Well, It's One D Better, Isn't It?

As a coda to King's discussing the film Coraline, Colleen and I watched the movie yesterday. We both enjoyed it, me especially. After seeing so much recent movie fantasy skew epic, towards Tolkien or even C.S. Lewis, it's comforting to see such a dedicated treatment of fantasy of the Carrollean tradition: Stories that are personal and reflexive, placing the mundane in sharp relief against the wondrous.

Coraline is weird and wonderful. It isn't often you find a film that succeeds both in being perfectly intimate, and perfectly monomythic.

But! The same technology that King expounded upon, I found jarring and newfangled. Watching it on our tv at home, we found quickly that the benefits of 3D were strongly outweighed by the cons - namely, we found it loused up an otherwise fine colour palette, transforming the shabbilly beautiful shades of the film into a muddy smudge. After watching about 20 minutes, we switched to 2D... it may be one D worse, but we got by just fine.

Despite everything, I'm quite happy we got two pairs of rinky-dink glasses with the rental for free. Now, if I ever stumble across a re-run of "The Bots Master", I'll have 3D shades at the ready.

Or, more accurately, "3D Shaaaaaaaaaaaaaaades."



Oh, look. It's my childhood. What can I say? I'm a sucker for jive-talking robots.


- Rook

It's kind of like a kobold....

As Rook mentioned earlier in the week, I recently hosted a game of 4th edition Dungeons and Dragons. It was a real treat to be back in the drivers seat after a hiatus of a couple of years. We didn't get into any story or roleplaying this time as it was just a test session to practice a few things. Namely, the 4th edition system, and the software.

Something Rook didn't mention was that this game was run entirely online. I distributed PDFs of the core books, had everyone build their characters with Wizards of the Coasts Character Builder, connected through Skype for voice chat, and Maptools for a virtual grid and dice roller.

First, let's get PDFs and piracy out of the way. Yes, distributing PDFs to my players is technically piracy but let's be honest folks, back in the day each player didn't own a full set of books, we all had a couple different ones and passed them between each other as needed, I feel that PDFs are simply the digital version of the same practice.

The Character Builder is simply one of the most powerful tools we have and one of the best products Wizards has ever released. It seems simple at first, in that it takes you through character creation step-by-step and automatically builds the numbers based on your choices. Populating things like defenses, skill bonuses and so forth. It's when you start selecting powers and feats that you realize you have something amazing at your fingertips. See Character Builder pulls information from every book printed and provides not only references to book and page number but also the relevant text. It's like having a magical tome that opens to the page of your choice, from the book of your choice, at will.

It may not look it, but this darkness is about to get attacked

Next up we have Skype. Now I just don't get how Skype hasn't seen more widespread adoption. It's a free phone line, with no long distance charges, assuming you're using your computer as the phone and the person you're calling also has Skype. You can of course use it to call normal landline numbers, though that has a cost associated. At any rate it also incorporates an instant messenger and, most importantly, allows conference calls. To get our game started I simply call up all the players via a conference call and away we go.

Finally, We have Maptools. This software is also free, and coded with pure love by a couple of dudes and we all know what kind of quality pure love coding gets us. Maptools has a virtual grid, a chat window, and a dice roller all built in. You can Import tokens and textures to draw your own maps and populate them, or you can simply drop in a jpg which is particularly nice when using a printed adventure. The grid allows you to move the tokens around, draw Area of Effect templates and just about anything else you could do on a kitchen table with some graph paper and pens, but you can never knock the map over with an errant die toss.

The die roller is extremely handy especially with 4th edition, as you can set up rolling macros. All the players have set up their various character powers as macros. When the mage wants to cast a magic missile he simply presses the magic missile button and the software populates the results. It's also handy that, when I have everyone roll for something like initiative I can just glance at the chat window to see the results instead of having to ask the players for their results one by one.

Well, if this isn't the future I don't now what is.

That's really only the tip of the iceberg with Maptools. It has fog of war and line of sight options and, if you wanted to put the effort in could be made into an entirely automated version of DnD. I could actually set up statistics for the PCs and the monsters and have Maptools take care of everything. I doubt we'll ever dive into that but it's cool to know it's there.

In closing, one of the cool things about a digital game is that it's pretty easy to record it. We recorded the first encounter, but look forward to full sessions in the weeks to come once we start the game proper. Until then this will give you a fair idea of how DnD 4th comes together in a simple encounter.

-King

I Meta man with seven wives

I had the great opportunity to play a session of D&D this week, hosted by King. It was my first in several years, and my first experience with the 4^th Edition of the rules. Playing in a new system was a pleasure in itself, and not only because of the many changes made since I set the game aside. It was oddly exhilarating to not know everything anymore.

There is a certain epistemological crisis to roleplaying: The more you do it, the more information you have that you are forced to suppress. Playing characters with independent intelligence and wisdom from your own means, to some extent, having to fake it. You begin as a novice player roleplaying that he has a clue what’s going on, and end up as an experienced player roleplaying that he doesn’t.

This type of metagaming lends itself to some pretty absurd scenarios, of course. Sometimes common knowledge blends into play knowledge, until everything turns into an Abbott and Costello routine.

DM: All right, so you enter the tomb. There’s a fancily dressed pale guy, with two really sharp teeth.

PLAYER 1: Oh no! A vampire!

DM: You don’t know what a vampire is.

PLAYER 1: I mean, Oh no! A pale guy!

PLAYER 2: Wait, we live in a world where vampires are real, and we don’t know one when we see one?

PLAYER 3: I show it my holy symbol. Does it hiss?

PLAYER 2: No, that doesn’t work. You have to impale it. Or expose it to the sun.

DM: You don’t know that.

PLAYER 1: But I thought when you expose vampires to the sun they just twinkled like diamonds.

PLAYER 3: Okay, but I show my holy symbol. Does it hiss?

DM: Sure. Yeah. It hisses.

PLAYER 1: Oh no! The pale guy is hissing!

It’s for this exact reason that every vampire movie starts with a speech explaining why everything you know about vampires is wrong.

“Forget what you know about vampires. Now remember half of it again. That’s the true half.”

In these cases, metagaming is something recursive and reflexive, the unavoidable baggage of prolonged play-pretend. As a function of the game, is self-defeating: if a fantasy space is defined by the wonder of difference, once the fantasy becomes the function normal, it ceases to be different.

Recently I talked a friend of mine and longtime gamer about his playing of MMOGs. He had been playing World of Warcraft for several years, and had risen through the ranks to becoming the top raid leader in his server. I asked him if he still got any enjoyment out of the game.

He thought about it, and said, “I guess so. But I’d give anything to be a noob again.”

But is metagame inevitably self-defeating? In the days and weeks to come, I’ll be looking at ways in which our inevitable metagame experience changes and accentuates play experiences. From platformer games about platform gaming to violent videogames about videogame violence, we have begun to see a new breed of games that deliberately engage player knowledge of genre. There are games that know they’re games, games that are played by changing the rules, and games where the only way to win is not to play.

Thanks, Ferris Bueller. Thanks for thermonuclear war.

It’s a lot to chew on, but I’m game. Are you?

- Rook

Pick up eggs, cheese, milk.

I hate lists. Something about them drive me up the wall. If I were to pin down the Top Five Reasons They Get Under My Skin, they would have to be :

1. Lists can cobble together information without extracting any useful insight.
2. . Lists can be used to present subjective opinion through a lens of false objective value.
3. Lists can be a crutch that stand in for actual writing.
4. Oh God, no.
5. I've become everything I hate.


Don't get me wrong. Often lists can be helpful and serve a purpose. A grocery list, for example, is often more practical than a grocery pie chart.

You win this day, Cheap Cheese. But I'll be back.

But more often than not, you have either opinion masquerading as data, or data masquerading as useful. I'm well aware that I'm in the minority on this one. List-based comedy abounds on these treacherous tubes, and we've begun to chart the merits and failings of art through increasingly listy groupthink. It may be that I'm preparing myself for a future in which everything on the internet is something I dislike, in which case I suspect I'll need a new hobby.

But then there that occasional list that takes my breath away. A list that attains that trifecta of listdom: One that somehow manages to be pointless, irrelevant and inaccurate all at once.

Newsweek has decided to dabble its toe into the the murky waters of games journalism, with a List of the Top-Ten Best-Selling Video Games of All Time, a piece that begins with the priceless observation that "Playing video games is serious business."

Serious business.

For those interested, Newsweek outlines the top ten games as follows:

Grand Theft Auto
Grand Theft Auto
Guitar Hero
Madden NFL
Grand Theft Auto
Halo
Madden NFL
Madden NFL
Call of Duty
Grand Theft Auto

Congratulations, Grand Theft Auto! Your pluck and determination have won you first, second, fifth and tenth place. This list stands as a helpful reminder to the world that we still like cars, rock music, football and war. I notice that Barbie Horse Adventure didn't manage to crack the list. I hope there are still horses out there, somewhere.

You'd think in light of the franchise dominance at work here, they'd opt to sort them in terms of sum profit, or gross.You also might imagine that they'd be drawing from a complete set from information: However, some of the games listed as 'top-selling of all time' are not sorted by posted profits, but rather by units sold. And, if that's the criterion they're going by, they're not just confusing. They're wrong.

Even if you slice the pie another way, and conclude that gamers instead prefer saving princesses, playing with cute animals, solving brain teasers, and putting around on go-karts, what does this tell us? Even a completely subjective "Best Whatever" list stands as a statement to what succeeds, and what doesn't. Everything else just boils down to them most basic Boolean splat: Popular Things Are Popular!

If we're hoping for a better games journalism, both as a more intelligent investigation and a more meditative look at why we play, this is exactly the type of empty fat we've got to trim. No matter how you break it down, counting to ten is kid's stuff.





Nightmarish, horrifying kid's stuff.


- Rook

This Is Your Brain Online

Do you suffer from a fear of social contact? Do you have difficulty concentrating or sleeping? Do you spend around six hours online… and, when offline, do you occasionally miss the time you spend surfing these glorious tubes?

Final question: Despite these other pressing health concerns, are you on the Internet RIGHT NOW?

Hmm. I’m no doctor, so I’ve referred your case to my friend Dr. Yang Yongxin. He thinks you should be shocked repeatedly.

In the brain.

I can hear your collective sighs of relief now. At least he’s not going to be strapping electrodes to your nether bits, right? And your nipples are safe too. So it’s nothing weird, just a quick little zap to the cranium, thus eliciting a seizure. We’ll keep it up until you no longer want to go on the internet… or, I guess, if the internet goes away.

In a case of what I might refer to as “news of the weird,” if I thought unwilling ECT was more weird than, say, horrible and ethically unsound, a doctor in the Shandong Province of China has been experimenting with exactly this, sometimes conducting his experiments on unwilling participants. I can’t say I fully blame him, either. After all, there’s been a long history of using it to correct delusional kids who have trouble separating fantasy from reality.

China has stepped in and outlawed the procedure, recognizing that Yongxin has crossed the fine line between regular old-fashioned quackery and cartoonish super villainy. Apparently this guy was also administering shocks to patients who broke any of his house rules, including eating chocolate, locking the bathroom door, or sitting in his chair.

To be fair, it does look super comfy.

I don’t mean to suggest that there is no room for outlining pathology when it comes to new technologies, or that work towards understanding these conditions is in any way unwelcome. Consider the work being done to understand the Japanese phenomenon of Hikkikomori, a shut-in community made possible through extensive technological connections. But there is a danger to thinking that we have easy answers to these questions… or that drastic solutions are the only ones available to us.

Yes, Yongxin is a kook, but he isn’t alone. A quick glance at sites like Warcraft Addiction and WoW Detox show that commonly the issue of ‘playing too much video games’ is framed not just as a compulsive problem, but as a mental disorder rivaling alcoholism or drug addiction. Agree or disagree with such thinking, it’s interesting to see the extent of their diagnoses: Warcraft Addiction opens with the disclaimer that they are “not professional therapists,” and then go on to provide opinions based off of ‘years of study of the addiction.’ WoW Detox provides a link for a ‘situation in which there is no hope.’ It leads to a suicide hotline.

This is how it works, people.

If nothing else, the case of Linyi City’s psychiatric hospital’s unwilling electroshock is a reminder that snake-oil salesmen are an endlessly inventive bunch. When all you are doing is pulling treatments out of thin air, anything and everything can be cured. But the specific lesson here is that to overreact to a misunderstood problem may lead to a cure more harmful than problem itself.

- Rook

Embarking on a DS Journey

So I traded in a stack of my old games in order to procure a DSi and it has been a real treat. I grabbed a few games with it including: New Super Mario Bros, Zelda: Phantom Hourglass, Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars, Final Fantasy IV, Fire Emblem, and Dokapon Journey. Of these I have easily spent the most time with Dokapon Journey, so let me break it down for you.

Dokapon Journey, from Atlus, is essentially Mario Party, but instead of mini games you find yourself in CRPG style battles with monsters when you land on open spaces as you move across the board (cleverly disguised as an overworld map) reminiscent of a random battle, or in towns where a boss style monster will be standing guard.

The objective of the scenario is to be the player with the most gold after a number of weeks determined before the games starts. Each week consists of seven turns and the number of weeks are chosen during the game set-up, between 1 and 199 allowing a game session of anywhere from 15 minutes to 80 hours. Games can, of course, be saved midplay.

Scrooge McDuck: Regular player, and winner, of Dokapon Journey.

So now that you’re up to pace I’ll explain what makes Dokapon so good. You can also enter battle, cast spells on, and use skills against other players. In a nutshell, PvP. Should you defeat a player you will be able collect any bounties that may be on their head as well as select a looting option to steal a single item from their inventory, a spell, or all their gold. There is another option if you don’t feel a need to take their loot which is to, delectably, prank them by changing their name. I’m not sure about the world at large but this option significantly changes the games ESRB rating when I play it.

It's pretty much just like this.

There are also several game modes to play. Greed Mode determines the winner as the person with the most gold at games end. Death Match is the player with the most PvP kills, and of course a single player story mode. There’s another multiplayer mode that escapes me at the moment. I myself play Greed almost exclusively. Multiplayer can be played one of 3 ways. Over the internets by connecting to another player who owns the game, via local wi-fi with other DS owners in close proximity though only one of you need own the cartridge and finally, hotseat, where you and up to 3 other players simply pass a single DS around when your turn comes up.

For those who don’t own a DS you can pick up Dokapon Kingdom on either the Wii or PS2 that is more or less the same thing with some minor graphical and class selection differences. It's my understanding that they give away PS2's for free, launched from shirt canons at car races and sporting events or as a bonus when you buy a slushie at convenience stores so you don't really have an excuse not to try Dokapon at least once.

For the 20 bucks I paid you're looking at a pretty great dollar to fun ratio.

Until next time, may you stab your friends in the back.

-King

Space Inventory

Whenever I struggle to complete a game, I always check out what the guys over at Game Helpin' Squad have to say about it. From the time I couldn't max my malignancy modifiers in Cyst Warrior to the time I couldn't get past 3.1415926535897932384 in Pi Reciter, they've been there for me. Now they've come out with a solid guide for World Quester 2.

They do things a little differently... I've always been more reliant on Fire Icers and Mathematitions, for example. But it's worth checking out.

A Helpful Tutorial on The Most Difficult Video Game Ever -- powered by Cracked.com

- Rook

Wasting the same amount of time, but less efficiently

When it comes to things that are shit, not having the internet is one of them. Not having the internet for 2 weeks in 2009 is the equivalent of sleeping from 1942-1964, accounting for inflation and all that.

In case you also have not had the internet for 2 weeks I would like to share some things I missed:

-Han Solo, PI memed all over the place.

-Penny-Arcade did a thing. My vote goes to Lookouts. I would confidently bet my life savings that Rook has already started a letter writing campaign to ensure Automata is selected.

-Little Wheel was released with a sort of polite golf clap from the indie community.

-Magic: the Gathering was ruined.

-E3 blew its load on every gaming site and nobody cared.

To juxtapose, here are the things that I did instead of the internet:

-Played InFamous

-Played Sacred 2

-Played Red Faction: Guerilla

-Finally got 100% wins in 100 games of free cell.

-Drew a funny picture.

My funny picture

Of all the things listed I would most like to talk about InFamous. Well, I would most like to talk about my awesome FreeCell record but let’s go with InFamous. I will begin by describing it as a bastard child birthed from an orgy involving GTA, Crackdown, and Star Wars: the Force Unleashed. You play a dude with super powers of an electrical nature, able to shoot lightning, make lightning grenades, heal people with lightning, lightning surf, and make shields out of lightning. When you are not doing these things you crackle…sort of like lightning.

More like In-lightning-Famous mirite?

Aside from lightning, one of the neat things is that the city has a feeling of feeling of being alive and not just become people the citizens and bad guys driving and walking around. The game opens with a bomb going off (A lightning bomb) and it turns out you are the bike courier that has unwittingly delivered this bomb. Anyway, when it goes off you get powers and half the people in the city die. It’s apocalyptic destruction on albeit on an island scale and as you play through the game your choice of actions, including how carefree you are with your powers, not only do you change, with your appearance leaning towards a light or dark side reminiscent of the Knights of the Old Republic, but the city itself either gets worse or becomes rejuvenated.

I tried to get a screenshot of lightning but IT'S SO FAST!

So you run around the city leaping from rooftop to rooftop shooting people with your powers and it is good. The short of it is that it has a good story with some big twists, plenty to do, strong controls even with the number of powers available, and stellar visuals. Standing crouched atop a building looking out over your city you can’t help but feel like you’re having a Batman moment. Also, the cut scene are done up like a comic book which adds to the whole superhero thing. So if you have the chance to play the PS3 exclusive I say go for it, and play it evil. I normally play karma games light side but in this case the powers are more enjoyable and the gameplay smoother if you’re not worrying about hitting the civilians your targets are holding hostage. Plus, dark side get's force lightning

Until next time, if you kill someone by accident consider doing it again.
-King

Free Thing of the Week: FreeRice

As theories go, Chaos Theory is pretty much the best. It states that while the behavior of certain system may appear to be random, in fact it may be simply a highly sensitive response to initial conditions. It's determinism WITH AN ATTITUDE. Jeff Goldblum used it to fight dinosaurs, making it the mathematical equivalent of a bazooka.

"Dynamic systems aren't the only thing that's 'highly sensitive' around here, LADIES."

This explains how a butterfly might beat its wings somewhere in the world, and cause a hurricane. Inevitably it is always butterflies, and it is always hurricanes. You'd think a theory that ostensibly describes 'randomness' would try mixing it up once in a while. It is never a frog croaking somewhere in the world, causing some guy to watch an entire Sanford and Son marathon. I mean, yes, there was that one time I went back in time on a dinosaur safari and accidentally stepped on that butterfly, and when I came back to the present my roommate was a total jerk, but that's a small price to pay. I mean, Dinosaur Safaris, right?

Now maybe it's just me, but I am SICK and TIRED of all these butterflies bogarting our perfectly fine chaos. We need options! Luckily there is FreeRice, which does not dissapoint.

Do you know what 'doleful' means? 'Gimcrack?' 'Passerine?' Congratuations. Someone halfway around the world gets some rice, which I think is a much nicer gift than a hurricane. Operating under the same principle as The Hunger Site, which leverages a free cup of food through a daily click of a button and a few flashy ads, there is the distinct sensation of cornucopia. We are so accustomed to the internet being much ado about nothing that to suggest a direct change in the world, even a subtle one, requires a shifting of stance.

Of course, english vocabulary is only the default setting. Brush up on your famous paintings or chemical symbols. Practice your Italian or French, go over world capitals or multiplication tables.

I've spoken about this before, and remarked upon how simple it is to transform a neutral gaming experience into a vehicle for charity. Often there is the question of impact but these questions need not be rhetorical ones. In this case, the question "Does it make a difference?" has a simple and tangible answer: It makes 65 billion rice of difference.

Ultimately it frames gaming as a matter of choice. Yes, I could help Mario get past Bowser, though likely my princess will be in another castle. Or I could help some dude get his rice on.


- Rook

Pod People!

Recently I was invited to present at the University of Bedfordshire's Under the Mask 2009, a conference on the relationship between player and character. Circumstances conspired such that I was unable to go in person, but, age of wonders that we live in, I was able to be broken down into pure digital information and transported through the tubes that comprise The Internet at THE SPEED OF LIGHT. * Thus I was able to be virtually present at an actual presentation on virtuality.

With the help of Bryan Piitz from Georgian Bay Video, I produced this video essay, entitled "Pod People and Swappable Selves: On the Buying an Selling of Avatar." It engages such questions as 'how do players achieve authentic experiences in massively-multiplayer spaces?', 'Can virtual bodies be understood as "genuine?"', and, 'My haircut: is it nice?'

Pod People and Swappable Selves: On the Buying and Selling of Avatar from VideoYEAH on Vimeo.

If you'd just rather have the questions spoiled, the answers are "It's complicated", "Sometimes", and "Sure?"

The paper essay can be read here as a .doc file, along with the other papers presented to the conference. There's some fascinating work on show, and it's my pleasure to have been able to contribute to it.


- Rook

* N.B.: I actually have no idea how the internet works.

+1 Against Recessions

I mentioned yesterday how some coverage of E3 functioned as set-up - not as assessments in their own right, but as a lead-in to gloomy insights about the state of the industry.

Well, if that was the set-up, then this is the punchline.

Harold Goldberg at The Big Money is not buying it, and deigns to say what everyone else is thinking: That when it comes to questions of monay monay, E3 doth protest too much.


"By not mentioning the deep worldwide recession during these days in Los Angeles, it looks as through game makers are firmly ensconced in a video game fantasy of their own design, one that is carefully choreographed to show them all as great heroes and masters of the universe. In this world, they have drawn their swords and vanquished their foes, so much so that the economy needs never to be mentioned."

Oh, burn. ECONOMY burn. You got punk'd by a guy who uses the word 'ensconced,' which I think is when you're entranced by a scone.

As in: "Dude, I am totally ensconsed by that pastry."

Here's hoping we'll see a trend of these type of pieces, which blend economic critique with hackneyed video game metaphors.

"Well, up until now the video game industry has had a star and thus invincible, but recently it's taken a hit from a Recession Goomba and their profits have shrunk... just like MARIO! Now they will either need to get a super mushroom of infused capital, assemble the Triforce of Economic Solubility, or take that warp pipe which leads to the Water World. Of.. of money."

And everyone will be like: Okay, come on. That doesn't make any sense.

Mario doesn't have the Triforce.


- Rook

Vaudeville!

I love E3, but it is a complicated and melancholic love. I do not love, for instance, the flashing lights, the scrum of the crowd, the omnipresent rumble of electronic whatchamajiggers - all of these suggest sheer novelty, as if queued within a grand casino. In fact, I'm sure I would absolutely loathe being at E3, which either means I am lucky that I never have, or prudent that I never will. No, what E3 and I have is a long-distance relationship: It does its thing, and I love it from afar.

You see, I love it when people lie. In the epicentre of that digimal carnival, that cross between Xanadu and Faxanadu, I'm sure it all makes sense. Spin, in these places, is de rigueur - not simply a helpful tool, but a way of life. If you haven't believed six impossible things before breakfast, you're under quota.

But take a few steps back, and everything changes: the glitz seems chintzy, the electronic bleeps and bloops sound suspiciously tin-horn, and everyone seems rather crushed by the electronic goodies that surround them. And it's from this vantage that it becomes delightful.

Take this bit from Slate, presented ostensibly to comment on the economic downturn. I submit that this doesn't succeed as news - its function, rather, is parody.



What a garden of delights! We are presented with:

- A booth babe's grammatically unsound, but somehow appealing invitation: "We will waiting for you!"

- THQ's Brian Farrell calling himself a 'pundit,' and sounding like that one kid in sixth grade who doesn't know what a swear word means.

- Bob Ladrach of Digital Extreme Technologies, explains that he is not working on 'virtual reality' but rather 'augmented reality', the difference being that the former is actually a thing and not words he just made up. In Ladrach's words: "It's a new technology that's just coming out. Matter of fact, it's so new that it doesn't even exist yet!"

This isn't a unicorn, it's an 'augmented horse!' They're so new they don't even exist yet!

- Yoon Im of Perfect World extolling the virtues of free-to-play games, first by bragging how one can play without paying a dime, then by extolling the wonderful things that you can pay for.

- A glimpse of Ladrach's imaginary technology, which looks suspiciously like the VR rig that's been gathering dust at Disney's Epcot Center for 20 years. We have seen the future, and it is the present, only worse.

- Jesse Petrilla, the wunderkind behind "Quest for Al-Qa'eda" revealing hisspiritual sequel: Durka 3D: The Fall of Ahmadinejad. You play a "highly trained special forces soldier that's fed up with the current situation in Iran. So you take it upon yourself to singlehandedly dismantle the regime of terror."

- Petrilla continues: "I think a lot of video games have missed the boat, where they're shooting aliens when they could be really addressing curent issues and making sort of a subtle commentary on society as well." Petrilla apparently thinks we should all be killing more pretend Muslims. Thank you for the subtle commentary on society, Mr. Petrilla!

So now I can satirically shoot people? Why isn't all satire like this?
Jonathan Swift can fricking eat it!

- Finally, in a real show stopper, we have everyone agreeing that the video game industry is invincible and recession-proof juggernaut that will continue to make dollar dollar bills for eternity. This of course is not shot as a valid assessment of economical stability but as elaborate set-up, like investing in a 401K of schadenfreude. What was that thing that goeth before a fall, again?

All this could be a joke. Watching, I laughed (out loud!) like it was something from "This is Spinal Tap." It is done with such sincerity, with everyone clamoring to go forward, not backward, upward, not forward, and always twirling, twirling, twirling towards freedom. It makes such sense, you are tempted to forget that it is all malarkey.

If I were to datamine two insights out of this dog's breakfast, they would be these:

1. If you don't know who the joke is on, the joke is on you.

2. The term "spin" denotes not only orientation but sensation. Spinning can be fun: think of tilt-a-whirls and merry-go-rounds. But spin too much and you will want to puke.

Thus: E3, I love you both as a man loves a woman and the way a man loves a fine cuban cigar. Just as long as you stay where you belong... thousands and thousands of miles away from me.


- Rook

Free Thing of the Week: Well Played

Games studies can be a tricky fish to fry. Here is this gorgeous new medium with limitless potential to be poked, prodded and punctiliously ployed, but always, we must realize that what we are studying here is play. You may think it's 'srs business,' but to most other folks, it may well be 'just a game.'

Fun, here, may have some relation to Mark Twain's thinking on humour: "Explaining a joke is like dissecting a frog: you understand it better, but the frog dies in the process."

Critics of the time were known to respond: "Yeah, well, your FACE is that!"

Observant readers will note that my analogy has shifted species. How do we get from fish to frog? Well, when a mommy fish and a daddy frog love each other very, very much...

Since games at the best of times need a light touch, it it my double delight when I find critical thought that keeps some life kindled in its subject - Inevitably, these tend to be not strictly endeavors of the mind, but labours of love. Play remains the subject, but it is not captive... it is allowed to roam, free-range.

Thus we have the FREE THING OF THE WEEK, which is not just free as in libre, but free as in gratis. Enter "Well Played 1.0, Video Game, Value and Meaning", a text which backflaps itself thusly:

"What makes a game good? or bad? or better?

Video games can be “well played” in two senses. On the one hand, well played is to games as well read is to books. On the other hand, well played as in well done.

This book is full of in-depth close readings of video games that parse out the various meanings to be found in the experience of playing a game. 22 contributors (developers, scholars, reviewers and bloggers) look at video games through both senses of “well played.”

The goal is to help develop and define a literacy of games as well as a sense of their value as an experience. Video games are a complex medium that merits careful interpretation and insightful analysis."

The plaintext is free on the internet. Free as in, why aren't you reading it right now? We have analyses of old standbys such as Super Mario Bros. and Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, considerations of cult favorites like Ico, Silent Hill 2 and Parappa the Rappa. You'll find work ranging the gamut from blockbuster games like Metal Gear Solid 4 and Half-Life 2 and indy gems such as Portal and World of Goo.

Oh, and Zork. So that's me in the bag.

Reading these essays, you may find much to disagree with - but everything is put forward so cheerfully, one can hardly protest. These people have found pleasure in these games, and as such they are a pleasure to read. Who was it that spoke of the importance of being earnest?

Oh right. It was this guy.

- Rook