommonly challenging creative exercise. It's as if through the act of playing, you're in Tim's head working through the mental acrobatics and twisting around what we know to be natural and right to arrive at a seemingly impossible conclusion. Tim is probably so divorced from reality that he would abstract nuclear physics and quantum mechanics to the comprehensible immaturity of monsters and keys.

Tim operates in isolation, and if he is a person at all, then this is certainly no good for him. The nature of his work means he is thoroughly consumed. Occasionally he gets tantalizingly close to final confirmation, but, time and again, the Princess is in another castle. He longs to know her at last, and so on. But we understand why he keeps going. He's messing around with things that he shouldn't -- like time -- but he's getting smarter and smarter, so he's fine with this. The sheer intellectual fascination of his task provides him with enough intermittent stimulation for him to continue.

Is that the theme of Braid? The price of obsession is the loss of compassion? Playing the game, you too can obsess over the puzzles. You can easily get zeroed in on forcing a solution to work that you don't register the nearby platform that actually does figure into the answer. Puzzles left unfinished stay with you; even after you turn off the game, they run through your mind. Gamers are trained to overcome all obstacles. At the Game Developers Conference this year, an absent exhibitor at the IGF left behind a hastily-constructed jigsaw puzzle of their company logo, cut into a handful of laminated pieces. I saw it and smirked derisively, thinking I could solve that thing in three seconds. I couldn't do it at all. I am still upset about this.

Still, you can't screw up your life too badly by tormenting yourself over two locked doors in Braid. This is unless you are actually in the situation of ignoring your spouse to play more of the game, but the events of the game might illuminate you as to your own situation. You would have learned more about your relationship with your significant other from an Xbox Live Arcade game than you ever did in conversation with him or her.

Braid's not a long game and the puzzles aren't really impossible. What aspect, then, could you really hone in on, what holy grail could you really torture yourself over? There's the secret constellation: the game's hidden stars, very much out of the way and, comparatively, a real ordeal to find. Would the reward be worth it putting yourself through that? Would you feel smart, or just exceedingly patient?

What if you figured out, conclusively, what Braid was about? What a rush it was to realise the nuclear bomb connection on your own. Imagine that was only the starting point: if you could then produce an absolute interpretation that crystallized every facet of the game into sharp relief. Imagine that it satisfied all questions and met with everyone's approval, even the game's creator. You made Braid make complete sense; you found the Princess. If you were the one to discover the answer, if you were the very first one... God, wouldn't that feel great?

Photo Album

2009-05-14T17:55:00.003+12:00

What you hear a lot about music is that people often intractably associate songs with events in their lives. They've ended up with some unpredictable connection between the song and their own experience. A song will forever remind them of a breakup or the summer of '81 (don't get me started on the summer of 1981. Suffice it to say: what a summer.)

These connections tend to be unique to the individual. It's not some generally agreed-upon association like Auld Lang Syne with New Year's Eve and Time of Your Life with a teenager's funeral. When we identify songs with completely unrelated moments, and only we understand the correlation, I think that's more memorable. Or at least more interesting.

You can't really set out to tie memories and songs together. It just happens, it's an accidental experience. Connections are haphazardly generated. In contrast, what's interesting about games to me is how much they're about control. Not just the game itself but in how many alternatives you have to decide upon before playing. We strive to achieve technical perfection with enhanced experience or immersion as the goal.

There are options with every medium, but with games especially: choice of platform, hardware, sound system, high or standard definition, keyboard and mouse, widescreen FOV, lights on or off (Dead Space is only scary if it's the former), handheld, Far Cry 2 with or without the music, stealth path or action path (and one of these is the wrong way to play Deus Ex or Metal Gear Solid 4).

We often try so hard to pin down the proper way to play a game. It's an innate aspect of gamer culture to want to be the best. In creating the optimal technical conditions for play it's definitely possible to improve the fidelity but ultimately I'm not sure how much that is actually worth. I think some of the best memories you can have of games are the ones that are impossible to create. A bizarre sequence of unscripted events in an emergent open world hits closer to home than a cutscene. Even if the former is dramatically less powerful, it only happened once and it only happened to you.

Mass Effect, on its merits alone, shouldn't occupy as much of my long-term memory as it currently does. I played it when I began a new job that involved getting up at six every morning, when it was still dark and raining outside. I had ten minutes in the morning before I had to get out the door, and I used that time to play Mass Effect. There's an ice planet in the game where Shepard begins in a slate-gray docking station. Shepard can run around and do some quests and observe that it's snowing out. I can hear the rain hitting my window. It's explained to Shepard that it's below freezing out there, but you know Shepard has to head out there eventually. Shepard gets in his warm space suit and Mako vehicle and takes on the blizzard. I go outside and walk to work in the rain.

That comparatively insignificant section of the game stands out more clearly than any other, which doesn't mean anything to anyone else other than me. I never loved Mass Effect, but I may remember that for the rest of my life.

Sometimes I wish I had these lasting memories in games that I liked more. But I try not to think about it too much.

Twenty-One Guns

2009-05-08T18:46:00.007+12:00

On Wednesday, a 26-year-old game programmer in London walked into his boss's office and closed the door. The Duke is dead, he said. I'm sorry, I think I need to be at home today. The boss nodded gravely. I understand, he said, take all the time you need. Cleaning his glasses on his shirt, the programmer confessed: I really didn't think this would affect me so much. The boss told him that it was perfectly fine to feel this way, and said he would see him on Monday. The programmer thanked him and headed for the door. His hand trembled on the doorknob.

On Thursday, a 33-year-old art director in Boston drove to a quarry with his buddies. There, they drained cheap cans of beer and hurled them at the horizon. After three hours, the art director tore off his shirt and climbed up on the roof of his black Dodge Rampage. Nothing matters anymore, he yelled, and emptied the clip of a compact handgun into the air. Shortly thereafter, he was arrested. As the cops slapped on handcuffs and ushered him into the back of the police car, he yelled: what's up, you pigs gonna give me a hard time? One of the cops leaned close to his ear and whispered: not tonight.

On Friday, a 42-year-old executive producer in Texas took his young son to view the funeral procession. They watched the horses, the marching band and the police escort file past the crowds, and the producer hoped for a glimpse of the casket. His son tugged at his hand. This is boring, he said, why does everyone care so much? The producer looked down at him and said it was one of those things he would understand when he was older.

Chaos Theory

2009-04-30T05:36:00.002+12:00

As long as there's a Game Developers Conference in San Francisco, I am able to plan a day like this: Rod Humble lecture, visit to Alcatraz, Jason Rohrer lecture. That was my Tuesday at GDC. Sometimes you need to take a break from games for a while and go to a prison.

Alcatraz used to be a pretty grim scene. Tour highlights include the spot where the suicidal leapt into the ocean and dashed their brains on the rocks, and the hallway where inmates and guards shot and killed one another. The floor tiles are still marred from grenade blasts. A place like this commands a certain solemnity. There should be a threshold of decorum here. Overly cheery tour guides who use the words "cell house", "recreation yard" and "all that good stuff" in the same sentence might be slightly over that line. An Alcatraz gift shop that sells The Rock on DVD is probably over that line. The former inmate who sits miserably in the middle of that gift shop trying to sign copies of his memoir, looking like the loneliest old man in the world, that's borderline. Wandering around the island pointing out how similar everything is to video games... definitely over the line.

For instance, take the audio tour of the Alcatraz cell house. The tour designers have carved out a linear route through the building, and for twenty minutes, you listen to a voice directing you to hit your marks while also trying to communicate the history of Alcatraz. "Turn left," it says, "take five steps forward, look at cell 32, look to your right, turn right -- turn left -- turn left immediately!" It's like the worst kind of scripted video game, which sacrifices any illusion of meaningful interactivity or autonomy in favour of brusquely ushering you down a narrative corridor.

It's sort of a gruff and impatient voice. Games are never that rude. Games prefer to pretend that the player's in charge, but ultimately the game can always seize back control through a cutscene or locked camera. In Alcatraz, I enjoy a much greater freedom of movement -- ironically -- so to make sure I stay focused on the subject at hand, maybe the tour designers feels that they need to be mean to me.

The tour's use of art assets is particularly cost-effective. Every individual object in the cell house is deliberately placed to convey a specific story point. The only furnished cells, with folded laundry on the bed and watercolours on the wall, were not arranged like that for decoration but to specifically inform you about the prisoners' amenities. When you see the cell with a hole in the wall, it's because you're about to hear about that escape attempt. The only cells that you can walk into are the ones that are dark, empty and intended to evoke panic attacks in the claustrophobic. If it's unique, it has a purpose; the rest of the environment is generic texture.

Besides the narration, the audio tape incorporates short monologues by both prisoners and guards. These recordings, of people who are probably long since dead, function as historical artefacts and ad hoc recurring characters. They convey important plot details or, for colour, the mundanities of Alcatraz living. Alcatraz has audio diaries.

The Alcatraz tour is an unbroken one-way circuit, dictated by the guidance of a husky narrator. The fatal flaw is that you never have to obey the narrator's instruction. A video game might kill the player or throw up an invisible wall; in the Alcatraz cell house you can head off in any direction that you like. That's similar, in theory, to the open worlds of Grand Theft Auto and Fallout: games with a main quest by which completion is measured, but a plethora of side content that players can explore at their leisure.

In Grand Theft Auto, you can opt out of the main quest for as long as you like. In Alcatraz, however, unless you actively pause the tape, or if you misunderstand the instructions, then it doesn't realise and the narration will continue. It doesn't have a contingency plan for the tourist getting lost. You can wander off the set, forget your lines, and the tour is not aware enough to recognise your transgression. Bad scripting.

The tour is a single-player experience. You might be surrounded by other people, but you do not interact with them and as soon as you strap on your headphones, you're isolated in your own instance of the tour. It speaks directly to you, and as it's telling you about the echoes of raucous New Year's Eve parties that carried across the bay to drive the prisoners insane, you forget about the people around you. Although you can grief the other players if you want, and impose yourself upon their experience in ways unintended by the designers. For example, catch someone's eye, say "this tour's pretty stupid, isn't it?" and then make out in the warden's office.

The tour, like all single-player games, is actually a shared experience. The author, or the game, is never talking solely to you. It's related this same spiel to thousands of others and will continue to do so long after your horrible death. For all the effect that it pretends you have on the world, everyone else has already taken their turn at being the hero. When Bastila says she loves you, she doesn't mean you. The Alcatraz cell house tour is what it would be like if the ghosts of previous players started showing up in your single-player game. You're all moving down an identical path, but all out of sync and scattered around the location at different points in the chronology. The Wikipedia page on Alcatraz claims that the prison is famously haunted. They probably don't mean like this.

I returned my headphones and tape to the disaffected teenage tour guide minding the exit, and I thought about asking him if he realised, you know, the similarities the last twenty minutes have to level design theory, and social dynamics in MMOs, and non-linear open worlds, and all that good stuff? But if he doesn't know already, someday he'll play Half-Life 2, and he'll see for himself.

[Photos thanks to Siorna McFarlane.]

Domestic Terminal

2009-04-26T17:00:00.004+12:00

Earlier this year, I'm tired and sprawled out in an airport lounge waiting for a plane to take me home. Sitting nearby is a young boy who's intensely focused on the DS game that he's playing. What first gets my attention is that whatever game this is, it uses the generic "video game" sound effects that appear in every movie and TV show.

The second thing is that the kid's mother, who looks to be in her early thirties, is watching the game over his shoulder. She frequently asks him about what each enemy and power-up does. She offers suggestions about what powers her son should deploy to take care of a monster. What quickly becomes apparent about this woman is that she is really trying. Video games are not native to her, and she is learning a second language to better communicate with her son -- who, for the entire duration of this scene, never actually says a word.

I can relate to the experience of being raised primarily by a single parent, but not one that took any interest in the games that I was playing. Where I grew up, everybody over the age of thirteen seemed to consider video games a passing (and entirely incomprehensible) adolescent distraction. Nobody thought people would build their careers around video games or attend video game conferences and deliver lectures about intentionality versus improvisation, readability or iterative level design. Even us thirteen-year-olds didn't really think that stuff happened. We all ended up very surprised.

What if my parents had understood video games like I did? Would I have been able to connect with them on a deeper level, or was I actually glad to have games all to myself and my generation? If they had tried to involve themselves like this single mother in the airport, would I have bristled at the interference and ultimately not enjoyed games so much?

I don't remember that far back, but this boy probably knows, and so I study his face for clues. He's really absorbed in a jumping puzzle, though, and I can't figure it out.

There Goes A Diaspora

2009-04-21T20:57:00.002+12:00

My strongest memories of the Game Developers Conference this year actually have very little to do with video games. This is discouraging. Instead, I mostly have stories like the one below.

On Monday afternoon -- my third day back in San Francisco -- I caught a bus from Haight-Ashbury back to my hotel in Union Square. I'm sitting opposite an African-American woman in her 40s who soon gets a cellphone call from who appears to be her daughter. They chat casually for a while about everyday things, and the mother nods and mm-hms her way through the call before just as casually leading into "Did you get high today? Did you get high? That's good, see, that's a start. Three days, you're getting there. I'm proud of you." Then she says goodbye and hangs up.

She gets off the bus shortly after that, and her seat and the surrounding area are suddenly occupied by a couple of white and massively-hipster high school kids who have been out shopping for records and neat posters. They're heading home to Berkeley and they discuss vegan fudge, Facebook, prom and Rock Band. I wasn't looking at my watch but they were talking for about nine hours. And somewhere out there is that mother and her daughter the recovering addict, focus-tested out of existence.

The rest of the week at GDC, I kept wondering who I was in that metaphor. Am I replacing someone or am I getting replaced?

I could very well be the new media, print-is-dead, cult-of-the-amateur firebrand who is indirectly contributing to the web 2.0 uprising that's driving newspapers and magazines out of business. People like me might possibly be as alarming to print journalists as a teenage biker gang terrorizing a retirement home. We're high-speed, chain-wielding maniacs and we've come to destroy you.

Alternatively, maybe I'm the one getting pushed to the sidelines. At GDC, I'm surrounded by people who have graduated to working in games professionally and I'm the only one who still hasn't got there and will probably never go there at all. GDC serves as a visual reminder of my extreme superfluousness to the game industry. Maybe I'm the dead weight. Maybe I should be getting off the bus.

GDC can seem like a community in flux. In a year, some of the people who are covering the show as press will be the ones making games; today's developers will be overlooked for the indie guys who are making better games for free; and soon all of them will probably be laid off. GDC itself cruises through San Francicso, attracting thousands of different people from different disciplines to the Moscone Center like moths to a flame, and on Friday they rapidly disperse to the four corners of the world. Sometimes, before you can figure out where you fit in to all of that, it's gone.

On my first day in San Francisco, I walked with my friends down a street and past a woman who was standing on the steps of her row house. "There goes a diaspora," she said. I don't know what that meant.

After Hours

2009-04-13T14:00:00.002+12:00

You sit at the bar, poised over a vodka martini. You don't know what goes in a vodka martini other than vodka, but you ordered it as if you did. The place is decorated in warm neon lights, and jazz riffs carry down the room past women in silk dresses. Your parents always warned you about jazz clubs. You survey the crowd, knowing that all these faces tell a story, but all of the faces that you can see look like their stories would be pretty boring. Just in case, you keep a hand on your iPhone, tucked away in the pocket of your journalist trenchcoat. You are beginning to think that the coat store man lied, and that there is no such thing as a journalist trenchcoat.

A tall man leans over your shoulder, flashing you a row of perfect white teeth. He wants to know your name. After ordering you a second drink, he inches closer and says he has a hotel room across the street. He asks if you want to come and see a press demo. You play it cool; smile and say sure.

There is a computer already set up at the desk, alongside a bowl of chocolate chip cookies. The man sits you down in front of the monitor and asks you what you think of the graphics. You say they're impressive. You shoot some guys on the screen for a little bit and compliment the engine and AI mechanics. The man notes something on a clipboard. He says this is all good feedback. When you reach the end of the level, you ask to see more. He apologises, saying he has another appointment. As he ushers you out the door, he gives you a t-shirt and a sticker and says he looks forward to your written impressions.

You wake up in the backseat of a convertible parked in your ex's garage. You decide to stop drinking.

End Of History

2009-04-09T18:40:00.001+12:00

I have a younger brother, who, last year, pointed to my bookshelf and said: "The Witcher, I've heard of that." At that time my brother was still in high school and didn't play very many games, so I asked him how he could possibly know what The Witcher is. He said that this is the game all his friends are talking about. Nothing against The Witcher, but in what universe do high school boys care more about a Polish CRPG than Gears of War 2 or Rock Band? Apparently it's this universe, which makes me feel confused and alone. You can make certain assumptions about how the next generation will be different, but here they are evolving along a completely unexpected track. I no longer understand anything of the world beneath my age bracket.

Around the time of this conversation, I went into a game store and overheard two nine-year-old kids talking about how casual games are ruining the industry. I assume that at some point these kids found out what NeoGAF was and believed that they had stumbled upon the inner sanctum and, overnight, had become industry experts and also cooler than all their friends. From a purely intellectual perspective, it shouldn't be surprising that today's nine-year-olds are forming their impressions of the industry entirely from the most sensationalistic sites on the internet. Cultural touchstones are exchanged for newer versions as a matter of course: Kotaku replaces Usenet replaces Electronic Gaming Monthly as a teenager's conduit for gaming hipness.

It's still easy to be disorientated at how fast everything changes and relevance diminishes. Kids growing up on Joystiq is unsettling for the same reasons as it is to imagine those same high school kids with Twitter accounts. That's where social interaction and romances are playing out for 15-year-olds: on Twitter, Facebook, and maybe LinkedIn, who knows. The generations who conducted awkward teenage relationships via nervous phone calls and love letters look at their children and think: what the fuck is all this? Where's the legitimacy and innocence in a relationship borne of cyberspace nudges and pokes? We had to do it the hard way. It's a shame that technology advances at such a rate that our children will never understand what we were forced to put up without the luxuries that they currently burn through. Incidentally, I think every person reaches a milestone in their life when they begin to identify with the dad from Calvin & Hobbes who talked about how shoveling snow builds character.

We have a desire, I think, to preserve our own experiences, to prove that they were worth experiencing in the first place. Otherwise, everything that made our lives meaningful ends up forgotten. This is why pretty much anyone born in the last ten years will be told by their parents to disregard everything they've learned about the numerical system and accept that the Star Wars movies start with the fourth one. If we can pass on anything to our kids, it's knowledge like that.

It's hard enough to recommend Star Wars when it's constantly being retroactively altered, and classic albums whose reissues conclude not as originally intended but with a collection of forgettable bonus tracks that were left on the cutting room floor for a reason. Recommending a video game to the younger generation is harder still. Not only because it's increasingly difficult to run old games on available hardware, or that graphics age painfully fast. When games are increasingly tied to narrative campaigns and individual experiences, recommending Deus Ex means something different than a recommendation for chess. Even if players get the former running, odds are they won't play the game the way you did and so, consequently, they aren't playing it right. When they play the game as a shooter they've abandoned all the reasons why it was so memorable for us as a stealth game, or whatever.

To pass down video games is to live vicariously through someone else's playthrough. Whenever I made my younger brother play a game that I liked, I would get so frustrated at how he wasn't getting it right, or would miss every possible hidden room in a level. His experience wasn't the one that I recommended; how could he get it so wrong? I'm the oldest of two brothers, so that's the only role I know: yelling over his shoulder like an English teacher, turning play into work.

He doesn't understand what I saw in these games in the first place, and probably never will. In the future, he will understand what it's like to have Peggle streamed to him intraveneously while riding a hoverboard and also wearing some cool sunglasses. He won't, however, be able to convince his son or daughter that that was ever considered fun.

I'll never get to know what that's like. And that's fine, because it sounds stupid.

Life Of The Party

2009-04-05T14:08:00.007+12:00

[The following article was published on GameSetWatch about a month ago. This Anniversary Reprint Edition features an exclusive new story by Marek Bronstring. And some pictures, too.

Marek Bronstring: Mostly, you see publishers from the outside and people who pitch to them always complain about the long process of getting a publisher signed up to something. It's interesting to see the other side a little bit. This executive got a call from a friend of his, a pitch call. This friend said, "okay, I'm gonna give the phone to my brother now, his name is Mario."

Mario got on the phone and said "...look, here's the deal: I'm probably the best Elvis impersonator in the UK. I want a game about me. Well, about Elvis, but I should be in it." So that was weird in itself but then the exec was like, "okay, whatever, let's hear the pitch."

And Mario the Elvis impersonator was like "...what do you mean? Aren't you the publisher? I thought you could come up with the game ideas for it."]

Last week, [man, this piece dated fast! -- Duncan] Kotaku claimed that more than 20 people lost their jobs when Obsidian Entertainment's Aliens RPG was cancelled. Though not confirmed, no one should have to look for any other reasons why that report was bad news. Selfishly, perhaps, I thought of some anyway.

Very little was ever said about the Aliens RPG, but I'm sure that I would have played it, regardless of whether it now gets completed. I've found that Obsidian Entertainment, compared to every other developer that makes party-based RPGs, has consistently had the most interesting and forward-thinking ideas about party members and dynamics, whether in games that I like (Knights of the Old Republic II) or ones that I don't (Neverwinter Nights 2).

If RPG parties don't seem like a design element fraught with weakness, consider games like Knights or Mass Effect wherein your character faces the greatest conceivable evil in the universe, but isn't allowed to take more than two people along to fight it.

No game fiction has ever made a convincing argument for why the world's biggest hero can't deal with having three guys around at once. Restrictions on party members are a tech limitation, presumably; in the isometric Baldur's Gate days, the limit was five. Still, there were always more characters available, so why not six? Why not seven? What can they possibly be doing that's more important than saving the world?

I think gamers largely recognise it as an issue of engine capacity or gameplay balance, but that doesn't make it any less of a logical flaw. Whenever the player character meets an exciting new person, he should never have to lamely respond "I'd love to have you on board, but I don't have room."

Party members haven't aged very well conceptually. Games used to present them solely as stat amplifiers and combat assists, but even as they developed voice acting and subplots and became love interests they still seem more often than not like accessories instead of personalities.

If it wasn't so steeped in familiar RPG convention, it would surely seem bizarre that party members, upon their initial meeting with you, sign on to your cause and then hang out inactive at your headquarters forever after you decide they're no good in fights.

Why would anyone be so content to be relegated to the background and how can they afford to put their lives on hold? No hero's that charismatic. Maybe in the future all RPG protagonists should be eccentric billionaires who hire random pedestrians to carry their bags; it would explain a lot.

The closer RPGs approximate our own reality, the less plausible this comes off. It's passable in fantasy worlds where nobody has a job other than tavern owner or blacksmith, but when placed against the near-future military backdrop of BioWare's Mass Effect, certain conventions become absurd.

The commander is required to buy munitions from his subordinates and, on a whim, appoints as his closest advisors and ground team foreign nationals and volunteers who never passed a security check and are happy not getting paid. If you're in line for a promotion on the good ship Mass Effect, twenty years of service doesn't cut it next to a mysterious alien with a past.

With every game they've made in the last six years, BioWare have moved closer towards a cinematic style of storytelling, an more immediate combat model and away from traditional CRPG artifice. Except they're still encouraging players to accumulate characters as extra abilities and then leave them in the engine room, forgotten.

Obsidian writer/designer Chris Avellone addressed this point ten years ago when he worked at Black Isle Studios. In Planescape: Torment, a disparate cast of characters, in the usual fashion, abandon their everyday routine to support a stern, violent and naked man with more tattoos than memory.

For once, this is remarked upon as odd. In a denouement equivalent to a detective gathering all the murder suspects in the parlour room, the Torment party members' motivations and histories are all revealed to be deeper than originally apparent. Given their specific, tragic circumstances, they had no choice but to follow him when he asked.

Knights of the Old Republic II echoed that scene. One of the game's principal features was its influence system. Players gained influence with their companions by performing actions that they endorsed, which unlocked additional dialogue options.

Avellone works this mechanic into the story, explaining that the main character is in fact so aberrantly charismatic that he exerts a metaphysical influence on people which compels them to do crazy things like join his party and fight on his behalf. He is therefore dangerous and must be stopped.

Neverwinter Nights 2 players don't have the same luck. In that game some party members will quit or switch sides based on the level of influence the player has with them. Most will leave over ideological disagreements, but at least one person will side with the enemy at a critical moment if the player didn't put her in the party enough or give her any cool armour or weapons.

It might not be convincing that she'd want to kill her former friend based on that grievance, but it's a pretty accurate indictment of typical RPG player behaviour. I never selected that character precisely because I did think she was useless, and games have conditioned me to think that she wouldn't have a problem with that.

In Knights II, Obsidian had players take direct control of their supplicants for solo missions, and the full cast featured in their own cutscene-driven subplots. Neverwinter Nights 2 treated its concluding battle with appropriate gravity by allowing the players control of their entire party. Obsidian granted those secondary characters greater presence with each successive game -- until removing them entirely in their upcoming spy RPG, Alpha Protocol.

Alpha Protocol has one controllable character and no permanent party members. Maybe it's a deliberate change of pace for Obsidian, or maybe it's the best solution of all. Alpha Protocol will certainly be free from deadbeats and hangers-on who admonish you for acts of kindness but will still do whatever you say. The best way to deal with those plausibility issues is not to invite them into the design in the first place. It'll work, but because it's the safe option.

If it marks the beginning of a new approach for Obsidian, then I'll miss the subversion and the experimentation. Developers can craft a character with a wealth of personal history, trust issues and the potential for an ice-thawing courtship, and they can have them try to kill me for not buying them shoes. I like the second option more.

Broadcast Failure

2009-03-31T20:13:00.005+13:00

Last Friday, I walked into the Moscone Center at four o'clock to catch my final lecture of GDC. Seeing me, one of the volunteers remarked to his buddy: "this show is over and people are still coming in." For a second, I felt like correcting him, and letting him know that in fact the conference had another hour left. Then I thought that would sound like a dog begging for scraps, whimpering that it's not technically over while there's something left on the table.

Actually, GDC isn't very much like being a dog who got to feast for a week. The end of GDC is more like the last day of school. Classes are dismissed and for the most part you won't see all your peers until after the break. In this case, however, the break lasts for 51 weeks, and nobody is all that thrilled about school ending. You hardly see anyone smashing windows and yelling that "GDC's out forever."

So it's not at all like that. Given the long break, it's more like a school reunion, at least for a couple of people for whom GDC is really just a convenient and rare pretext to get together with good friends who live all over the world. The only thing is that the demographics of a Game Developers Conference do not correspond to those of a high school but more accurately a high school computer lab. Coincidentally, right across the street from the Moscone Center there was a football convention and one day their bathrooms were out of order so some jock wandered in and met a GDC attendee by the same toilet and they were confused about who's the boss now and whose head gets flushed.

Actually, the end of GDC is more like -- fuck it: it's like a game industry conference that ended, which can be an unhappy thing after so easily becoming acclimated to that state of existence. I got so used to it, in fact, and so tired and busy, that my regular writing habits basically lapsed and I didn't end up writing as much about the conference as I hoped. The subject is extremely likely to come up again once I have the time to mentally process it, but right now I'm only looking forward to sleeping, for the first time in ten days, for more than six hours and not on an airplane.

When I wake up tomorrow, I will have begun another year of complete isolation from the game industry. Here's to normalcy. Or whatever.

Print Is Dead

2009-03-27T12:08:00.007+13:00

"Don't you know print is dead?" This is what someone asked me in a tone that was sympathetic, patronising and uncertain of its own cleveness.

This week, Idle Thumbs, the website that I used to write for and which has since been relaunched as a podcast, published 2,000 copies of an eight-page broadsheet newspaper to hand out around GDC. The newspaper reprinted Missed Connections and Interactive Journalism, originally seen right here on Hit Self-Destruct. Seeing those stories and my byline on actual pieces of paper was a strange and anachronistic feeling.

Right now, you can't read this newspaper unless you come to the Moscone Center today or tomorrow and grab a copy that's lying on a table somewhere. In the meantime, trust me: this thing looks amazing. Producing the Idle Thumbs Journal of Games required a Herculean effort and even up close it can be easily mistaken for a legitimate newspaper.

Tangentially, I'm not really supposed to be at GDC. I don't develop games. I see my role at the Game Developers Conference to sit quietly, take notes and not get in the way. The best thing about GDC is that Clint Hocking and Jonathan Blow can have an impromptu and public dialogue about encouraging player improvisation, or that two designers who are total strangers can strike up a high-level technical conversation because they happen to be sitting next to each other at a lecture. The more time I spend here, that's what I want to see happen -- not live-twittering the exclusive first teaser trailer and release date announcement for Modern Warfare 2. I haven't seen yet what's being reported about Keita Takahashi's Noby Noby Boy talk, but if all people got out of it was "Takahashi Announces Noby Noby Boy Multiplayer, iPhone Version" then that will be awful.

Developers talking to each other: that's what I want, but I can't be a part of it. As a member of the press -- in the loosest possible definition of the word 'press' -- I don't fit in at GDC, but this was never made completely explicit to me until I started thrusting newspapers in people's faces.

When you stand in the halls of the Moscone Center actively throwing papers around, people with bluetooth headsets and leather jackets look at you with contempt. They've just heard about Eskil Steenberg's cool tools and the lighting in Mirror's Edge and I'm so last century. Also, I'm annoying them.

I ended up sitting at the Game Design Challenge with two of my friends and about three hundred copies between us. Of all the GDC sessions, the Game Design Challenge is the closest to pure entertainment, and so is extremely well-attended. We decided to stand outside the lecture hall and as the crowd -- over two-hundred strong -- filtered out, we'd confront them all with a free newspaper. This isn't how you network.

We assigned ourselves to cover each of the three doors out of the conference. Pretty soon we were asking if someone wanted a newspaper every five seconds. A lot said no thanks or, more pleasingly, took it because it was free. Some tried to ignore us because they thought we were handing out the San Francisco Examiner. One guy accepted a copy and as he walked away I heard him exclaim "this isn't a real newspaper!" Eventually, a second session across the hall also finished and the traffic got so dense that the three of us fell back into a circle facing out at the surge and warding them off with our amusing and semi-fictional newspaper. It was a scene out of a zombie movie, except we were the print guys. We were the ones who are supposed to be dead.

I'm typing this in the GDC press room. As I get up to leave, I think I'll accidentally forget to take a newspaper with me.

The Keynote

2009-03-25T01:50:00.003+13:00

Rod Humble was once a manual labourer in the lumber yards of Britain, until a supervisor told him that if he kept at it and did a good enough job, then maybe one day he would get to work on the machines. On that day, he quit. In the following years, Rod Humble became the head of Electronic Arts' Play label, supervising franchises like The Sims and Harry Potter; the developer of art games The Marriage and Stars over Half-Moon Bay; and a man whose hometown newspaper, inferring an erroneous fact from The Marriage, printed that he was cheating on his wife.

Humble spoke at the Independent Games Summit earlier today about his perspective and lessons learned working in two commercially disparate areas of game development. When Humble ran his presentation by Jonathan Blow, the Braid designer said his talk was useless. Humble conceded it was a fair point -- his career is already so unique and unlikely that he couldn't and didn't offer much specific and practical advice. The session may have been underwhelming for indie developers who came looking for hard data about business models and team dynamics; instead, Humble spoke generally about "the indie advantage": having the creative freedom of individualism and staying true to one's dreams. He made sure to mention that if anyone in the audience thought he was full of it, that they could do better, make a better game -- then go ahead, go your own way. Much of the territory Humble covered in his 30-minute talk was encapsulated in the three-minute Fleetwood Mac hit of 1977, Go Your Own Way.

Indies, argued Humble, should be trying to carve out their own niche. As he noted, the science fiction and fantasy sections in a hypothetical video game bookstore are overflowing. The Marriage was an entry in the rarely-tackled romance genre -- which, Humble pointed out, appeals primarily to women, who fortuitously are the majority audience on the PC.

The subject matter might have contributed to The Marriage's relative popularity, but as the game is a free download, Humble clearly didn't get into indie games for the money -- and neither, he stressed, should you. He hoped that the audience were all in it for the right reasons: that they simply want to make games. How can I ever change things that I feel?

Humble endorsed another motivation as perfectly valid: you make games because you want to bring joy to others. The world is rough, he said, and there's nothing wrong with making people happy. Humble used the words "bringing joy to millions", which is true for sure in the case of The Sims, but probably less so for the indie games being made by everyone in that room. If I could, maybe I'd give you my world. How can I, when you won't take it from me?

Be prepared to fail, because indie development ''is a great way to lose money." Most times the failure won't even stop at massive personal debt -- one day your series of commercially-overlooked critical darlings might veer horribly off course. Maybe the critics hate it, maybe the message boards hate it, maybe your friends hate it, maybe your ideas aren't good anymore, maybe people say your talk is useless. Humble's favourite game designers -- Miyamoto, Molyneux, Wright -- had all at one point been written off by the industry but refused to stop making games. Humble, then, had only one piece of advice: Move on.

The takeaway:

You can go your own way
Go your own way
You can call it
Another lonely day
You can go your own way
Go your own way

Repeat chorus

The Fall

2009-03-20T23:50:00.004+13:00

Niko Bellic was promised the life of kings. Five minutes after coming to America, he's sharing a squalid one-couch apartment with his cousin Roman and a family of rats. Niko is disillusioned, understandably, but if only he knew how good he had it at that moment. This is not the American Dream, but it's still something he can believe in.

For a while, Grand Theft Auto IV is nothing but the extremely authored, slow-paced and dialogue-heavy saga of two Eastern European immigrants who work at a taxi service in a facsimile New York City. They have girlfriends and gambling debts, they get shit-faced drunk and sober up to heartfelt emails from Niko's mother. The premise sounds like it belongs to a sitcom or an arthouse movie, but of course Grand Theft Auto is a series about blowing up cop cars with rocket launchers in a sprawling urban world. In this game you shop for clothes and take girls out bowling along a very narrow story path.

For hours, the game doesn't make you do anything illegal or even put a gun into your hands. This is not Grand Theft Auto. It's better.

The grudging affection Niko Bellic feels towards his cousin, his earnest attraction towards girlfriend Michelle and his controlled resentment at loan shark Vlad belittling his ethnicity all feel authentic and capable of driving an entire game. It's subtle, it's sincere -- a Grand Theft Auto game is sincere? It doesn't give me a gun or make me steal a car, but for the first time I don't feel like I need those.

If Liberty City feels like a living world, to skirt a cliche, it isn't because of the significant upgrades in visual fidelity, the physics engine or the traffic density. For the first time, the city is populated by people who aren't larger-than-life. Car thieves don't actually make their getaways in helicopters, hurl grenades at pedestrians or dive-roll out of police cars.

In Grand Theft Auto IV's Liberty City, you do things like obey traffic lights and buy hot dogs from street vendors because no one yet has betrayed their contract with reality to sanction random, meaningless violence. It means something, I think, that the default movement speed is to walk. When the game first told me to walk to Roman's office, I did it, I walked all the way, just looking around without ever carjacking someone to speed up the process. That's what psychopaths do, and Niko Bellic is not a psychopath. Not yet.

Grand Theft Auto IV doesn't stop me from stealing a car or shooting a police officer with his own gun, but as this game begins, that feels like an actor in a play deliberately screwing up his lines. It's a testament to the fiction of this game that I'm willing to sustain it by forgoing gameplay conveniences -- like hotwiring a car instead of borrowing Roman's -- that might contradict Niko's character.

It's curious that Rockstar would attempt a mundanity so contrary to their well-worn groove of casual, amoral mayhem. Grand Theft Auto IV works well enough for a time because the missions do not encourage the player to fly off the handle and do something insane. But check out that completion statistic, still in the single digits.

The game is called Grand Theft Auto and there are snipers and car chases right on the cover. Niko's story is clearly going to be about his unfortunate slide into crime. This is his downfall. How long, though, can we stay in that shitty apartment, where all we care about is collecting on taxi fares and where to take Michelle for dinner? How far does Niko have to fall?

If past Grand Theft Autos are any indication, Niko will not simply run drugs and extort shop owners to make ends meet. He's not headed for a life of crime, he's headed for a life of cartoon sociopathy.

It's difficult to picture Niko Bellic, who appears have to a conscience, and has evidently made some mistakes in his past but does not intend to repeat them, assuming the role of a Grand Theft Auto protagonist. This is a guy who only wants to take a girl to the funfair.

When Niko takes a stand against the mobster harassing his brother, he goes too far and the guy falls out of a window to his death. "I didn't want to kill anyone here," he says, shaking his head. That moment is like the teaser poster for Star Wars: Episode I with young Anakin Skywalker casting Darth Vader's shadow. We know, at that point, that little innocent Anakin is going to grow up to be an unlockable Soul Calibur character.

For the first five hours, Grand Theft Auto IV almost succeeds in escaping its history. Then all the memories worm their way back in -- like the amnesiac Jason Bourne, sitting on a park bench, who suddenly disarms and incapacitates two cops without even knowing he could do that. Alternatively, like A History of Violence, a movie I have never seen but remember its trailer fondly.

Sometimes when you tell Niko to hail a cab, the game mistakes your input and has Niko brutally curb-stomp the driver. It's a horrifying accident, but at the same time it's a little too familiar. It's all coming back now.

Multiple mission icons appear on the map, Niko visits an arms dealer, buys an assault rifle -- what would he ever need an assault rifle for? Will it help his darts game? -- steals a car, turns on the radio and is struck by an obvious and crude satire of American culture and the vapidity of excess; a bluntly political kind of humour that would have been vetoed by the editors of a George W. Bush-themed joke book from 2004. That embarrassing parody, even as it co-exists with the realistic coming-to-America story, warns that Rockstar haven't grown up quite so much as it initially appeared.

Niko and his morals can be indulged for a while, but at a certain point he's got to drop the act. They didn't build this city to be set dressing. It needs to have glowing pigeons to shoot. Rockstar flips the switch. Wake up.

Niko decides to kill Vlad because he was possibly sleeping with a woman Roman has a crush on. It's a drastic overreaction, and it's not a momentary logical lapse but the beginning of the end.

This guy has to fit into the established Grand Theft Auto template. After killing Vlad, he abandons all normal ethical compunctions. Niko needs money, he says, to get by, but he never stops to try and get by, and twenty hours into the game he's got more cash on hand than 80% of households in the country. Score one for the American dream.

Niko's a criminal, but who's there to be disappointed in him? You'd think friends would disapprove when he kicks off their date by kicking someone in the face and stealing their car, but they exclaim "Niko, what are you doing?", if that, and then it's back to normal. It doesn't feel like this is a tragedy about Niko's inability to save himself. I feel like in my traditional role as a gamer, I'm complicit in his ruination. I'm the teenager telling him he'll be cool if he smokes a cigarette and listens to Led Zeppelin, although instead of cigarettes it's blowing up a tractor trailer.

Where Grand Theft Auto IV fails is that beneath the accent, the superficial ethics, the dry wit, the regrets, the fierce protectiveness and pride, the pondering gait, under all that, Niko Bellic is really just this person:

I tried harder to resist Niko's descent into crime than Niko himself. By the time the player reaches the second island, Niko is any other thug and this game is any other Grand Theft Auto. Cellphone calls from Roman, originally a means to delve into the characters' backstory and explore the world, become far-too-frequent minigame intrusions. Subsequent stabs at realism ring false: Niko disapproves of Roman's gambling problem, but doesn't stop to consider the severity of his own murder problem.

Niko's after money, and the player is forced to adopt a similarly pragmatic approach. Niko robs banks, slaughters the denizens of row houses, sleeps with a girl to unlock a special healing power. I hit civilians with my car, flip off police officers, walk around with a sniper rifle in the daylight because nothing is real anymore, and why should it matter?

The systems are transparent. NPC questgivers change their names, their faces and their ethnicities to prolong the length of the game without ever changing the game. Grand Theft Auto IV is long -- for 2008, anachronistically long -- and is subject to diminishing returns in the same way that the Simpsons, after having been on the air for 20 years, cannot be good anymore. Grand Theft Auto cannot and does not command the same respect or cast the same spell at hour 50 that it did at hour five.

How could this not be the case? This is Grand Theft Auto. It's formulaic by design, and for all the strides they make in this one game, they've got to compromise eventually, just like Niko. It's as if Hideo Kojima patterned Metal Gear Solid 5 after Half-Life 2's unbroken camera and contextual environmental storytelling then freaked out halfway through and fell back on a 40-minute cutscene. Grand Theft Auto IV can dream, but, as one of its character remarks mournfully: "we can pick the game... but we cannot change the rules."

In America, you can do anything if you work hard for it; in Grand Theft Auto you can do anything you want; and Rockstar are the kings of the industry and can do anything they want -- but not really. Rockstar had an ambitious idea once -- a real-time 3D world with traffic and a world clock independent of the players' action -- and they did it. In Grand Theft Auto IV Rockstar's ambition was to tell a serious story, which they really can't do if they're still beholden to letting the player run around killing with leisurely impunity.

Niko doesn't make a new life for himself; neither does Rockstar. Their old ways are easier. That's why in the end, Grand Theft Auto IV is a tragedy, though not for the reasons intended. It's the same thing with BioShock's third-act collapse that mirrors the trajectory of Andrew Ryan's failed underwater utopia. These games are so focused on portraying the fall, and succumb to the same fate. It's an irony out of Greek mythology or a Twilight Zone plot twist. Grand Theft Auto IV's undoing has a sting that other good games with poor endings do not. There, it's merely frustrating. Here, it's a heartache.

Love hurts. But Niko Bellic, who's up to four cop stars, doing a stunt jump in a stolen motorcycle, shooting an Uzi at the crowd and breaking up with a vapid stereotype over the phone, wouldn't understand that.

A Shark In The Sewer

2009-03-16T18:34:00.001+13:00

Video game protagonists define stoicism. Every time a hero is called upon to save the world, tragedy befalls him and yet he presses on without complaint. Sometimes he won't even utter a word. At least one of his friends or family will get murdered, he's forced to make difficult moral choices, his home is burnt to the ground, all his equipment gets stolen, he gets betrayed by those he trusts the most, he's revealed to be a secret villain and for certain he will have to brutally kill hundreds of people. He does this in post-apocalyptic dystopias, poorly-lit dungeons and the various circles of hell under constant pressure, and subtly oppressive conditions like ammunition scarcity and everyone trying to shoot him.

These heroes can put up with basically anything. In the event of a personal disaster, they never seek nor are they given any opportunities to wallow in self-pity or take a moment to compose themselves. After a parent or love interest is executed before their eyes, a voice in their ear barks "Soldier, there's no time to mourn them; we need you to get on that turret!" They'll get on that turret, and pump their fist when they bring down a helicopter.

Video game heroes, like sharks, never stop swimming. If you need to pull aside a shark for a quiet, personal conversation, the shark says "sorry, dude, I'm a shark, I have to keep swimming or I'll die." This is why sharks make for shitty friends but why video game heroes are beloved by their fictional constituencies. They are dependable and resolute in any crisis.

It's common practice for one of those guys, in a single day, to chainsaw his way out of the belly of a giant worm, take a detour through a zombie shantytown, euthanise his long-lost wife, and spend hours in a sewer trawling through blood and waste, with monsters leaping up at his face and depositing their brain matter on his boots.

How surprising would it be to emerge from the sewer to an NPC colleague who exclaims "Soldier! Oh my God, I can't believe what you've gone through! That must have felt absolutely horrible, I can't even imagine what kind of pain you're in. Are you OK? Don't worry about the objective, I'll get someone else to take care of that. Let me buy you a drink, you can tell me all about it."

Experience would never teach him to expect that. The hero would probably get confused and shoot the NPC. Pausing over the corpse, he quickly runs off to blow up aliens at a water treatment plant.

War Crimes

2009-03-09T17:30:00.002+13:00

When I was an International Relations student, I shared desks with idealists and overachievers. Once, the professor polled the class of twenty-year-olds, asking what we wanted to do with our post-academic lives. Most wanted to work for an NGO or the United Nations, dispatching humanitarian aid, negotiating ceasefires or spreading democracy. Well, I thought, I'll probably write about video games.

The fictional conflict in a fictionalised Africa depicted in Far Cry 2 differs from the modern warfare of Call of Duty in a significant respect. It's an informal war. It's a war of mercenaries and militant rebels, not of armies or soldiers. Mercenaries are effective because they're anonymous, privatised and accountable to no one. The game likes to use the term "deniable asset."

For instance, mercenaries aren't required to abide by the rules of engagement, as the Marines and SAS of Call of Duty 4's campaign are. The rules of engagement distinguish between civilians and hostiles, and dictate permissible levels of force. Soldiers are allowed to shoot only when the rules of engagement are satisfied. Call of Duty 4 isn't set in Iraq (instead, "the Middle East") but take this example from Generation Kill, the journalist Evan Wright's account of the first Marine company into Iraq, and its subsequent HBO dramatisation. At night, the Marines establish a roadblock. Approaching vehicles receive warning shots, as it's impossible to infer whether the drivers are hostile. Most turn around, but one truck doesn't -- it keeps on coming and only then, when all procedures have failed, is the driver killed through his windshield. Maybe it was a member of the Republican Guard; maybe it was just a guy who didn't understand what was going on.

The luxury of the Far Cry 2 mercenary is that he isn't bound by the appropriate and lawful conduct in a situation like that. He shoots as soon as he sees the headlights. There are no rules of engagement in Far Cry 2 -- which might mean something, but there aren't any rules in Call of Duty either. The Marine shoots everything that moves. There is never any question about who's hostile and who's not; everyone is, and they'll confirm it by firing first. The rules of engagement, in part, exist to prevent unnecessary civilian casualties. In these games, the civilians are never there to begin with. These are entertainment wars.

In Africa, the mercenary's freedom from responsibility for killing non-combatants is a redundancy, since at no point is he able to do it. It's not that civilians should exist to get casually slaughtered, but the gameplay could use a little variety: the only non-violent character interaction in the game is when someone orders the player to go and kill someone else. All the characters are either fellow mercenaries -- with whom the player's alliances are extremely shaky -- and the infinitely-numbered faction warriors, who inexplicably open fire at first sight. Even the guards in the central towns, where there's a vague truce in place, still turn the crosshairs red. There are displaced former residents fleeing the country, and of whom the player can catch only a removed and fleeting glimpse. In these moments, the game restricts the player from using a weapon at all. In Far Cry 2, the player murders hundreds of people, diverts aid to criminals, betrays his allies, assassinates police chiefs, pillages the country and burns it to the ground -- but here the game draws the line. The Far Cry mercenary will do anything for money (but he won't do that.)

In all of Call of Duty's urban cities, apartment complexes and television stations, there isn't a single civilian. One mission in Russia takes on a certain urgency when the player is told that rebels are massacring villagers right over the hill. They must have done a really good job.

Call of Duty is problematic as its firefights are so chaotic and swiftly-paced that the player would be guaranteed to maim a civilian in error. The game trains the player in a kind of trigger-happy twitch combat that is probably hugely dangerous in real life. It's hazardous even in this virtual war zone: I shot my own teammates so many times. Generously, they'll even brush that off for at least a couple of direct hits.

What happens, then, in the hypothetical Call of Duty when the player does make that mistake? This is a singularly-focused game with no branching paths. Does it stop entirely or let it slide, inviting controversy by implicitly endorsing the action? Presumably for these sort of reasons, and other practical design or technical considerations, is why these games don't have any vulnerable friendly NPCs. In doing so, however, Call of Duty 4 eliminates a crucial element of Modern Warfare, where tactical planning has to factor in amateur jihadists and Iraqi soldiers disguised as farmers.

Consequently, these games are a military wet dream: there's never a civilian in that truck. You cannot screw up. Everyone innocent has left and the country is made freely available for gung-ho wannabes to run around playing paintball. There is no possibility of a fatal accident. Shoot with confidence. Far Cry's Africa is a mercenary theme park where everything bad that can happen will happen to somebody bad. Neither it nor Call of Duty are so reductive to have good and bad guys, but they do have, clearly and consistently, sides who are there to fight each other and no bystanders get in their way.

If there's a reason this standard should be applied to Call of Duty and Far Cry, and not to Killzone or Crysis, it's that the former two purport to represent contemporary conflicts with actual and continuing body counts. In their choice of mechanics, and removal of civilians, they end up presenting white-washed versions of real-life wars that are easier to stomach. It's military escapism to places that people are trying to escape from.

There's no inherent issue with staging fiction in a war zone. Call of Duty's story is of above-average quality, very well-presented, and it treats its setting with due gravitas (except for not naming the Middle Eastern country in which it takes place.) The thriller storyline isn't the game's main draw, though, that would be the frenetic action set pieces, the combat, the multiplayer -- all the things that were designed to make the game fun. Call of Duty is indeed a really fun action game, but "fun" and "escapism" are grossly inappropriate reasons to set a shooter in the Middle East. The game is a fantasy, and keeping civilians in might not have changed that but keeping them out results in a game that looks like it doesn't want to deal with the ethical hassle. No one wants to see soldiers on either side kicking women and little kids in the head before executing them on the sidewalk. The game wants to be a space where players can enjoy themselves. Admittedly, there's a lot of hardship in virtual war too: missed headshots, respawning enemies, weak cover systems. Sometimes war is so frustrating I almost throw my controller at the television.

I can enjoy Call of Duty, playing from encounter to encounter, but to take a step back, it's as if the ultimate destiny of mortars exploding over the Gaza Strip is to become a mass-market entertainment product for a greasy teenager who trash-talks and griefs over Xbox Live and gets an achievement for killing two people in the same car explosion.

I used to listen to stories about former International Relations students who were motivated to ban land mines, and when my in-game avatar steps on a mine it's such a minor irritant that I can't be motivated to find the quickload. Increasingly, that's less and less how I like games to portray actual war. I don't get excited about the new flamethrower. Where there are no civilians, there are no mistakes, there's no collateral damage and it starts to feel safe. It changes from war into a murder mystery vacation. Maybe there isn't a morally unimpeachable way to make a entertaining game about atrocities, but I'd feel better if those games didn't try and make me feel so good.

Far Cry 2 is like an absurdly literal interpretation of Call of Duty 4. The civilians actually are all bailing out of the country, leaving it to the people who really want to go wild shooting at each other. The fiction supports the mechanics, but never pretends that this open-world environment is a gamer's paradise. The player is not there to save the country but to profit from its suffering. Far Cry actively tries to make players enjoy themselves less, with degrading weapons, debilitating bouts of malaria, frequent guardposts, a general surface oppression and persistent fast talking that's more irritating and inexplicable than anything else in the game. Your mercenary "buddies" are self-interested, amoral assholes and the player rarely gets to engage in any more ethical behaviour.

All of that makes Far Cry 2 sound like a horrible place to be, but then it's set in an area of the world where traditionally, African rebels and power vacuums have led to some pretty grotesque outcomes. It's oppressive, it's nihilistic, but why would it ever be anything else?

At one point the player is given the choice between saving the lives of a group of civilians or all the buddies he has met in the game to date. By then, the buddies will have rescued the player multiple times, he has a history with them, and the civilians only exist as an abstract concept without gameplay effect. After hearing this, you get in your car and arrive at a distressingly non-proverbial fork in the road. The right thing to do would appear self-evident: the buddies provide all kinds of tangible benefits and extra missions. Helping the civilians doesn't seem to net the player anything more than an ephemeral feeling of good will and a little post-hoc rationalisation that he's not a completely irredeemable person.

In this kind of place, though, you need that.

Domestic City, Part Nine of Nine

2009-03-05T12:00:00.001+13:00

When Emily turned 45, her immediate family showed up at her house in the tradition of celebration if not the spirit. Emily's younger brother had two boys, who, out of everyone assembled in the living room, were the worst at concealing their boredom.

It had been suggested to Emily's nephews that she liked video games -- or did, at one point -- and so a quick trip to EB would result in a surefire birthday present. After getting saddled with some kitchenware and historical fiction, Emily was handed their gift last. She unwrapped it to find something called Sudoku: Another Wet Weekend for the DS, and she smiled and said thanks.

While Emily made coffee, her brother, her sister and their spouses argued in her kitchen about whether to relocate their mother to a rest home. She passed them some cups and withdrew to the kitchen counter, where she stirred her coffee in silence and listened, but not really, to her siblings' debate over responsibility. After a minute, she excused herself.

Emily's nephews were outside, in the back seat of their parents' car and huddled over some handheld game system that she had never even seen before. They were fighting over whose turn it was. Folding her arms over the window, she asked: "Do you guys have any games where you can shoot things?"

Domestic City, Part Eight

2009-03-04T22:47:00.003+13:00

When Nina told Anthony that their marriage of eighteen years was coming to an end, Anthony wanted two things. First, his wife back. Then, to lock himself in a hotel room for two days with a dozen video games. One of his wishes came true.

In preparation for his lost weekend, Anthony walked through a game store picking up a variety of titles which he selected almost at random and without regard for cost, like a shopping spree of the super-depressed.

Stationed at the foot of his single hotel room bed, he loaded the new Grand Theft Auto. His intent was to steal a sports car and drive it straight down the sidewalk in a violent kaleidoscope of property and bodily damage. Anthony hadn't touched a Grand Theft Auto since college, and was surprised by how easily the motions of play returned to him. He was diving out of moving cars and steering helicopters as if no time had passed. It felt like coming home, which was lucky for him now that he didn't have one.

Anthony looked, for what was really the first time, at all the games that he had bought that day. Grand Theft Auto, Final Fantasy, Street Fighter, Mario: all new versions of things that he was playing eighteen years ago. It occurred to him that if developers kept remaking and revising these franchises as they evidently did, then he could have been playing these same games all his life. He tried to imagine what it would have even been like, always having a current generation Tomb Raider or Sim City waiting for him, no matter who or where he was.

He'd made himself learn how to balance spreadsheets in Baldur's Gate, how to cook in Order Up, how to handle sports cars in Burnout Paradise, how to arrange furniture in the Sims, how to putt in Wii Golf and how to enhance his awareness of current affairs with Global Conflicts: Palestine, but in retrospect couldn't remember if he had enjoyed doing any of it.

From where Anthony was sitting, stability had its merits.

Domestic City, Part Seven

2009-03-03T22:42:00.001+13:00

Weeks after the death of Emily's father, she was persuaded by her therapist to attend a bereavement group. Plainly dressed for the first time in twenty years, Emily joined eight other people in a church basement decorated by plastic chairs and posters about gambling addiction.

The man leading the session spoke about grief and coping with loss. Emily found herself nodding along as he described the death of a loved one as a sudden absence of structure in one's life. It was normal to feel without guidance, like you're stranded in the world with no clue where to go next. He said that people in mourning commonly lose interest in their routines, that they feel alone and afraid now that someone they relied upon for direction was gone. Emily thought about her father always insisting what was best for her and a lump formed in her throat.

There was a television in the corner of the room, and the man flicked it on with a remote. "It can feel a bit like going from this," he said, and the screen showed an excerpt from a Final Fantasy game, with the player character running back and forth between clearly-defined objectives and cutscenes, "to this." He pressed a button again and the television now displayed a game of Far Cry 2; the player standing unguided in the epicentre of the massive African savannah. "Look at this. No one's telling you where to go. You have so many choices. You can feel anxious. It's normal to feel overwhelmed when you switch from some very prescribed JRPG to a big open-ended, hands-off Western game like this. The differing approaches in design can result in a very abrupt adjustment. Where are you supposed to go from this point? Why isn't there someone telling you what to do?"

Emily, confused, turned to a elderly woman who had interjected, nodding vigorously. "After my husband died I started playing Grand Theft Auto, which was unusual for me, I never do that. I play Persona and Metal Gear mostly, it was like I was in a trance. But playing that game was a revelation for me: the openness of the world, it spoke to me. It knew exactly how I felt."

She collapsed into sobs and a sympathetic teenager sitting beside her held her hand tenderly. Emily got to her feet. "What the fuck is going on? Stop talking about video games!"

Domestic City, Part Six

2009-03-02T10:42:00.000+13:00

Given the demands of his office job, Anthony needed to blow off some steam occasionally, and so had organised an informal golf game with three of the other managers. On Sundays the regular four convened in Anthony and Nina's living room, uniformly dressed in polo shirts and khakis, and lined up in front of the Wii.

Jason erred on the third hole with a wild swing that sent his ball flying into the ocean. His friends laughed at the apparent ineptitude but Anthony, as the senior manager, secretly wondered if this was Jason letting him win. Anthony did win these games an awful lot, and he was a casual player at best. If it was true, he considered, at least he was getting some respect.

An hour passed, and Greg was first up on the ninth hole. He asked his caddy to hand him the Wiimote, and the fifteen year-old boy standing behind him passed it over from his shoulder bag. Greg stared at the proffered controller and said "if I wanted the nunchuk, I would have asked for it." As the boy rummaged deeper into the bag, Greg shook his head at the guys. "Unbelievable."

After a sandwich break, Paul asked Anthony if he had any other games: "maybe something by Rockstar?" Anthony explained how, with his job and everything, he didn't have much time to play video games for fun. He indicated his entire game collection present on the living room bookcase.

"I mostly play these now, these are what's called 'serious games'. This one," he said, pulling down a shoebox-sized DVD case, "is about managing your stock portfolio in an economic crisis, and this follow-up by the same developer is about controlling inflation. We're saving that one for the kids."

"That's a pretty big case," said Paul.

"Well, this is the collector's edition, it comes in this cool tin box and it has a little figurine of an investment banker."

"That's cool, can I see it?"

"No, nobody's allowed to touch it."

Domestic City, Part Five

2009-02-28T13:04:00.000+13:00

On Saturday night, Emily walked around the lake with her boyfriend. That day, in between online matches of Death Tank which were totally amazing and destructive, she had played through the entirety of Braid. Afterwards, she took an aspirin and lay down on the couch for ten minutes in silence. Video games did not usually move her or confuse her like Braid had, and after completing the game she felt a strong need to be contemplative. She didn't really know what being contemplative properly entailed, but decided it would probably work if she and Patrick went and stared quietly at a lake. Unfortunately, there was a jetski speeding around the lake blasting techno, which ruined the mood but it did make Emily want to buy a jetski.

Braid has set Emily's brain on fire. The game, she was sure, had to mean something. Emily had about thirteen thousand different thoughts on the game rushing through her head (was there something in there about a nuclear bomb?) and she needed to talk about it with somebody who would understand.

Patrick was not that person. Emily and Patrick had an equal share in their living room bookcase: Patrick's half contained books, DVDs, music and comics, and Emily's half was nothing but games, and also one Philip Roth novel.

A couple of women in Emily's new office had recently organised a 'game group' which chose a certain game and then met every week in a cafe or somewhere similar to discuss it. Emily briefly considered joining, and submitting Braid as a topic, and then pictured herself in a library drinking tea with women ten years her senior and felt so uninspired that she wanted to throw up.

"Listen," she said to Patrick, "when we get back I want to show you this fun game Death Tank. It's cool; you can guide the missiles."

The jetski buzzed past the shore. Emily raised her arms and shouted as it sped away: "Whoooooo!"

Domestic City, Part Four

2009-02-26T19:54:00.003+13:00

The worst thing about married life, Anthony discovered, was his keepsake photo of Dom and Maria from the Gears of War 2 limited edition and having to explain to his new wife why he wanted to tape it to the bathroom mirror. Nina had not been impressed then, or when Anthony had told the movers that the Rock Band smoke machine goes in the bedroom. Some of Nina's facial expressions made Anthony reevaluate his lifestyle choices.

She teased him one day about all the games he played being a neverending series of big macho men shooting each other and exchanging high-fives. When Anthony tried to explain the subtle thematic variations between Gears, Killzone and Army of Two, he could not do so in a way that made him feel very good about his hobby.

Eventually, Anthony reasoned with himself that being a responsible husband and a professional businessman probably meant saying goodbye to the more bro-ish aspects of his frat days -- things like violent online shooters and urinating on freshmen.

Sitting at the kitchen table with the household laptop on, Anthony tried to build swimming pools and carpet floors in The Sims, in between attempts at solving a crossword puzzle. He wondered what he would look like with a haircut.

Domestic City, Part Three

2009-02-23T22:12:00.000+13:00

Emily's posters were affixed by thumb tacks to her dorm room drywall. The posters, collected by Emily and her roommate, had been free -- sort of, they had stolen them -- and promoted the release dates of games like Castle Crashers and PixelJunk Eden. When Emily left for class every day, she always threw on her white, faded and hand screened Minotaur China Shop t-shirt. It was the only game shirt that she owned and so she wore it as much as possible.

The shirt testified to Emily's passion for cool underground games and she wore it as a beacon for others with like-minded tastes, who she hoped would approach her and be all like "oh, sweet, rad" but the reality was that her tastes ran so niche that no one who saw the shirt even knew it was a game. The same went for the N+ patches sewn on to her jacket. Upon this realisation, she slouched sullenly in lecture halls, carving Stars over Half Moon Bay constellations into the desks with a penknife.

On weekends, she visited game stores and made her way to the alternative section at the back and flipped through the rows of second-hand games. Selecting a bootleg CD-R of Gravitation, she walked back to the counter where she overheard two guys discussing the copy of BioShock that they were buying and in particular what a deep story it was supposed to have. Emily rolled her eyes.

That Tuesday, Emily and her roommate lied their way into a club downtown where the launch party for Flower was being held. Emily flashed her fake ID at the door and with her posture affected a maturity that wouldn't be legally hers until the next year. In the club, Emily and her roommate pointed out to each other all the developers that they recognised from blogs. Late into the night, someone took the stage to make a speech and Emily threw her arms into the air and at the top of her lungs screamed "whooooooo!"

A morose-looking guy stood at the bar talking to his friends, wearing a Flashbang Studios t-shirt. Emily leaned across the bar next to him, and shouted giddily over the music: "hey, I like that developer."

Domestic City, Part Two

2009-02-22T21:23:00.001+13:00

Between semesters, Anthony might visit the game store up to five times a week. Each time he brought in a game that he had previously purchased and was now trading in for something else that he would also eventually exchange for store credit.

Anthony was so frequent a customer that at least one of the clerks considered him a friend, although Anthony had never learned his name and after a while it would have been awkward to ask. Anthony had been calling him 'bro' for three years, which seemed to suffice.

One day the clerk asked why Anthony kept trading everything. Anthony explained that he liked trying out lots of different games, without ever feeling the need to finish or indeed stay with them for very long at all. He thought of himself as a busy and important guy and if a game frustrated him, or bored him, then he would ditch it fast and move on. He preferred things that were immediately appealing and uncomplicated. He didn't want his games to be serious work.

After beating a game once, there was little reason to keep it around. Anthony found more value in trading it for a new thing rather than playing it through it again or holding onto it.

"I'm almost out of college, bro, I'm not ready to tie myself down to a permanent game collection," Anthony said. "Oh, incidentally, I almost forgot, I'm getting married."

Domestic City, Part One

2009-02-21T10:12:00.001+13:00

When Emily was sixteen, she disturbed her parents by dying her hair in red streaks and having her lip pierced. Her mother and father worried about what rebellious moves their daughter might make next -- teen pregnancy? identity theft? tax evasion? -- and about how to set her straight. They had seen on a MSNBC segment that teens her age could relate to popular media like Twilight, the Jonas Brothers, and video games better than to their parents, and so they decided to make her play an instructional video game in the hope it would teach her about propriety and virtue.

The game they had bought for her was a first person shooter that related a cautionary tale about teens giving into peer pressure. It was called Resistance: Fall of Morality, and it was about aliens who invade the planet because of a teenage girl who smoked pot and lost her virginity to a skateboarder.

Emily had never cared about video games, but as she idled with the controller in her hands and skipped through preachy cutscenes demeaning her value system, she realised she liked the feel of the guns. Tuning out the didacticism, she ran her avatar through virtual alleys and bombed-out office buildings, equipped with the rail rifle and shooting the heads off of grunts and nailing shock troopers to the walls by their dicks. For a video game, she considered, this was a lot of fun.

Whatever Happened To

2009-02-11T18:19:00.011+13:00

When I was a kid, my dad would disappear for weeks at a time on his "trips" and never explain where he went. That's not true, actually, but I am going on a similar trip. A trip to not writing.

I'm taking a break from Hit Self-Destruct for the next couple of weeks. But if everything works out then I'll still be posting something almost every day. How can this be possible? Wait and see, or leave forever and read one of the many superior blogs that are available to you and never take breaks.

In other overdue announcements, I'll be at GDC next month. I hope to produce some special San Francisco-based Hit Self-Destruct content, although the last time I was there all I did was point out a printing error on the program guide. What a great service I provide.

This thing will be back soon enough. When you least expect it.

Everyone's Fired

2009-02-10T19:35:00.011+13:00

Three drinks:

"I have to learn not to take it personally. It's the economy, right? This is happening, you don't know this, but this is happening all over the industry, even to the press. I was not the problem. We were not the problem. Our games were great. Maybe you don't play games, but trust me. You have to trust somebody.

"If there's one thing I really regret it's that I never got to send my farewell email to the company. I was looking forward to doing that for five years. I had been writing it in my head that whole time, and also on some post-it notes. I was thinking that whenever I left it would be on my own terms, and I'd be able to go out with this fantastic goodbye message I had prepared. You've never seen a farewell email this amazing. What are they usually, 'thanks everyone, good luck'? Please. My thing had fucking class. It had structure. It would wring pathos out of you like a strongman at the circus. That was my exit strategy for so long. Then when we got the news, I tried to remember what I wanted to say and I just couldn't. So I didn't write anything.

"I'm sorry, tell me your name again? Cheyenne? That's spectacular."

Seven drinks:

"This is funny, actually, because I had been thinking about quitting for months. Again, we were making really cool games but... I guess I have to explain to you how the gaming press works. We got some bad reviews, no matter what we did. Really dismissive, nasty, snarky stuff, you know? You wouldn't know. That kind of thing hurts. Especially when you can see all the flaws in their reasoning but before you even have a chance to respond they've already got hundreds or thousands of people convinced that you're an asshole based on their specious bullshit. Without even thinking about it, they'll decide we're bad at our jobs. And you can't change their minds. It's unfair, sometimes.

"You're looking at me like I can't cope with criticism, but you're so wrong. Call me a dick, right now. Watch me not react. See, you can't even do it. You know it won't affect me. I'm much stronger than that.

"It wasn't like we only got one bad review, or a few for one game. We were getting them with every game that we made. Do you know how long it takes to make a video game? One year, minimum. These things take years of my life and at a certain point it feels like I'm only making them to get shit on down the line. I didn't want to wake up every morning to read about someone else who hated our game, so I decided to leave. I liked the attention, I did, but I'd rather not do this at all than do it badly.

"I was thinking about moving and doing some design or programming work for an educational software company or something, some place where nobody would pay any attention to what I'm doing. You read the internet, don't you? You have a Facebook page. Probably. You go on the internet and see that vitriol come in, and if you're even just a little bit unsure about yourself then you think that they're right and you don't want anyone to associate you with your product ever again. I suppose I'm not anymore, so it doesn't matter.

"How about you? What do you do? Oh, I don't care, don't even say it."

Ten drinks:

"If there was a reason I didn't quit before they fired me, it's because I have no idea what I would do otherwise. I could go to another developer, but it would end up being the same thing all over again. I spent my whole life wanting this job. This job. Games. I wanted it so much, you don't even know. I was more, uh, determined to make video games than I have been about anything else in my life. And all the crunches, all the late nights, all the stress... I'd go through that because I wanted to get better and better. But that stuff, I'm just gonna tell you this, killed my social life and ruined every relationship I ever had. You know? I was putting so much effort into my work, and it wasn't like I was in, in, fucking Doctors without Borders. I made video games. She didn't understand what games were.

"I wanted so badly to be good at this. I let everything else fall apart because I wanted to make games for a living. I thought when I got there that I'd be satisfied. But look what happened. What am I supposed to do now?

"What about you, Cheyenne? Where would you go?"

Seen Your Video

2009-02-07T11:31:00.001+13:00

[The following piece, except for the endnote, originally appeared on GameSetWatch yesterday. First, however, a brief conversation with Mitch Krpata of Insult Swordfighting, the Boston Phoenix and Paste magazine.

Duncan Fyfe: What do you think are the advantages and disadvantages of writing about games for a mainstream publication like the Boston Phoenix over the gaming enthusiast press?

Mitch Krpata: "Mainstream" may not be the right word, since the Phoenix is part of the proud tradition of alternative newsweeklies, whose mission in life has historically been to stick a thumb in the eye of the corporate media. But I get your point. It's a much different outlet than the traditional games press, with benefits and drawbacks all its own.

They're two sides of the same coin. A paper like the Phoenix doesn't rely on game publishers for advertising, or even for a significant portion of its coverage, so we have complete editorial independence. There's no conflict, real or perceived, between sales and editorial. I can be as honest and as unsparing as I'd like, and I'm free to explore the review space a little bit more than I imagine the [enthusiast press] can.

On the other hand, that also means that we sometimes have trouble getting any access at all. We hardly ever cover games in as timely a fashion we'd like, often running a review weeks or even as much as a month after a game's release -- which is a lifetime in this industry. Some publishers still don't even seem to realize we exist. (The New York Times probably doesn't have this problem.) That's the downside, but it's a trade-off I'll gladly make. In the long run, I think readers are better served by what we're doing than by outlets that trade high scores for exclusives.]

I Will Dare

The last time I played Rock Band, I was in someone's living room and the game was running on a PlayStation 3 hooked up to a HDTV and 5.1 surround sound system. Playing bass along with Blitzkreig Bop, a basic enough track that my mind has time to wander, I start thinking about the Ramones at the time they made this recording.

The original line-up were alarmingly dressed in leather uniforms and hammering out no more than three chords in New York dive bars with horrible acoustics. Their act was an aggressive endorsement of simplicity in an age of overcomplicated prog rock, delivered to a bemused audience. After the set Dee Dee, the real bassist, would get stabbed in the ass by a prostitute.

Here I am, 30 years later, button-mashing in time to the flashing lights with a look of grim determination. The biggest concern I have in the world is whether my cellphone is fully charged. My problem with Rock Band is that I overthink it. This is as close as I get in my life to rocking out, and that's a depressing notion.

Not that it should matter, since Rock Band isn't a rock band. It's a video game, and one I like. The mechanics are enjoyable in the same way that Tetris is enjoyable, aside from whatever fictional veneer is pasted over them.

I haven't committed to the game fully, however: I get into it exclusively as a casual party game and social experience. I don't own a copy, mostly because if I dragged a drum kit into my small apartment it would have to double as at least one additional piece of furniture. Keeping up with the franchise's additional instruments, accessories and iterations seems totally irrelevant to my appreciation of the game.

I like rock more than Rock Band and as much as I do video games. I tend to gravitate towards a lot of relatively unsuccessful indie or punk bands who spent a lot of their careers slightly above the poverty line, sleeping on urine-soaked floors during tours, or pulling multiple day jobs so they could afford to be in a band that they loved.

Either that, or they suffered from all kinds of internal conflicts, creative frustrations, ill-fated vacations on major labels and alcohol or drug problems, because they wanted to make music, which a majority of the population found to be inaccessible. Their music is why I like them in the first place, of course, but those circumstances, which I find so instantly endearing and relatable, are why I continue to think about them.

These same bands, despite their devotion, weren't technically expert, didn't have classically trained voices and gave shambolic, noisy performances. It's a bit ridiculous that the music I like colours my feelings about a video game that I otherwise should, but there's something a little too inauthentic about the role the Rock Band player is supposed to assume.

Rock, to me, is about chaos and Rock Band is tightly controlled, with defined victory and failure states. I still enjoy the act of play, and perfectly understand those who can embrace it without reservation, but for a fantasy fulfillment game, Rock Band captures none of the idealism I have about rock music.

When the Replacements, a bunch of mean and heartfelt drunks, were propelled to a major label and an appearance on Saturday Night Live, they got trashed, destroyed their dressing room, threw their performance and said "fuck" on the air.[1] When forced to make a music video for one of their songs, they filmed a three minute-long close-up of a stereo speaker.

That contrarian attitude was a big reason why people liked the Replacements at all, even as it detonated the band's chances at commercial success. A Replacements track appearing on Rock Band 2 without irony is like they performed at the Academy Awards with complete solemnity and reverence for Hollywood. It's almost subversive, but the Rock Band fan is on the wrong side of the subversion.

Rock Band songs are adorned in shiny colours, lip-synched to by animated hipsters and contained in the trappings of a franchise that so quickly became synonymous with completely crass commercialisation and exploitation. It's a series that in seeming earnest produces official Rock Band smoke machines, disco balls and eventually, probably, Rock Band-branded red cellophane that you tape over your ceiling lights, and a footstool that gives the illusion of being on a stage.

It's not exactly in the DIY spirit. That kind of glitz is antithetical to actual rock bands that gave everything they had with utmost conviction and then fell apart. It's the fantasy of four-star hotels and one thousand brown M&Ms; rock that's overindulgent but safe in its excess.

I feel self-conscious pretending to emulate that raucousness in front of a TV screen and by jamming on plastic instruments, and concerned about looking stupid. It's a little pathetic, I'll admit, compared to the stage fright these actual bands felt getting up in front of anonymous and unreceptive crowds, possibly including Black Flag fans who would try and burn all the band members with lit cigarettes.

Bands like the Replacements and Guided by Voices would get over that fear by drinking a lot, and over the years that would become an intractable part of their image. First, they drank to ease performance anxiety, then drank simply because they were performing, and then drank to get drunk.

I play Rock Band as a party game in a social setting, which means I'm usually drinking too. Generally, I don't have to be drunk to play video games. I'm not slamming vodka to get psychologically geared up for Age of Empires, but then I don't have any hang-ups about Age of Empires.

Getting past the hesitation of sobriety, I realise that a Rock Band performance is going to look embarrassing and artificial to a certain kind of person -- including myself most of the time -- but I don't care. I'll do it anyway. In that state of mind, I decide that rock is not caring about what rock is.

This is how I came to insist, after a night of weak Police songs, on ditching the bass so I can sing on the New Pornographers' Electric Version. I can't sing, and in any event I'm thoroughly outclassed by the high pitched vocals, but I launch into it regardless with arrogant and obnoxious self-confidence, not thinking even a little about things like indie rock or ludonarrative dissonance.

Two minutes in, I'm slurring the words. The chorus is this line, repeated: "streaming out of the magnets" and so I yell an absurd lyric in an absurd setting with dead sincerity. Then the amp blows out and the song abruptly collapses into an awkward vacuum. That was the best time I had playing games all year.

I'm drinking, I'm saddled with unresolved contradictions, I look like an idiot and I don't care. Is this rock? It's close enough.

[1] This is not immediately verifiable, at least not on the internet. The Replacements did both Bastards of Young and Kiss Me on the Bus that night, and only the former is viewable online. That's actually a great performance, and apparently it was the second song that they came out totally trashed and were dropping their guitars. I think the curse may have been in Bastards of Young though -- there's an abrupt edit at about 1:47 into that video. If you know more, please tell me!

Rosetta

2009-02-03T23:33:00.001+13:00

[This post is a spoiler-heavy discussion of Gravity Bone, a thoroughly worthwhile -- and also free -- indie game.]

There's not a lot to get about Gravity Bone, the indie game from Pandemic designer Brendon Chung. You can't understand the purpose of the missions you receive, or the significance of the woman in the number 99 shirt. You can't reconcile the hints at galactic exploration with the exploding birds. You're surrounded by surrealistic imagery and blockhead characters, and what on earth is a "gravity bone" anyway?

The game has no ultimate reveal, and its deliberate obtuseness (it takes its music cues from the film Brazil) leaves it vulnerable to misconceptions. New players, knowing that Gravity Bone is indie, weird, experimental and well-received, might equate the game to Passage and Braid and the Marriage and assume that Gravity Bone's absurdity-for-absurdity's-sake actually belies a message. Gravity Bone isn't an allegory, and players who assume that it is may suppose instead that the game poorly communicates it -- especially in the early stages of the game where nothing stands out beyond its aesthetics.

In Gravity Bone's second level, there's a part where the player can cruise the list of residents at an apartment complex. The names are immediately recognisable as Seinfeld, Cheers and NewsRadio characters, and this I think was a mistake since it gives the impression that everything else in the game can be similarly decoded. Most of Gravity Bone will never be explained, and its mysterious fragments and non-sequiturs are there to trick players into thinking that answers are actually forthcoming.

Though it isn't as infused with subtext, Gravity Bone is very similar to the Marriage and Passage: at a certain point, the player has an epiphany. They don't fully appreciate why the game's so well-renowned until their moment of clarity, and then the game's over. Anyone who's played Portal knows that revelation well: it's a fun enough physics game for a while, but -- "oh! I see." All these games lead the player to a realisation, after which the game's true purpose is evident at last. With the Marriage, it's what the symbols represent and how they behave; with Passage, it's how the play changes based on whether the character is married or not, and with Gravity Bone, it's the ending. (This is where, I believe, the still-present frustration with Braid arises from: its story is the one puzzle in a puzzle game that will never be definitively solved. There's a "correct" interpretation, but one that remains unconfirmed. It's like Jonathan Blow gets off on being withholding.)

The criticism that Gravity Bone ends too soon, or that it comes off as incomplete are misguided. The ending doesn't send a message other than it exists to confound expectations, which is a motivation I can appreciate. Without its conclusion, there's less to recommend about Gravity Bone. The unique lo-fi art style is nice, and the reductive Hitman/No One Lives Forever spy gameplay supports it for a time, but the ending is what makes Gravity Bone such a laudable piece of game design.

The game is one long exercise in structural misdirection, pulled off masterfully. Kieron Gillen explains why at Rock, Paper, Shotgun: Gravity Bone, like most games, progressively introduces new skills and talents, and in mapping your equipment to hotkeys 1, 2 and 4, suggests the existence of an item #3. The player will die before it ever materialises.

The game asserts the existence of a deeper fiction and plot threads that will never be resolved. It establishes a pace of simple, episodic missions, and ends before anyone would predict. Gravity Bone is a 300-page novel that ends on page 60. Because the art style is so charming and pronounced, players might think that that's the big attraction and therefore the extent of the game's creativity. Gravity Bone's purpose is to manipulate expectations by cutting them short, which is why it's effective at all. Everyone who plays Gravity Bone gets played by Gravity Bone. If you remember the debate over Portal's shortness from a year and a half ago, the consensus was that Portal's brevity was beneficial. Here, it's essential.

To argue, as commenters in this Gamers With Jobs thread do, that Gravity Bone is more of a proof-of-concept and isn't even a game because it lacks victory conditions is to miss the point utterly. Presumably they also think that Passage isn't a game because the player dies at the end, and a better use of Jason Rohrer's time would have been a full-length squad-based treasure hunting game, or to let the Passage player unlock an alternate ending wherein instead of succumbing to old age they can speed away on a motorcycle.

Occasionally, games will off the player character in what is clearly a final cutscene, but Gravity Bone makes the foregone conclusion a genuine surprise. Pretty much everyone has played a game in which they assume the role of the universe's greatest hero but fall down an elevator shaft or get shot by some hoodlum in the first level. Gravity Bone canonises that embarrassment.

Gravity Bone needs no sequels or additional installments. It subverts video game convention with such finesse that it rattled hardcore gamers. It ends at the exact right time and there's nothing more to be done with it. This is the rare game that manages to communicate its intent exactly and would be compromised by saying anything further. It is a full stop, conceived and executed perfectly.

School Sucks

2009-01-28T08:00:00.001+13:00

Prompted, I assume, by the closure of Electronic Gaming Monthly magazine earlier this year, a NeoGAF poster scanned the first EGM issues from 1989. They're a great read. I'm not linking it to make fun of it, or to point out the obvious disparity in the quality of criticism compared to the level expected (or not) today. These pages, 20 years old, are a kind of uncomplicated, unabashed and cynicism-free writing about games that really no longer exists.

It might not be very good, but I find its effusive wonder to be endearing in a bittersweetly nostalgic sort of way. By way of a repetitive metaphor, Editor Steve Harris suggests that the rival console manufacturers could be seen as engaging in a 'console war': "The lines have been drawn and the artillery is about to be revealed to the game playing public.... Both NEC and Sega are poised to enter a heated battle for control of the 16-bit system sweepstakes!" Even technical pieces on the Lynx, the P.C. Engine-2 and Nintendo's new "portable arcade", the 'GameBoy' are written with unbridled enthusiasm, including an exclamation point at the end of every sentence. At one point the editorial collapses into a cheer of "Games, games, games!"

EGM reveals a lot about the state of games journalism in 1989 by how it chose to promote itself. EGM, it declares, is "the magazine to turn to for the hottest new game tips, tricks and strategies!" Furthermore, its "Top Secret section is also loaded with power-ups, codes, and other tricks of the trade! You can always rely on Electronic Gaming to blast your scores to new heights and get more out of every game you own!" Pre-internet, the print media used to be exclusively privileged with that kind of inside information. The idea, insofar as it's apparent from these early issues, was that you read EGM not because you were interested in games critically but that you aspired to mastery.

Harris brags on his reviewing team, advancing their credentials not as writers but as hardcore gaming experts. The 1989 EGM reviewers are "four of the hottest players in the nation... who have what it takes to finish any game that comes along." EGM evidently hired quiz show contestants, another quirk of games journalism which (for the better) hasn't persisted. The move towards serious critique comes at the unintentional expense of the charm this early house style must have held for school kids who would read EGM and view it as a dream job. EGM positioned the responsibilities of a games reviewer as honing video game skills, with special access to awesome cheat codes, and then either dismissing or boosting games in a magazine. They didn't have to be writers, because the job was the ultimate and probably only reward for a life of playing video games obsessively to the detriment of school work. They could claim to their parents that indeed they could succeed with their specific skill set, and high scores would get them somewhere in life. Magazine writers were gaming experts, but they, and the magazine itself, would eventually be supplanted by anyone posting on a message board. I don't think that level of childhood idealisation is present anymore.

I don't remember what gaming was like in 1989, but I hope it was all like this anecdote from EGM issue #2: 300 Japanese kids skipped school to buy a Dragon Quest sequel the day it came out, and were arrested for "truency". I hope on the day that game was released that some burnouts in their parents' Cadillac passed by some nerd walking to school in the morning and told him that they were cutting class to get their hands on the newest Dragon Quest. They dare the kid to come along, and he hesitates, but then a girl with a mohawk and nose ring tells him not to be a pussy, so he agrees. 300 surly teenagers arrive at the mall and pound on the windows of an electronics store, screaming for Dragon Quest. Nervous staff freak out and call the police, who surge into the unruly mob, who yell about the pigs and fight back. The Dragon Quest riots spill out over escalators and through fountains; the perpetrators hurling trash cans through storefronts and the police neutralizing delinquent teens with pepper spray and batons.

That one kid gets pinned down on the ground with his face pressed hard against the cold tile floor. He feels a knee shoved up into the small of his back as his hands are cuffed. He hears the cop call him a stupid punk, who does he think he is? And the kid thinks: "Fuck you, man, I'm going to be a video game journalist."

There's A Monster In My Closet

2009-01-24T21:43:00.004+13:00

"Don't leave, Dad," said the kid, all tucked up in bed.
"I'm frightened of things and they're not in my head."

"I know young boys like myself ought to be brave,
When facing black bears or a big tidal wave.
I admit it, I'm scared. To you, I posit:
I know there are monsters hiding in my closet!"

Dad sat on the bed,
With a smile on his face.
"You know, son," he said,
"I've been in your place.

"There's no shame in fearing those creatures Satanic,
But you're scared of an outdated mechanic.
Hiding monsters in closets? That's yesterday's news!
That trick doesn't work, it's been overabused.

"Sliding panels and invisible triggers,
Monsters spawn behind me, no shock, it figures.
It's too easy a fright, a cliché, no surprise.
Once I ran screaming, now I'll just roll my eyes.

"I'll tell 'em, 'No sir! You don't scare me too much,
No, not your red eyes, green horns, blue claws and such.
With greasy skin, you look like a teen at the mall,
Not a towering serpent, five hundred feet tall.'

"Don't let them get to you,
It's mind over matter:
You just say get lost,
Get outta here -- scatter!

"Don't give them respect, 'cause their scares are old hat,
And they can do better, so much better than that.
There's smarter ways to make your hair stand on end,
Your skin to crawl and your disbelief suspend.
Psychological terrors, sound and atmosphere,
Bloody visions of corpses that then disappear.
Static on the radio heralds your doom,
Not junior high bogeymen camped out in your room.

"Headcrabs and lurkers attaching to faces,
That's just the small stuff, now we're off to the races.
The doors slam shut and the lights are a-flicker,
Isn't your heart beating a little bit quicker?
Growling in the dark, make sure you have a gun,
But no flashlight, no map, you don't know where to run.
A chase through a hospital? The thought reviles.
Now do it in the fog while moving some tiles.

"Screaming monkeys are experiments gone wrong,
Creepy apparitions were dead all along.
Uncover dark secrets that fill you with dread,
the Shalebridge Cradle and the Pyramid Head.
Villagers in shantytowns worship Cthulhu,
Is that a cute little girl? No, she's fooled you!
Watch her dash like a spider over the ceiling,
She leaves mental scars from which you'll be reeling.

"Don't shine lights on witches,
You'll end up with stitches,
Don't get trapped in castles,
The staff there are assholes.
And don't go down tunnels
Without ammunition,
The mutants in there have
A viral affliction.

"There's so much to be scared of, don't settle for less.
Sophisticated techniques can cause real distress.
Look at your window, a hound could come through there!
Better block it at once with a bookcase or chair.

"But you'll do fine, 'cause you're a smart enough sort:
You'll conserve your resources and put in some thought.
If you're alone and you're scared, that's no way to be,
Remember I'm your father, you'll always have me."

The Sisters

2009-01-20T23:51:00.003+13:00

[As of yesterday, I have a regular biweekly column on GameSetWatch. I don't know exactly how this is going to work yet, but for now what follows is a partial reprint of the first column. The full thing is available on GameSetWatch, but only on Hit Self-Destruct do you get access to the bonus behind-the-scenes liner notes on the column. This is a new and recurring feature -- short interviews with game industry professionals -- which has nothing to do with the column I wrote.

Duncan Fyfe: Right now, you're working as a programmer on the indie game Plain Sight at the six-person studio Beatnik Games, although I like to think that you are more famous for writing about the Austin GDC and video dames. What's your greatest regret about working in the games industry?

Alex Ashby: I think it's that I spent so much of my life believing that the success of my career hung solely on my ability to get a job with a big AAA company. From the age of 16 when I decided that I wanted to make games, I've had dreams of working with the huge company, being on the technical cutting edge, and making epic blockbusters that everyone would know about. There was no way that I could realise my grand visions single-handed, they would be only pale imitations of the kind of games I could make if I were at the helm of a huge lumbering giant of a studio.

So I made it my mission in life to climb the ladder, take the shitty jobs, moan about them and work up and up through the status quo, instead of actually doing anything. It was fun and I met a lot of super people, but at 25 that's nearly a decade of any creative potential I might have, wasted. Since then, every job I've taken has been with a smaller and smaller scale company, I've enjoyed the job more and more. I've slowly and stubbornly discovered that actually, I could have been doing this for years if I'd pulled my finger out. But I didn't.

Working for indie companies has changed my perspective so radically, that if I lost my job tomorrow, I honestly don't know if I'd take a job at a big dev studio again. If I couldn't find a small company or work for myself, I might just quit and do something else entirely.

Duncan Fyfe: You told me once that one of the first indie games you ever worked on was something called "Test Your Mettle", and that title was a pun because the character was a robot.

Alex Ashby: It wasn't called "Test Your Mettle"! It was just "Mettle", I added the "Test Your" for irony.]

The Sisters: an excerpt

The protagonist of Bethesda's Fallout 3 is a cipher, a window through which to view the gameworld, so if he had a LiveJournal he would not be writing about his feelings. He'd write about the post-nuclear Wasteland, about the slaves who rallied around the Lincoln Memorial, the android who wanted to live like a human, free elections in a one-man republic, the day the ghouls crashed the gated community.

He'd write about the young girl who fell in love with a priest, the father who took shelter with his injured son in a storm drain, the downfall of Vault 106 and the rangers trapped on the hotel roof. Fallout 3 is like any other RPG insofar as the player collects experience points, gear and currency, but it's essential to the experience that they collect stories, too.

Fallout 3 is easily cross-referenced and classifiable in the modern video gaming canon. The game grew up in an Elder Scrolls household where it aspired to be Fallout, it has all the trappings of a Western RPG and the unbroken camera of Half-Life, and gameplay buzzwords cling to it: non-linear, open world, emergent. Its least likely structural resemblance, though, as per the above paragraph, is to a book of short stories. Essentially, it's Dubliners with guns.

Holding forth on Irish municipal politics in a drunken stagger, this thought probably never even crossed James Joyce's mind. There was nothing to suggest the eventual similarity in the video games of Joyce's day (older games, they would have been in black and white). Dubliners and Fallout 3 compile isolated tales about unrelated people to establish the character of a city in decline: Dublin and a fictional future Washington, respectively.

They abstain from a central unifying plot (more on Fallout's exception later): Dubliners relies on its 13 vignettes, Fallout 3 on an array of sidequests, text and environmental tableaus for players who skip all the dialogue.

Joyce presents 13 drunks, writers, schoolboys and stage mothers whose collective epiphanies on themes of religion, nationalism and masculinity inform the artist's portrait of a city. The book is less a chronicle of individuals but of the social, religious and economic constitution of early 20th century Dublin. Fallout 3, obviously, is not nearly the literary equivalent of Dubliners: they are analogues in form, not in depth.

This is, in part, because Fallout 3 is collaboratively written and designed, and so lacks a prominent auteur as its figurehead. While critics can analyze Dubliners in the context of Joyce's personal history, Fallout 3 players don't know as much about the troubled Roman Catholic upbringing of Todd Howard or the trenchant alcoholism of Emil Pagliarulo, and so instead of subtle and deeply-encoded meaning we see plainness.

[Read the rest on GameSetWatch.]

Osaka

2009-01-18T17:40:00.001+13:00

At first glance, Yakuza 2 has rendered the city of Osaka in realistic and modern detail. The open world exists as a kind of interactive relief to the game's linear and cutscene-driven story, a pretty dour affair featuring gangsters, detectives and people getting slaughtered. In between, there are restaurants, convenience stores, driving ranges, arcades and random fist fights with deadbeats. There's also a pregnant lady who demands child support from you but is actually wearing a large rubber ball under her shirt, a guy who needs a steady stream of tissues to plug up his running nose, a petition to save the trees which is a front for an extortion ring, secret parties, illicit video dealers and nerds who attack you with laser swords.

The streets are lined with baffling non sequiturs. Scripted encounters with pedestrians last a few minutes, convey some offbeat theme or situation, usually just in text, and then vanish forever. Urging a guitarist to pursue his dream or feeding a picky cat might feel inconsequential compared to saving your love interest from a sniper attack, and why, in this crime epic, is the protagonist spending half an hour helping a man buy presents for his girlfriend? Yakuza 2 is like Mass Effect if every piece of side content was like the fan who wanted an autograph. These small, weird moments would seem like afterthoughts if their inclusion in this game wasn't so deliberate and unapologetic.

The city is steeped in subdued surrealism: in Osaka, no one thinks it's insane for this yakuza to field all these bizarre and unimportant problems, like the guy who claims to have an icecream toothache and shakes down a store owner down for dentist money. This aspect of the game's character is self-evidently incongruent with its very serious and bloody mafia story. The contrast might be more irritatingly dissonant if it wasn't also so charmingly absurd. There's a likable quality to an open world that works overtime to hold the player's interest rather than abdicating all control of the sandbox. Other games often hide backstory and lore in incidental characters and elective missions, but Yakuza 2 tries to make them as superficially entertaining as possible, even when limited to dialogue text.

I like Yakuza 2 because of how it slowly makes you realise in the middle of a fight that you've been violently beating a room of Mahjong players, and that when you win a bowling match against one of the employees, you win a sealed fried chicken lunch. All right! The silliness can work against the long and humourless story -- every character has a remarkable tolerance for getting shot -- but they usually stay separate, to their mutual benefit. The plot remains high melodrama, and Osaka a place where hilarious things happen.

It leads to a strange kind of roleplaying, where your actions might not reflect either your personality or your notion of a tough yakuza character. You might think it's a really bad idea to involve yourself in a certain sidequest, but follow through on it anyway because Yakuza 2 is trusted to make it worth your while and ensure that you'll get more than extra playtime out of it. Example: A loud and obnoxious drunk is harassing a cabaret girl on the street. Usually the RPG hero's cue, instead her boss shows up with a bouncer and threatens the drunk to lay off. At that moment you are given the opportunity to intervene on the drunk's behalf. If you accept, you'll fight the bouncer, after which the drunk is revealed to be a famous manga author who is now really upset that you did that because he was trying to research what it was like to get beaten up. Now the boss is enthusing wildly because he's a big fan of this guy's work. The author changes his tune and proposes a manga written about you. Never has the JRPG mainstay "..." been more effectively employed.

For hypothesis' sake, imagine a game that was comprised entirely of these moments, without any pretense at a larger story. Yakuza 2 is not the worse for its operatic revenge saga; it hints at a different model of game, not a better version of the extant one. Pretend that you weren't flying to Osaka to settle a score, but to hang out in the city for the weekend. It would be a game with all the same bowling and golf minigames and the self-contained and ludicrous vignettes, but with much deeper potential for interaction, the ability to enter into extended relationships with other characters, operating under the overall premise of cool things that you could happen on your vacation. You don't start the game thinking that you're about to be drawn into a web of intrigue and body counts, but that you're in a new city for two days and you should make the most of it. It recalls Warren Spector's long-proposed "city block" game concept -- a comparatively narrow game space with much higher levels of interaction -- without Spector's penchant for science fiction and conspiracies. It'd be Lost in Translation.

It might be a novel representation of a game world, and if it was anything like Yakuza 2 there'd be a surprise on every street corner. I wonder, though, how long a game like that would be able to sustain itself, or remain tolerable outside of the overt direction of a narrative or conventional video game goals. Without any counterbalance, what was refreshing in Yakuza 2 could easily become monotonous or lack any incentive to continue. Could it work? I hope so. I'd visit.

Graduation Day

2009-01-16T22:37:00.001+13:00

Who remembers the true meaning of the Game of the Year awards? Ostensibly a celebration of quality games, the tradition has garnered some negative connotations. It can look like an arbitrary list-making exercise, driven by an irresistible urge to compare things, and in which hardcore gamers seriously invest themselves because it's fun to argue about rankings and the biases of the enthusiast press. Most of these lists only ever seem effective at provoking high-strung forum posters. Also, the GOTY season is unfortunately handcuffed to the ostentatious frat shimmer of the Spike VGAs.

I think the role of Game of the Year within video game discussion communities is as the curtain call for all the nominees. December's festivities were the send-off for Mirror's Edge, Fallout 3, Spore and all their friends. Why do we need such a thing? Those games aren't going anywhere. Well, they are.

In May, Grand Theft Auto IV emerged from its cocoon as the most important video game of all time, a scion destined to change the gaming landscape. It was so exceptionally influential that a month later it was forgotten en masse for Metal Gear Solid 4: another once-in-a-lifetime masterpiece promptly devalued. Every superstar gets a honeymoon and a backlash, and then most of them disappear forever. A few stick around as game design examplars, but older games are valuable primarily as nostalgia trips. The games of 2008 were quickly assessed and the thoughts of hardcore gamers and reviewers turned to what was next.

Gamers move on and their initial enthusiasm diminishes, until that magic time of year: GOTY, the reprise.

After a hiatus, all the year's major games return to the forefront of public conscious and briefly, they all matter again. No More Heroes and Sins of a Solar Empire, 11 and 10 months old respectively, might be dinosaurs by December but even they are welcomed back. They're part of the Class of 2008, an erratic assortment of triple-A, indie and casual titles linked only by their age and their fashion sense and cultural sensibilities with which they grew up. Dead Space catches up with Valkyria Chronicles and Far Cry 2, and like a high school reunion, everyone is reevaluated. What was unjustly popular once and has received their comeuppance, and what used to be niche and unpopular and is still unpopular. Special achievement awards and dubious honours are handed out: who makes the most money, who got fat. It's not really like a reunion, though, because this cast of characters won't ever get another one.

I've never been to a high school reunion but I have been to a university graduation and Game of the Year is like a month of graduation days. The ceremony serves as the gaming industry's cathartic purge of these games from their system. It was their year, and now they're done. Their names are called -- Braid, Saints Row 2, Left 4 Dead, Silent Hill: Homecoming, Prince of Persia, Persona 4, The Club, Audiosurf, Boom Blox, PixelJunk Eden, Gears of War 2, Burnout Paradise, World of Goo -- heralding their ascendancy into history, and if they're lucky, out of irrelevancy. That was 2008. Let's never talk about it again.

Time After Time

2009-01-11T13:28:00.008+13:00

The tragedy of Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time's ending -- spoiler warning on this paragraph for Jake Rodkin and others -- is that while the Prince has saved the life of his new love Farah by rewinding time, she has now never met him. The Prince remembers their relationship, and still loves her, but they can no longer be together. The irony of the ending is that soon the Prince will forget all this too, as will the audience. In 2008 the slate was wiped clean and the Prince and the Princess met anew and fell in love for what is now the third time. Their story, once patterned after the fables of One Thousand and One Nights, has become Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.

After only two games, not including a DS card-based spinoff and a baffling array of repackaged PSP and Wii versions, Prince of Persia needed a reboot. Maybe audiences viewed the series as inaccessible or irrelevant; thought of its history as baggage. The new (and conservatively-titled) Prince of Persia erased from its legacy all but platforms, a sword, magic, a girl and a guy who doesn't seem either princely or Persian but does appear on the cover. The series has taken the drastic step of resetting its entire history, shortly after it reset its entire history in 2003. Sands of Time quietly called itself a prequel, not a reboot, probably because the film Casino Royale hadn't yet been made, and Ubisoft overestimated the audience's protectiveness of Prince of Persia continuity.

Before Casino Royale, James Bond had worn out his welcome. The secret agent himself was an old, larger-than-life caricature and the films were creatively stagnant. Even though Bond's love interests and physical appearance were reset all the time, those changes alone couldn't halt the series' gradual decline. If anyone was going to take James Bond seriously again, there would have to be a clean break from a 40-year, 20-movie quagmire of gadgets and supervillains, and it would have to start all over. It took Prince of Persia three games to get to that point.

It's been pretty easy to fall out of love with Prince of Persia. It was great in 1989 and then never again until Sands of Time, which had unequivocally divorced itself from the preceding three games and from the clunky misfire Prince of Persia 3D in particular. To broaden its appeal, the roles were recast, the story was retold, and it regained the attractive simplicity the series had lost after 1989. It made itself young again. (Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, released the same year, pulled off the same trick, but because it's not quite so permissible to "reboot" Star Wars, placed its events 4,000 years before the movies.) A year later, the series discovered a new nadir in Warrior Within, prompting another rethink. After two promising starts, Prince of Persia sank each time until someone came along with a crane to haul its corpse out of a tar pit.

Prince of Persia has never ended well, and so Ubisoft brings it back to the beginning. That was where the potential was, and it's the only way anyone will care again. Where does Prince of Persia keep going wrong, and is it doomed to be eternally reinvented?

Prince of Persia began with, and has twice returned to, a fairy tale in the style of Aladdin and the magic lamp. A noble prince overcomes an evil vizier to rescue a beautiful princess. That's the origin of its narrow fiction. The initial game mechanics have attained a similar timelessness within the video gaming canon: the 1989 game directly communicates objectives (the princess, level exits) and obstacles (traps, monsters) to the player in an unencumbered language less and less possible with each successive gameplay generation. It offered the template for a genre just as simple parabolic fairy tales and myths have inspired later fiction.

Fables aren't so charmingly minimalist when they're progressively convoluted sagas, but because Prince of Persia's a franchise it must move in that direction. The Prince of Persia sequels retrofit myths into trilogies with quick-time events and DLC. If Sands of Time's time rewind ability doesn't feel anachronistically complex compared to its still-basic platforming and combat, it's because the mechanic is easily understood in terms of moving back and forward -- far more intuitive than back, forward, A, B, right trigger, and tap X while running to execute the Whirling Dance of Blades (Warrior Within's contribution.)

The recent games haven't been comfortable with their predecessors' ordinary elegance. In Warrior Within and Two Thrones, we see an affected "adult", "sophisticated" take on the fairy tale and Prince of Persia '08 updates the fiction for modern audiences via a sassy hero. Out of the series' two completed trilogies, the first game in each still stands as the best. It's proven difficult to improve on a classic, but not so hard to wave all the progress away and pretend none of it ever happened. This is the franchise that can't grow up.

From the beginning, Prince of Persia was at heart romantic, idealistic and nostalgic for the 10th century, or for being ten years old and reading about viziers, djinn and young heroes. It was never meant to grow up. Sands of Time delivered with a slight relationship story about a boy and a girl in a world of magic, and with its colourful visuals, Prince of Persia '08 embraces that style halfheartedly, reserving the right to snark about it. The game pledges that there's more to come, but is the new trilogy already off to an unsteady start? Historically, it's all downhill from here. This Prince is off on a great adventure, but maybe he has less time than he thinks.

The Prince may be cursed to run through that dungeon chasing the same girl for the rest of his life, every five years forgetting the way out. But it's alright. That's where he's loved.