Gaming Blog

Chuck Klosterman

2007-04-19T09:04:00.000-07:00

I mentioned in class that Chuck Klosterman wrote a pretty great little piece about the Sims. You can access the first section of it here, and if you think it's worth it, go ahead and rent the book. (I'd loan you mine, but I lost it years ago!)

Come to think of it, everyone should read this book anyway. The chapter blaming John Cusack for ruining women is especially fantastic, and also very true.

Representations in Videogaming

2007-04-17T09:45:00.000-07:00

Today's presentation got me thinking a lot about the concept of representation in videogames: that is, how the same physical (or i guess virtual) act can be represented differently from game to game to produce different visceral effects. One example I talked about with Bryan after class comes from Wii Sports.

In the training function of the bowling game, there's a mode in which one can practice 'power throws.' In this mode, the point is to throw the ball as hard as you can without curving the ball off one way or another without trying (or, at least, that's how I think about it). As a player progresses through this stage, the game adds more and more pins so that, in the end, the player is trying to knock down as many as 91 pins. The game rewards a player for bowling a strike by doubling the points awarded on that level - in other words, if you bowl a strike on the last level, you will be credited 182 pins to your total score. In addition to the score booost, however, there is a visceral reward in seeing the ball you "threw" smash nearly 100 pins into oblivion. Often when I play with my friends, the score is viewed as secondary to this second type of reward. "Look at how you made those pins explode!" is not just something we say to a newbie friend to make her feel better about not hitting many pins - it's a genuine reaction to how cool it is to see one really charged up pin take out 10 or 15 others. (For a demonstration of Wii Bowling, click below.)

The Ultimate Powerthrow - The best bloopers are a click away

This part of Wii bowling sounds very similar to the crash mode described by today's presentation group. If I understand correctly, in this mode the player's car can be seen as something of a Wii-bowling ball: a player charges it up as fast as he can, rams it into any other cars as possible, and then waits for that big, gratifying explosion at the end. To me, the difference in the acts is negligible. But because this later example performs that act using the representation of vehicles (and humans, by implication) rather than a ball and pins, people - especially critics - react differently.

At this point, I think the question becomes more a matter of what, exactly, it is that we respond to in videogames. Do people respond to acts of human-on-human violence in gameplay because the person is genuinely seeking human blooshed? Or is it somewhat more innocent than that - something that would be equally satisfied (if not in exactly the same way) by ball-on-pin violence? It seems to go back to the quote we heard earlier in the semester:

...gamers are dismissive of the ethical implications of games--they don't see "get a blowjob from a hooker, then run her over." They see a power-up. (Koster Fun 81-85)

I'd be interested to see what everyone else thinks of this - the question lends itself to a discussion of gaming sociology, but I think there's also an aspect of literary criticism in there somewhere. After all, we have much the same types of problems when discussing novels and plays - context and characterization often make all the difference in the world when we form our opinions about the persons in a work of literature. To what extent is this true in the world of videogames?

Action RPGs - Dedicated to Jeff and Kevin

2007-04-02T19:18:00.000-07:00

Our playgroup got together today to discuss our upcoming presentation on Diablo, and we came up with some really, really great stuff (so get excited!). The paratextual elements that go along with Diablo are just fabulous. I'm especially looking forward to approaching 'The Bard's Tale,' which appears to be a (snarky) action RPG about action PRGs. It brings to mind a discussion we had in Crime, Deviance and Despair in Early Modern Drama, about the question of paradigm versus parody. A game like Diablo has certainly had its share of emulators, but just how (self-) conscious do these games appear to be of the conventions and stereotypes of the action RPG? And how do they approach them? I think that this question will help a lot in reading these games and classifying them, as well as in constructing a critical literary analysis of the action RPG genre.

Geek-foo

2007-04-01T22:10:00.000-07:00

This week I bought:
- Okami
- Katamari Damacy
- Baldur's Gate Dark Alliance
- The Bard's Tale
- A Gamestop discount card
- (and thus) a subscription to Game Informer

Also, on Saturday, I spent roughly 8 hours playing Wii. I don't know this for sure, but I've got a feeling history will repeat itself next and all subsequent weekends, because my boyfriend just bought a Wii for himself for his birthday and we've done nothing but play with it since it moved in. In fact, as I type this, he's about 3 feet away from me swearing at Wii Sports for not sinking his last put even though it was PERFECT. It's amazing how life-like Wii really is.

The Five Games You'll Play In Heaven

2007-03-24T13:44:00.000-07:00

Today I encountered an artcle entitled 'The Five Games You Play in Heaven' by Dan Scog. Though he's not exactly Matt Kirschenbaum, I find he does make an interesting point: Scog argues that Super Mario Brothers, Pac Man, Tetris, Space Invaders, and Pong are the five games that every video game expert should have mastered. Though it seems that Scog feels that mastery of these games is more of a point of pride than anything else (and though the author does seem to fall prey to the same generational prejudices he supposedly objects to), I think there's a larger point at the heart of this article.

The author claims that these five games are largely overlooked and disregarded today because of the availability of more complex or visually stimulating games on later platforms. Still, he reasons that they are still valuable because the skills aquired by playing these games are the building blocks of the skills one needs to play later games. I agree with this, and also submit that these games have become 'classics' because of their adaptability. That is, it is not only the skills these games require that make them stand out in our memories as special and interesting, but the combinations of their formal and narrative elements with these skills. In this sense I argue that even though people may not regularly pick up an Atari to play Space Invaders, for example, people still encounter most of the qualities of this and other classics in later games (Halo, for example) that attracted people to games like Space Invaders in the first place.

There's a definite parallel between book-literature and videogames in this sense: the true classics are those works which are constantly emulated, improved upon, and updated to fit the changing times. Just as, for example, MacBeth was updated for the movie Scotland, PA (2001), Super Mario Brothers has been rehashed for today's gamer in Half-Life, for one example.

I should probably substantiate that claim. In both Mario and Half-Life, the game objective is to progress through stages by gathering items and defeating 'mini' foes. Climax scenes divide the story into levels or stages, and an over-arching narrative links these stages until the ultimate objective is reached at the end. Though these qualities that link the two games are, admittedly, pretty general, I think the narrative structures of the games, their search-and-find objectives, and the presence of goons that inhibit the main character along his path are enough to place Mario Brothers and Half-Life in a class of games that differs from others.

I think that, in various ways, people today are playing the same games that people a generation before were playing; that is, it's less often the formal elements that change from game to game than the tools we are given to reach them. This is why platform has become so important in the modern gaming world, I think; technological innovation allows the same basic game structures to take on new dimensions that turn them into what is, partly (but not essentially) a new game.

So regardless of Scog's retrophilic opinion that these five specific games are the ones that will be 'played in heaven,' I argue that the formal elements of these games are important, in the grand scheme of things, primarily as the dawn of a genre, making it possible for other games to stand on their shoulders and exist as equally, if differntly, entertaining pastimes.

Rectifying the Mario Shortage

2007-03-21T09:40:00.000-07:00

I actually play a fair amout of the original SMB in my spare time to de-stress while writing papers or studying. The other night, as I was hopelessly stuck on level 6, I decided to break the monotony and try to find some cheats or something. I was expecting a simple ↑ ↑ ↓ ↓ ← → ← → B A select start or something, but what I found instead was a world of possibilities that ranged from simple cheats to game glitches that can be used to get Mario into all kinds of trouble I never knew was possible.

Pardon my ignorance, everyone who knows this already (I imagine some of you are probably going to say,' yeah, I figured that out.... when i was four."), but there is a never-ending water world at the end of 1.2!! This, to me, was remarkable. Not merely the fact that I've been playing Mario since I was in diapers (practically) and never knew about this, but that even now, there's interest in what this world is, what Mario can do in it, and whether it has any additional relevance to the game experience beyond diversion.

The never-ending water level, or "minus world" as most sites refer to it, brings up some new (well, if you're me) questions about paratextuality and canonicity in a franchize that is already so richly endowed with possibilities for interpretation. For example, can a portion of a canonical paratext be considered an epitext, and, if so, can external epitexts be considered more canonical than those internal ones?

We discussed with Myst that you can go though the entire game without really addressing the narrative exposition in the video content. Similarly, in SMB, you can play the game for, like, 20 years without ever addressing -1. And, in truth, you wouldn't be missing much narratively because, apparently, there's no way to leave it once you get in short of restarting. (Only one person has ever claimed to have completed the minus level, but he or she is largely regarded as a scammer.) Still, the presence of the minus world and other glitches of this nature have found a place in the game experience, particularly with the types of people who are attracted to cheat codes and other, more intentional secrets embedded in a game.

In fact, it appears that the minus world and the turtle of infinite life in 3.1 have survived editing, making it onto SMB for wii among other reincarnations. Yet I've found no indication that there has been any attempt to complete the minus level, to encode a destination at the end of it so that it doesn't loop, or to fix the "infinite" life trick in 3.1 so that it doesn't eventually game over (as it did in the original game after 128 1ups). That is, even though the glitches was almost certainly not intended for the final version of the game, the editors have kept them upon revisitation, and in so doing have acknowledged them as part of the Mario canon.

Still, I feel like there is a division between the type of experience in the minus world and that which takes place in normal gameplay that warrants their seperation. I would say that the minus world can indeed be considered epitextual, even though it is contained on the same physical device as the proper game and can be accessed through an exploitation of SMB's glitches. And if this is the case, I believe other texts with similar issues can be regarded in the same way, since physical location does not seem to be a determining factor of canonicity, even if that physical location is embedded within a canonical object.

A Wii-Markably Unscholarly Post About My New Favorite Thing

2007-03-08T21:53:00.000-08:00

(Pardon the pun. I couldn't help myself. Really.)

My sister got a Wii a couple of weeks ago, and I tried it for the first time today.

Now, I know this is supposed to be a scholarly blog, and I usually do my best to comply with that guideline, but this entry is going to contain very little substance. None, in fact. I'm sorry, and I'll do better next time, but this has to be said:

Wii might be the coolest toy ever.

I played just about everything available to me, and it's really great because I kicked all kinds of ass at bowling and baseball and boxing and everything. I threw strikes all over the place, and KOed every person who crossed my path, and pretty much wiped the floor with my sister. Not that I dont usually, at most things in fact, but it was still really cool to confirm that I could take her virtually, as well as literally.

Anyway, Wii was some of the most fun I've had in a long time. There was an article in the Red Eye last week about how people play this system so much they loose serious weight, and I totally get why. If I didn't have a million other things to do, I'd Wii-exercise (Wii-xercise?) like crazy.
Every day, probably. First I'd do 30 minutes of DDR (the only other videogame pheonomenon I've subscribed to in my adult life), then I'd switch gears to Wii Sports for another 30 to pound homers out of the park, Billy Blanks be damned. I'm confident that if we all did this, we'd all look like Giselle. Even the boys.

I remember when I was a kid and my parents got me one of those great Nintendo sports pads and I went nuts with it. Wii brings back some of those great memories of stomping my feet really hard in the same place over and over again, except with the added bonus of superior graphics and comparatively realistic sports action. I got sick of the Nintendo thing after a little while, but between you and me I'm glad that Wii belongs to my sister and not me, because let's just say I'd be doing a disproportional amont of homework for videogames class.

Put Ze Candle Back - Secret Passageways and Videogaming

2007-03-06T13:07:00.000-08:00

Recently, HGTV aired a special entitled Secret Spaces, which explored hidden rooms and secret passages in modern architecture. (See link: HiddenPassageway.com)

The program featured a number of rooms and passageways, each of which was activated by a unique "trigger" known only to the architect and the homeowner. Interviews with the head inventor at Hidden Passageways revealed many portal options, including a revolving fireplace, a revolving bookshelf, and a staircase on hydraulics that lifts to reveal another staircase.

Though the passageways themselves may seem to have been torn from the pages of a Nancy Drew mystery (or perhaps a Mel Brooks comedy?), what is intriguing about them is the way by which they are accessed. Rather than falling back on the old "trick book" trigger, many buyers opt for less obvious choices. For example, one homeowner's secret space is revealed only when one uses a special statuette to circumscribe exactly the right pattern over an electromagnetic countertop. Currently, engineers are working on a chess board that will, when all the pieces are in their correct places, give access to a secret room that originates elsewhere in the house. Hidden Passageways also offers hinged paintings that, when opened, reveal the passageway they depict; there are also wall panels that push to reveal hidden rooms, trap doors that mask underground safe rooms, and secret-rooms-within-secret-rooms, accessed by way of sliding shelving.

Strangely enough, however, the rooms that are masked by these elaborate entryways are hardly ever worth the trouble. One might find oneself crawling through a slender gap in the back of a fireplace only to discover an ordinary sitting room on the other side. Or one might wander a corridor for half an hour before leaning against the wall in utter frustration -- and falling backwards into the secret loo. The luckiest of secret passage-seekers might find a cache of wine at the end of his expedition, but in more instances than not, one would be fortunate to find merely a dusty stairmaster or a pile of old posters. In fact, it is very consistently the case that the rooms concealed by these secret entrances are far less exciting than the entrances themselves.

If all of this starts to sound a little familiar, it might be because you've played a few videogames.

Admittedly, none of these secret features is a “convention” of architecture, but the opposite is true of videogames. Many (if not most) games, from Mario to Myst to San Andreas, invoke the convention of the secret room in order to add excitement, mystery, and heightened difficulty to the gaming experience. Just as, according to Hidden Passageways, a secret space in a house can make it “the talk of the town,” secret rooms and optional levels will spur additional interest in a game, and will get people thinking and talking about it in much more depth than they might otherwise. The mere fact of secret passages and optional modes keeps the astute player on the lookout for deeper significances. It acquaints them with the possibility of game interaction that they otherwise would not have known. It gives them the opportunity to “author” the game, to determine its path and its contents.

And even though secret rooms themselves are often routine in both form and content, offering a small clue or a one-up as a reward for perhaps hours of hard work, I maintain that, as in the example of the house, the room itself is not what a player is after -- rather, it is the experience of having found the room, of having interacted with text in a deep and meaningful way, that keeps gamers wanting to look beyond the obvious linearity of the gamescape and into the possibilities that lay beyond.

CI Gaming as a Teaching Tool

2007-02-19T13:16:00.000-08:00

What do these myriad CI projects share in common? They all use digital networks to connect
massively-multi human users in a persistent process of social data-gathering, analysis and
application. Their goal: to produce a kind of collectively-generated knowledge that is different
not just quantitatively, but also qualitatively, in both its formation and its uses.
- from Jane McGonigal, 'Why I Love Bees: A Case Study In Collective Intelligence Gaming''

Jane McGonigal's essay, 'Why I Love Bees,' approaches the topic of collective intelligence

There are several things that attract me to this CI business. First of all, I love that it fosters an environment of collaboration and cooperation in an era that, from my experience, is becoming increasingly divided and individuated (despite the popularity of cell phones, instant messengers, and the like). Though I do fancy myself a "rugged individualist," I admit that we cannot ignore what I see as our basic human need for collaboration and friendship, both socially and intellectually. CI, and specifically CI gaming, gives us a reason, but more importantly an opportunity, to pursue this need in a fun and stimulating way. Yet 'I Love Bees' was structured in such a way that the individual would not be lost to the collective, since, according to Levy, “the mutual recognition and enrichment of individuals” is the goal of collective intelligence. And this, more importantly, is what really intrigues me.

What makes the 'I Love Bees' community special, I think, is that unlike most fraternities and social circles that thrive on similarities (or in some cases commonality) among its members, 'I Love Bees' thrived on its members' differences; that is, the philosophy of the game derived from the idea that not everyone can know everything, but everyone can know something, and, with collaboration, that something can be added to the somethings else of others. In this way, through collaboration with other players, one's own experience and intelligence are expanded and enriched. I find this to be a very truthful, and very useful, statement. It very importantly shifts the focus from the collective to the individual, which almost universally keeps individuals more interested and involved than if the focus was direced the opposite way.

However, there is one place in which I get critical. The makers of the game actively pursued a manifestation of their philosophy by making sure that not everyone would have access to all of the game's clues. McGonigal writes:

The distributed narrative of I Love Bees played out in highly “deconstructed” form. It was revealed in clue-sized pieces over the course of four months across hundreds of web pages, dozens of blog posts, thousands of emails, and over 40,000 live Mp3 transmissions. Some of these content fragments could be found by anyone who looked closely enough. Others loaded only on the Web browsers of players logging in from IP addresses linked to specific geographic regions. Still others were sent as private, personalized emails or phone calls to a single player out of the hundreds of thousands of total players. Because of this massive distribution of content, responsibility rested on each and every player to come forward with any and all discoveries, so that the entire collective could access and process as complete a data set as possible.

What I don't understand is the need to hand select players special information no one else had access to until those players decided to share it. If the philosophy of CI is that not everyone can know something, that is, no one can cognitively hold all the game knowledge, then why artificially inject inequalities of knowledge into gameplay? Yes, I admit that it would be cool to be that player who got the phone call at home or the special packet of information in the mail, but that aspect of CI seems a little a little heavy-handed to me, and maybe a little superfluous.

It seems to me that 'I Love Bees' and other CI ventures of this kind work because knowledge is not a commodity -- it can be infinitely shared without ever being diminished, and is more often than not enriched when it is shared. But I fell like the game's engineers unintentionally commodify the game's knowledge when they hand it to individuals.

Of course, I may be looking at this all wrong. Maybe the fact that, eventually, the information does get disbursed negates my opinion entirely. But I still feel like there's some aspect of artificiality in effectively saying, 'this firsthand knowledge is only available to one person, but he or she can do with it what he or she pleases.' If we're supposed to be regarding CI as a teaching tool, as McGonigal's article suggests, and as a way of showing that collaboration leads to a more fulfilling (individual) human experience, I think game engineers should take a more lasiez-faire attitude in the future by making players always work for their firsthand knowledge (by solving puzzles, traveling to GPS coordinates, etc.), never handing it to them. This will teach people that even though knowledge becomes common by sharing, there was once a point where said knowledge had to be pursued. And this will keep people interested in the act of discovery, rather than focused merely in the knowledge itself. This, to me, is the more useful end of CI endeavors in gaming.

MOO Project - Any Takers?

2007-02-15T17:47:00.000-08:00

I've been thinking a bit about the final project, and I think it would be great to try to re-imagine a familiar story in the MOO tool. Anyone interested in this idea? We can build the room and then collaborate on a paper or presentation based on how the video game medium changes our interpretation of the text.

I have a few ideas, but I'd like to see what everyone else thinks, too. Reply to this post or see me before/after class.

Thanks, everyone!

If Only The Colts Drank More Coke...

2007-02-08T13:52:00.000-08:00

If there was still any question regarding the viability of videogames as a cultural textual medium, America's leading soft drink manufacturer has entered the debate, and is putting its money where its mouth is. Coca-Cola has released a new ad campaign based on the Grand Theft Auto series, which recently aired during the Superbowl. The ad features a GTA-like avatar (fresh from breaking every traffic law in the book) who, after guzzling a Coke, changes his plundering ways and spreads charity and good will with the help of the brown-and-bubbly. The peppy refrain in the background reminds the viewer, "Give a little love and it all comes back to you." (I'm sure I don't need to explain just how stark a contrast this is to the idiological refrain of the actual game.)

Similarly, Coca-Cola Company has been marketing its product in China with ads and packaging based on the game World of Warcraft. This campaign, featuring what can only be described as the Trifecta of Nerddom (hot girls, medieval weaponry, and videogaming), is both sensorally and emotionally stimulating, just like its American counterpart.

But does it put the bottles in the hands?

The answer to this question will depend on a lot of factors, but among the most important of them, of course, is the factor of recognizibility. Will people (specifically, people outside of the 18-24 year old male demographic) understand and relate to these images?

Without the market research at hand to answer these questions, I am forced to resort to conjecture. Hence, today's anecdote:

This year, rather than surround myself with the usual band of college-aged miscreants, I watched the Superbowl with my mother. Nearly 50, female, and the mother of two girls, my mom falls well beyond the demographic typically associated with videogaming. In fact, I can personally attest to her not having played a single videogame since the last time she played Tetris before we broke our NES in 1993.

So when the Coke GTA commercial came on, I wasn't expeting much of a response on her end.

Yet, as it turns out, videogaming is so pervasive in society today that even my mom (my mom) got the reference, the irony, and the humor of the commercial. She could even tell me exctly which videogame the commercial had parodied.

I'm not sure what to say about this episode other than this: videogaming, for better or for worse, is something that relates to a larger portion of American society (and perhaps those of others, as well) than we perhaps thing. If this kind of widespread, mainstream usage of videogames proves successful, perhaps it will draw more attention to the use of videogames and other digital media as a new wave of textuality, appealing not just to the nerd in mom's basement, but to mom, as well.

Fraidy Cat

2007-01-26T14:35:00.001-08:00

Myst: I remember playing it as an adolescent with my friend, Jodi. We spent some time on the first level; I don’t recall ever progressing further, but we were mostly content to stay where we were. In our little playgroup, each of us did her part to optimize the overall game-playing experience. Jodi’s job was to control the mouse, to explore and discover – she was the brawn of the operation. For my part (I was the brains), I would bravely issue strategy from behind the nearest piece of furniture because, frankly, the game weirded me out something awful.

This week, for the first time, I was to be both the brains and the brawn in control of Myst, both clicker and strategist. This was an interesting position for me. Just thinking about it, hopeful anticipation and near crippling anxiety mingled within my palpitating heart, and I silently prayed for a couch or a heavy end table to appear in case of emergency.

After successfully installing the disk, I loaded the game and began to explore. As I moved about the island I appreciated the arcane graphics, the imagination behind the landscape, and the innumerable clickables populating the island. (Very impressive for a game this old, I noted.) I discovered the two books, added a page to each, and winced only slightly as each of two rather strange and frightening men tried to talk to me from inside them. I was doing well for awhile, and I am proud to say that game play lasted almost 10 minutes, at which point I accidentally locked myself in a fireplace, momentarily freaked out (screaming may or may not have been involved), and quit as fast as my right hand could carry me.

My experience, however brief, was enlightening.

Because I am relatively new to video games, especially ones with story lines, I was not nearly prepared for a multimedia, first-person mystery. In fact, I’ve never been fully comfortable when the “fourth wall” is broken in any literary medium; I recall, for example, the 2005 season of Tip/Tuck, which occasionally punctuated its commercial breaks with a seemingly home-made video announcement from “the Carver,” a serial killer character, addressing the audience directly. Without the welcomed buffer of third-person narrative, my hyper-developed ability to suspend my disbelief took over, and I didn’t sleep for a week.

But literature (my genre of choice) typically allows little opportunity for an author to do as Nip/Tuck did, or as video games continue to do. Literature, to whatever extent this can be said, is typically assumed to have been authored by someone other than one’s self. With the occasional exceptions of choose-your-own-ending story books and rare pieces of second person fiction, the physicality of a book and the relative immutability of its parts renders it almost impossible for one to get literally (or virtually) tangled in its story. But video games readily embrace their native ability to move freely between the game writer and the game player, continually blurring the line of authorship almost to the point of invisibility.

I will admit that there’s absolutely no reason for me to be this afraid of video games. I don’t believe in ghosts or boogiemen, zombies or demons. I understand that nothing in video games can “get” me, and that all I have to do is turn it off if things get too intense. But at the same time, I think my fear of some video games results from many of the same elements of gaming that entice most of the gaming public. There’s something alluring about being able to immerse one’s self into another world. Sure, literature, drama, and film do that, too, but in video games (and in Myst especially) we are afforded the opportunity to linger at the points that interest us most, to play and replay with different outcomes, and to mold the overall experience to our individual tastes. With all these things comes a sense of power, and with that, a sense of responsibility (as a wise man once said). Some gamers will embrace that responsibility and play the game to its conclusion, making all the right decisions and, in return, gaining a true sense of accomplishment – one that cannot be achieved merely by reading through the end of a novel or attending a scripted performance. The less certain of us, on the other hand, might become overwhelmed by the part we are asked to play, and may have a good deal of psychological difficulty re-constructing (even partially) the fourth wall to suit our gaming fancy.

I'm not sure where I will ultimately fall into this dichotomy. I know where I am currently, but I aspire to grow. In the meantime, however, I’ll do my best to stay out from behind the couch.