Escapist #223: M is for Massive

In some ways, "massive" is the perfect word to describe online gaming. It communicates a certain heft - a suggestion that our games have not just become larger, but gained shape and substance. As massive gaming models have become more prevalent, the term has only increased in usage, finding its way into a bevy of acronyms each more weighty than the last: MMORPG, MMOFPS, MMORTS, etc. Even in debates on how best to classify these games - do we stick with the oddly truncated "MMO" or the accurate but somehow lopsided "MMOG"? - there is always the assumption that whatever else these games may be, they're certainly massive. It's the one M to rule them all.

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

+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

Geekonomics: A Blog on Bling

With massive-multiplayer games blooming to big business, and bringing in the big bucks, much more media attention has been bent towards understanding the economics of these behemoths.

Alliterative!

This attention only make sense. Once a successful business model has emerged from a volatile market, it's simply bad business not to know how the model works. For example, when I came over to Florida as a young but optimistic Cuban immigrant, and clawed my way to the top of the 1980's cocaine boom, everybody wanted to know how I did it. My secret? Don't get high on your own supply.

First I got the money. Then I got the power. Then I got the weeeeeeemon.

An exceptional amount of work has been devoted to understanding the real-world economics of such systems. Over at GigaOM, Wagner James Au breaks down the top earners in the market. A lot of the data he reports is not what you'd expect, much of it owing to the boom of Korean MMOs, which operate under the principle of Free-to-play-but-I-guess-you-can-pay-for-some-stuff-like-maybe-a-shirt?-why-don't you-go-get-your-mom's-credit-card-and-we'll-figure-it-out gaming. To be fair, it was a really nice shirt.

Fashionably black is the new black.

Things complicate, however, when you begin analyzing the internal economies of these games, and the ways in which virtual economies meet and affect real ones. Lines become blurry, and definitions become softer. Where some MMOs are designed with commerce in mind - Second Life operates through the continuous investiture and circulation of Lindenbucks, And EVE Online is based upon the very premise of a functioning in-game economy - not all MMOs are devoted to such a maintained system. Most operate under a “dealer” principle, which controls how money flows from, and back to the game. Consider the act of “grinding,” where monsters are killed repeatedly. Upon their bodies, gold or valuables are found.

This is pure van Helmont stuff happening here: The valuables didn’t ‘come’ from anywhere, so much as sprung into existence from the aether. This can approximate a rough time-to-money system well enough, but things get squirrely when trade between players in introduced.

Look at the difference: A player pays another player hundreds of gold for a valuable or rare item, and that money stays in circulation, and can be further invested. But if a player purchases an item from a non-player character vendor, that money vanishes - sometimes to the tune of thousands of gold for the most expensive articles.

Enter the goldsink: the various sites introduced to any functional MMO operating in this system, in which hundreds of thousands of virtual moolah vanish every day. In this way can the value of in-game currency be controlled, even manipulated towards inflation and deflation. People’s purses a little too light, and you can introduce new quest lines that provide players with faster ways to accrue goodies than ever before. If there’s too much money clogging down the system, the introduction of a few new vanity items can suck all that troublesome cash out of the system in a matter of weeks.

Pictured above: Troublesome Cash

This needn’t be done to simply manage the economy - it can also be done to maintain a play environment. As a case in point, consider Blizzard’s management of World of Warcraft in the months preceding their second expansion. Knowing that players of their game would have to be given new ways to occupy themselves in the doldrums between their first expansion and the next, a new location was introduced: One that contained, in addition to a new 5-player dungeon “instance” and a new 25-player “raid” dungeon, a plethora of daily quests that provided gobs of easy cash to players - far easier, in fact, than previous environments had allowed.

In addition to these additions, if players spent enough time grinding “reputation” with a factions associated with these new quests, they could invest their hard-earned virtual cash on.. a title. For one thousand gold, a player can be “NAME of the Shattered Sun.”

To be fair, that is pretty impressive-sounding. I wouldn’t even know how to begin to go about shattering suns.

So: To keep real customers from spending their real time elsewhere and thus stop forking over real money, Blizzard introduced a new virtual place where they could spend their virtual time, amassing virtual wealth to currying virtual favour with some virtual people, to the point that one is given the elite privilege of spending all that virtual money on something that has purely aesthetic value to impress other (real) folks in a virtual space.

Compare that to a virtual mount, which at least helps you cover virtual terrain, or virtual gear, which has direct applicability in interfacing with a virtual environment (read here: pwning). One thousand gold gets you a bunch of virtual letters, stapled to your virtual face, approximating Ozymandias-level posturing. “Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”

Not this guy. But, close enough.

This may be the central difference between economies like those found in traditional MMOs and virtual trade experiments like Second Life and EVE. In the case of the former, at the end of the day, any changes applied to the system in place are may not be to facilitate commerce, but to keep people on the teat.


- Rook

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

A virtual affair to remember

Recently I’ve been noticing a story about Second Life buzzing about a number of news outlets. For those keeping track of reportage on gaming and virtual interactions, it represents more of the same: A “Tales From the Wired” parable that serves up online misbehavior at its most titillating. Broken down simply, this tragic tale of lust and betrayal plays out as follows:


- A man and woman met virtually on Second Life. They began a virtual relationship (This may have been in virtual spring, when a young man’s eFancy turns lightly to iLove).

- The virtual couple met in real life, and got Honest-to-God actually married.

- One day, the woman caught her actually husband virtually canoodling with some hussy. (That is, an actually hussy, virtually, as opposed to a virtual hussy, actually, which would be one of those inflatable ones).

- Because of the man’s virtual philandering, the couple has gotten Real-Life No-Take-Backsies divorced.

All clear? Virtually?

I read the story originally at The Times, where the story was headlined with “Second Life affair leads to Real Life divorce…” In skimming the dozen or so other news outlets that have taken up this story, the telling has generally been the same, focusing on the ‘real life’ consequences of this gent’s ‘virtual affair.’

Like so many of these types of tech culture reports, the tone is one of restrained incredulity. “Can you imagine… Two people who took a game so seriously that they got married? Gosh, you couldn’t do that in ‘Frogger! And then, because of some play-pretend affair, now they've called it quits. Maybe instead of their ‘Second Lives,’ they should have focused on their normal ones like the rest of us!”

What fascinates me of how the story is reported is the wide divide maintained between the virtual and the actual. In the articles detailing the behavior of the two, the point is driven home that in this case, the result of something purely virtual has spilled out, messily into the ‘real world’. Some headlines carry the terms in quotations, as if picking up something odious with a pair of tongs. The Telegraph claims that “Woman divorces husband over ‘virtual’ affair..”, where the Sydney Morning Herald states that “Couple divorce after virtual-world ‘affair’”.

All told, does a ‘virtual’ affair differ from a virtual ‘affair’? The former suggests that for all its virtuality, something tangible did in fact occur… where in the latter case, it isn’t an affair at all, but the ghostly semblance of one, meted out in some pixilated Candyland. The result of all this ambiguity is a real mess, one hinging upon conflated meanings of the virtual.

Yes, the virtual is unreal, but in a different way than unicorns and leprechauns. When it comes to the already-messy world of human interaction, a rose is a rose is a rose, even if it happens to be a cyber-rose plucked fresh from the inter-dirts.

This rose is The Matrix.

If there is a semantic point to be made here, it’s that in these cases 'virtual' is not equal. What was one once a fanciful term relating to the specific realm of simulation (i.e. the vaguely paradoxical ‘virtual reality’), the term has come to be a catch-all phrase for action and interaction on the internet.

In the most concrete cases, ‘virtual’ simply means done via a computer: Consider such mundane tasks as virtual banking, or virtual shopping. You aren’t transferring virtual money or buying virtual goods, you are making actual decisions in a virtual context.

On a singularly abstract level, ‘virtual’ denotes relation, dealing in essences and almosts. If you were to log onto a real estate website and receive a virtual tour of a prospective house, you would be getting an approximation of the house’s look and space, represented virtually.

Finally, on the other end of things, we have virtual as the antonym of actual - something that is defined by its illusory or false nature. Thus a ‘virtual’ death in an online game is not death in any actual sense, and does not relate to anything outside of its own context.

These divisions aren’t cut and dry, but they show a real range in what we might consider to be virtual conduct. And its no accident that the most concrete representations of virtuality skew towards the serious business of finances and transactions, where more fully abstract interactions often fall within the realm of play.

So imagine a woman divorces a man because he is addicted to pornography - we can understand that there is something tangible there, something of consequence and weight. Yet catch a man fiddling around with another woman online, a circumstance in which there is an actual other woman on the other end, and suddenly it becomes farcical.

In no other circumstance could the ‘realness’ of this type of infraction could be called into question - say, in the case where a man is caught sneaking calls to 1-900 numbers: “Well, sure, I was having sex with women over the phone… but none of that was real, you see? It happened in the magical realm of my imagination. The $3.50 a minute, on the other hand? Disturbingly real”.

So this isn’t a case of a virtual affair, but rather of a real affair, committed virtually. The infraction is a real one, and it should be no surprise to anyone that its consequences have played out in reality. Of course, anyone still skeptical that this woman had no actual reason to divorce her husband might look no further than their now-well-publicized wedding photo for further proof:



As you can see, dude looks bad in a bow tie.

- Rook