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Review: Rock Band 2 (Xbox 360)

2008-10-01T19:16:28Z

Rock Band 2 is therapy for your inner rock snob—that sneering music cynic that resides in many of us. You know the one. The jerk who shivers every time an overplayed relic pops up in classic-rock radio rotation. Or the naysayer who loves telling people that their favorite band hasn't made a great record since the '90s. See, Rock Band 2, just like its predecessor, has a way of making players come to appreciate songs outside the taste boundaries they've erected over the years. ]]> Rock Band 2. There's a little bit of magic in Rock Band 2, I'm not sure what it is, but for me, it's helping peel away the years and feel, again, like the teenager who just spent a big chunk of his paycheck to cop Blood Sugar Sex Magik.

Rock Band 2's playlist continues the work. The 75-song set feels like a mix-tape prepared by an omnivorous music lover. The game is full of classic-rock deep cuts (Rush's “The Trees”), unexpected indie additions (“De-Luxe” by Lush), '80s pop classics (“We Got The Beat” by The Go-Gos) and contemporary tracks you didn't know you loved (Silversun Pickups' “Lazy Eye”). But the game doesn't just throw a bunch of new songs at you. It integrates all the old tracks from the original Rock Band, as well as all the downloadable songs, into one massive play list. For parties, that means a much bigger karaoke menu. For those playing through the game's revamped “world tour” that means never knowing what to expect—especially when certain gigs throw together mystery playlists for you and your band mates.

The new “world tour” is much friendlier towards solo-players—those looking to practice their chops in preparation for the next Rock Band party. Now, even loners can go on the road, earn money and play to fans. This simulated concert tour is much more fun that the game's old songs tiers, which forced players to concentrate on the same five or six songs. Now, with the game's entire library popping into play lists it never feels like you’re stuck at a dead end, stymied by a particularly challenging song. And along the road the game throws interesting decisions your way—inviting your band to play benefit concerts or shoot music videos. The best I've encountered so far revolved around a Hot Topic sponsorship. I took the gig, despite misgivings and wound up playing the fairly terrible “That's What You Get” by emo rockers Paramore. Even though I rocked the crowd, playing nearly flawlessly, I lost 60,000 fans. There are some bands—and brands—that even Rock Band 2 is incapable of making cool.

Watch the trailer for Rock Band 2:

In-Depth Q&A With Spore Creator Will Wright

2008-09-24T20:49:45Z

Will Wright’s Spore seemed destined for controversy. The game is, after all, about evolution. And we know that a significant chunk of the American public believes that a loving God created the heavens, earth and everything in between. Yet the game has shipped with nary a peep from detractors. The only cannonball fired in the game’s direction—a fairly whacked-out blog called Anti-Spore—turned out to be a hoax (and a Rickroll, to add insult to injury).

Regardless, we were eager to speak with Wright and discuss the intriguing push and pull at work in a "God game" that’s goal is to inform and entertain gamers by ushering them aboard the biological roller coaster of Darwinian theory. The following transcript (edited only for clarity) became the framework for Paste’s November ’08 Complicated Games column, "Life, The Universe and Everything." Wright discusses his issues with the 'intelligent design' movement, his thoughts on the educational potential of video games and why people should invent their own personal religions.
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PASTE: The Spore trailer (see below) at Electronic Arts’ E3 press conference struck me. The narrator in the clip says, “someone made a decision” when it comes to creating life and eventually winds up saying “that someone is you.” There's an interesting parallel to creationism and intelligent design in the ad even though the game is ostensibly about evolution.

WILL WRIGHT: It's funny because in the game you're kind of in the role of an intelligent designer. Yet the kind of meta message of the game is life becomes what it is through the process of evolution. In fact the other creatures around you are evolving while you're exhibiting intelligent design. Personally, I'm very much a strong evolutionist—basically atheist, agnostic-ish. For the game design, though, we really wanted the player to be emotionally involved with what they were doing. Throughout any kind of game, especially a game like Spore, you have to be always cognizant of keeping the player's emotional engagement with what they're doing. It's very much a game design kind of decision to have the player do this. We did have prototypes, actually, where creatures were evolving out of your control and you were picking from a selected set of mutations of your creature. And it was so much less engaging than if you'd actually gone and designed the creature itself. But we kind of liked the idea that the game is fairly ambiguous in that space. It doesn't really feel like it has a strong agenda. Because we're actually reading on our forums on the website, a lot of religious people talking to atheist people and basically discussing these concepts and debating them, fairly intelligently, without a lot of malice towards each other.

P: I found some Christian reviews of The Sims games and similarly it seemed like people from the Christian perspective were able to say, “Look, some of those characters were wont to be polyamorous, but you can control them—again it's another 'God game'—and say look I want my world to be this way and people to have monogamous relationships.” It seems like your games are really good at allowing both groups to enjoy their respective fantasies.

WW: That was interesting about The Sims. From the early stages of the design we decided that we wanted to allow gay relationships. If the player kinda pushed it in that direction we wanted people to basically build whatever family they came from or create in the game. I thought it would be more controversial. But then again, like you mentioned, they don't do that unless you push them in that direction. So if somebody called us up and said, “my two guys are in love,” well you must have made them flirt. Right? So the player pretty much had to drive it in that direction. I remember an interview I had with Out magazine, about a year after The Sims was released. They wanted to come and report all the controversy about gay relationships in The Sims from the religious community. They were, apparently, disappointed because basically there was none.

P: Did you expect Spore to generate any of its own controversy?

WW: Depending on how you look at this, it's kind of funny and ironic. I was talking about this with some European reporters a couple of weeks ago and they approach the whole thing with utter bemusement that evolution would even be the slightest bit controversial. Compared to American culture where you have this whole creationist undertone. So it's very much an American cultural phenomenon, almost in the same way that alien abductions are. I think evolution is such a fundamental aspect, not just of biological advancement, but also of a lot of natural systems and the way they organize in the complexity that Spore was an attempt to find a very simple model that you can roughly use to explain the entire universe. That's really the point of Spore, to step back five steps from life and the universe and the world and get a very vast perspective on the complete history and possible future of life and what life means to the overall universe.

So, at that level, I think the idea that even the religious people are trying to look for meaning in what's out there. At least the ones that are really religiously inquisitive, I should say, as opposed to dogmatic. The fact that we're at least trying to bring up how vast and wonderful life and the universe are, that’s a feeling people on both sides can appreciate. We actually deal with a lot of fairly specific religious things in the game especially around the “civilization” phase where religion is one of your superpowers or strategic approaches to playing the game. We were trying to be fairly careful not to overtly offend anyone religious. We had a lot of religious people on our team, in fact. And there were a couple of spots in the game where they sort of felt uncomfortable about things we were doing. We had a meeting, had them air their concerns and then we tried to design around that. It wasn't our intention to offend anybody. But at the same time, we wanted to present, what we saw in a playful, fun way, was a roughly scientific view of the universe and life.

P: What kind of behaviors, if you don't mind sharing, were you implementing that people thought were too silly?

WW: Well, there were a couple of thing that had to do with the end game, that I can't really talk about because they're kinda secret, where we wanted to make it clear that some of these creatures you were interacting with were not God, but just really powerful aliens. That was part of it. There's another part, like in the “city” game, there's a religious strategy you can pursue with religious cities. We have superpowers that you earn depending on how you play the game. You get a cultural personality slider set. And some of stuff gets kind of silly out of the box—some of the religious superpowers like “plague of locusts” and stuff like that. And, oddly enough, those didn't offend the religious people at all. It offended the hardcore atheist people. There's a whole big discussion going on on our website where pretty much the only people who seem offended at this point are the really hardcore atheists, because they don't like the idea of religion in the game at all. They wish there was a switch where they could turn off religion. But religious people, for the most part, seem pretty tolerant about it.

The criticism is not always coming from where you'd expect. But also we have things like the religious strategy working the best on unhappy citizens. That's where you really want to target. An unhappy populace is the most susceptible to bring over to your religion. Some people pointed it out, but it didn't seem to offend anybody to the degree that we would remove it. It made for a good paper, rock, scissors kind of balance between the different powers.

P: It kind of plays to the “opiate of the masses” idea of religion if anybody was going to take that negative angle.

WW: I can see how certain religious people might find that somewhat offensive or slightly offensive, but I've found, for the most part, that the mainstream people—in some sense I get feeling that they're unfairly categorized against a very small minority of fundamentalists. Most religious people I know believe in evolution. That's kind of overwhelmed by the small, vocal minority of people that don't.

P: That's really an interesting point. What your game is doing is saying that there is a possibility for evolution and intelligent design to coexist, at least in our imagination. Maybe not in reality, but here's an example of both things working together and here's how it could happen.

WW: I think a lot of people, even ones that are what we call Darwinists or are scientifically inclined, are not necessarily closed to the idea that there are aspects of the universe we don't understand. Like how it originated. There's a question of whether that's normal science or religion. But there's clearly some limits to our understanding right now. For a lot of people that's where religion starts, where science starts. A lot of the debate is about “is there overlap there, or not?” A lot of the top scientists that I respect consider themselves religious.

The ‘intelligent design’ thing, in particular, is a label that's applied to something that I, so far, have found nobody that actually believes in. There are definitely people that believe in creationism and other various interpretations of the Bible. But the whole intelligent-design movement as we know it today is actually a very recent movement that originated in the early '90s from this place called The Discovery Institute. And it's really a clever strategy to crack the door open and start teaching creationism in schools. But what they talk about with intelligent design actually has no theory behind it. It's just trying to poke holes in Darwinism. And if you go out and talk to regular people, there's nobody I've met that says, “Oh, I believe in intelligent design.” The might say, “I believe that God created the earth four thousand years ago.” But that's not what intelligent design is about at all. So I think intelligent design is more of an agenda than a belief system.

P: There's the old concept of the divine clockmaker, where God created this system and flicked it, started it going and the system just went on its own.

WW: When you talk to scientists that are religious, that really comes back to the clean line between where scientific inquiry stops and religious faith begins. A lot of scientists say, “that's outside the role of science” if it was pre-big bang. What initiated the big bang is something you might call metaphysics.

P: You mentioned that you were atheist. During the E3 press conference, you gave a power-point presentation that suggested that Spore gamers are "38% god." That's pretty playful, but it's aimed towards the video game audience, mostly. Is the messaging for Spore going to change slightly, like say, when you advertise on TV? Or aiming at the mass market?

WW: I think a lot of our positioning is going to be very much around the idea that you have the ability to create an entire universe, now how you chose to philosophically categorize that or interpret that, I think we're going to leave fairly unstated. Again, we don't really mean it in a religiously offensive way. In fact after I gave that talk at E3 I started scanning the boards and stuff. The biggest criticism I got, directly, from religious people was that I got my numbers wrong. According to them, God created all plants and animals in two days, not seven, therefore he was far more efficient than I was giving him credit for.

Again, I'm still continually impressed in how they don't feel threatened in their beliefs, when you play around with them. In fact they are very open the idea of playfully engaging. I kind of appreciate that. Whether somebody's coming at it from a scientific point of view or a religious point of view the fact that they're not threatened talking about this stuff, in fact they see value in discussing these things with people that don't share their views, I think is a good thing.

P: It doesn't seem like an antagonistic discussion.

WW: Exactly. And, in some sense, I think we can accomplish this in a way that feels like its catalytic, in a good direction, rather than just trying to stir up trouble.

P: I wanted to talk about your interest and involvement with the organization SETI [Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence]. You wore that shirt mentioning the Aricebo telescope. And you debuted the Spore Creature Creator at the NASA Yuri's Night event?

WW: Yeah, I think it was. SETI also had, at their facility, an open school night a few weeks ago. We had people there so the kids could play with it at that event as well.

P: Is there going to be more participation with SETI?

WW: Yeah we have a lot of things, down the road, planned with them. They're just down the road in Silicon Valley from us. I've gotten to know, while working on Spore, Jill Tarter and Frank Drake, who are actually a large part of the initial inspirations for the game. A lot of the SETI Institutes' charter is around education and getting kids interested in science...which is very much one of the intents behind Spore as well. I'd say our agendas are very well aligned in that sense.

P: The possibility of Spore as an educational tool and the release of experimental software on the fringes of Spore. Do you see this as the beginning of a thrust towards outreach in education? More so than in other games.

WW: Well actually we've done that a lot over the years. Back before Electronic Arts bought Maxis, we published teacher guides for all of our things. We had a set of teachers that would come in twice a year and talk about how they're using their games in their classrooms and stuff. There's been a major change in the way education is approaching computers and the way kids think about and use computers. I think that nowadays, especially with something like Spore, that wants to be primarily entertainment, that I see the value of these things much more in the realm of motivation than education. I'm much more interested in this point in getting kids motivated to be interested in all these different fields whether they're science fields, cultural, engineering or whatever. They have plenty of opportunities and resources to go out there and do further study and learn about these things. If you can get them fundamentally interested in them to begin with. And so that's, I think, more of my agenda, than overtly trying to pour facts into their head.

P: To create something that encourages further exploration.

WW: And I've already heard from a lot of people that will come to me and say, “Oh, I became a civil engineer because I played SimCity when I was twelve.” So I've been making games long enough now that I've actually seen a lot of people growing up being inspired by games and it fundamentally influenced the career path they take. And if you talk to any scientist, actually, they'll have some story about the one little thing that got them into science—they'll have a very personal story about this one thing. And it wasn't flash cards or necessarily even a book, but it was usually some entertaining interaction they had with the real world that got them fundamentally thinking, “Oh, this is way cool. I want to go down this path.” And that's how most scientists wind up where they are.

P: As an entertainment product, is Spore capable of replicating the processes of science such as experimentation? Do you feel those processes are occurring when people play Spore?

WW: I think they occur in almost any game that's made. If you look at any kid playing a game, what they do is they go up and they grab the controller and they start pushing buttons randomly. They observe the results. They start building a model in their head for how the buttons are mapped. Then they start trying to set high-level goals. They start building a more and more elaborate model in their head of the underlying simulation in our game. And they're doing it purely through the scientific method. They observe data. They craft and experiment and do interactions to test their experiment. They observe their results then they increase the resolution of their model. And that's pretty much exactly what the scientific method is. So I think any kid, almost inherently, knows that and recognizes it as such. If you look at adults, they're really the problem case. Adults generally don't want to touch these things until they know what the rules are. They don't want to fail. Whereas kids are totally comfortable with failure-based learning. And so the kids are the whole time experimenting and actually learning much faster as a result of inherently knowing the scientific method. Whereas adults basically want to know all the rules, they're afraid to press the wrong button, they're afraid to experiment, etc., etc.

P: In the New Yorker profile on you, John Seabrook mentioned that you attended an Episcopal School in Louisiana. It suggested that it was there that you formed your atheistic beliefs.

WW: I think I was an atheist before then. I never had a lot of intelligent discourse around why I was an atheist. I've always been fairly impressed with people that are, not fringe, but more mainstream. There were priests and fathers in my high school, that in fact, taught a lot of courses. I took courses in comparative religions with them. At the same time I had a fair amount of interesting theological debate with them about belief systems. And they weren't threatened by it. In fact they grew up in seminary having these types of debates. So it was very engaging to talk to somebody else who had really, fundamentally thought about these questions and arrived at their belief systems through exploration rather than through accident of birth.

In some sense I can really respect people that arrived, even to disagreeing points of view, like certain religious viewpoints, if they've really thought about it and they can sit there and justify in their head why they really believe it. It feels like they've actually gone through the mental exploration to arrive at that belief system. Again, as opposed to just the lazy path of “my parents were Catholic therefore I'm going to be Catholic and I don't even know what ‘Catholic’ means.” They haven't actually followed all the repercussions of what that belief system is actually based on.

P: You admire the rigor in people's beliefs, if there's such a thing.

WW: In fact, I partially think that people should almost invent their own religions. If you fundamentally thought about all these questions that religious systems were built upon you'd probably end up with a more diverse set of potential answers. As opposed to these ten major categories that people gravitate toward. You know, “what church am I going to go to?” That's the biggest problem I have with organized religion at this point. I think it makes people never have to confront these questions and somebody gets up and tells them this is why I'm going to believe this and therefore I'm just going to accept it as a worldview. It's almost like going to a buffet.

P: It's a one-way discussion.

WW: They don't sit there and have discussions exploring all these different branching points of why you may believe something. They basically get up and tell you what the doctrine is. And you're expected to maybe memorize the doctrine or not. But you never question the doctrine.

P: That's the appeal of the Unitarians, I'd imagine. It's a fairly open system. People can come and discuss what they believe and there's no wrong answer there.

WW: Edward O. Wilson, who is one of my favorite scientists, has explored that stuff a lot. He's actually looked at religions over time and he's found that religions like the Unitarian religion they have not built up strong cellular walls, so as a result of that, what happens is all these people come in with different belief systems and it gets pulled and diffused in all these different directions and those religions generally do not last long over generations. It's ones like Catholicism that have this very strong cellular membrane that rejects all other forms of belief. They're the ones that actually last five hundred to a thousand years.

P: The ones that have viral behaviors, “I will make you fishers of men.” They're always expanding.

WW: Wilson was showing that only the dogmatic belief systems have immune systems to reject invaders and will survive over the millennium. Which is kind of depressing.

Review: Mega Man 9 (Wii)

2008-09-24T16:38:34Z

No one in my generation who grew up playing video games needs to be reminded that the production qualities and technological muscle of contemporary video games have reached once-unimaginable levels. There was a time back in the halcyon 8-bit days of yore when too many Octarocks crawling around the screen in Legend of Zelda caused your game to lapse into a lurching slow-motion cadence until things cleared out a bit. You could practically hear Scotty’s muffled brogue coming from inside your NES console: “I’m givin’ her all she’s got, Cap’n.” And 'all she had' was enough. We were too busy enjoying ourselves to care.
]]> Mega Man 9, you have the option of toggling on legacy affectations that good-naturedly mimic some of those familiar glitches from back in the day. Screen sprites—misfiring individual pixels in the display—will flicker occasionally like distant stars. While it seems a bit gimmicky to design a 2008 release in a defiantly traditional 8-bit style, the effect is one of pure joy and elegant simplicity.

Capcom’s use of simulated imperfections in Mega Man 9 feels like the gaming equivalent of a recording engineer going into his studio’s state-of-the-art ProTools rig and adding record crackle to a newly minted track. The nostalgic charm of those subtle imperfections becomes part of the allure. I actually prefer listening to the older, scratched-up records in my vinyl collection—The Four Tops, The Beatles, Stevie Wonder. The crackle of the needle jumping those scratches warms the soul like the sound of wood burning in a campfire. Bob Dylan’s voice ain’t perfect, but it’s also one of a kind. So what if the man has an 8-bit croon? He uses it to great effect, just like Mega Man creator Keiji Inafune and his team do with the so called “limitations” of midi music and slightly beefier pixels.

Mega Man 9 slips effortlessly into the template of the former numbered titles in the series, the last of which came out in 1996. Eight new boss robots to battle and the 2-D side-scrolling, platforming action of its predecessors. Two buttons—jump and fire. The formula’s brilliance is in its deceptive straight-forwardness. Don’t fall into any pits. Don’t touch those pointy spikes. Shoot the robot baddies. But, after playing the game for a couple minutes, you’ll realize these objectives are infinitely easier said than done. The timing of your jumps requires pin-point precision and environments make matters that much more complicated. Introduce a simple gusting wind and see how well you do leaping between platforms over a yawning chasm.

Some of the most savory gaming experiences I’ve had this year were delivered by downloadable titles. The delicious visual bombast and adrenalized survival impulse of Geometry Wars 2; the showered-and-shaved update of a NES classic, Bionic Commando Rearmed; the gorgeous soundtrack and wistful emotional payload of Jonathan Blow’s Braid…and now Mega Man 9.

Talk about a gargantuan win-win. The money game publishers save from not having to manufacture and ship physical product means pure profit for the industry and cheaper games for consumers (maybe the only drawback is that you can’t sell a downloaded game on half.com once you’re finished with it). The relatively modest capital investment required to develop a less tech-intensive project means lower financial risk, which frees game designers up to cultivate fresh, less-commercially-proven ideas. As Nintendo’s bulging pockets have proven, it’s the quality of the gaming experience that will drive our industry forward, not the one-upsmanship of the technology race. No amount of makeup can help an ugly person caught in the unforgiving gaze of HD cameras.

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Watch the trailer for Mega Man 9:

Unglued: The Casual-Gaming Olympics

2008-09-10T21:06:55Z

Major League Gaming, or MLG, is a professional video gaming organization founded in 2002. Its tournaments draw the hardest of the hardcore out of their dank, Doritos-strewn warrens to compete for bushels of prize money, lucrative endorsement deals, and the envy of carbuncular, homophobic, Vitamin-D deficient fragsters across the world. (The hardcore gamers Paste queried for this article declined to comment, standing on the principle that magazines are “gay.”)]]> Paris Hilton’s Jewel Jam, which capitalizes on the success of her wildly popular non-interactive adventure One Night in Paris.) Thanks in no small part to Nintendo’s casual-friendly DS and Wii platforms, casual gaming has become a market force unto itself. So while ESPN and other gaming journalists flocked to MLG’s Halo 3 tourney at the Sands Expo Center in Las Vegas last October, Paste deployed me to the modestly appointed function room of the Poughkeepsie Elks Lodge for the CLG’s inaugural Casual Gaming Olympics, where the casual-est of the casual-core would compete for a fifty-dollar Crate & Barrel gift certificate. My assignment was to secure an interview with one Ms. Hazel Mumgood (screen name: Nuttin_But_Knittin), currently the top-ranked Cooking Mama: Cook Off player in the world.

I clipped my press laminate to my complimentary Brain Age lanyard and wandered around cadging sponsor swag from Good Housekeeping magazine, Depends Adult Undergarments, and MGA Entertainment (the manufacturer of Bratz, which is like Barbie for slutty babies). The Red Bull and Mountain Dew that’s usually plentiful at gaming tournaments was nowhere to be found, so I loaded up on comped calcium supplements, lemon throat lozenges, and Starbucks-brand Caramel Macchiatos (which turned out to be ginormous milkshake-things with no apparent relationship to actual cafés or lattes macchiato). I spotted the septuagenarian Ms. Mumgood’s blue-rinsed bouffant towering over a promotional Bejeweled display. She was staring daggers through her pince-nez at Julie Packer (a.k.a. BratzBabe12039), her eleven-year-old arch nemesis, who was at the Wii Fit warm-up station across the room, doing intricate calisthenics with her grotesquely hypertrophied “Wii-mote arm” while blowing an enormous pink bubble and looking terminally bored.

Ms. Mumgood is a paragon of casual dedication. She has bridge twice per week, and bingo, and of course, her knitting, yet she still manages to log an astounding “hour or two” of Cooking Mama practice time every week. She claims not to own “one of those game machines,” but discovered her preternatural aptitude for pretending to cook when her grandkids brought their Wii over to her house. She doesn’t know what a n00b is but gets by just fine on her Social Security checks without pawning anything, thanks very much. When asked about her strategy for defeating Packer, Mumgood looked around to make sure no one was eavesdropping, and then confided to Paste in a conspiratorial whisper, “I’m just going to grab this doohickey here,” indicating the Wii-mote, “and shake the aitch-ee-double-hockey-sticks out of it.” Unfortunately, the interview was abruptly terminated when I asked Ms. Mumgood to weigh in on the hardcore community’s heated debate over whether Cooking Mama was “for girls,” “lame,” “gay,” or some combination thereof.

[Editor’s note: In a shocking upset, Julie Packer would go on to win by default when, after 15 minutes of official play, Ms. Mumgood quit the game despite her comfortable lead, citing “boredom” and the imminence of what she referred to as her “programs,” apparently referring to syndicated reruns of Dallas and General Hospital. When asked how it felt to be the new Cooking Mama champ, Packer rolled her eyes while texting arcane clusters of letters and diacritics to someone called “Suzie,” to whom she’d like to say “hi” via this article.]

Sam Potts' Geek-Formation Flowchart

2008-09-09T19:02:22Z

Mmm....Gandalf, Mountain Dew and Hot Pockets. Delicious.

Mr. Potts, we salute you. In the vulcan manner, of course.

**Click on the image to see a larger version

NetHack: How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love Death

2008-09-04T18:19:44Z

Our memory has grown a bit hazy lately with the glut of cookie-cutter, loot-based RPGs that have carved a wide swathe across the gaming landscape. For many, Diablo is the earliest incarnation of the dungeon crawler that readily comes to mind. Diablo, iconic as it may be, is forever indebted to a game that came nearly a decade before and set the gold standard for hack ’n’ slash RPGs, Nethack, a game that is simultaneously more complicated than any other game out there, yet almost small enough to fit on a single 3.5” diskette. As a representative of your deity, your adventurer must make its way to the bottom of the Dungeons of Doom and retrieve the amulet of Yendor, so that their god might ascend above all others. Things are never quite as simple as they sound. ]]> Nethack was published in 1987 to comp.sources.games on Usenet as a refinement of its previous incarnation, Rogue. ‘Hack’ alludes to the swords-and-sorcery nature of the game, while the ‘Net’ prefix refers to the still active online community that regularly releases updates. You play the game entirely in ASCII, which means everything is text-based. Movement and actions are controlled by key combinations, and colored characters on the screen represent items, monsters and architecture in each randomly-generated dungeon. The low-tech design means that if you can read this, odds are your computer can play Nethack. The game is available for download, for free, on most operating systems at http://www.nethack.org.

As a case study in video-game history it’s interesting enough, but the real appeal of Nethack, and what keeps players coming back for more, is that the game is utterly merciless. Nethack sets the bar for sadism in video games—the controller-smashing frustration of Super Ghouls ’n Ghosts can seem like a welcome reprieve after a floating eye freezes your character and a grid bug nibbles you to death. Monsters, traps, rotten food, and a single ill-advised decision will put your character six feet under, over and over again.

You will die often, and there are no second chances. Once you die, your character’s gone forever - there’s no reloading, and you have to start at the beginning of the dungeon again as a level 1 bumpkin. You can save, but only to take a break from the game, since your save file is deleted as soon as you load it. Veteran hackers (as players endearingly term themselves) are all too familiar with the dreaded death screen: “Do you want your possessions identified? ”. Fortunately, with all that death you’ll have plenty of time to experiment with the 5 different races and 12 classes, leaving you plenty of wiggle room to find a play style that suits you.

Nethack is a difficult game, but it’s not entirely unreasonable. Once you have a grasp of the game’s mechanics you’ll find yourself making steady progress. The level of open-ended randomness in each game will always keep you on your toes—every action you take has butterfly effect-style ramifications. If you play as a dwarf, the gnomes and dwarves of the Gnomish Mines will be friendly to you, but you’ll be KOS to the goblins in the lower depths of the dungeon. A Healer is an easier class in the early game since they can heal themselves and conjure their own food, but they’ll hit a serious wall as they run up against tougher fauna. You can use that scroll of teleportation now to escape a horde of monsters, but you might regret it later when you activate an unidentified wand that buries you beneath an avalanche of boulders. You might want to ditch that cloak of frost resistance to ease your load, but there could be an ice giant just around the corner.

The versatile nature of the game is ultimately what makes Nethack so engrossing. Unlike modern games that prepackage your entertainment in hi-def visuals hi-fi surround sound, Nethack relies entirely on your imagination. Once you get into it, you'll breathe a sigh of relief when you see the "_" of your deity’s altar in the dungeon ahead, and you'll squirm in terror when you see the "L" of an arch-lich round the corner. The adventure isn't being force-fed to you by a screen, it's inside your head, which is exactly where it's best. The learning curve can be steep, but the reward is one of the most engrossing, satisfying and engaging games you’ll ever play.

This Title Brought To You By Nabisco!

2008-07-28T20:32:12Z

My explorers were underdeveloped, but I’d spent my meager gold supply on the strongest armor and weaponry I could, and spread it amongst the party to minimize collateral damage as they endeavored into a dungeon they might not all survive.

The going was treacherous but manageable; the healers, in back, tossed regenerative spells to the truncheon-wielding marauders on the front line, as my ranged-weapon users chucked arrows and bombs into the fray from safe distance. At once we came upon a mighty dragon, and I was unprepared for its fiery countenance, and breath. Down went my front line of fighters, at which point one of my clerics yelled out,

“Quick, use a Red Bull™-Brand Phoenix Down to revive our ally and fill him with the necessary vigor and energy to make it through the battle, and the rest of his day!”

Ridiculous? Oh yeah. Unthinkable? Not for long. Real-world advertisements are creeping into gamespaces at an alarming rate, regardless of the comfort of the fit, and every few months a new story crosses the wire about some ad agency inking a deal with a major game company to install ads in their games.

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But the happy medium is being giddily ignored, for dubious reasons. Sure, it adds to the realism to see billboards for real-world products whipping past my car at 150 mph in a game of Burnout, and on banners and signs in the stadiums in a game of Madden. And some developers even pursue ad opportunities that genuinely make sense within the context of the game, as with the Guitar Hero series licensing actual name-brand guitars to appear in-game to let budding faux-musicians further lose themselves in the rock-god fantasy.

But what of completely unrelated ads that pop up during loading screens, or as actual in-game powerups, or even worse, as flow-breaking obstructions akin to an Internet popup ad? Does a virtual world feel more real if I can stop at a vending machine every thirty feet, no matter how insane or dangerous the location, and buy some Bawls energy drink? Who are the unlucky short-straw-drawing Bawls drivers who must make supply runs to refill the machine just outside the dungeon of some superpowered enemy?

For that matter, how on earth could a group of human beings, assumedly each with consciences that now keep them awake nights, greenlight a platforming game based wholly on Skittles?

Yes, it happened. Yes, it was terrible beyond comprehension. And it raises a question of whose hunger is being fed here. Are developers reaching out to anyone they can get to smear logo feces across a game and completely pop the delicate bubble of immersion that games can hold over the player? Or are corporations researching games, sussing out where best to expose unwitting gamers to their occasionally related products?

When Electronic Arts’ 2008 title Army of Two was still in development, the publicity mavens made a big deal out of the (since discarded ) mechanism where your in-game avatar could shove a tampon into a bullet wound on his body as a makeshift field dressing in the heat of battle. Do you suppose Tampax lobbied to be mentioned by name by the two grizzled, muscled killers-for-hire during in-game cinematics, just in case a previously untapped demographic could be addressed?

The biggest crime here is that the rise of in-game ads violates the whole purpose. As consumers, we tacitly allow ads because they make a product cheaper (or free) to us, since the advertised companies are footing some of the bill. But gamers aren’t seeing any of these savings passed onto them. Quite the opposite, as any of us can attest who remember buying new games for forty bucks a pop on the original Playstation, and now shell out sixty for sequels to the same games on the Playstation 3. Or paying for the privilege of wading through ads on Xbox Live in order to access downloadable content (that, again, we’re paying for without any recompense that an ad should allow).

It’s all so wearying after a while that it’d almost be easier to just shut off the game and go see a movie, were it not for the 20 minutes of ads someone has managed to unspool on the big screen before so much as a coming attraction trailer starts.

Speak with your wallets, gamers. And not like the ad buyers want you to. Let enough ad-lousy titles perish at retail and maybe, just maybe, the message will get across that The Legend of Zelda: Reebok’s Awakening isn’t a fantasy world anyone wants to visit.

E3 2008 (Video games and stuff like that)

2008-07-17T03:08:53Z

If I ever get jaded about video games, somebody please slap me...hard. This year's installment of the Electronic Entertainment Expo in Los Angeles is winding down and there's enough exciting stuff on the way to keep you crossing out calendar days in red Sharpie from now till eternity. When Bethesda Softworks' post-apocalyptic epic Fallout 3 (pictured above) arrives this fall, I will be calling in sick every day until I a) get fired for lying, or 2) get sick for real and still get fired. Or maybe I'll just do what I did with Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion: play until the birds outside start getting chatty, then jump in bed for a quick nap before work. I talked to Bethesda's Creative Lead, Todd Howard, for a few minutes this afternoon and he doesn't seem to be getting much sleep either. He arrives to the office when it's dark, leaves when it's dark. Goes home, goes to sleep, goes to work, goes home. His dedication is pretty inspiring, actually. "I don't take it lightly that people would pay $60 for our game," he said. "That's a lot of money for a piece of entertainment. I want to make Fallout 3 worth the investment."

Check out the trailer below before moving on to the highlights from the rest of the week:

]]> 10 other things that have excited me so far this week:

1) Gears of War 2 looks amazing. There's a majesty to the battered landscape in this sequel that wasn't quite as epic in the first installment. The smoke trails winding up into the sky from some smoldering wreckage far away as you and your fellow soldiers battle the menacing Locust hordes. The action feels more dynamic this time as well. During the Microsoft media briefing, lead designer Cliffy B demoed a sequence in the game where you're in the elevator of a toppled building as it gets pulled along on its side, alien hordes snarling at you as the door opens and you send a cloud of bullets spraying. Exciting stuff.

2) Fable II from legendary RPG designer Peter Molyneux is also coming this fall. In addition to being a questing hero, you can get married, have kids, buy a house in the country. The realism is shocking. If you're gone from home too long, your wife pouts upon your return and your kids tell you not to go away again. That's right, guilt is coming to an Xbox 360 console near you this holiday season. Also exciting is the breakthrough co-op experience. If your friend on the West Coast is on Xbox Live and playing at the same time as you, having her join your game is as easy as walking your character up to her and asking her to join your adventure. Friends can drop in and drop out of your game on a whim.

3) One of the interesting developments that seems to be happening in RPGs is the AI dog sidekick. Game makers seem to be realizing the emotional bond between pets and their owners and the potential for bringing that into the virtual space. In Fable II, your dog runs devotedly alongside you, nipping excitedly, occasionally running off the trail when it catches the scent of a treasure chest. It will start barking uncontrollably at an enemy threat lurking around the corner. In Fallout 3, you meet a furry canine friend that you name Dogmeat (I know, perfect).

4) Even though you're sick of hearing about RPGs, the most exciting announcement of the Microsoft media briefing was the news that Final Fantasy XIII is coming to the Xbox 360. There are a lot of 360 owners out there who were finally ready to cave and get a Playstation 3. Now it's likely they'll spend that $399 on a tank of gas, instead.

5) Microsoft has partnered with Netflix so Xbox Live users who already subscribe to the mail rental service will now be able to download and watch on-demand movies from their console. Nice. No additional cost. Very nice.

6) Sequel to Galaga. It's called Galaga Legions and is being developed by Namco Bandai. It's about time.

7) While we're talking sequels, Portal: Still Alive is on the way.

8) Microsoft is getting ready to launch a karaoke game called Lips. Looks pretty fun. Most exciting feature is that you'll be able to plug in your iPod and do karaoke from your own music collection. Not sure if you'll get lyrics to follow along with onscreen when you do.

9) The war between Guitar Hero and Rock Band is heating up. Guitar Hero: World Tour will feature a drum kit (including cymbals), a full-band approach, even a little Pro Tools kind of interface where you can make your own original multi-tracked music and share it with friends. Rock Band 2 boasts a master track from the forthcoming Chinese Democracy. They're also the first to convince Dylan to license one of his songs to a video game so get ready to play "Tangled Up In Blue" off Blood On The Tracks.

10) Electronic Arts had some exciting news to share at its media briefing. Their survival-horror title Dead Space looks thrilling. The trailer had this freaky rendition of "Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star" playing over images of soldiers getting ripped apart by grotesque aliens aboard some space station. If you wet your pants easily, don't view the following trailer:

NBA Live '09 will feature something called Dynamic DNA where the game will update "player tendencies" daily from what's going on in the real-life league. If your point-guard's free-throw percentage drops off mid-season, you'll have a harder time sinking free throws in the game.

Spore is looking to be every bit the revelation we imagined it might be with Sims mastermind Will Wright at the helm. In the trailer shown at the press conference, it actually managed to sidestep the controversy of its evolution content by subtly highlighting the fact that the cute little blob onscreen with 14 eyeballs and a big purple flagella is being controlled by a higher being. In the case of the game, you. It'll be fascinating to see how proponents of intelligent design attempt to take this one on. After all, the process ain't haphazard when there's a person holding a controller.

You Don't Know, Jack

2008-05-16T15:29:12Z

It’s a good thing anti-gaming attorney Jack Thompson doesn’t give a damn.

In 2005, when the “Hot Coffee” scandal broke regarding sexual content (inaccessible to players) left on the extra disc space in Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, he was among the first voices of outrage, yelling to all who would listen that the downfall of civilization was nigh, and that we could subvert the catastrophe if we’d just forget about the First Amendment and get on board with governmental legislation of the gaming industry.

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He was in front of a camera within hours of the Virginia Tech shooting in 2007, yelling to all who would listen that the shooter had honed his skills on violent video games before his attack. It didn’t matter that everyone who knew the shooter came forth in the days following to directly contradict that assertion, adding that they’d never seen the shooter play ANY video game, violent or not.

It didn’t matter, because it gave a purveyor of hot air a conduit with which to blow.

It’s a good thing he doesn’t give a damn.

Jack is a lawyer by trade and a charlatan by reputation, though the distinction some would find arguable. His raison d’etre is to play the role of Alarmist Talking Head on news shows whose producers don’t know better, and to spew poorly researched and often confrontationally incorrect and inflammatory opinion posited as fact, regarding the games industry. His stated aim is clear: legislation of violent or sexual video games, and banning any titles which violate his patrician’s view of suitable content for a game.

His antics are well-known within the industry. He’s locked horns at length with Take Two Interactive, the producer of the Grand Theft Auto series, and clearly views himself as a David versus their Goliath. He attacks their product without knowing the first thing about it; when their charming boarding-school fantasy Bully was nearing release in 2006, Jack needed only the game’s title and publisher in order to go on a public tirade about some nonexistent game in which players are rewarded for bullying their fellow students, and given bonuses for especially egregious violence. None of this was in Bully, of course, but what did it matter?

He’s made enough noise to be considered an authority on a topic about which he clearly knows perilously little; politicians have taken counsel with him in forming pro-regulatory views of the gaming industry, such is his perceived influence and ability to capitalize on mainstream media’s ignorance of the nature of gaming. Any research of their trusted “industry insider” would show that he’s seen as a shrill demagogue at risk of being disbarred for his repeated disdain for legal process, as he’s gone out of his way to draw up unwarranted litigation against his opponents time and again, to no avail, at cost to taxpayers.

Intellectuals in the gaming community have repeatedly attempted to make simple, ground-level points to the man regarding the average age of gamers today (it’s thirty-two, by the way, and not the single-digit number Jack evidently would have us believe) and the burgeoning mature markets that gaming must utilize in order to be on par with film and music and literature as tastemakers for adults. It doesn’t matter. He’s not interested in facts.

It’s a good thing he doesn’t give a damn.

Not about children, anyway. Not about gamers, nor violence, nor sexual content, nor accuracy and integrity in one’s convictions, nor whether video games are regulated by the government or protected expressions of free speech.

Jack cares about none of that. Jack cares about yelling to all who will listen, to advance his own opinions and beliefs on the legislature and make his own views manifest in the eyes of the law, no matter how lacking in foundation.

Jack is a brand name, now. It’s about being on TV, and having “expert” attached to your name in an on-screen graphic written by someone who doesn’t know better. It’s about instilling fear in soccer moms and clueless seniors, who see kids gaming and will react with an audible knee-jerk to any perceived danger therein, no matter how manufactured.

I don’t buy Jack. My mind can’t handle the toxicity in its ingredients.

But I still have to hear his crowing any time there is a disaster by which he can get in front of a camera and peddle the Jack brand of fear-mongering and misinformation. I have to watch him pick his battles based on what’s most likely to get him on television, as he makes targets out of innocuous titles like Bully while ignoring games like Persona 3, in which the teenaged protagonist characters unleash their “inner demons” by miming shooting themselves in the heads with devices strongly resembling guns.

Where’s the outrage over THAT title, Jack? Oh, right. That’s not a heavily marketed title, and not likely to get him on a poorly researched cable news segment pretending to debate “whether games have gone too far.” It’s not worth his time. Not like going on TV following the release of Grand Theft Auto IV and, bafflingly, comparing the game to the polio virus. Or writing letters to the mother of a Take-Two executive imploring her to feel shame for her son’s business decisions.

It’s a good thing he doesn’t actually give a damn.

Can you imagine how terrible it would be if he did?

This Title Is Rated "I" For Immature

2008-05-14T21:29:57Z

As a hobby and as an industry, gaming is going through some wicked growing pains. Games are truly the rock & roll of this generation; non-gamers decry it as childish escapism at best, a ticking time-bomb of societal menace at worst, while we in the fold can rarely muster up anything more effective as a counterpoint than “you’ll see if you just give ‘em a try!” While that parry could stand a chance to some change-averse politico with an album they can simply passively listen to, it suffers in this medium of interactive entertainment. Realistically, who is going to take time away from railing against games as harbingers of the apocalypse long enough to sit down with a controller and struggle through the thousand “how do I make my guy do this?” situations gamers adapted to long ago?

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The average gamer is 32 years old. It’s a statistic that shocks many when they first hear it, but it makes sense; the generation that made Nintendo billionaires in the eighties has grown up and, by and large, kept playing around jobs and raising families. And we are many, enough to skew the average up from the gamers targeted by annual Hannah Montana and That’s So Raven games.

What hasn’t shifted with this median age, though, is the public perception of games as being just for kids. Whenever violent or sexual content in gaming is brought up in the media, it is universally accompanied by some blowhard espousing the haggard old platitude, “Won’t someone think of the children?” as if it’s still relevant or fresh. Gamers profess frustration at outsiders’ ignorance of our hobby, but there’s something to be said for stepping out of your experience and viewing an issue through your opponent’s eyes.

It lets you see message boards filled with gamers’ ire that they have to “settle” for just the hint of horrific, unsparing depictions of evisceration in games like Manhunt 2, instead of the full unblinking torture-porn glory of it all, once the censors got done with it. It lets you see whole sectors of gamers thrown into an outrage when a highly-anticipated title only gets an 8.8 out of 10 from a professional reviewer upon release.

It lets you see the gaming industry crying from the rafters that it wants to be respected as a reputable art form for people of varying ages, just as film or literature are, and yet being complacent in selling favorable reviews to advertisers. Or only using the 7-10 range on a 10 point review scale to avoid angering passion-blinded fanboys. Or printing gushing previews of upcoming titles in which some hot new game is lauded for being “just like a blockbuster movie” in its presentation, as if the lowest common denominator just isn’t low enough.

From an outsider’s eye, the industry is run by children, for children, and begs to be marginalized. Roger Ebert’s infamous and oft-repeated belief that games can never be considered art is understandable, when our greatest knock-kneed aspiration is to create an experience emulating a Michael Bay film, which itself could never be confused for art.

This isn’t simple curmudgeon’s semantics; aspiring to emulate film is not the problem. The problem, for gamers professing this hobby as an adult’s enterprise, is the dearth of intelligent, thought-provoking, truly adult games at retail, and the palsied acceptance by consumers of the few which exist. The Okamis and Icos and Beyond Good & Evils of the world languish at the feet of Generic Space Marine Shooter #3476 and Amnesiac With Ridiculous Hair Fights Evil With A Sword The Size of a Pontiac, Volume MCXXXVIII, while gamers pretend they have no voice in forcing gaming’s maturation. The encouraging success of titles like Bioshock and Mass Effect underscores this voice; the developers are listening, and will only churn out what we want. And what we want, evidently, are at least seven World War II-themed first-person shooters every year.

Escapist fare is fine. The film industry floats on it every summer. But they also have a balance, with artistic expressions that stand to broaden our perspective of our world and our place in it. Games, more often than not, settle for the prettiest explosions they can generate, or the skimpiest outfits, or the most caringly-depicted disembowelings.

Perhaps the worst part of all of this is that the outsider looks at something like Manhunt 2 and assumes it’s what we mean when we describe ‘mature’ gaming. Show me the first person ready to rally around Manhunt 2 as a bellwether for adult gaming and I’ll show you a misguided and probably teenaged debater who has yet to truly examine what adults truly want from their games, as it would take precious time away from blanketing gaming website message boards with posts decrying the juvenilia of the industry.

Especially when it could all be made okay, and the outsiders would all see, if they’d just give ‘em a try.

Whither Accountability?

2008-04-21T17:34:00Z

By: Justin Cooper

Not long ago, Chuck Klosterman wrote an editorial for Esquire which explored gaming’s noticeable dearth of a true critical voice. Certainly there are review sections in gaming magazines and websites, but more often than not they focus on tech jargon and system specs, serving more of a consumer advice function than of true criticism of a game’s place in the world into which it was born. The great films can be discussed in that context; the American Film Institute has made a cottage industry of just such discussions, in numbered lists meant to engender debate. Why does gaming not have that shorthand available to it? How come I can make an oblique reference to Citizen Kane in this sentence and have every one of you (even those of you who’ve never seen a frame of the film) know of the cultural touchstone implied beneath its title, but if I make much the same contextual reference to Bioshock or Ico or Grim Fandango or Metal Gear Solid, I’m met more often than not with a blank stare?

It’s because gaming doesn’t have that bedrock of critical appraisal with which to determine those cultural touchstones. There isn’t that almost oligarchic monolith of a critic with the trust of the public as a true taste-maker, with both the ability and want to dissect a game’s place in society as much as its multiplayer capture-the-flag options, its sociological impact alongside its frames-per-second, its allegorical messages and deeper truths sharing ink with its utilization of dual-wielding and sidequests. As Mr. Klosterman wrote, “There is no Pauline Kael of video-game writing. There is no Lester Bangs of video-game writing. And I’m starting to suspect there will never be that kind of authoritative critical voice within the world of video games…”

It’s getting easier to agree with him lately. Jeff Gerstmann, longtime editor at game review/preview site Gamespot, was recently let go under what could generously be called shady circumstances. The higher-ups at Gamespot, via its parent company C|Net, deny what many gamers believe to be the cause of his dismissal, but the stench of corruption is yet to relent from the outward appearance that a well-regarded, tenured editor was unceremoniously let go following an unfavorable review of a game supported through ad revenue at the same website.

Why would a nascent Lester Bangs or Pauline Kael ever venture into game critique, knowing what we now know or are left to believe? What is to be gained by attempting to be that first authoritative, fearless voice, beyond paving a road for others to perhaps follow once you’ve been driven from the field and into other, more scrupulous journalistic endeavors?

There is plenty of conjecture, but there are also certain facts we know for sure.

We know that Gamespot had, in the days leading up to Gerstmann’s firing, been engaging in heavy banner advertising for the Eidos title from late last year, Kane & Lynch: Dead Men. This advertising extended beyond the usual banner and side-banner ads and into user-manipulated content, letting the site’s visitors choose which Kane & Lynch “skin” they wanted overlaid on the site during their perusal. Essentially, it was impossible to navigate Gamespot in mid-to-late November without being bombarded with the knowledge that this game was coming soon.

We also know that Eidos had committed to thousands of dollars’ worth of future advertising on Gamespot, beyond its gaudy and intrusive Kane & Lynch campaign.

We know that Jeff Gerstmann wrote a disparaging review of Kane & Lynch for Gamespot, in which he gave the game an above-average 6.0 out of 10 but also voiced several misgivings about the title, which could be seen as overtly snarky depending on one’s perspective. This written review was bolstered by a video review, since taken down by Gamespot (and then put BACK up following waves of public outcry), which was arguably even less kind in its savaging of the game’s various shortcomings.

We know that Jeff Gerstmann posted that written review and its attendant video review, then finished the pre-Thanksgiving weekend crunch with his fellow editors before heading home for the holiday… and returned from said holiday to find his office locked and his personal effects in a box in the lobby for him to pick up on his way out.

We know that, as the story broke, Gamespot posted an editorial notice that somehow failed to mention that Gerstmann had even been fired; instead euphemisms abounded for how he’d “moved on,” et al. To the uninitiated eye, the two entities could be seen as parting amicably instead of the employee being kept on and used long enough to get through the tough pre-holiday weekend and then sacked while away and with no notification.

Finally, we know that Jeff Gerstmann confirmed his firing, but due to the always nebulous, always sinister-sounding “legal reasons” he was unable to elaborate on the reasoning thereof. We also know, but are asked not to correlate, that Eidos contacted Gamespot and C|Net to voice their disapproval of the content and tone of Gerstmann’s review once it was uploaded for public consumption.

From here we saunter rather haphazardly into conjecture, though one can argue that it is, at the very least, not far-fetched conjecture. The dots connect themselves, to a degree: Eidos sees the negative review, appearing on the very page as Kane’s and Lynch’s leering mugs in the ubiquitous advertising, and raises concern to Gamespot and C|Net. Talk is made of Eidos’ substantial ad stake in Gamespot’s revenues. Jeff Gerstmann is sacrificed to suture that potential fissure in the ad stream.

Advertiser Dictates Content—Content Provider Scrambles To Make Peace Once Public Finds Out. It’s a wordy headline, but it’s also a very worthy one, if merited.

By no means am I arguing that Jeff Gerstmann was gaming’s Lester Bangs. But what on earth could possibly draw our hobby’s prospective Lester into the fold, once he or she saw the treatment bestowed on a writer with eleven years experience at his post, all for writing a review at odds with corporations pumping ad money into his employers’ site? What would our rhetorical Mr. Bangs say about his career choice had he the knowledge that Gamespot, in its desperate sweaty-palmed rush to avoid looking like a comical mustache-twirling villain, has taken to disparaging Gerstmann’s “tone” in his entire body of work as of late as justification for his dismissal, in a move that essentially answers the question, “Have you no decency, sir?” with a very honorable and Joseph McCarthy-esque, “Hey, look over here at this other thing instead, isn’t it SCANDLOUS?!”

The unspoken undercurrent of Mr. Klosterman’s Esquire piece was that gaming journalism would never change until the gamers made it clear that such a change is what they want.

If that’s the case, then maybe there’s room for our Lester Bangs yet.

In the days immediately following the unveiling of what’s now being called “Gerstmann-Gate,” Gamespot has weathered a vehement backlash from all corners of the Internet. Its credibility as a news organization has been perhaps irreparably slandered, its name made to stand for a huckster’s cash-grabbing avarice. The site has reportedly hemorrhaged money due to the cancellation, in droves, of its paid subscriber base. Irate users have attacked the Kane & Lynch page on Gamespot, bombarding the User Reviews section with malignant “1.0 out of 10” reviews to spite Eidos’ attempts to stifle dissenting critique, thus pulling the average user review score down to an abysmal 2.6 before Gamespot actually froze user reviews for just that title to stop the free-fall. As image repair gestures go, it was tantamount to closing the barn door after the cows have all gotten out, the hay bales set on fire, and the foreclosure papers signed.

Indeed, even Gamespot’s own editorial staff is up in arms, as the rank and file employees at the website have been murmuring about “mass resignations” if parent company C|Net did not open the channels of communication with Gamespot’s users and allow for some transparency in how the site claims to have honestly dealt with Gerstmann.

Gamespot finally posted a more in-depth response almost a week after the firing, in which they finally referred to it as a “termination”; they had little choice, what with the angry digital horde all but on their doorsteps with torches. It would be easy to demonize anything less than a blanket mea culpa from the website; conversely, it was difficult to swallow the sea of coincidences we were asked to accept in the skein of events immediately preceding and following Gerstmann’s dismissal.

If we’re accepting, despite everything our eyes and ears tell us, that there is no ad-revenue related culpability in Gerstmann’s dismissal, then as part and parcel we are also accepting:

--That Gerstmann’s lengthy tenure was increasingly fraught with sloppy work and a “celebrity attitude,” which included “tone” issues putting him at odds with C|Net management, and that the snarky attitude in the Kane & Lynch review was simply the proverbial last straw.

--That Gerstmann’s video review was quickly yanked from Gamespot due to some sort of audio problem with the microphone used to record the video (although the clip, salvaged for easy reference on YouTube in case Gamespot removes it once more, sounds fine) and due to not enough in-game scenes shown in the clip (I count less than ten total seconds out of the four-and-a-half minute clip which do not have the game at least running above Gerstmann’s shoulder as he discusses the title, with over two minutes devoted to full-screen game footage).

--That the physical text of Gerstmann’s review was altered by Gamespot after his dismissal, but solely because, in Gamespot’s words, “Jeff’s supervisors and select members of the editorial team felt the review’s negativity did not match its ‘fair’ 6.0 rating. The copy was adjusted several days after its publication so that it better meshed with its score, which remained unchanged.”

--That the sudden disappearance of all Kane & Lynch advertising “skins” from Gamespot was due to a preordained ad purchase schedule which just happened to cycle as Gerstmann was fired and outrage began to bloom.

--That Eidos’ complaints, and their sizeable monetary contributions to the site’s bottom line, had nothing at all to do with any of the preceding.

Perhaps gaming doesn’t yet have its Lester Bangs because it’s in more dire need of its Woodward and Bernstein.

It would be too easy at this point to confuse a faceless corporation for the actual faces behind it. Before we are fully overwhelmed by our zeal for Gamespot’s collective head on a platter, we’d be wise to consider the honest editors left behind by this black mark on gaming journalism, and how it could mean positive change going forward, industry-wide. Gamespot editor Kevin Van Ord had this to say about Gerstmann’s termination in a personal blog posted soon afterward:

“As much as you may feel in the dark about what is happening, please know that we are too. It is confusing, upsetting, and hurtful. In the blink of an eye, my mentor no longer sits 50 feet from me. When I need advice and encouragement and shielding, my greatest advocate is no longer there to offer that kind of support.”

In this way, Jeff Gerstmann did end up sharing some of the traits of a Lester Bangs. By his peers he is respected deeply, his impact is felt, and he is missed. It may be the closest surrogate we can aspire to, for now.

The Art of Scapegoating

2008-04-16T16:12:00Z

By: Justin Cooper

We’ve grown weary from battle. We try to keep a level head, stay calm in the face of adversity. We remember Bunker Hill, and Prescott’s famous advice, “Don’t fire until you see the whites of their eyes.”

But we see the enemy closing in on all sides, and it’s suffocating and saddening in equal terms.

The “we” I speak of are gamers, and the war we fight is seemingly never-ending, for as long as there are politicians and media willing to pervert a misunderstood hobby beyond reason in order to make a good story or stump speech, we have our work cut out for us in guaranteeing freedom of expression for our games and their developers.

Mortal Kombat was a bellwether for the industry, in that it brought about the first Congressional hearings on possible federal gaming regulation back in 1993. Born from that was the Entertainment Software Ratings Board, with its voluntary rating system akin to the Motion Picture Association of America’s voluntary film-rating scale.

Neither scale is perfect; neither has the universal approval and comprehension from the public and the politicos.

And yet ours is so readily assailable when something unspeakable happens to our culture—at Columbine, at Virginia Tech—and talking-head idiots hop in front of a camera to blame violent video games. In that sense, games are truly the rock ’n’ roll of this generation. It doesn’t matter that no study exists to prove even the most tenuous causal link between gaming and behavioral violence; it sure makes a good headline in 92-point font.

On December 6th, 2007, two Colorado teens were babysitting a seven-year-old girl, sibling to one of the teens. Reports differ as to exactly what transpired, but common to all accounts is that the teens were drinking, that they were acting out martial arts moves from Mortal Kombat, and, most horrifyingly of all, that they were using the younger girl as a human punching bag for their fun.

That little girl died from injuries sustained during the evening. Autopsy results showed she sustained, among other things, a broken wrist, over 20 visible bruises, swelling on the brain and bleeding in the muscle tissue of her spine around her neck.

It is appalling beyond comprehension to think of the evil and ignorance which led to her death. It is just as disgusting to see the mainstream media jump on a 14-year-old video game as the obvious cause of her death, in their rush to overlook that the teens had been drinking heavily that night. Or that the young man, who reportedly delivered the final kick that sent that poor girl to the ground for the last time, admitted to police that she’d asked him to stop hitting her, but that he didn’t because “I was drunk.” Or that he was referring to his hands as “lethal weapons” throughout the ordeal, as he swung them on a child less than half his age and a third his size. Or that his girlfriend, the older sister to the dying girl, did nothing to prevent it.

Or, heartbreakingly, that the girl had told people of being beaten by her big sister’s boyfriend in the past, and was outwardly reticent to go home in the evenings.

That there is a festering sickness within these two freshly minted killers is beyond question. That we as a culture choose to blithely ignore the actual causes in order to erect easily-pummeled straw men makes us complicit in manufacturing the poison that made these teens what they are.

Because our endless fight is already plenty difficult. We don’t need to feed our opponents’ coffers with fresh reasons that games should be censored, or abolished; never mind that the reasoning here sounds like slapped-together justification by teens forged in media savvy and lazy scapegoating.

That won’t matter to our opponents on the other side of this war. They never wait to see the whites of our eyes. They blindside with flawed logic from questionably funded studies, and blanket the uninformed public with rhetoric, painting games as a harbinger of whatever manufactured Apocalypse scares them the most.

As human beings we are sickened by the story of what happened to that little girl in Colorado. As weary soldiers on the other side of this fight, we know that the Bunker Hill quote cannot help us, and we prepare our thickest armor for what comes next, once the mainstream media gets hold of this story and its “cause.”

And we think of a far different quote than General Prescott’s, courtesy of the author Dorothy Parker:

“They fear the calm who know the storm.”

Press X Chromosome To Continue

2008-04-14T18:20:00Z

By: Justin Cooper

I was fourteen, and nervous. She looked the same age, but far more self-assured. And gorgeous. I dropped my quarters into Street Fighter II, selecting Guile to face off against her. Ken (with whom she’d just dispatched two other knock-kneed dudes before my turn), and I had roughly three seconds to ponder whether chivalry dictated my keeping it close, before the match was over and I was just the latest boy this siren had laid waste to in the arcade that day.

Not too long ago this tale would’ve been met with a raised eyebrow, The Myth of the Girl Gamer. But the face of gaming has changed remarkably in the last decade or so. The stigma of gaming being somehow unladylike is disappearing, and the barrier of entry for curious women is rapidly disintegrating.

If only guys would wise up to the phenomenon and better adapt. Developers seem to have a hard time imagining a girl holding her own in Halo or enjoying some casual Grand Theft Auto; they’re far more ready to haplessly subject burgeoning girl gamers to Barbie games and mall-shopping simulations, assuming that’s what girls are into—besides the color pink and unicorns, that is.

It’s worse online. Tune in to any online multiplayer match and imagine the burden of being a woman in that environment and daring to reveal it to the boys-club hierarchy therein. Certainly there are enlightened exceptions, but guys still tend to revert to grade-school boys around female gamers, as if we don’t know how to act.

If online message boards are any indication, guys still regard Ubisoft’s producer Jade Raymond (Assassin’s Creed) like a curio from a museum: Look, it’s an actual woman in the industry who seems to know her stuff! And she’s beautiful! It reinforces the notion that it’s just too bizarre to comprehend women’s involvement in the various phases of the industry, even as consumers enjoying the finished product. This extends to the game avatars themselves; many of us recall the flabbergasting moment after finishing Metroid only to have fearless hero Samus Aran pull of his helmet to reveal that he’s actually been our fearless heroine this whole time. It was the ultimate Keyser-Soze-style hoodwink of our young gaming careers.

The hyper-sexuality of game characters is a strong barrier we’ve yet to topple. Smart, independent female protagonists (Alyx Vance, April Ryan, and, yes, even Lara Croft) are far outnumbered by balloon-breasted sex automatons seemingly allergic to clothing (the Dead or Alive girls, anyone?) and helpless damsels waiting lamely to be rescued (Princess Peach, a thousand times over). Surely gamers can evolve past our long winter of adolescence, as equity of the sexes becomes more of a reality.

Change is in the air. It’s for the better, and we’d all be better served to adapt. You skeptics with raised eyebrows would be well to know that demographic studies place women as high as 48 percent of the game-buying populace, proportionate to world population.

If casual, accessible fare like The Sims, Nintendogs and Wii Sports are what it takes to make women eventually take a more serious look at the Bioshocks, Silent Hills and Metroids of the world, then male gamers should be all for it. After all, before she was the baddest bounty hunter in the cosmos, I’ll bet Samus Aran weathered her fair share of disbelieving glances from guys who couldn’t believe their eyes, either.

Heeeeello Halo!

2007-09-25T17:49:00Z

I consider myself a pretty hardcore gamer. I’ve got multiple consoles and at least one handheld and stacks of games cluttering one corner of my living room. I regularly light incense and bow prostrate before the guy who came up with the idea of an Italian plumber jumping on turtles in a toadstool kingdom (mushrooms indeed!). Even still, for the past several years Halo was something that other people stayed up all night playing. I had my precious RPGs and Action Adventures—my Final Fantasys, my Zeldas, my Elder Scrollses—and decided I had no interest in first-person shooters. However, after recently having my mind blown into several thousand tiny little pieces by BioShock (see my full review in Paste‘s November issue), I decided that maybe, just maybe, I was out of my mind and had wasted 28 years not savoring the full awesomeness of the FPS genre. Even though I’d never played the first two installments of Halo, all of a sudden I absolutely couldn’t wait for Halo 3 to come out. To the point that I decided it would be an extremely good idea to go to a Harry Potter-style midnight release party and geek out with lots of people I didn’t know.

This is my view from the back of the line. I was very relieved when a few guys strolled up and stood behind me because it made me feel like a silver medalist all of a sudden. I would not be the last human being on earth to drop $60 on this game. It was interesting to survey the people standing in line. What exactly does a gamer look like? Well, the line consisted mostly of dudes, a few girls, black people, white people, Asian people, guys in wheelchairs, fat guys, skinny hipsters chain-smoking and chain-texting, people with tattoos, middle-aged people with flat-top haircuts, guys in Bonnarroo t-shirts, etc. I overheard a guy near me bragging to his friend about taking off work and getting a whole free day with the game. Everyone was friendly, if not chatty. Despite our differences, we had lots in common. We liked to blow things and people up. We liked to shoot lasers and be ambushed by strange monsters galloping through the jungle. We liked shiny, reflective visors and things that look “futuristic.” We liked fun. There was acres of common ground.

After picking up my game, I got a picture with Halo‘s main character, Master Chief. One of the popular conversation topics in line was this guy and his outfit, mainly how much it cost (roughly $5,000). There’d been a girl hanging out just past the checkout line taking pictures for people with their cameras, but I didn’t see her after paying for my copy. So I asked a police officer who was standing nearby if he’d take the picture for me. He shot me a look that said, I’m a law enforcement officer, not a @#$*! event photographer so I told him not to worry about it. Eventually the girl showed back up and took the picture. Then I drove home quickly to play the game.

One of the great features in Halo 3 is the theater playback option. It lets you watch a movie of your progress in the game and control the camera as it orbits around Master Chief. I can’t tell you how thrilling it was to watch the replay of my first few minutes in the Halo universe. I rotated the camera view as Master Chief plowed through the jungle overgrowth with his gun raised intimidatingly. Then he came up to a giant fallen tree crossing his path, only to stop and fidget for an extended beat while he struggled to figure out which button let him jump over the tree. He looked at the tree through his gold reflective visor, changed guns, stood still, reloaded his already full clip, then finally jumped in place, then jumped forward over the tree and progressed through the game. I felt self-conscious even though I was alone in the living room, my wife fast asleep in another part of the house. I felt like I was watching a movie of myself relearning how to ride a bike in the wake of a traumatic head injury.

Soon I’ll be fearsome. Soon I’ll be one not to mess with. Soon I’ll know how to jump over a log. Soon I’ll be able to save the world.