Chungking Espresso

Written for Sande Chen’s “Game Design Aspect of the Month” blog. A reply to this post by Reid Kimball.

Reading Reid’s article, I found myself agreeing with everything he was saying (except perhaps the knock on physicians for their love of pharmaceuticals, which I’m sure he and I can debate heatedly some other place, some other time). That said, I found it sorely lacking in one practical consideration: convincing a publisher that it would be worth their money investing in an advocacy game. Although The Sims shows that a boring game can move units, Maxis takes a decidedly apolitical stance incongruous with the idea of making a game strictly for advocacy. I’m a fledgling academic and designer, so I don’t have the industry experience to speak here with certainty; however, even in academic game design emphasis is placed on the proof-of-concept. I imagine this works quite the same when pitching a game commercially—a working prototype does persuasive wonders that even a thorough design document could only dream of. I’d like to suggest a form of one-session game that would make strides toward convincing people that advocacy games are commercially viable (at least on a small scale).

One relatively early text in the theory of political games is “Ephemeral Games” by Gonzalo Frasca, who later went on to design the first newsgames September 12th and Madrid. In the article, Frasca asks a question that has been circulating in game design blogs (especially Clint Hocking’s and Manveer Heir’s) recently: how does it effect the impact of a game’s ethical decisions if we allow the player to take them back by loading a save? His answer was the “OSGON,” or “one-session game of narration.” The idea was to make it clear to the player that they would only be allowed to play the game once, after which their copy of it would lock them out. This, he thought, would ensure that players made decisions carefully and would forever reflect on the consequences.

Interestingly, in the past few weeks two such games were created. One by Terry Cavanagh, called Airplane Adventures, asks the player not to release their mouse. When they eventually do, their plane crashes; on reloading, players receive not another chance to play the game but a message, “YOU HAVE CRASHED.” Another game by raitendo, You Only Live Once, tells the story of a Mario-type who goes on a quest to free his girlfriend from a Bowser-type; when the player dies and tries to hit continue, they are treated to a series of humorous cartoons depicting the aftermath of their avatar’s death. Neither of these games can be played again without clearing out your Flash caches. Raitendo explored the same idea with Free Will, which endlessly cycles the player’s failed attempt at the game after they die (though this can be reloaded). Note that neither of these games feature ethical decisions, cues that the game cannot be replayed, or could be considered models for profitable advocacy games. To my knowledge, a politically-minded OSGON has never been created. Frasca himself opted for games that almost demand replaying.

Putting aside the idea of an OSGON, I’d like to suggest another type of small-scale project that, if successful, would serve as a proof-of-concept for the public’s willingness to engage seriously with an advocacy game: the mod. Mods have always enjoyed a curious existence on the fringes of mainstream gaming. One reason for this is that they are, to date, available only to PC gamers. The other is that they are only advertised on personal blogs and forums. Every once in awhile, a publisher will observe the quality and quiet success of a mod and decide to purchase the idea—the best example being Counter Strike. The makers of another mod, Killing Floor for Unreal Tournament 2004, found funding after the mod gained popular attention in gaming magazines; eventually the makers polished the mod into a standalone game and sold it on Steam this year.

Of course, you can see some problems here: the best examples of profitable mods are shooters, and as online games they demand the kind of replay addiction Reid avers. What hope does a political or educational game have in such a market? On the other hand, mods have been popular in the academic and artistic game design circles for quite a while. Mary Flanagan’s [domestic] is another Unreal mod that takes players through the interior of one of her traumatic childhood memories. One day, while walking home from church, she saw smoke billowing from her home in the distance… she knew her father was inside. [domestic] allows players to move through an expressive 3D recreation of her burning home, the walls textured with prose and the ever-present FPS gun replaced by a fire extinguisher. Escape From Woomera (Source mod, I believe) was designed by an Australian art collective in order to expose the machinations of a government-run camp for illegal aliens. The press wasn’t allowed inside the camp, so the game was pieced together from accounts by those who had been interred there. Finally, Medieval Unreality (Unreal mod) is an abstract trek through a nightmarish landscape designed collectively by some of the victims of the infamous Albanian blood fueds.

All of these games take less than an hour to play, and the replay value is fairly little. Also, they fall into the problem of being a bit too “serious” or “boring” for the average player (with the exception, perhaps, of Woomera). Another possibility would be to build the political mod into the existing structure of an open-ended game. Humana, the health insurance company, recently realized that it pays to keep their customers healthy rather than letting their health deteriorate to the point that supporting them becomes cost-prohibitive. Thus, they have begun inviting student interns to design health advocacy games for them. Many of these are ARG-types, but one is a mod for (you guessed it) The Sims that helps elderly men and women understand the importance of basic monitoring and medication. The mod also makes it easy for the player to understand the purposes and uses of any medical devices the insurance company or doctors may have suggested for them. Again—this is an admittedly boring example, not exactly what you’d show a publisher to pitch a larger game. But who’s to say that somebody like Reid couldn’t make a similar mod that simulated the lifestyle choices he had to make on learning that he had Crohn’s disease? Such a mod could be used, at the very least, to prototype mechanics that would prove that it would be intriguing to have a AAA protagonist with a disability, disorder, handicap, or disease (this was, I believe, attempted in Condemned 2 with alcoholism).

One of the reasons I only have boring examples to show you is that, for the most part, these mods weren’t made by working game designers. Although the lives of most designers are already strained by hours on the job, more and more professionals are leaving the big companies to start their own or work independently. In the coming years, I think we’ll see more short-length mods with mainstream appeal and “serious” aspirations coming down the pipe. People are already willing to pay between $1-$8 dollars for an iPhone game… so I think the acceptance of micro-sized, niche-interest games can only be considered to be on the rise. Thanks for reading, and if I’ve gotten any specifics of the life of working designers and publishers incorrect here I hope you’ll take the opportunity to educate me instead of flaming!

XBOX Live, or a website with access to achievement databases such as 360achievements.org, should create a game where players can battle each other, Magic-style, with their achievements. Achievement structures in online services and consoles have reached saturation. World of Warcraft has them now, Flash sites have them, every console except the Wii has them, and Steam has them. There’s even an iPhone app called Booyah! that gives players achievements for writing journal entries about their real-life betterment experiences, such as hanging out with friends and exercising. Now that the market is saturated and achievements are a requirement instead of something that sets a platform apart, we need to figure out something to actually do with them. Because XBL already allows outside websites to draw on their databases for the instantaneous creation of GamerCards, like the one you see to the right, I think the 360 achievements would be the best system to build a Magic-style game upon. Those Playstation trophies you see on the card below the XBOX one? I had to add those manually. Sony needs to get its act together.

Here is the beauty of building a game on top of the 360 achievement structure: instead of having to buy booster packs to supplement your playing deck, you would just buy games. This would definitely drive sales on downloadable games. You could begin by designing the game around a limited number of disc and downloadble titles, perhaps the top sellers for the console. This would ensure the maximum number of potential players for the core game. Just as Magic releases subsequent evolutions of tournament-playable card series, you would slowly integrate new games into the system to drive the sales of those games. If the game were popular, devs would probably petition you to integrate their games into your system. At the least, it would fetch a decent amount of advertising revenue.

The most common cards in any trading card game are the energy, mana, land, resource, etc. cards. The most common achievement come from progressing through a game (ie: “You completed level 1!”). So these achievements would be where you drew your resource cards from. Instead of having elemental or color-based decks, you would base decks on the game genre. First-person shooters would be create an aggressive deck (Magic’s red), simulation games a defensive deck (Magic’s white), etc. Achievements for making certain numbers of kills against an eneemy type or with certain weapons would make your base creature cards. Obviously, the achievements renowned for their difficulty would grant hero cards. You could easily limit the number of these allowed per deck or in play. Achievements for executing tricky feats in games or finding secrets would become your spell and artifact type cards.

I haven’t blogged in awhile, so I’m going to keep this one short (if I spend myself, then I won’t be able to get back into the swing of things). This summer I’ve been writing chapters for a book with Ian Bogost and Bobby Schweizer, so much of the pleasure of writing long-ass blog posts that only about four people read had diminished. A new semester begins in a few weeks, and I’m hoping that my blogging will increase. Going to try to keep these at a consumable 1k-word hard cap. I’ve got notes for about ten posts on the games I’ve played throughout the summer, so this probably won’t be one of those things where somebody says they’re going to start blogging again and then peaces out for another month before publishing anything. If I’ve stayed in your blogroll throughout this absence: many thanks, my friend.

In an hour or two I’ll finish Mothership Zeta and clear all the Fallout 3 DLC off of my meagre 20GB hard drive forever–a moment nine months in the making. I’d been meaning to write about the DLC packs as they came along (I played them all within a day of their release), but for some reason I never felt inspired enough to do so. Because they’re so short, mainstream reviewers really had to stretch themselves to write a thorough consumer report; thus, they managed to say most of what I wanted to say, and I don’t like contributing nothing to a conversation. Today I finally realized my angle; I’m going to cover something that doesn’t often come up when talking about what’s good about Fallout 3: its gunplay.

Sometime in the middle of Broken Steel (the third of the DLC releases, upping the level cap to 30 and extending the main storyline ad infinitum), I stopped caring about Fallout 3. At this point I had tens of thousands of caps, enough ammo to run around the virtual world shooting off any gun I cared to constantly, 300 stimpacks, maxed out skills, and  a locker full of so many copies of every weapon that I could repair anything to one-hundred percent at any time. To be sure, the game started off difficult–running through labyrinthine decrepit halls disarming booby traps, scrounging for shotgun shells, nearly dying to the assault fire rounds of Raiders and Super Mutants; however, at this time even upping the difficulty to “Very Hard” just means a few more trivially easy headshots to perform and a few more spiked veins to pump my body up with stimpacks.

As far as story and thematic level design go, the DLC for Fallout 3 progress in quality to pitch perfection. The Pitt and Point Lookout added some of the most compelling quests since Oasis and Tenpenny Tower, and I’d be lying to you if I said that I haven’t always wanted to get abducted by aliens so that I could break out of my cell and bludgeon them to death in a sprawling steampunk UFO (Mothership Zeta). But I reached a moment of clarity when the guardian drones started lobbing exploding balls of energy at me, almost killing me for the first time in about 6 hours of playtime in the game world: Fallout 3, a game where (despite everything else that’s lovely about the game) the primary mechanic is shooting, lacks a necessary variety of projectiles.

There are six threats in the game: bullets (including lasers), melee (including flamers), missiles, mines, grenades, and radiation. Usually you’re only confronted by 2-3 of these at a time, because when a fourth is introduced it becomes almost too much for the average player to manage. Combat-with-words was available in a few quests (Tenpenny Tower, for one), but it’s not as extensive as in the Bioware’s KotOR titles. I realized that the only time that I’d been thrilled by the game since I’d hit level 20 was when it hit me with explosives and snipers. Some of the best battles of Point Lookout and Broken Steel come when you accidentally trigger waves of Feral Reavers in the graveyard and Presidential subway (respectively), because the Reavers lob exploding balls of radioactive goo at you. In the main Wastes, I always loved passing by substation towers, because often there were raiders manning the scaffolding with missile launchers and sniper rifles that would end me if I didn’t creep by or pick them off one by one from a distance.

The optimal moments from the DLC took into account the fact that by the endgame you were so decked out in gear that escalating enemy health and damage wouldn’t provide enough of a challenge, so it introduced novel approaches to some of the six threats listed above or restricted your equipment (or both). For this reason I’m going to make a somewhat controversial (not really the word for it) claim: Operation Anchorage is the best DLC for the game.

Admittedly, the greatest weaknesses of OA are its length and its story. That it was the first Bethsoft expansion pack after Oblivion’s incredible Shivering Isles (it was more engaging than the main quest of the original game, featured varied visuals and memorable characters, and included some nominal alignment choices) didn’t help OA’s case at all. The limited equipment enforced by the training simulation, which many complained of, was a boon for me: once again it was somewhat difficult to kill, like in the early stages of the game. Crawling through the cliffside tunnel complex with the mortars blasting was the most physically visceral experience provided by Fallout 3, and the crackling erasure of enemies when they died is exactly what you want to see when you’re playing a virtual reality within a virtual world.

The Chinese stealth soldiers, with their swords and sniper rifles, were a formidable opponent, and it was a wonderful payoff when you finally claimed their armor at the end of the simulation. Best of all was the tactical combat section, adding a mechanic unseen throughout the rest of the game: planning out your team was fun and important, because the Chinese snipers and flying droids presented a tangible threat to you as you crawled through the final trenches toward the dampening field generator. The Pitt–featuring moral ambiguity, a Wicker Man, and the same limiting of equipment and slow progression toward more powerful gear–is arguably the second best of the DLC packs from this perspective. Which of the DLC was your favorite?

Morrowind remains the best Bethsoft title, by the way; I’ll argue that one out in the comments section if you like.

Trying to help kick off discussion on this thread: Game Design Round Table 2. Most of this is old hat if you’ve read my thoughts on achievements before.

is this offensive or empowering? (edit) Tom Cross calls it: offensive

I get in a lot of arguments about achievements, because I like them and I work with a lot of idealists/purists. From a design perspective, achievement structures are typically intangible, superlative, and exploitative—that is, they create game goals not based on good design or good play per se. They also don’t fit neatly in any work ethic or modus—for instance, where would one cram them into the MDA method? Are they really a mechanic, or are they simply an aesthetic after-effect? The distinction seems to be in whether they affect gameplay for a majority of players (or at all). I would argue that this is what lends them design legitimacy, as well as opening them up to be a double-edged sword in the designer’s toolbox.

Let’s start with achievements that simply note player progress through explicit in-game goals. Achievements that mark one’s progress through a game are helpful both for developing gamer cred and for general stats-tracking. It’s a good thing to have a uniform system in place by which to tell how many of your players have completed a certain percentage of your game, right? As a researcher and blogger, I find it very helpful to follow the Gamertags of my colleagues: if they write about a game, and I don’t think their argument is solid, then the first thing I check is whether they’ve actually beaten it (this is by no means an deal-closer, but it helps understand how much of the game their argument is based upon).

That said, can we really claim that an achievement marking level progression or percentage of hidden widgets collected (following Petrie’s example, which I totally agree with) is a design choice? Progression is already a game goal in itself (for most games), and collectibles usually already carry their own in-game reward (if they don’t, shame on the developer—you’ve just artificially extended your game and not thanked your player for allowing you to get away with it). These are cases where the achievements are entirely an aesthetic effect. They may motivate more players to collect or complete, but your game should already be good enough to encourage that behavior in the first place. A game like Oblivion is rare in that every single achievement in the game marks advancement in a faction or the main quest (it was a launch title, I believe, so no surprise); I didn’t pay attention to these things popping onto my screen while I was playing the game, because it was good enough to encourage play without them.

Moving onto functionally superior achievements now, my two favorite 360 games (achievement-wise) are Mass Effect and The Orange Box. Mass Effect did something really novel early on in the console’s life: it provided in-game stats bonuses based on certain achievements, and these bonuses worked on a meta-level that persisted over multiple playthroughs (and in the case of some, such as the experience boost for reaching level 50, building on each other). These achievements vary from marking game progress and completion, tallying kills with specific weapons and against specific types of enemies, rewarding unique in-game actions such as making love or saving a teammate’s life, and for skill-based play such as beating the game on harder difficulties or playing tactically (measured in the damage ratio between your shields and your health). Some of these are not explicit game goals: for instance, an Adept (magic user) can only effectively use a pistol at first; however, after playing as a Soldier and getting a number of kills with a shotgun, an achievement unlocks that allows you to roll an Adept with the ability to effectively use a shotgun. I was more impressed with this achievement system than I was with the rest of the game’s design, to be honest.

The Orange Box is wonderful for numerous reasons (as you all know). Its achievement system isn’t as mechanically refined as Mass Effect’s; however, it shines in encouraging multiple play styles that the player might not think of themselves. One asks the player to complete Ravenholm using only the gravity gun, which the level has clearly been designed for. The level designers clearly weren’t allowed to take all other weapons away from the player, but they literally littered the ground and walls with sawblades and other nasties to throw at headcrab zombies. It’s not something I would’ve thought to do without encouragement from the achievement system, and it was really thrilling/enlightening to play through the space in that way. There was another one that rewarded you for carrying a garden gnome all the way through Episode 2 (I believe), which was a huge bloody pain but immensely rewarding at the end—the experience could be likened to trying to carry a baby through a battlefield… in a car without a second seat. There are other examples—little touches, like killing certain enemies by feeding them exploding barrels or hitting cops with a crane—but these are the most prominent in my mind.

Finally, as to Trent’s initial and most pressing question: even good achievement structures can be double-edged swords. My third favorite 360 game, achievement-wise, is Halo 3. I loved unlocking armor pieces to customize my avatar with (although I wish they had more-than-aesthetic affects on gameplay)—I was the only person I knew with the Security gear for a really long time, huge nerd cred. As he shares in his anecdote, though, the multiplayer achievements encourage farming and cheating. Bungie has gone through phases where they crack down on this behavior, but in the early days of the game or after a new expansion it’s hard to find a match where half the players aren’t trying to boost in some way. I’ve never played a public Grifball match where one of the eight players didn’t start asking if they could farm for a Killionaire and end up team-killing out of anger. Following Petrie’s comments on Mega Man 9, I prefer in-game MP challenge systems such as CoD4’s; these allow designers to craft elaborate achievement structures without giving players the incentive to boost just to show off their global Gamerscore to others. I think multiplayer global achievements are possible, but they need to be designed around aspects of play that can’t be easily exploited (win x# matches with x class or weapon, for instance, might work).

I’ll share one last anecdote about the communities that have built up around achievements. There are websites like Achieve 360 and 360 Achievements that basically encourage sharing of game knowledge and cooperative exploration of new games. There’s a downside to this: many people are just there to learn how to cheat, boost, or get an achievement in the easiest way possible. But the work ethic that has arisen out of these communities can approach the amazing—I’ve seen achievement guides with video and photograph accompaniment that rival those produced by companies such as Brady Games. Completionists are an interesting population to study, because they’re kind of like non-professional beta testers—taken in sum, they know everything there is to know about most games (after a few weeks of release).

Again, this is a double-edged sword. When I started becoming interested in achievements, I would check guides just to make sure there weren’t any that I could miss during a particularly long playthrough. This led me to spoil a lot of games for myself, and eventually I had to stop caring about them. As somebody particularly prone to grind addiction, coin-drop, whatever, achievement structures always have the potential to be exploitative, which is why I’m really excited that Trent is kicking off a discussion of how to design them well. Thanks for reading.

My girlfriend, Sarah, beat me at pool. This is a picture of her showing off what I call her “Zelda ear”:

We were sitting outside at a bar in Athens, called the Max Canada, and it started raining. I don’t like sitting inside bars. Usually, either it’s too loud because of people shouting at each other or too loud because the bartender is blaring their favorite awful music. The back of the Max Canada, where the games are, is relatively quiet. Back here your options are: the Softcore Porn Match game, Ms. Pac-Man and Galaga (a dollar per play), Frogger and Tapper (25 cents), CarnEvil (25 cents per life), Guns ‘n’ Roses pinball, darts, and pool. I wanted to play Ms. Pac-Man, but I wasn’t going to shell out a dollar for it.

I’m not good at pool. Either I hit the cue ball too hard or I whiff it trying to be subtle. When I try to figure out the geometry of a complex bank shot, I end up missing by a mile. Sarah isn’t good at pool either. I generally had better aim then she did, but I scratched almost every time I got a pocket. She ended up beating me with one ball left on the table, with a beautiful 45-degree trick shot that I didn’t think she’d be able to pull off. After she sank the eight ball, I said: “That’s the first and last time you’ll ever beat me at a game.” I’m a sore loser.

Relishing her victory, Sarah commanded me to tell everybody on Twitter that she beat me. Sarah detests blogging. She has a two-year old Twitter account with 10 updates on it, a Tumblr she only uses for school projects, and absolutely no patience for my stories about arguing with L.B. Jeffries or the eviscerating women of the Iris Network. I told her I’d one-up her demand, dedicating an entire blog post to her. The inspiration for this was Krystian Majewski’s post on what he called “Girlfriend Games.” I don’t quite know if this is the wording I want to use for my post, because I don’t really see Sarah so much as “my girlfriend, who sometimes plays games” but rather “someone who I’m in love with, who is interested in games in theory but hates them in practice.” This post isn’t just about the games I’ve played with her, but also a short discussion of her experience taking a game design class this past semester (which, despite my goading, she refuses to write about).

My videogame addiction has always been a major obstacle to my relationships with both friends and girlfriends. In the case of friends, I can usually surround myself with a healthy mix of gamers and non-gamers; however, I’ve never dated a gamer before. Past girlfriends have treated my love of games with an undue level of acid. Compare these two statements:

Ivy: “I would never stay with you for a long time if you kept smoking.”
Caroline: “I’ll dump you if you start playing World of Warcraft.”

Of course, these were two very different women talking about two very different bad habits of mine. But their treatments of the two roughly equate—both smoking, which might eventually kill me, and gaming, which I would eventually go on to study for a living, were deal-breakers. In both cases I treated the ultimata as challenges. I kept smoking while dating Ivy, washing myself and rinsing with Listerine constantly to hide the smell from her. And I started playing World of Warcraft toward the end of my relationship with Caroline, waiting until she fell asleep each night to sneak out of bed and spend six hours in Azeroth (apparently this a fairly common phenomenon). A number of similar experiences eventually led me to the conclusion, early in the summer of last year, that I needed to date a gamer if I wanted to be happy.

It was a bad summer. Female gamers are uncommon even on the Internet, let alone in a liberal arts university town such as Athens, Georgia (this is the South, mind you). Even once you find a female who shares your passion for gaming, it’s highly unlikely that you’ll be compatible in any other way (when you’re an ultra-leftist, atheist-determinist Jew with degrees in philosophy and film studies). Finally, there’s the fact that most eligible gamer girls already have boyfriends who are a lot cooler than I. My ridiculous determination to date a gamer led me through two horribly unsuccessful courtships.

I tried writing about these for a few days, but couldn’t come up with anything that didn’t sound completely stupid or offensive. If you want to talk about these hilarious misadventures with me, you’ll have to come to Atlanta, get me drunk, and play videogames with me. One was a girl who could play the main theme of Bubble Bobble on a Casio… from memory. The other girl manipulates boys on World of Warcraft by sex chatting four of them simultaneously (on different channels) during raids… I’m still really good friends with the Casio-toter.

The circumstances leading up to my dating Sarah are, again, not-safe-for-blog. She’s not a gamer—I learned my lesson. What she is is tolerant, and she also happens to know as much about film as I do (and quite a bit more about music). Sarah is the first person I’ve dated who never once told me that I was spending too much time playing games, who asked me not to play them around her, who questioned my desire to study them in graduate school. But she also never once volunteered to play them with me (and I was fine with that), which led me to be rather surprised and confused when she told me that she’d be taking a game design class last semester.

She never really explained why she decided to take the class—whether it was to understand what it was I was doing all day, to expand her media repertoire, to decide whether she thought games were a legitimate art form, to help decide on a possible career path—and really, I don’t mind not understanding. Apparently there were multiple students in the class who admitted to not playing games or enjoying them much. That’s a strange phenomenon for me to relate to: I like film and games more than books and music, so my course of study seems obvious to me. The idea of denying myself what I actually enjoy experiencing in order to expand my general knowledge of the world is strange to me, because I’m a somewhat firm believer in specialization and expertise—we have the Internet (and libraries) for general knowledge and record-keeping.

When Sarah told me she’d be taking the game design class, I got unduly excited. I bought the textbooks she’d be reading, started stalking her future professor (Casey O’Donnell, who I’m rather decent friends with now), and demanded that she submit to an insane regimen of games history lessons at my despotic hands. This didn’t go so well. I had just received Namco’s latest “virtual arcade” disc, and one night we (I) decided to sit down and spend an hour on each game—passing the controller back and forth with each death. I couldn’t get her to focus on any of the games (Galaga, Xevious, Dig Dug, Pole Position) except for Ms. Pac-Man (and that’s not even a Namco game, strictly speaking—see Crazy Otto).

On all the other games, she tried passing every time it was her turn. With Ms. Pac-Man, she wouldn’t let me have the controller! She cursed when a ghost caught up to her, she cursed when the fruit ran away from her, she cursed when she couldn’t nab all four ghosts after ingesting a power-up. Eventually we put the virtual arcade away. I asked Sarah about this months later. She told me that she didn’t like the way Ms. Pac-Man made her feel: she looked coin-drop straight in the eye, denying it access to her heart and mind.

Through the course of the semester we played a decent smattering of other games together. First she wanted to try Geometry Wars, because she loved the psychedelia of the thing; however, she got really angry at me when I started playing Space Giraffe in her apartment—she hated the pretentious sound effects and overbearing visualizations. Lacking any platforming experience, she didn’t have the patience for Braid. She wanted to write about Passage for her first paper, and I suggested that she compare it to The Graveyard. Her second paper was a cross-analysis of The Marriage and Facade. By far our favorite game to play together has been Castle Crashers (though she refuses to admit that Dan Paladin is the cutest thing in existence). We indie music and film snobs make good indie game snobs, as if that were a surprise to anyone. When Jason Rohrer came to visit Georgia Tech, she got permission from her professors to skip class and come listen. I can only imagine how those conversations went: “You want to go to a lecture by who? He makes what?”

Unfortunately, Sarah won’t let me read her papers or post them here. Maybe if we all write expressive pleas in the comments section she’ll oblige us with some choice bits of non-gamer analysis and wisdom. Here’s one reason why I think she’s not comfortable with my reading them (and let this be a lesson to you all): some dickbag in her class berated her, asking why she, a girl, was trying to learn game design. Apparently the other girl who had registered for the class dropped out early on in the semester. Sarah didn’t want to tell her professor about this semi-harassment, so (of course) I did. This is reminiscent of a recent post by Tracey John, musing about the fact that male gamers crave female gaming partners but often resort to creepery or verbal abuse when interacting with them in-game. Any similar experiences from my (probably non-existent) female readers would be much appreciated!

This post started out as kind of a dare from Sarah to admit that I’d lost at pool, and it’s actually been a great exercise in recounting our relationship thus far and reminding myself why I like her so much.

I quit smoking three days ago. I’ve been on the patch to make it easier to detox, because I not only have to overcome nicotine/tar addiction but also my reliance on the extra chemicals used in menthol cigarettes. For two years I’ve been a Newport smoker. Newports are marketed directly to African American youths, but they are popular among my friends because we are hipsters—cultural pirates. I started smoking to impress a girl. I’d already made it through college without succumbing to the desire to smoke to relieve stress. I was working a shitty retail job. I was single.

Quitting smoking is a painful, necessary ritual that I must undergo in order to grow up. To leave my years of directionless rambling behind. It is going to help me live longer, but it is also a sign that I am now beginning my slow decline toward stagnation and death. Giving up smoking means I’m giving up part of my hipster identity. It means I’m getting old, that every day I’m less and less able to stay up late nights and keep up with everything that’s new, young, and exciting. In a few weeks, I’ll be one of those douche bags that scowls at you if you blow smoke in my face at a party. I have some money now from my work as a research assistant, so I’ll probably start drinking hefeweizen instead of PBR. As you may be able to tell, I’m not entirely happy about this metamorphosis.

L.B. Jeffries is writing about an analogy he came up with recently, that hardcore gamers are the hipsters of videogames. Jeffries has a fairly low opinion of hipsters, supporting his distaste for them by claiming to have interacted with quite a few of them before his law school days. I don’t want to give him the impression that he’s nestled a snake in his bosom—the man gave me a place to stay during a conference when I’d planned on sleeping in a car—but I’d expect him to call my bluff if I ever wrote about something that I clearly didn’t understand (as Krystian did with one of my previous ramblings about game AI). Right now he’s in research mode, making the necessary connections between the Beats, the hippies, and the Dadaists in order to support his pre-formed opinions on hipsters. Perhaps he’ll end up writing something truly elucidating, but from what I’ve seen he’s equally as likely to write something rife with false assumptions and non sequiturs.

Let’s begin. We’re drawing our quotes from Jeffries’ Escapist forum posting and a Twitter conversation between himself, PixelVixen, and betajames. He writes that “[t]he hipster’s agenda is to just actively pursue meaninglessness. To be into anonymous culture & wear meaningless clothes.” This is a fundamental misunderstanding of postmodernism on his part. One could just as well mistakenly criticize Luc Besson, Jean-Jacques Beineix, or Leos Carax for creating films without easily consumed morals or narratives. For these directors, and for hipster culture in general, the image is the message. Postmodern works, following Barthes’ death of the author, are readerly. On experiencing them, one is asked to construct one’s own meaning based on personal tastes and experiences. People are confused when they first show up at a house show to listen to some upstart band; they usually say, “I can’t hear the singer, and when I can—he’s just screaming at us.” These virgin ears do not understand that, like in free jazz, the entire aural experience is the message—not the story told by the lyrics you cannot hear.

L.B. picks up on the elitist current in hipster culture, explaining: “Ergo the joke that a hipster will abandon something as soon as it’s cool or popular, they do so because it now has some kind of identity value and so they move on to something equally banal.” He follows this up with an example: “Dunno about using any particular band as evidence, Phish comes to mind as one of their more rotten victims.” To reiterate my earlier aside, let’s explain up front what hipsters are: cultural pirates. What does this mean? They like the best of everything. Not just music and clothes, but films, paintings, architecture, and even fonts. Being decidedly postmodern, they derive their personal taste and appearance from numerous ages, trends, theories, and cultures. Jeffries picks up on this when he writes that he’s “mostly approaching them from a Dadaist angle. Remarkably similar in their goals, Bakhtin looks interesting.” Hipsters do revel in intertextuality and the carnival—even the most daft of hipsters is fairly well-versed in the history of visual and aural aesthetics.

Most people hate hipsters because their tastes seem so constructed. Because they like the best of everything, they maintain an intellectual distance from the cultural sources of important artifacts instead of engaging with them emotionally. For example, hipsters don’t hate country music—they love Will Oldham, Hank Williams, and Johnny Cash (to name a few). They hate people who love country music for its own sake, people who will buy anything within the genre and find something to like about it. Jeffries is mistaken if he believes that hipsters ever embraced Phish “before they got big.” Phish do not represent the artistic peak of jam-band music; they have always been the purview of those who’ve had a bit too much to smoke—contemporary pseudo-hippies and frat boys. This is not to say that hipsters don’t indulge themselves with marijuana far too often for my tastes, but rather that contemporary hippie and hipster culture are not nearly one and the same.

Let’s explain one of the pitfalls of talking about hipsters. Even though much of hipster visual culture trickles out of the basement and house shows of New York and Los Angeles, hipster aural culture is extremely localized. Each college town that sustains a sizable population of hipsters is also the home of a number of bands that play numerous times a month at the same few dives. These bands are those that hipsters enjoy the most. It is a mistake to assume that hipsters only listen to music you’ve never heard of just for the sake of its obscurity—part of the combined hipster and college radio ethos is that they serve as incubator for bands struggling to find fiscal independence.

Most people who make music have to work in the service industry in order to feed themselves. Hipsters love the underdog. They don’t abandon (in the traditional sense) a band when it becomes popular (they don’t hate Animal Collective), but rather recognize that such a band is no longer reliant on their support in order to gain popular ground and fiscal recognition for their hard work and talent. Typically these bands have to normalize their sound to get traditional radio play, further distancing themselves from the postmodern aural experiences that hipsters prefer. This isn’t an unalloyed evil, but a recognized process of growth and decay that everyone plays their part in.

So there is my response to the underlying assumptions of Jeffries’ statements about hipsters. Next we will address the core of his analogy between hipsters and hardcore gamers. Thanks for reading.

Responding to this post by my man LB Jeffries; re-posting here so I’ll remember it.

Only two arguments with this. First: “And yet in a video game it is ourselves we care about. It is our own character or the person we are playing with whom we connect first.”

That isn’t a distinguishing characteristic, and it isn’t necessarily true, either. Ebert is wrong to say it’s “the people” that are important in film. Most films ask you to identify with a single protagonist and stick with them despite their actions. The body count metaphor for success you use is echoed exactly in Falling Down with Michael Douglas, and any number of spaghetti westerns. The unique thing isn’t that these same systems aren’t represented, but that you can force the player to confront their own actions (physically, as they hold the controller) rather than the actions of somebody else who they’ve only identified with mentally/emotionally. My thinking here probably has something to do with the fact that my favorite games and films are the ones that attempt to manipulate your identification with the protagonist.

Second: it never struck me until today that Steve Gaynor’s description of the immersion model is basically the summary of how to create travelogue cinema verite documentary films. I suppose this isn’t so much an argument with either you or him, but perhaps something we should study if we hope to achieve this wonderful Promised Land where AI doesn’t totally suck and do and say the same stupid things with every playthrough. Certainly the illusion of spontaneity is there if you’re willing to bite, but game AI still usually follows the rules of “if the player can’t tell it’s stupid, make it stupid to save cycle counts.” We need to get to a stage where we’re willing to give up narrative continuity and a few really great textures to waste processing power on AI that’s disruptive and therefore enlightening.

Also, Celia Pearce and Henry Jenkins came up with the idea of game design as narrative architecture a really, really long time ago. It’s a shame to attribute it to anyone else.

Finally, this article is a really great summary of the pieces you’re covering, but I don’t think any of these pieces are attacking the questions we need to answer (with the exception of positing procedural rhetoric as our analogue for editing, which I think is an important connection). For instance, how are all the psychoanalytic connections we’ve made in film over the past 40 years altered by games? We could write for a lifetime just analyzing these differences (there are quite a number of feminist game theorists doing just that, but these ideas have yet to enter popular writing).

You mention Mirror’s Edge, right? So the other day this incoming 1st year is talking to me about the male gaze in Mirror’s Edge and Portal. And I ask, but the game camera and the cameras watching the female protagonists are different. How do you address the fact that Glados is female? How is the first-person camera acting different following the fact that we are identifying explicitly as female? Do we necessarily sexualize/objectify a female protagonist if she’s in third-person camera, or only when the creators want us to (ie Lara Croft’s muddy bottom in Underworld)? So here’s a short conversation in which Laura Mulvey’s idea of visual pleasure in the cinema is completely destroyed by the examples of two games. These are the filmic connections that are important to distinguish between and analyze.

Cut scenes and linearity in games have been dying for awhile. Time to put some bullets into the kneecaps of other cinematic tropes we’ve carried over.

EDIT: I’m actually working on killing one cinematic trope next semester: the idea of a continuity of space established by Classical Hollywood Cinema and Lev Kuleshov in early Soviet Montage film and then carried over directly into the shifting frames of Adventure and Zelda. Not going to tell you how I’m going to do it; gotta figure out how to program it first, then I’ll show you!

Tonight was my first night fooling around with my new PS3. There have been some ups and some downs.

First thing I did was download Home and get my avatar worked out. He looks nothing like me. One hours of work, and he looks less like me than my 360 avatar. Uncanny Valley or somesuch nonsense. Or the customization options are no good. Walking around the town square outside my personal apartment place, I found some people dancing and saying “Got DamMit” over and over again. It looked like a good time. No tea bagging and butt humping to be found, which was a relief after the Penny Arcade comic. They also show movies, which I knew in the back of my head but had been ignoring. I might conceivably get into Home if I meet anyone in real life or playing PS3 games that use it. Doubt I’ll spend money pimping my crib out, though.

As to the hardware itself, I love how quietly it runs. The controller is wonderful (I kind of like how slow the analog sticks rotate), and the fact that it comes with a charger (unlike my 360 ones) was a huge plus. Still no need for batteries in my apartment! Some downs: it only comes with analog cables. After a year of reading about how the PS3 was so much better than the 360 because it came with everything you needed, I was a bit nonplussed about this. Currently I’m waiting for a 30 buck set of HDMI cables to come in the mail, and the display looks kind of like stretched out shit. Another downside: no headset for talking online. Luckily, I bought a USB headset to play WoW a year ago, and since the PS3 is basically a computer it picked up the signal right away and I spent a good 5 minutes modifying my voice (neat feature, Sony).

I didn’t buy any disc games (hard to find sales, and I don’t pay 60 dollars for 6-month old games), so I hit up the Playstation Network Store. The UI is a bit disgusting, but I guess it’s easier to find things than it is on the 360. Only downside? Since the definition on my TV is so low, I didn’t see the blatant “PSP game” next to some of the titles I dropped in my cart. So now I have PSP copies of Everyday Shooter and Echochrome. Which would be awesome if I owned a PSP. Kinda wished downloading one version unlocked both, but it was my fault for buying in a frenzy. It’s just that I’ve wanted PS3 indies for over a year now!

So what did I buy? I picked up Flower, Echochrome, PixelJunk Monsters, PixelJunk Eden, Noby Noby Boy, Everyday Shooter, Linger in Shadows, and the Super Stardust HD bundle. Really freaking excited about every single one. So far I’ve only ventured into Eden and Everyday Shooter. Going to take it slow with these and play them interspersed with some JRPGs on the 360. Also going to save Flower for when the HDMI cables come in. If I can bear the excitement. That’s probably all I’m buying for now, except for a second controller and Little Big Planet when my girlfriend finishes her semester (she’s wanted to play it since I first showed her one of the knit SackBoys last year). Because she’s an indie music snob, since dating me she has become an indie game snob. I think she’ll end up getting a lot more into the PS3 than the 360. Who knows?

Trophies are daunting. Unlike the 360, where I get a tangible number of points, I don’t think I care too much about these. Since most of the games I got are “art games,” I don’t think I’m going to ruin the experience by even looking at the Trophy list. I guess you get a “level” based on the Trophies you accrue, but since I’m not going to double up on games I can play on the 360, I don’t see my score ever getting that high. I did pick up a PSN ID for the blog, which took a goddamn arm and a leg. I had to create an EU PSN account, then another account on a site that created gamercards that weren’t god-awful long. Kind of annoying to deal with all that, but now I have a cute SackBoy-themed banner to go under my 360 card!

One last downside to the PS3 is the lack of people I know who own one. My friend’s list has two pending requests going, and those are the only people I know with a PS3. On top of that, they don’t really own that many games for it. So online play with people I know is kind of out of the question. A few of these downloadable indies have multiplayer support, but I don’t really know if I want to have sublime experiences with strangers. Finally, I’m on the patch and I’ve only smoked 3 cigarettes today. Here’s to hoping videogames and the love of a good woman can keep me off the damn things in the weeks to come!

And I got a little job until Wednesday so I won’t be posting much. I’ll tell you how the PS3 works out on Wednesday. Already Pixel Junking and EveryDay Shooting. I don’t think I even want a retail game. Too spensive. We’ll see.

I don’t have the time right now to give this a full treatment, and I don’t have a napkin to scribble this on… but I’m feeling a manifesto coming on. I’ve been writing and researching about TWEWY for the past few days, and one thing that struck me is how different the game plays based on how you stack your difficulty (there are two different sliders for this!). I also remember that when I was writing about Left 4 Dead I felt the need to make it clear that I was analyzing the game from the perspective of someone playing on Expert. I feel that, often, the only way to fully experience the level of balance and design that has gone into making a game is to play it through on the hardest difficulty you can manage. Charles Pratt recently reflected on what playing Gears of War 2 on Hardcore has made him realize: that the cover mechanic is superfluous (perhaps on every difficulty except Insane).

One of the problems with the hardcore/casual dichotomy is that it’s colonizing: that is to say, there are gamers who identified as hardcore way before we started making this distinction. Hardcore in the traditional sense refers explicitly to players who play games on the hardest difficulty, often quitting the game and starting a new playthrough if they die. L.B. Jeffries and I recently talked to a bartender in Savannah for about two hours on the subject of his hardcore playing of Diablo II. Now, I’m not saying everybody needs to play as a true hardcore gamer in order to appreciate the level of complexity in games, but I do think there should be a little more of a “put up or shut up” attitude in academic, personal, and journalistic reviews of games. The example Pratt sets is, well, exemplary: every traditional review of a game should list the difficulty that one played on (as well as the time it took and how long the average play session lasted).

Remember when Stephen Totilo got totally destroyed by Soulja Boi, to the point where he could barely beat the young rapper in games he hadn’t even played before? I see way too much of this at school, where I easily “out-gamer” a lot of my colleagues. Here’s the manifesto I’m declaring for all my fellow academic and Brainy gamers, it is rather short (I must admit): Play It On Hard.

P.S. Please tell me if somebody has already written on these topics (how difficulty sliders influence how one writes and thinks about a game, besides Juul’s recent paper that I need to get to reading soon). Also, anybody wanna try to take me in Halo 3?