I was surprised and mawkishly heartbroken

I've relaxed these last few days by playing Rock Band 2 with my wife, in preparation for a Rock Band Party next weekend. This is a portentous occasion, and must be treated with deadly seriousness. Far be it from me to let the beat.. umm.. drop?

(Though it's perfectly acceptable to turn the beat around. Go figure.)

In the face of such crippling responsibility, only one thing will do: I have to get my groove back.

And in the middle of brushing up on my drums, with Colleen rocking vox, I was struck by a THOUGHT of striking resonance and clarity. After a moment, I realized it wasn't one of mine - that, in fact, it was a QUOTE. From a BOOK.

The book is Kurt Vonnegut's Cat's Cradle, and the quote is thus:


"Dr. Breed was interrupted by whispers in his outer office, whispers loud and portentous. They were the sounds of the Girl Pool.

The girls were preparing to sing in the outer office.

And they did sing, as Dr. Breed and I appeared in the doorway. Each of about a hundred girls had made herself into a choirgirl by putting on a collar of white bond paper, secured by a paper clip. They sang beautifully.

I was surprised and mawkishly heartbroken. I am always moved by that seldom-used treasure, the sweetness with which most girls can sing."

- Rook

Signifying Violence, Part Three: Turtles in Time

In my last two posts, I looked at two factors that affect performances of violence in game-space: mediation and signification. In terms of the latter, I looked at the degree in which acts could be signified as violent or otherwise, and how these significations affected play experience. In case of the former, I looked at how the degree to which play was controlled, in terms of what a player could and could not do.

So now we have two major forces at work, shaping how violence is portrayed in video games. I think we all know what I have to do now.

I HAVE TO GRAPH IT.

This graph is funner than a skin graph, but less delicious than a pie graph.

I made this graph using the most cutting-edge software available to me: The paint program that comes with every computer. You might want to click on it to make it big, instead of "undersized the point of Clown Car hilarity."

Here are twenty games, plotted in relation to the degree in which their acts of violence are signified, and the degree in which these spaces are mediated. In placing these games along these two variables, a number of considerations were made regarding what constitutes highly signified violence, and how mediation should be understood in this context. After placing these games, a number of things stuck out:

1) The games that exhibited the highest signification of violence did so through very different means.

Fallout scans so highly because, in terms of representation and play factor, pains were taken to represent a space in which violent acts are real, and have consequences on a game-world. If you breeze into town and blow everyone away, it'll be a ghost town for the remainder of the game. There's no respawn, and no 'reset switch'.

State of Emergency, as a riot simulator, places graphic violence as chief thematic element and central play element: It makes even Grand Theft Auto seem restrained in comparison.

Finally, Super Columbine incorporates footage of actual event to distinguish their game as tied to the actual fact of violence, rather than something divorced from reality.

2) Though genres tensed to shake out along the horizontal axis, with puzzle and free-roam games tending left and more mediated play experiences like platformers and role-playing games tending right, a number of influences could cause a game to shift both in terms of mediation and signification.

When the Final Fantasy series, a highly mediated play experiences that contains moderately signified acts of violence (other figures are 'killed', within context, but this killing is not graphic or thematized') produced a "Tactics" spin-off, it significantly introduced a feature in which injured party members could 'die' permanently if not tended to on the battlefield. The result is a game where the constant RPG 'killing' is given consideration and resonance, bolstered as well by a darker, Machiavellian narrative of court intrigue.

Once in a public washroom I saw written "Machiavelli was naive."
Underneath it, someone else wrote "SO WAS YOUR MOM."

We can see a game like World of Warcraft make a similar shift in both mediation and signification when play moves from a player-versus-player to a player-versus-environment game setting. With the former allowing players greater opportunity to attack and hinder unwilling players in the vast no-man's land of contested territory, gameplay is both less mediated, and has a stronger signification of violence. Implementing one change, albeit a major one, can shift a game along both axes.

3) In most cases, the games that graphed lowest in terms of signified violence avoid such signification through abstraction, instruction of non-violent game mechanics. In the case of Puzzle Pirates, the ostensibly violent acts of attacking and plundering another shop on the high seas are reflected through simple and cheery mini-games. Abstraction plays a major part in the innocuousness of a game like SimCity, one in which you can level entire metropolises through fire, wind, earth and water.

In this scenario, the final element of 'heart' is replaced by 'monster'.

In a strictly denotative sense, these are acts of massacre, to rival the bombings of Hiroshima or Dresden. But because these acts are abstracted to the point of inoffensiveness, because you can 'hit a button' and restore your shattered burgs, because it is fundamentally a game thematically concerned with building, rather than destroying, these acts carry all of the freight of a someone knocking over a pile of blocks.

By plotting franchises, rather than individual games, there is of course room for imprecision. The recently-released Fallout 3 would scan slightly to the right than previous entries, and lower down, due to the game-designers decision to omit the ability to kill children, a move that has, incredibly, earned them some criticism.

On the other hand, the top-down, splat-cartoon vantage and tone of Grand Theft Auto 1 and 2 would scan a good deal lower, in that its homicidal bent is treated both at a distance, and with a dose of irreverent humour.

Finally, user-generated content like suicide booths and grave plots in games like Second Life offer a chance to inch both higher and further left, though these additions currently are purely cosmetic propositions.

In a week, I'll conclude with an examination of games that vary wildly in terms of mediation and signification of violence, including a few that attempt to subvert the long-established tropes of violence-as-progress and the function of conflict in game-space.

And then it'll be right back to the dick jokes and oatmeal recipes, I promise.

- Rook

Sang-FREUD

All right. I thought I could stop at one, but I have to get these out of my system.

"Anal fixation?" Up yours!

"Oedipal Complex?" Your mother!

"Phallocentric?" Dick.

I call them LOLFreuds, and they're going to be the NEXT BIG THING ON THE INTERNET.

- Rook

Signifying Violence, Part Deux: Lost in New York

Why, if we've dispatched millions of goombas and koopa troopas in our gaming lifetimes, do some symbolic acts of violence come to matter, and others come to be dismissed?

In part, there is the matter of signification. In most early video games, death and violence serve as handy referents to the act of playing and progressing, but contain none of the symbolic weight of the actual acts. The earliest model of this is found in arcades, where 'lives' referred directly to play-time and performance: In playing against the clock, and your own dime, the notion of the "free man" evolves directly from Pinball's "free play": the literal notion of a free bit of playtime.


When games moves from arcades to consoles the system of "points" quickly went from being a chief arbiter of performance to a vestigial limb of earlier media, but the notion of playtime as finite and operating within a window of opportunity remained. Death in this context is a soft reset, a do-over: Fall a thousand feet onto rows upon rows of jagged spikes? Yikes. Well, just don't do it again.

Similarly, when you "kill" a sprite, it flickers for a moment, and disappears. Not disappears in a "Your soul will be dead before your body: fear nothing further", Nietzsche-type-deal. It's a time-out: according to the rules of the game, it's gone for a little while. Die and start over, and everything's back to status quo.


It's only when the signification of death and dying are brought to the fore that this transaction comes to have any type of moral weight. To suggest that all you are doing in Mario is "killing things" isn't just disingenuous, it's downright Froot Loops.

Pictured at down-right: Froot Loops

This isn't to say that the signification of violence and death are possible in a game-space where respawns and points-for-killing are the norm, only that an environment like this functions as a kind of null-space: You get what you give: Consider a game like Stainless Games' Carmageddon, a proto-GTA sandbox racer where the way you generate points is by hitting people with your car. Here is a game boating "motorized carnage", where the very goal of the game is to slaughter people. Here, people don't flicker and disappear when killed: They explode like blood sausages in a microwave.

As a caveat, blood sausage is actually quite delicious.

Though made in 1997, and boasting the graphical wizardry of the mesozoic, we have here a game capable of inciting widspread revulsion, to the point of moral rejection: For some time, the game as ported to countries like Germany changed the 'people' sprites to zombies, thus hammering home this basic pillar of ethics: It's okay to kill everyone, so long as they're already dead.


Of course, in either case, no act of violence is actually being committed: It's a matter of whether violence is being signified, or not. And it's here that we encounter the moralistic questions raised by individual playership: Do I want to be playing a game where you can kill people? Where you must? Which has the greater capability to offend: The game that insists we do something that offends our morals, or the game that simply offers it an option within a spectrum of action? Next week I hope to look at games that are conscious of this type of signification, and attempt to put it to use in one form or another.

- Rook

Player 2 has joined the game

So I spent the Christmas holiday playing video games. I mean the whole thing, one straight week of nonstop gaming.
I was back in my hometown with my friends of yore, we had two TVs and two Xboxs and were prepared to beat the following games or die trying: Gears of War 2 Co-Op Campaign, Gears of War 2 Horde Mode, All 4 Scenarios in Left 4 Dead, and Castle Crashers.

Needless to say we did it, we beat them all. But where did we get the energy to keep going? The resolve to believe it could be done? Let's call it 'Multiplayer Magic'

I've always found that a multiplayer game is better than a single player one, heck, the single player game can be complete shite and still the co-op is amazing, it's that sense of camraderie and the certain knowledge that someone else is having the same amount of fun as you, and they've got your back.

Of course there's always versus multiplayer, but sometimes that can be the most fun of all. Every night of that game-a-thon week, after the dust settled on whatever epic game we had been playing and it was time to shut the system off and catch some Z's we would look at each other and nod and one of us would say "call Nick"

Shortly after Nick would be downstairs, controller in hand at 2 in the morning and Bomberman HD would be on the screen with bombs and expletives flying everywhere until 6 or 7 in the morning. By the way, have you ever played multiplayer Pac-Man, where 3 players control ghosts with limited vision on gameboys? DO IT.

It comes down to complexity I think. All games have a certain level of complexity and you move through the games environment interacting with whatever complexities those may be. Once you figure it out it's all the same. Toss another living breathing thinking human into the mix and suddenly things become interesting.

It's like that quintessential movie scene where the hero and his sidekick are suddenly ambushed by enemies and separated, running in opposite directions from the explosions the hero looks back to see his sidekick overwhelmed by the bad guys before continuing his mission. He disarms the bomb and turns to leave only to find himself staring down the barrel of the enemy commanders gun. BANG! moments pass and the bad guy slumps down to reveal the sidekick, who made it after all, just saved you. That's co-op gaming.

So, why is multiplayer more fun? When you consider that just about every non-video game is a social activity and that people have been playing games for thousands of years then you start to realize that maybe the social aspect, the shared experience, is the heart of gaming and it's soul.

As technology and understanding of video games, which is a relatively new thing, advances we've begun to see more and more refined gaming but his isn't new. Looking to board games as an example, would you rather play 'Monopoly' or 'Settlers of Catan'? 'Sorry' or 'Munchkin'? 'Hungry, Hungry Hippos' or...well the Triple H stands alone. Yet, my point remains, video games are only going to get better and, therefore, so shall our enjoyment of them.


What about Artifical Intelligence you ask?. Besides being the subject of many an Aasimov tale, A.I. is what makes single player games work. But it's based on a series of controls and responses. Chess is a pretty basic game and so, at it's most basic level you can compare just about any other game to it 'The way pieces move' is the function of the game, you ultimately don't play against your opponents pieces, you play against the opponent. The gameplay is simply the other persons input, and everyone will generally play it differently. When you switch out another person for a chess A.I. things change dramatically, as the A.I. is only capable of working in terms of pre-programmed move sets, probabilities and basic reactions.

I wanted to talk about how MMO's and "four dudes on a couch" compare but I think I bounced around topics enough this week, so you'll get that on Tuesday maybe.

Until next time, remember that not all A.I. is evil.

Signifying Violence, Part 1: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomberman

In Zork, one of the original text based games, many short commands would produce numerous replies - a type of conversational easter egg that acknowledged how frustrating navigating this type of space could be.

If, in a fit of pique, the player typed "Kill Self" they game would reply: "It is forbidden to commit seppuku." At once acknowledging the action and dismissing it, it framed the question of action in games as a matter of mediation. What one could or couldn't do isnot 'forbidden' by social customs, but by the game itself. The game space may be malleable, but the player is indestructible.

Other games of the time were also toying with the boundaries of what you could and couldn't kill. At the end of Taito's Double Dragon, after all the enemies have been vanquished, both players must fight each other to determine who ends up saving the captured ladyfriend. In a final twist, co-op becomes versus, and the player you've been playing beside for hours suddenly becomes one more thug to smack down.

Another early game where it is definitely not "forbidden to commit seppuku" is Hudson Soft's Bomberman, a game wherein one plays a bomberman, whose job it is to bomb other mans with bombs. Much of the game is spent ducking around corners to hide from bombs you've laid, as nothing distinguishes your enemies' bombs from your own. By the time you're in the thick of things, there exists no real boundary between you or your opponents actions: The only question you ask yourself is whether any given nook will, or won't be blown to smithereerns.

In these cases, the general rule that these games will protect you from yourselves is broken, whether by allowing counterproductive play choices, changing the rules of how players interact, or not differentiating a player's attacks from an opponent's. Ultimately the "video" part of video games relates to mediation: How much, or how little, one can do within the parameters of a program.

But the moment that interactivity is expanded to a point that includes changing the way that one negotiates a game-space (through bad decisions, or altered rules) suddenly you enter into an ambivalent realm, where a host of questions apply: What happens when it's not men, but children and prostitutes, than you can kill? At what point is it a moral decision, and upon whose behalf is good behavior enforced?

On Thursday I'll be looking at some later games in which interactivity (in terms of what you can, or cannot do) applies directly to the gaming experience, and tackle some of the questions that are raised.

- Rook

Another lovely thing is your mom

A lovely thing about Christmas is that it's compulsory, like a thunderstorm, and we all go through it together. - Garrison Keillor


- Rook

Yuletidings

As I write this I'm sitting on a large couch, in my pajamas and robe, listening to the crackle of the fire while enjoying some hot mulled cider. Of course the cider has about half a cup of brandy in it, the crackling fire is a 'Fireplace Ambiance' DVD, and the couch is in the home of my good friend Matt but this is Christmas in Toronto and one should expect no less.

Growing up, Ol' Saint Nick and I had our differences, with the primary point of contention being where I would spend Christmas morning, you see there were rarely fewer than 3 options vying for my attention, what with my parents being divorced and I being raised with my Mom and Stepdad, each of my families would request the honour of my presence each year. This is stressful on a young man whose only goals in life are to become a firefighter, become an astronaut, and please everyone all the time.

Eventually I had an epiphany, I would attend none of them. Certainly I would lose the gifts the season would grant me, new books, and video games. But in return I would get an actual holiday. A day to relax, kick back and enjoy life to it's fullest. And so, for the last few years, that's exactly what I've done and now, for the second year running Matt has opened his doors to all wayward christmas celebrants to come by and enjoy a bit of pressure free, straight up 'spirit of' Christmas morning.

Truth be told I can't think of a place I'd rather be.

Happy Holidays everyone.

Until Next Time, Enjoy This Christmas As Though it were the last.

-King

Pro Choices

So I recently applied to a couple of Universities for business and history studies (What DON’T they have in common!?)at York and Trent. York got back to me about two weeks ago to let me know I had been accepted and all was well because, by dangit, I was going to York.

Today Trent sent me an E-mail to let me know they, also, wanted me to join their ranks as a soldier of academia. Well crap, now what was I going to do? I mean I knew exactly which one I wanted to attend when it was only York yearning for the honour of my presence, but now the Trent faction has made a tempting offer. What’s a man to do?

What is it about being forced to decide something that changes everything about it? A Choose Your Own Adventure story is totally different than a Hardy Boys book. Sure, either way it’s a couple of prepubescent kids uncovering an underground crime ring but whether or not they succeed is now in your hands. That is stressful stuff.

If there are two things prepubescent kids are good at it's
solving mysteries and piloting giant robots

The same holds true in a video game, many gamers have spoken about how they love a good storyline in an RPG yet become paralyzed when playing Grand Theft Auto. All of a sudden there are just too many options, Do I walk over there? Stay here? Get in that car? Buy a Hotdog? Shoot a hooker? Frick if I know.

Video games have had an increasing amount of decision making thrown into the mix. Montreal based Bioware, best known for the Knights of the Old Republic and Mass Effect games, has focused on it as a primary gaming device, forcing you to make difficult moral decisions that will inevitably lead you to the light or dark side of the force or force analog. In ages past the Fallout games combined the Sandbox style of gameplay with the option to make decisions that change the world itself. The same goes for Peter Molyneux’s Fable series. All of these games have multiple endings and encourage multiple play-throughs to see them all. Don’t even get me start on Star Ocean : The Second Story's 88 different endings.

If you save just before this you can go back and not push him off the roof.
Alternatively you can go back and push him again.

Choices are scary. Well, maybe you’re good at them but I buckle under the pressure. Which movie do I want to see? Well the best one of course. Hopefully somebody else knows which one that is. Which sandwich do I want to eat? The one that looks best of course. And, of course, you can’t keep your finger on the last page or save your game just before you decide which University you’re going to attend, you have to suck it up and hope you’re making the right choice. Unfortunately I haven’t made a choice that I wouldn't discover the outcome of for 4 years, but I imagine I’m making the right decision, I mean it looks better, so how could I go wrong?

Until next time, I sure hope we solve this mystery!

-King

A holiday gift for your soul!

For a limited time only King and Rook is now selling Karma!
That's right folks, pay dollars and get an equivalent amount of karma!
I draw your attention to the widget on the right. Now give!
Give like you've never gived before!


Kingfully yours,

-King

Live Like There's Snow Tomorrow

So I totally missed my post yesterday, and for that I apologize. You no doubt have come to rely on us here at King and Rook for our informative, and timely, work. I am ashamed it was I who let you down.

Greater still was my shame that I probably wouldn't be posting until sometime this weekend maybe not even until Monday, terrible, I know but the holidays have me so damn busy and I don't even celebrate them. Today was to be my last day of work before my holidays began, likely lasting a few weeks before I begin University in January. It was looking like alot of work too, but then something happened. Something profound was in the works.

I always thought the middle-aged Fate was hottest. Rook likes the old one.

I left at my usual 8:15 to take the 20 minute Subway ride to Finch, the northern most of the stations, where I would transfer onto a 45 minute bus to travel the rest of the way to work. The trip to Finch was a hour and 10 minutes alone. What is going on, I pondered as I walked up the stairs from the underground tunnel. Cresting the last of the concrete steps I saw it. A blizzard. Fate had spoken and ushered in a new day, long forgotten.

The Snow Day.

That's right there wasn't much chance of me getting to work today dear readers. I called the boss and let him know my oh so unfortunate plight and then turned around, back to the subway, a spring to my step.

Polar Bear in a Snow Storm

The awesome power of the Snow Day is undeniable. A power that many learn to summon for the great pleasures the snow day can bring. Snowball fights, tobogganing, video games, no homework, writing your blog article. Who doesn't appreciate the snow day, Nature's own time machine with the power to give the world a free day, pulled perhaps from spare reserves in the past or future, filled with limitless possibilities.

There are different kinds of Snow Days too. There is the snow day created when an enterprising individual decides, in advance, that tomorrow will be a snow day. These guys usually aren't meteorologists, but I'm not going to argue with days off especially with someone who is my boss or principal. The problem with these snow days is that they kind of take the magic away, you know they're coming, make plans in advance, and have the day full of activities before you know it.

There is also the Suspected Snow Day. Where you are so damn sure it is going to snow tomorrow that you just assume that's what's going down. You stay up late, skip homework, and prepare for adventure, all the while teetering with anticipation and hope. Sometimes this kind of Snow Day will screw you though and you'll wake up to some weird pre-spring weather.

Finally there is the best of all. The Sneak Attack Snow Day. You went to bed early, you got all your business done and are prepared for another day of the same old. You wake up, go about your morning ritual and then notice, sweet baby jesus, there is 4 feet of snow outside. These are the best, the truly free days.

The look of pure, Snow Day, joy

All of these days come less and less frequently. The glory years are during the elementary school years of course, and hold strong through high school, but once you've joined the work force they evaporate quite quickly. Business is business and the phrase 'business as usual' holds true in inclement weather. But when you can't get into work you simply can't.

So next time you have a snow day, have yourself a cup of hot chocolate, grab your laptop and open up your favourite blog. Play some video games, eat some junk food and maybe, just maybe, catch up on something you meant to do yesterday.

Until Next Time, Toboggan in style.

-King

Game-space: The Final FUNtier

Fun fact: Our universe is expanding, and has been for Quite Some Time. This limits our ability to perceive it in sum, since the outer regions are literally traveling too fact to allow light to ever reach us. If things continue in this vein, more and more stellar objects will disappear from the sky altogether, as entropy begins to render the universe unfit for life of any sort. Scientists, helpfully, have dubbed this "The Big Freeze", presumably because it sounded that much more terrifying than "The Big Chill."

But don't worry! You'll be long dead before then.

(Hmm. That's sort of heavy stuff for a Thursday, isn't it? I had just wanted to rhetorically consider the idea of breath in a finite space, before segueing into talking about video games. Let's give it a do-over. )

Fun fact: Our universe is awesome, and has been since I got over dinosaurs. Do you think there are aliens because if we went and visited them, we would be the aliens. So how about that. Soon everyone will be having adventures in the cosmos, flying through Saturn's rings and chasing comets and fighting the Borg, and it will be exactly like a video game. And speaking of video games...

(Okay, much better.)

In the design behind many original video games played in the arcade, play time was directly related to a player's skill, multiplied by their wallet. In these cases as a players skill increased, their individual play sessions would proportionately lengthen in relation, rewarding their play with the opportunity to play more. As players got better and better, play time could be prolonged indefinitely.. at least, until the machines themselves gave up.

Enter the Kill Screen, the result of 8-bit limitations on an otherwise endless play time. Using 8-bit memory, values from 0 to 255 can be recorded properly, but anything past that value causes an integer overflow, wherein the value 'spills over', causing all manner of computational hilarity. In arcade classics such as Pac-Man and Donkey Kong, the game comes to a screeching halt at level 256, rewarding you with a scrambled, unplayable screen.

"What the? I must've eaten some bad fruit."

What should be noted about these games is that though technology presents an ostensible limit on play time, the games themselves don't consist of unlimited content, but rather unlimited iterations of the same content. It's ultimately up to the player to decide how many iterations will be played. It's like a paddle ball or a yoyo: You get your fill, you move on with your life.

On the other hand we have games that present linear play narratives, in which the goal, expressly, is to get from point A to point B. This goal can be as simple as "save the princess", but it's enough to shift the onus from playing to survive to playing to complete. In these content-based "games with endings", play experience begins to resemble something closer to media such as film and literature, involving movement through a concrete work that has a beginning, a middle, and an end. (Or just a beginning and an end, if you used a warp pipe.)

But while these self-contained games can be played through and revisited up to a point of mastery, they are ultimately contained experiences. However, we've reached a point in which many game environments represent neither the iterable arcade experiences of the medium's inception, or the closed-model design inherent to earlier games. Largely, what has changed is how we approach and produce content.

First there is user-generated content, ranging from using internal tools or outright modding. Consider the history of Team Fortress, which originated as a mod of first-person shooter Quake and has now produced a sequel that can be a considered a game in its own right. And then there is Warcraft 3's Defense of the Ancients, a custom map strategy scenario which has become much more popular than the 'actual' game itself. Then there are games that deliberately capitalize on the groupthink of user-generated environments, such as Spore and Little Big Planet: Rather than simply open themselves up to community creativity, these games are designed to rely upon it.

Thank-you, game community, for this umpteenth penis man.

But even in these cases, while user input changes a game's permutations and dimensions, what is occurring is not so much growth, outright, as change. In some cases, games may be changed enough to represent separate iterations entirely, removed from earlier incarnations. The same can't be said for MMOs such as World of Warcraft, where through the process of frequent patches and expansions, changes to game design, and to content, occur right beneath a player's feet.

Entire continents may be plunked down, level caps lifted, entire new tiers of content coming to rest upon a strata of well-worn environment. In the case of Warcraft especially, where this continuous accretion has earned it a gaming-base in the millions, the two play drives - that is, the narrative navigation of linear games and the repetitive compulsion of open-style arcade games - balance each other like a delicate yin and yang.

A game like World of Warcraft cannot be 'mastered' in any meaningful way - the possibility of change, or further iterations, means the best a gamer can hope for is an understanding of its present state. In an environment where a game-world may expand faster than it is played, there exists a limit to one's experiences: An observable universe within a context of future, hypothetical incarnations.

In sum: We have killed the Kill Screen.

But no problem, right? We can always walk away. I mean, it's not like we'll just continue to whir in place like hamsters in a treadmill, until we finally game ourselves to death. Right?

(Hmm. There I go again, being a downer. I've got to end this on a more upbeat note. Think.. think..)



GUYS IT IS DINOSAURS AND IT IS IN SPACE.

(Mission accomplished.)


- Rook

When life gives you oats...

There is a new game that my wife and I play. It is a delicious bit of decadence, made all the more special that we've made it up ourselves. Late at night, while the world is sleeping, we are busy getting things in place, making sure everything is just so. It is our last thought as we go to sleep, and is the first thing that springs to mind when we awake.

Our game is called "Free Oatmeal." And here is how it woiks.

Right before we go to bed, we prepare oatmeal in our slow cooker. We have a patented recipe that produces perfect oatmeal every single time, which goes as follows:

Step one: Add oats.
Step two: Add water.
Step three: Thunderbirds are GO.

With everything set up, we go to sleep. And the next day?

FREE OATMEAL.

The oatmeal does not care that we are groggy and semi-coherent. The oatmeal does not judge. Like manna from the gods, it appears from nothing, a salvation to those faithful. Like the loaves and the fishes, it is an abundance: somehow a splash of water and a cup of oats produces a metric frickstack of oatmeal. We eat, and eat, and are replenished. This is no mere breakfast. This is a Christmas Miracle.

Though the rational part of me understands how this process works, my lizard brain is bamboozled into thinking this bounty is conjured up from nothing. I prefer to think of my slow cooker not as an appliance that simply 'slow cooks' something, but as a time capsule, sent rocketing off into space from my dying planet to give hope and succor to a Brand New Day.

"And these raisins! And this cinnamon!"

Though this is a game in the simplest sense (that is, it has rules, and it is fun), it draws its pleasure from an odd place - the experience of contiguity, or "sense of sequence". When we go to sleep, I remove myself, temporarily, from a causal chain. Sequence breaks down, and must be reassembled tomorrow while we reboot. So in the morning while I lie in bed, I begin making a mental list of my daily itinerary.. suddenly, it hits me: There is oatmeal. Waiting. Suddenly, I am a really hoopy frood who knows where his towel is.

At each end, there's a small pleasure in the process. In the morning, it's pleasant to remember. At night, it's pleasant to know you will forget. Have you ever played peek-a-boo with a baby? It never gets old to them - you can do it over, and over, until the kid is worn exhausted from surprise and delight. Their ability to link events in a sequence, their contiguous understanding of the world, hasn't fully formed yet. In transitory terms, it isn't that you "go away and then come back." It's that you're gone, and then you're there. Magic!

In more sophisticated cases, contiguity can involve you directly, rather than remove you from a sense of sequence. Consider a game like Will Wright's "Sim City", where the titular "city" is never stamped upon the earth outright, but rather assembled from a box of actions. First you make a place for people to live, and work, and shop. Then you build a road or two. Then they need electricity, and a plant to produce it. Oh, and don't forget water lines. All right, now let's go over there.. oh, I guess you need a bridge. Let's put some waterfront here, and hey! There's a sailboat! Now let's fix the taxes, and, oh neat, you can build a statue now.

Though every task relates directly to the other micro-managerial decisions you make as you progress, it isn't until you scroll the map right back, to look at your handiwork: the squares zoned, the trees cleared, the ground paved and developed, and: Peek-a-boo! It's a city! Suddenly you're God on the Seventh Day, looking down upon creation. Then you summon a robotic monster to destroy it with lasers, but you see what I'm getting at here.

In the beginning, Will Wright created the heavens and the earth.

In every case where our sense of causality is disrupted, in our fragmented experience of the scope of things, there is something profoundly anti-Pavlovian at work. When so much of gaming is written off as mere pleasure-pursuit, "ring and bell and salivate" type stuff, the notion of pleasure-deferral - or, in these cases, pleasure displacement - tends to be the exceptions that prove the rule. It's a small proof that there is something in the nature of games, at a fundamental level, that is transformative. Through the familiar and unfamiliar, in seeing things in part and in whole, when we realign and reconfigure, we don't simply change: We create. It's here that we find myth, and miracle.

Also... and I can't stress this enough:



Free. Freaking. Oatmeal.


- Rook

Apocalypse Nao

So I recently read Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, while my girlfriend was prepping for the upcoming Watchmen film by reading its source material. The latter involves the nature of superheroes set against the alternate history backdrop of a world where political tensions between the US and the Soviets are edging closer to nuclear war, While the former is the harrowing tale of a man and his son traveling to the coast across the U.S. 10 years after an unexplained cataclysm. Tales of this sort have been told since Mary Shelly’s 1826 The Last Man or, technically speaking, much, much, earlier.

But what’s the point of all of this? Why is humanity so enthralled by the depiction, fantasy and, in games, participation in apocalypse? I mean, clearly popular culture is rife with the apocalypse in a variety of forms, we’ve been destroying it in stories and prophecy pretty much it since it began. The stories go from war and acts of terrorism involving weapons of mass destruction, to religious, sci-fi, horror and fantasy representations of the end of the world, depicted in a wide range of media including novels, comics, film, television and video games. Considering how old the idea of the apocalypse is it’s certainly created some of the most imaginative and terrifying imagery I’ve seen.

The Large Hadron Collider still freaks me out abit

While Apocalyptic Fiction has a long pedigree there has also, for quite some time, been a similar genre in the gaming world. As far as games themselves are concerned it pretty much started with Wasteland, probably the first Post Apocalyptic Video Game and the undisputed Granddaddy of the genre, directly inspiring The Fallout Series with the most recent entry being 2008’s Fallout 3.

I don't want the future to look like this

Then of course we have film. Starting with Wells’ Things to Come, going the B-movie route through the 50’s and 60’s and then regaining prominence with Mad Max in the late 70’s and soon becoming mainstream with the Terminator series and Kevin Costners hard-on for Post-Cataclysmic adventure, capping off with The Matrix before moving away from Wars and bombs and towards zombies and plagues through the likes of Dawn of the Dead, 28 Days Later, and I Am Legend. It seems people are fascinated with the end of the world.

In recent years of course Environmental Apocalypse has taken the stage. The Day After Tomorrow, Japan Sinks, the upcoming 2012, the adapation of The Road, The Happening, and even Wall-E. These films are all moneymakers on account of the growing concerns regarding our environment…well except The Happening.

Insert obvious joke relating 'Apocalypse'
and 'M. Night Shyamalan's career'

With all of the available post apocalyptic musings, scenarios, games, film and literature I have read or heard about I can safely say I would not like to see one on the real. An apocalypse is a tragedy on a vast, and horrifying scale, but it brings with it the idea of starting new and on a bare slate where everything is destroyed, leaving a scattered few to rebuild from the ruins which seems to be where alot of the...let's say charm

So, as cool as trading some pre-apocalypse artifacts for a clean jug of water, a hunting rifle and a fur hat sounds, I’m pretty sure I don’t want to take part. I mean, it sounds like a really shitty time. Luckily there’s these guys.

Until Next time make a point of going out in style,

-King

Filled with Rage

If I had a single gamma ray in me I would have mutated into a green monstrosity and laid waste to New York twice already. New York is lucky that I am Gamma Free.

This is such bullshit.

-King

Everyone's a critic

There's an interesting post over at Slate, where Seth Scheisel, video-game critic for the New York Times, talks about how he became a video-game critic for the New York Times. His thoughts, if I might paraphrase, sum up as "Holy snaps I am a video-game critic for the New York Motherflipping Times." And, I suppose, holy snaps, he is.

He talks a bit about making the transition from gaming-reporter to critic, one that essentially boils down to one turning point: Now he is obliged to say what he thinks, even if it isn't nice. The cynics among us might wonder where Mr. Schiesel gets the idea that 'telling the truth' is something that a journalist is absolved of... that, in fact, it's sort of the job description. But it's a point of optimism that he clearly sees criticism as a higher calling, one to which he's done-his-derndest to rise.

A king among men.

Notably, he lists Roger Ebert as his inspiration to video-game criticism. He mentions Ebert's quoting of fellow critic Robert Warshow: "A man goes to the movies. The critic must be honest enough to admit that he is that man." In other words, whatever you saw, whatever you felt, whatever you did, you must say so. For example, two things that cannot be convincingly faked are laughter and orgasms. If a movie made you laugh, as a critic you have to be honest and report that. Maybe not so much with orgasms."

(For information on the latter, look no further.)

In this case, it isn't just out of admiration or inspiration that Schiesel cites Ebert - his very position as a critic, an orientation that affects his relation to both his medium in question and audience, comes from Ebert's playbook. In doing so, he cuts through a rhetorical Gordian Knot standing between him and the realm of criticism. Video games as a medium remain a cipher in the world of news-media, due to any number of factors: misreportage, underexposure, a lack of cohesion in criticism and coverage. But ultimately, it comes down to the matter of inexperience, and the shock of the new.

This isn't to say that gaming news is at a standstill. Things purr along contentedly enough until they encounter something unprocessable and unparseable, and then everything goes to the dogs. An example: When Danny Ledonne submitted his execrable Super Columbine Massacre RPG to the Guerilla Gaming Competition, it produced what could comfortably be called a kerfuffle: a host of angry calls, contestants dropping out of the content as a matter of solidarity, wailing and rending of garments.

Fig. 1-b: A garment, mid-rend.

But in the midst of this scrum, no one produced an adequate answer to the question of the game, itself. What was it, anyway? Was it art? Exploitation? Was it a comment on or a product of society? How should it be reviewed - as a product of culture, as entertainment, as a statement, as a social experiment?

All this uncertainty, despite Ledonne being nothing more than a disingenuous rabble-rouser. But if something as two-bit as Super Columbine throws sand in the gears, the need for critical clarity becomes all the more pressing. It's here that Seth Schiesel's critical lens becomes a welcome thing, a necessary compass that orients him in a sea of bewildered games-reportage.

Ledonne claims his game is designed to 'implore introspection'...
but all it 'implores' me to do is crack him in his ratty mug.

It's this aspect that may be the most difficult to pin down. Even moving past claims of games-as-art (some hifalutin', some credible), even beyond a continued discussion of games-as-culture, past the physiological and biological stuff, onward beyond hype and hysteria, there is the Bigger Picture. Panning back, and back, one can finally catch light of the arc and dimensions of the entire phenomenon of video-gaming: let's call it the "game-as-medium".

It's in this respect that I'm glad to see folks like Schiesel sounding off on what they intend to do with all of this data, even while he comes off as a greenhorn. He understands the elusive element of his task: to make games make sense. He's doing his best to do his part - as, I suppose, are we all. Because in an uncharted terrain, we are all cartographers.




(That is, unless we have Map Hacks).

- Rook

Let's talk about sex, baby

You've probably heard about Grand Theft Auto's 'Hot Coffee' scandal, even if you don't follow games. It made news shows and headlines for months and still remains the go to poster child for why games are worse than rock and roll. There are two sides to the argument, and about a dozen sub-sides to each. From 'There's nothing wrong with it since the game was rated mature at the time anyway' to 'It wasn't actually part of the game, simply code on a disk', to 'Satan has made his most recent move to devour the souls of our youth'. But as I said, it's already been debated.

More recently 2008's Mass Effect was making the headlines after it converted the Xbox 360 into a 'Sexbox.' What I'm going to rant about today is the generality of sex in video games and how a game with a sex scene takes a much harder hit than a movie. Let's start with Subject A) the Mass Effect scene in question I now follow with Subject B) The love scene from Meet Joe Black. Now Meet Joe Black's scene is quite a bit longer and slightly more explicit, but I think you'll agree that they're fairly comparable.

Sadly, this Salarian doesn't get any play.

Mass Effect received an M rating from the ESRB for Blood, Language, Partial Nudity, Sexual Themes, and Violence. The ESRB rating of M is defined as follows: "Titles rated M (Mature) have content that may be suitable for persons ages 17 and older. Titles in this category may contain intense violence, blood and gore, sexual content and/or strong language." I would say that's fair. Meet Joe Black received a PG-13 rating from the MPAA "for an accident scene, some sexuality and brief strong language." Now the MPAA's description for what PG-13 Means is somewhat bulkier but the gist is that kids 13 and over can see it and kids under 13 can see it if it's cool with their parents. But let's keep in mind that nobody has ever in the history of mankind asked a kid if he's 13 when renting a PG-13 movie or buying a theatre ticket. If it's rated R then they do card you and SWAT teams drop from the ceiling and pistol whip you if you're lying, but that's neither here nor there.

The real Gem of the PG-13 rating is "More than brief nudity will require at least a PG-13 rating, but such nudity in a PG-13 rated motion picture generally will not be sexually oriented." Really? Because I'm pretty sure Brad Pitt just had an orgasm in that scene.

King and Rook is now officially PG-13

So why is it that games are held to a much stricter standard than movies? Because kids actually have input? It's not like they're tapping up and down rapidly to get their moves on (Except God of War, but that should have a higher rating than even it's M in my opinion). The only input the player of mass effect has on the sex scene is whether or not to have it. That's right, there is no sex scene unless you make an effort to pursue the romantic subplot. Meet Joe Black doesn't give you much choice. A dude gets bounced off a couple of cars when you're least expecting it and then comes back to life and bangs Claire Forlani. Unless you turn off the movie that stuff is going to happen.

Now, don't get me wrong. I'm not saying that Mass Effect should have a lower rating. It shouldn't, It does in fact have scenes of violence and brief nudity. My problem is that parents, teachers and Baby Jesus think Mass effect shouldn't exist and that the game designers and publishers are a cult of devil worshipping heathens when any 10 year old can pay 5 bucks to watch Brad Pitt blow his wad (If he can sit through 2 and a half hours of Mr. Pitt being confused by Peanut Butter and Swimming Pools) It's a double standard and it shouldn't be.

While this may appear to be a jpg it's actually an embedded video
streaming 3/4's of the footage from Meet Joe Black

When it comes down to it there are about 30 games (not counting the slews of 18+ adult dating sims the Japanese pound out) that have sex scenes in them, and most of those simply have a screen fade to black to imply the act. Meanwhile, hundreds of movies below the R rating toss that stuff into every other scene.

So maybe before these parents get upset at what they're kids aren't supposed to be playing in the first place they should take a double look at the movies they rent for them. Iron Man, Pirates of the Caribbean, and a good many others.

Until next time, don't be afraid to sit your kids down and talk about sex,

-King