WoW Comic

One word says it all: Murlocs.

Dr. Dyack or How I Learned to Love Paying Twice As Much For Games

I may be one of the last few people who is actually interested in playing Too Human (or even thinks it will release), but Silicon Knights President Denis Dyack has shoved his foot squarely into his mouth in this interview, published today

I don't really see it as bold [to make Too Human a trilogy]. I see that as a promise to the consumer that there's more here than just one game. Legacy of Kain had about sixty hours of play, but games have changed. People don't want that any more. I don't care how good the game is I don't want to play something that's one hundred hours long. As much as I love World of Warcraft I pulled myself out of it.

The dis to WoW aside, this amounts to nothing more than doubling (or tripling) the price we pay for games. Does anyone here think that Too Human is going to cost less that $60? Anyone at all? I didn't think so. I'll add a little more.

If we're going to craft an epic story we decided we had to divide it into manageable chunks for the consumer. At the same time we wanted to do a game that it has a chance to evolve and take advantage of development changes. We think the future is all about content. By getting our flow of process together for the first game we can then look at it and evolve the way we work for the next games in the series. We didn't want to have to start from scratch again after the first Too Human. Is it gutsy to promise so much? Yes, but making games is hard.

This isn't about quicker turnaround times for games, Episode 2 has proved this. And I won't even devote more than one sentence to commenting that Too Human has been in development for frighteningly close to a decade. But as gamers we cannot let developers shortchange us on content or overcharge us for 10 hours of game play. If we let this happen, developers will know once and for all that we are nothing more than their ATMs.

On a more personal note, I love epics. I've put in 110+ on Oblivion, probably half that on Morrowind, Twilight Princess, gotten back into playing online thanks to Gears, and I've put in a fair amount of time into any other number of games -- my point is, I like epics, I absolutely love them, and the one thing that tends to knock a game down most in my book is a lack of depth / length. This is the main failing of games like Crackdown, or Fable: they're too short, and don't provide enough direction. That's when an epic sucks - when it loses its sense of direction and self. They don't suck because they're long, they suck if they're repetitive or pointless.

Just like the Destructoid post about losing in games, missing the point that all games needed was better writing / plotting, Dyack's comments miss the point that all epics need are direction and style (and quicker development teams). Then the 60+ hours are joy, and knowing that you can settle in and bask in the ocean that is the game should bring comfort to those in the pond-sized games that Dyack is interested in.

Even if you don't have the time to play more than a few hours a week, playing a great, long game should be everyone's dream. It's great to finish a game, but like with any other work of art, it is the process of enjoying it (especially with interactive media) that holds the most for us.

These epics also make the $60 outlay worthwhile. Don't buy purposely short games for full price. It dilutes our purity of essence ;).

Completely out of touch

Kotaku just posted a story that shows how increasingly out of touch mainstream culture is with video games. I would post content from the actual news article, but it appears that their server has crashed, likely from the influx of traffic from gaming sites.

The high school student committed the heinous crime of -- making a CounterStrike map. Now, in the interest of full disclosure, the map was of his (now former) high school. His bedroom was searched, producing swords of all things, and this led to his removal from Clements High School.

I'm going to admit something that hopefully won't lead to my own arrest. I actually wanted to design a CS map based on my high school. Many of my friends also thought it was a fun idea. The only thing that held us back was a lack of any skill whatsoever at the complicated and exacting task of mapping. Anyone who knew a damn thing about gaming would know that a kid who had the skill to accurately map his high school probably isn't a safety risk - anyone who would take that much time and interest in what is essentially an artistic endeavor is not the sort of person who is usually a danger to others. At a bare minimum, two or three hours of conversation would exonerate him or show that he needed some form of psychological help.

And swords?? We're worried about swords?? How many geeks / nerds / gamers have now, or have ever owned a sword, dagger, or large knife? I can name at least two, if not three of my friends who are perfectly functional and safe who own such things.

The general public needs to stop treating gamers like maladjusted time-bombs. It is tremendously disrespectful, and we're getting sick of it.

Since when is 1-1 Ice World?

Remember Line Rider? Sure, it's not the craziest track ever made with it, but I think it's the coolest.

Minor Item on game violence

This was buried at the end of a Washington Post column, mostly focused on embattled (and criminally dishonest, in my opinion) Attorney General Alberto Gonzales:

Guns and video games: ABC's "This Week" host, George Stephanopoulos, noted that the father of Sen. Christopher J. Dodd (D-Conn.) called for new gun laws the day after 14 were shot dead at the University of Texas in 1966, and the host asked Dodd, a 2008 presidential hopeful, whether he would follow in his father's footsteps. Dodd replied that there is more than guns to talk about: "mental health, what's on our television and video things. And it isn't just about legislation or regulation. It's having a leader in the White House that's willing to talk about these issues."

Honestly, the heading (in italics in the original article) is a bigger mention of games than what came up in the actual interview. Also, I happened to catch the McLaughlin group on Sunday morning, and I don't recall a single mention of games, although gun control was hotly debated.

On a side-note on gun control. I would self identify as very liberal, but I don't want to take anyone's guns away. However, if Virginia is on the cutting edge of gun control laws because you can only buy one gun a month, I've got to stop and take a second look. Do we really need to be able to buy 12 guns a year in this country? Stop and think about that, 12 guns a year.

Every year in this country, about 3,000 kids and teenagers are killed by guns. About half are suicides or accidents. Those are completely preventable and are directly influenced by more guns in society. Those kids shouldn't die because you're afraid of a burglar or think it's cool to have a gun or want to shoot at wildlife.

When we look at some parts of the world, we think that their cultures are violent. They look as us in the same way. We think it's stupid, dangerous and ignorant to fire assault rifles into the air at weddings for the most part. We think it's bad in Iraq that so many people have so many guns, and maybe it is, but those are people who have legitimate cause to protect themselves. I'm rambling, but I guess the point I'm trying to make is this --

To those of you who do not want any change in gun control laws in this country: there are costs in human lives for the way we act towards and think about guns. I've tried to amend another point here, but it comes off as preaching or whining, or just jabbing at the other side because I don't agree with them. The way we live is a choice, and if we continue to live in the same way, we shouldn't expect anything different than what we're used to.

No need to invent that time machine (until Spetmeber)

It looked as if we were going to have a nice little run, the Halo 3 Beta in May, Mass Effect in June, Bioshock in August, GTA IV in October, Halo 3 in "Fall." Sure, it was packed, but at least we had enough time to play them all. That seems to be no longer the case.

A September release date for Mass Effect just kills everything. This means that there's a good chance that Bioshock, Mass Effect and Halo 3 could all hit in the same month (fall begins September 21st of so). When you toss in GTA and Metroid Prime: Corruption, things get even messier.

I guess this means we're going to face a game drought this summer, and that this Holiday season is going to obliterate previous sales records for games. Start saving your pennies, guys, because this fall is going to break the bank.

Negative Sum Game - Part 1

In his last post, Chris speculated on the possibility of a game in which the protagonist doesn't win and is doomed to failure from the start. This made me curious: how would a game that a player can't win really look. 'Winning' takes on very specific meanings when it comes to video games, so it may not look the way we think it would.

First, let's split games into the two basic categories so we can determine what winning means in different contexts.

• Narrative-based games: games with a plot that a player is expected to follow. In this type of game, winning can be defined as playing the game through to it's successful conclusion.


• Round-based games: similar to board games, this type of game is based around a gameplay system that is implemented across different settings. In round based games, in order to win you must defeat other players or achieve specific objectives in a set time-frame or under certain conditions.

Now, there is some crossover between these two types of games, but most eventually fall into one camp or the other. Most modern games are narrative-based games (Gears of War to name but one), and older games were more likely to be round-based (Pacman, Pong, Battle Zone). However, some more recent games are round-based, such as most racing games, the Mario party series, and all competitive multiplayer games currently on the market.

It is very simple to determine what winning is in a round-based game, and that is to beat all the other players, be they human or computer controlled. In this context, games that are un-winnable are games that would not allow players to measure who did the best in any measurable way. This would be tremendously dull. Imagine a racing game where every player has a different track and the game never let any player know if they finished before another player. In the context of a round-based game, an un-winnable game doesn't sound like much fun.

So now we've defined what winning (and not winning) is in a round-based game, how can we define a narrative-based game that cannot be won? Well, the most basic way to lose a game is to die (provided you're not playing Prey). So does that mean in a narrative-based game that you lose the game if your character dies at the end of the story?

Not necessarily. Winning and losing are more complicated than that, because winning is as much an emotional experience as it is a hard-and-fast set of conditions. Winning also means you were successful in what you were trying to do. For example, the T-800 (the Governator) in Terminator 2 'wins' because he A) destroys the T-1000 and B) saves John Connor. However, he has to destroy himself in order to avert Judgment Day (unless you accept Terminator 3 as canon, which I don't). He dies, but he doesn't 'lose,' so even if the protagonist dies at the end of the narrative, he can still win.

What if the main character were to die, and failed the objective the set out to achieve? Now that would be losing! However, games are funny in the way they structure a narrative. Unlike in a movie, where you sit and watch things happen to a character, in a game you are in control of events and you can replay the game as many times as you wish. For these circumstances to result in anything other than 'winning' at some point, then the game itself would have to be designed to result in the failure of the protagonist. But again, we're undermined by the psychological dimension of winning, because in the absence of a traditional positive ending, gamers will feel a sense of accomplishment in having completed the game, overcome any challenges and progressed through the narrative of the game. So we're back at square one again - we've created a different ending, but the player still would feel like they won, since they achieved what they set out to do. Knowing your quest is hopeless from square one makes failure meaningless, and like I said before progress through the game becomes a surrogate for actual success.

Our trouble lies in expectation. Fiction depends to some degree on a willing suspension of disbelief, putting ourselves inside the world or the game, movie or book. In non-interactive fiction, this serves to keep us emotionally invested in the characters of the work, but in a game, where we can take control over the story, suspense isn't usually as sharp because we can react to surprises and no situation, no matter how dire, is ever hopeless because we can take control. Worst of all for narrative structure, if we die, then we jump back before the dangerous event that led to our demise. We can adjust tactics and strategy and best of all, this time we won't have been victims of the element of surprise. As we play through the game, we learn what to expect and adapt our sense of winning to our experiences. So to not win, our expectations have to be subverted. The ending, and how it unfolds, must be a surprise.

So in order to lose in a narrative-based game, the protagonist has to fail, and the player has to not know that this failure is imminent as they play through the game. Otherwise, they simply adjust their expectations to the structure of the narrative. So now, we finally have a working definition of a narrative-based game that is not winnable: a game that leads players to expect they will succeed, but is designed and plotted to result in nothing other than failure. If a player suspects this twist is coming, then the game goes from an un-winnable tragedy to a dark ending to our hero's noble quest.

In the second part of this article, I'll investigate how anyone would even make a game like this, if anyone should, and what losing can teach us about how to make games better.

Children of Hurin

I'll admit it, I'm a fan of Lord of the Rings. Despite this fact, I've never played any of the games. The upcoming LOTR MMORPG seems especially interesting, but usually games that are based on existing franchises tend to fall short of their possible greatness. So I have my doubts. LucasArts is the one notable exception to this claim: over the years I've been impressed with how the Star Wars games (Jedi Knight, X-wing & Tie Fighter, especially) have made significant strides in expanding and enriching that universe.

But the LOTR games have always been a disappointment, from what I can tell. I've played bits and pieces of them, and honestly never had a desire to play any of them all the way through. It didn't help that Frodo's stare, the One Ring, and the lidless eye all were given way more screen time than they deserved in Peter Jackson's trilogy. And since the games were so tightly tied to the movie franchise, I was expecting many more hours of a CG Frodo gazing at his CG Precious.

But with the new book The Children of Hurin, I think we have reason to be excited:

"In this way, before the summer had passed, the following of Turin had swelled to a great force, and the power of Angband was thrown back. Word of this came even to Nargothrond, and many there grew restless."

The many restless of Nargothrond... My hope is that these folk will be too restless to stare longingly at the One Ring for hours on end.

There are, however, many reasons to suspect that the new book will not be made into either a book or a movie. CNN's report on the subject states, "This is a gloomy tale -- Hurin's children doomed to failure by Turin's hubris and, of course, the curse." A video game where the protagonist doesn't win? That's a twist worth thinking about.

What if a good LOTR game could be made based on the Children of Hurin, and what if that game flew in the face of all conventional wisdom by being a game in which the curse was more powerful than the game's protagonist. What if the world was in fact doomed, and nothing you could do could stop the power of evil? A game without a happy ending. A game you couldn't win. Now that'd be something.

Good News Everyone!

In the last two days, my gaming fortunes have improved significantly. I am being sent a new Wii for free (warranties rock)and I received my confirmation email on the 17th.

Hello,

Thank you for contacting Nintendo regarding our Advance Replacement
program. We wanted to let you know that your order has been shipped to you
as requested. You should receive your replacement product within the next
three to four business days.

Microsoft was a bit more terse in their email, received today.

Your Xbox Video Game system has been shipped! You can expect to receive it in 2-5 days. Thank you for your patience and get ready to get back into the action!

It is such a relief to be getting back to normal, and have such wonderful machines at my disposal, day or night at any hour.

Virtually Guaranteed to be better than either the Transformers game or the Transformers movie

Makes me wish I knew fancy modeling and animation. I tried to learn how years ago to make units for Total Annihilation, but I was never really good at it.

Perspective on Tragedy

Firstly, let me say that the shootings at Virginia Tech, which can't rightly be called anything milder than a massacre, are so shocking as to seem unreal. To anyone who was affected by this event, I extend my most sincere condolences and prayers. It's just not fair, and I wish I could do something to fix it.

This post is speculation on what will result from the media frenzy over these killings, and how much or little it will affect public opinion about video games. If this doesn't sound like something that you want to read, or out of place given the severity of the events in Virginia, then thank you for visiting, and try another one of our older posts. For those of you who are interested, keep going.

Kotaku has the jump on me here, posting the running commentary on the "Games-are-to-blame" debate first with the Jack Thompson fear mongering and vicious lying then by linking the first mainstream article to mention games and most recently Rush Limbaugh's surprisingly sane response to blaming games.

Actually, between the time of the Kotaku post and the writing of this post, the Washington Post changed the article that the link points to, removing any reference to games. However, a search for "Counterstrike" on their site still returns:

1. Shooter Described as Eccentric Loner by Students, Teachers
Debbi Wilgoren, Sari Horwitz and Robert E. Pierre (Edition) 04/17/2007
...Several Korean youths who knew Cho Seung Hui from his high school days said he was a fan of violent video games, particularly Counterstrike, a hugely popular online game, in which players join terrorism or counterterrorism groups and try to shoot each other using...

This text, however, no longer appears in the article.

NOTE: Kotaku has now published a post on the WaPo edit.

The truth is, we should all be ready to hide our gaming for the next few weeks. If history teaches us anything about the modern news (any three things, that is) it is:

• Cable news networks will pump a story as long as they can if it can pull the public's attention


• Most news outlets tend to report stories in the same way they reported similar stories in the past, with similar commentators (the press equivalent of the military fighting the last war)


• Simple explanations are easier to present and invite less criticism or confusion

When you add all this up, you can probably expect a fair amount of blame to fall on games. As much as I hate to say this, as much as it goes against every fiber of my being, Limbaugh has (mostly) the right idea. We can't just assume that one issue created this event. However, I disagree with the fact that he uses this as another occasion to push his views on gun control, and his statement "You have here a sick individual, an evil individual who committed a random act." I would have put it "You have here a sick individual, an individual who committed an evil act." I don't know enough about Cho yet to conclude he was evil, but I have no problem condemning his actions as evil. I think it's a subtle and important difference. the minute we decide he is "evil" is the minute we cease to try to understand him, which is a tremendous mistake. This is not an isolated event, but part of a frightening trend in our schools and colleges of children going over the edge and killing their peers. To not attempt to understand how and why this is happening is irresponsible and dangerous, and this is why I would resist calling the shooter "evil."

All this said, I still think Limbaugh is a big fat idiot who is trying to drag this country back a century or two.

The fallout on games will not likely be as bad as in past shootings. It seems like the witch hunt is (in my opinion) going to decide that the local police and campus authorities are most to blame, despite the fact that they probably don't deserve it. This sort of situation is like an earthquake, impossible to predict and hard to react to. I'm sure that over the next weeks we'll know if they prepared and responded as properly as can be expected.

Video games have been called the new rock and roll, which is an interesting comparison. Both are driving social (and economic) forces that started in youth culture and quietly maneuvered themselves into the mainstream. They have also both faced a backlash from the defenders of mainstream culture, especially in moments of human crisis. I think it's worth exploring the worst example of rock and roll being linked to horrific violence, so we can see that we have, since the Columbine killings, moved to a more secure position within the mainstream where games may be less of a scapegoat.

I can put it in two words: Helter Skelter

From wikipedia

Manson regarded as foretold, by The Beatles, on The White Album, an apocalyptic war of which he was destined to be both the uncanny cause and the ultimate beneficiary. When, by his music, he, Manson, would have drawn to him the young, white female hippies of San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury district, black men, thus deprived of the white women whom the political changes of the 1960s had made sexually available to them, would be without an outlet for their frustrations and would lash out in violent crimes against whites. After a resultant murderous rampage against blacks by frightened whites would have been rhetorically exploited by the Black Muslims to trigger a war of mutual near-extermination between racist and non-racist whites over the treatment of blacks, the Black Muslims would arise to finish off sneakily the few whites they would know to have survived.

In this epic sequence of events, which Manson told his followers would take place in the summer of 1969 and which he termed Helter Skelter, after the White Album track of that name, the Family had little to fear; they would wait out the war in a secret city that was underneath California's Death Valley and that they would reach through a hole in the ground. As the actual remaining whites upon the war's true conclusion, they would emerge from underground to rule the now-satisfied blacks, who, as the vision went, would be incapable of running the world.

Now, games have been blamed before, and will likely be blamed again, but at least no one has ever said "Doom 2 laid out the apocalypse, and I was just following the plan." No one as crazy as Manson has yet used games as an excuse for their crimes, and if rock and roll can survive this sort of scapegoating and bad press, the explicit rationale for one of the most notorious serial killers of our time, and wind up the vibrant force in American culture that it is, then games will survive.

At the moment, should any of us in our daily lives be asked to comment on whether or not games are to blame for this, I suggest that we defend games in the gentlest possible terms. Explain that they're art, free expression, and not tools of violence. Explain that they can be outlets for pure joy and exploration. And make sure to let the person, reporter or TV station know how depressing and shocking these events are to you personally. Games will make it through this one okay, so let's pay our respects to the real casualties here.

Video Game Subculture

toothpastefordinner.com

Another death in the family

So, after losing my 360 out of warranty and beginning the process of getting it repaired, I was understandably bummed. But now, I though, I would have the time to spent with my Wii that it so richly deserved. My girlfriend even bought me Super Paper Mario, which I was tremendously excited to play.

It appears, however, that the fates were not aligned in my favor. For the last few days I've had odd freezing issues, but they cleared up quickly and were at most a minor annoyance. But as the week went on they got more and more common, and I was worried that the console had to be unplugged after a freeze, not responding to the power or reset buttons. However now, the console has gone completely kaput, freezing immediately on start-up, before I can even load a game.

Now, I called Nintendo customer service to start the repair process and guess what happened. The first time I called, they said they were too busy and suggested I call back later. Fun fact: They play the Twilight Princess version of the Zelda theme when you're on hold.

I'll keep you updated on the status. Hopefully I'll be able to get through soon.

Three Lights Update

Well, I got my shipping box last night, packed up my 360 and dropped it off this morning. Here are a few photos for those of you who are curious what all this looks like.

The address of the repair facility from the shipping label.



Here's the rest of the label



The instructions (sorry for the quality, this is the first time I've used this camera, I got it this week for my birthday)



Finally, this is the little UPS drop-off where I got my receipt, where, incidentally, they tossed my box a good four feet into the spot where they leave all the packages without even asking me if the contents were fragile or sensitive. Good thing for them it's already broken.



So wish me all luck. Hopefully we won't have to document any more failed systems here.

THERE ... ARE ... THREE ... LIGHTS!

Well, my 360 has been hinting that it was on it's way out, crashing during three successive play periods on two different games. I had one last hurrah when I beat a R6: Vegas level I've been stuck on for a month or so (due more to apathy than lack of skill). Saturday night, I fired it up, got about a minute into gaming and it froze on me.

It did not respond to the guide button.

I walked over to the TV, powered down and back up, and there it was. The red ring of death was staring me in the face. I went through everything with tech support, and yes, my hardware has failed. Considering that I was camped out at midnight launch night to get one of these, and given how notorious the 360 failure rate is and that I had a launch console, I'm not all that surprised by this development. It is tremendously unfortunate that the extended warranty, while a nice gesture, failed to cover me when I needed it. It's strange to think that my NES, SNES, N64, Xbox and Gamecube (until I traded it in towards a Wii) all still function perfectly, and that a system I had less than two years, actually for only 17 months died in spectacular fashion. It may happen that as systems become more complicated and technologically advanced, they are subject to higher rates of failure. I hope it's not the case, but it may well be.

They funny thing though (well, not really funny) is that Ben was had not one, but two Wiis fail on him. Luckily for him, they were covered under warranty.

I must say, in defense of Msoft, the tech was nice, helpful, and efficient, and had an answer to every question I had. The box for repair was supposed to be shipped to me in four business days, the system repaired in two, and shipped back in four. With a bit of luck, I should have it week after next. This may prove to be a blessing in disguise, as it will push me to play the games I have on other systems.

I should be getting a digital camera for my birthday this weekend (it was actually Tuesday, but I had to postpone celebrations due to a full schedule), with which I'll document the proceedings.

Wish me luck readers.

Bonus points if you can identify the source material