Ask not what your games can do for you...

The most depressing notion behind games is the 'timesink' - the extent to which these activities are repetitive, irrelevant, and ultimately wasteful. As a term it is unusually evocative: while a 'pastime' helps the time to pass, a time sink sucks it away, like some wretched Baba Yaga stealing your breath as you sleep. You don't just help time pass, you kill it. Played a nice game of checkers recently? You can't get that back. You're one more nice game of checkers closer to dead.

"Still not as bad as Warcraft"

With such a low poplar opinion of gaming and games, it's fascinating to see those who view these thousand of game-hours spent as something more than a colossal wank. Cast in a different light, this playtime posits an incredible potential, a powerful, invisible current that need only be harnessed. It is this perspective that lead to games like University of Washington's Foldit, which is a charming little way to waste a couple hours, and while you're at it, help cure cancer.

The thought process behind the game is a fairly straightforward one. It begins with a research problem: Proteins of all types can be imagined, offering any number of properties, but due to the massive amount of variation possible, cataloging every possible protein arrangement is an insurmountable task: One that is speculated, in a disquietingly Clarkian way, to require every computer on Earth a century of uninterrupted processing to hash out.

But here's the rub: It's thought that we pitiful hoo-mons, with our pathetic 'feelings' and 'emotions', might do a better job. It's one of those post-industrial tasks that for whatever reason the robots don't have us licked. Amazon's Mechanical Turk operates under the same premise: by breaking a task down into iterable parts to be processed, any number of time-consuming jobs become possible. Communal labour haven't been this promising since Shakespeare got those million monkeys on a million typewriters to produce his oft-overlooked masterwork "Od bhjHd lnjNDnjdbiAD: A tragedy in sixty-three parts".

So for Foldit, the task of crafting optimal protein-formations is left to the player: hydrophilic and hydrophobic side-chains must be bent away from each other, while amino acid coils can be dragged together to form hydrogen bonds. After running a gauntlet of tutorial environments, you are free to begin challenging others at devising new formations, and posting your performances online.

SCIIIIIIENCE!

In this case, the play environment takes its cues from modern game-spaces based on collaboration, comparison and mutual play. If anything is surprising, it's how easily this type of forum has been chained to the yoke of Pure Progress. While we've been told that there are personal benefits to gaming, ranging from the mental keening from games like Brain Age, the role of kinetic games like Wii Bowling in nursing homes, and even things like doctors sharpening their surgery skills through gaming-simulation, these are arguments for something intrinsic to gameplay, as opposed to something applied exterally.

Put simply, Foldit is a move away from an inward scrutiny of how games affect us, towards something potentially groundbreaking: How we can affect the world through games. This needn't be something sinister or ominous, an "Ender's Game" blurring of fact and fiction. It can be as simple as twiddling a peptide bond to get a new high score. So much time in games is spent in consideration: thinking, toying with options, evaluating moves. Who says we can't choose what we think about? A twist here, a pull there, and voila: Something new.

Me and my fellow million monkeys, we a-gonna change the world.


- Rook

In Memorium

I swear I was going to write a piece about the lack of strong male role models in today’s society. It was going to be both educational and thought provoking. Seriously, both. Check for that on Thursday.

I started writing the piece Sunday afternoon while waiting for a couple friends to come over. It was our intent to sling cards for awhile that afternoon after which I would dip my quill back into the ink pot and continue penning another chapter of my life’s work. We didn’t play cards that day.

What happened you might ask? Left 4 Dead happened. Left 4 frikkin’ Dead. It was alright though, I could finish writing on Monday. Nope, Monday night came along and with it, Left 4 Dead. I awoke late for work today, but scrawled on the bedroom wall in the orange dust from a Kraft Dinner package was an arcane formula, Multiplayer +Zombies = Fun.

My girlfriend was unimpressed.

Now, in case you haven’t noticed, I enjoy video games. Trickily, I also enjoy my social life. When I have the opportunity to blend the two it’s like making a peanut butter sandwich. Bread and peanut butter is delicious! Why doesn’t everyone eat this ALL THE TIME!? The same goes for multiplayer video games. I find it difficult to understand why every single person I know doesn’t play video games. I mean every single person I know owns a computer, likewise for “enjoys board games”.

That said, on Sunday night a good friend of mine who doesn’t play video games decided to go ahead and give Left 4 Dead a try. It started not unlike a childs first time in a pool. Except also he’s swimming the relay. “I don’t know about this guys. I don’t think I’ll be able to help and I’ll probably just hold you back.”

“It’s cool”, said Joel and I, experienced gamers,” We’ll watch your back.” The three of us stood atop a greenhouse. I contented myself to shoot the zombies below with my hunting rifle while Joel explained some of the basics to Matt. A few tentative shots at potted plants and even a zombie and he felt ready to give it a go. So down from the roof we climbed. Clamb? Climbed.

Things went well, we trekked through the large greenhouse into the warehouse it was attached to and took out our first horde of zombies before we proceeded through a small town towards an airstrip where we saw a plane land at the beginning. Now I’m going to take a moment and explain what the deal is with these zombies. We’re not talking the slow shambling zombies we all know and love. I speak of the sprinting, climbing, blood curdling scream kind. (I initially wrote blurdling by accident. I thought you should know)There are also super zombies. First there is the Smoker. This guy has a 635 foot long tongue which he lashes at you with like a vicious octopus. It will wrap you up in this tongue and drag you, helpless in its grasp, towards it, usually across a field and up the side of a building. Seriously the tongue is long. Then there’s the Hunter, a feral thing that leaps tall buildings in a single bound and crawls around on all fours. This fucker will jump on you and then he will eat your face. Both of these guys render you helpless and your only chance is to scream into your mic “helpmehelpmehelpmehelpme” and hope one of your friends has a spare moment to shoot the thing off you. The game is intense and really requires an unparalleled degree of teamwork in a video game.

I told you it was a long tongue.

Anyway Matt only shot me once during our journey, which was not great. We made it to a safehouse anyways where we patched up before heading onto the airstrip. There we found the plane beside a fuel truck. The pilot had locked himself in the cockpit and informed us, via the co-pilots radio, that they had tried to refuel and as soon as the co-pilot had turned on the fuel truck the zombie horde converged. Okay, so we began the planning stages. I stood atop the fuel truck with my sniper rifle while Joel walked around with propane tanks and set them in visible locations at the entrances to the various choke points leading to our last stand. Matt found a chaingun turret, we’re not sure why it was there but we didn’t question it. We informed Matt to hold onto the trigger of that thing right up until it overheated and caught on fire. At the last minute a friend of Joel’s jumped into the game to take control of the AI that had been accompanying us and so we were 4.

Things got out of hand quickly after that. I had killed scores of zombies with well placed shots on the propane tanks from atop the fuel truck while Joel kept others off my back with his shotgun. Matt was cutting a swath through the hordes with the mini-gun when a 10 foot chunk of concrete came flying out of the distance and smashed into the sandbags he was behind knocking him to the ground and destroying the turret. The Tank had arrived. The monstrosity was half-Incredible Hulk half-Zombie and came barreling down the runway tossing airplane fuselages left and right. Joel threw a molitov cocktail at it englufing the beast in flames. We now had a flaming tank rushing towards us. I fired off a few rounds as Joel, in a moment of pure cinematic badassery walked calmly towards charging beast unloading round after round of shotgun ammo at it. With a groundshaking roar the Tank stumbled and slide forward stopping at Joel’s feet. There was a moment of triumph before we saw the teeming mass of Zombies coming down the runway.

If Rook were a zombie I wouldn’t even feel bad when I shot him.

I wasn’t even sure if we were going to have enough bullets to take out that many. I helped Matt to his feet and clambered to the top of the fuel truck and that’s when I saw an equally large horde coming from behind. We were fucked. I pulled out my pistols, yes two, and began to open fire blindly in all directions, John Woo style. The hordes converged on the truck and began climbing up the sides. Joel and I stood atop it kicking them off the sides as the made their ascent and rifle butting when necessary. I looked to my left and saw the cargo bay of the plane opening and called to my comrades to run for it. Joel and I leapt from atop the truck, soaring majestically over the heads of the zombies, and landed in a full run towards the plane. I saw Matt fall to the ground in front of me and raced towards him. His hand reached out to clasp mine as I leapt over him and made for the hanger. Don’t look at me like that, the guy shot me that one time remember? I clambered into the plane’s cargo hold and pulled out my rifle to cover our backs as Joel ran in beside me. We fired madly to keep the zombies from entering the hold while we waited for Joel’s friend to get in.

What happened next is debated. I claim a hunter jumped on the guy’s back. Everyone else claimed I shot Joel’s friend in the head. Either way Joel’s friend and Matt were dead so it was my word against Joel’s in the end as we flew to safety. Credits actually rolled as the joke of the game is that it’s actually a movie. It displayed our user names as the actors and proceeded to dedicate the film to Matt and Lunchbox, Joel’s friend, who didn’t make it. In the end it’s not important who shot who, what matters is that we all had fun, and someone who doesn’t play video games gave it a shot.

Until next time remember, blades don’t need reloading

-King

15 Minutes of Fame

One of my friend's coworkers, who has a PhD in Sci-Fi, (We've been recognized by the academia!) had her own 15 minutes of fame passed my way. Check it out as it's both groovy and cool!

-King

A Wretched Hive Of Scum And Villainy

"Each film is only as good as its villain. Since the heroes and the gimmicks tend to repeat from film to film, only a great villain can transform a good try into a triumph." – Roger Ebert

There’s something about a memorable villain that gets the blood boiling, that pulls you into the story of a game emotionally. It takes a good villain to change the story of a game from being about stopping a meteor from destroying the planet to being about stopping the villain from summoning a meteor to destroy the planet. Those villains, they’re special.

Some villains aren’t all that special though, if you think about the Pac-Man Ghosts, well they’re just friggin’ ghosts. But they make the game, I mean, it could be said they’re more important than Pac-Man. The game would not be enjoyable if all you did was wander through a bunch of hallways eating glowing dots unopposed. Personality-wise the ghosts don’t have a lot going for them though. Their names are Inky, Blinky, Pinky, and Clyde, now granted Clyde is obviously some sort of Maverick, but other than that we can only rely on the campfire tales and dream-stories told by mysterious gypsies to learn more about their nefarious purpose and dark history. To the average Pac-Man player however, it’s enough that they just want to eat you because they are ghosts.

Ghost Faced Killer

If ghosts lacking personality can have that much impact then it’s easy to understand how a villain with goals, character, and personality can not only increase the drama of the tale but often single-handedly introduce theme and conflict into the story. They only show up every so often, starting off just like any other villain in that first moment where you see them and go “Oh, that’s the guy ima have to fight” But as you move ever closer to your goals you discover that this isn’t an ordinary villain. This villain has chutzpah.

Chutzpah.

These villains are not only your adversary and obstacle but also your opposite. All of your weaknesses are their strengths, and so the smaller the hero the bigger the villain which generally makes the victory all the more triumphant. The thing that really drives it home though is when the villains actions seem as though they’re the gratification of some symbolic desire causing you to identify more with the villain than the hero so that in the final confrontation you know you’ve got to save the world, but maybe it’s too bad you have to kill this guy to do it.

All Captain James Hook ever wanted was a mother… and to kill Pan.

One of the major things about games to me is the story, the sense that I’m accomplishing something. The story doesn’t have to be epic, or even particularly good, I just need a reason to be doing what I’m doing. Sometimes I am sneaking into a terrorist base trying to destroy a giant bipedal tank, but other times I am trying to eat a bunch of yellow dots. These things don’t do much for me on their own, its overcoming the obstacles on the way to the completion of the story that’s enjoyable and there’s no obstacle quite like a good villain to make a game memorable.

Until next time may you Omnislash your own one-winged angel,

-King

Jump, man, jump!

At the dank, cryptic arcade I frequented when I was young, there was one machine that towered above the rest: An original Donkey Kong. Set apart from the other games, it loomed monolithically, promising dark portents to any who dared plumb its depths. I’m talking real “hit a monkey with a bone” stuff, folks. Serious business.

"Huh.. it says 'insert quarter.'"

Despite my fascination, I never touched it. There was always a line of dull-eyed teenagers barring my way, menacingly clutching their cans of New Coke. Instead, I would gaze longingly at the art on the side of the machine, where a lumpy Mario-before-he-was-Mario was shown mid-spring. Underneath was a helpful protip, one as curious as a zen koan: “PRESS A TO MAKE JUMP MAN JUMP.”

It seems like we’ve been making Jump Man jump ever since. Since their inception, there have been video games about navigating space. Even pre-graphics classics like Adventure and Zork have a layout and a sense of motion - so much so that the ultimate threat is for your light to be extinguished, giving you no idea of where you are going. But with the platformer came the final ingredient to the recipe.

There is something supremely satisfying about jumping on a goomba. The way it remains squashed down, comic in defeat, while you spring upward and onward. It has a consistency: elastic, spongy, slightly al dente. (I have always suspected that they would be delicious in an omelet.) Though a lowly peon, one to be stomped with impunity, it has substance in a way the soulless blips of previous games never did.

The moment that physics are brought into the equation, the simple acts of running and jumping conjure a experience of the heft of the game: not simply the presence, but the experience of mass. In learning to move, we are not only learning to control a character but experiencing the scope of the world, the tactile sensations of bashing blocks and kicking about turtle shells. In coming to intuit how a character will jump, swim, fly, we encounter one of the first immersive experiences in gaming: the sensation of existing in a internally-consistent world.

Le saut-homme original.

In these cases the physics represent the grammar of these games, relating a language of motion. How Mario moves about the screen is not merely a character trait, but his essence. Compare to other 2D platform figures like Sonic the Hedgehog, Samus Aran, and Kirby: The way that the characters are defined relates directly to how they navigate their respective spaces.

King mentioned Cave Story in an earlier post, in tandem with Metroid. At first glance they seem to have nothing in common, due to their drastically different visual tones. But in beginning the game, the physical parallels are immediate and unmistakable. In both games you don’t so much jump as glide through the air, drifting in a way that is both crisp and surprisingly graceful. The connection is a kinetic one, as is the realization: “I have moved this way before.” They may not resemble each other, but they speak the same language.

So now we have a slew of 3D platformers, whose successes and failures have hinged upon how well they have provided navigable spaces. We have games like Portal, which translate first-person experiences into experiments with movement and space. We have Little Big Planet, which follows through on earlier experiences of tactile physics. We have Braid, which meta-textually examines this whole “jumping about from ledge to ledge” business we’ve busied ourselves with for decades.

So jump on, Jump Men and Jump Women. O’er pit of spikes, o’er lava deep, jump on. Jump on, Jump ever on, into the future. Because the one thing that we haven’t jumped yet?


THE SHARK.


- Rook

p.s. For an immediate and simple example of what I call heft, consider: Space Invaders don't got none. Asteroids does.

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

Indie Games and The Raiders of The Lost Art

I’m a hardcore gamer. I’ve tea-bagged Covenant Elite, Saw Manny and Meche all the way to the Ninth Underworld on the Double N, Caught 252 Pokemon on the Red, completed FF7 at level 28 without Materia and beaten Super Mario Bros 3 in 2 hours and 30 minutes.

Wait…what? Oh I know it can be beaten in less than 15 minutes, but why would I want to? Mario 3 is fun times and a speed run cuts out half of an extraordinary game. See I like playing video games, and I play them a lot, new ones and old, but eventually you run out of old. Or at least that was the case. These days some new games are…old? I’m talking Independent games here.

Remember this? Probably not since you skipped it with a flute you goomba.

Now granted not all indie games are of ‘the old-school’, the very excellent Mount and Blade comes to mind immediately, but most indie games seep old school charm from every pixilated pore and a select few do it better than their predecessors. Yes I’m looking at you Cave Story. The most incredible thing is that usually these are one or two man operations. I can barely draw a stick man and coding? I don’t want to talk about it. Most of these guys are doing the whole thing solo.

Bobble-headed robots are way sexier than chicks in robot suits

So where do they come from? How can we find them? Well it can be tough to track them down and you really have to keep your finger on the pulse to find these gems. Personally I read TIGsource and The Indiegames Blog daily. Sometimes though, when the stars align and the portents are auspicious, independent developers get a break. Introversion, the previously mentioned Cave Story by Pixel (Now being ported to the Wii!) Braid by Jonathon Blow and 2D Boy's World of Goo come to mind immediately.

Oh, you’ve heard of those last two? That’s probably because Microsoft and Nintendo put on some rubber boots and jumped into the ocean recently. The industry is finally recognizing that their target demographic grew up with games just like these and we, brace yourself, remember them fondly. So they’ve been putting in an effort to dish out some great Indy games though Xbox Live and WiiWare. This is good! Sort of!

Don’t worry true believers, I’m not going to give all the cred for mainstream indie games to the mega corps, things like Steam and Penny Arcade’s Greenhouse have been doing their part, not to mention organizations like the IGDA So try a couple of these, they’re usually free and the ones that aren’t are worth it. At the very least you’ll be supporting diversity in the market. But I guess WW2 Shooters are good too.

Until next time, may you be a bad enough dude to rescue the president.

-King