So Happy, I Could Eat a Brain

Dead Rising 2!!!!!!!!! The return of my favorite co-dependent, abusive gaming relationship!! Not to make you angry honey, but any chance we could have…I don’t know…two save slots? Don’t hit! I promise I’ll play you no matter what!

Translation: Props to Margaret Robertson for the endlessly useful metaphor for the player-game relationship. Her 2k8 GDC presentation PowerPoint? It’s here.

A Sign of Greatness

This morning, I heard a perfect distillation of with LittleBIGPlanet may be a game for the ages. I heard a phrase emanating from the basement/multimedia grotto, repeated over and over with overwhelming joy. It was its own source of excitement and a perfect balm to the kind of frustration that usually requires emptying the grotto of all youthful life and hosing down of the furnishings.

The phrase: “Wait! I have an idea!!” It shall save us all.

PS-Second most frequent phrase: “Quit slapping me!!” That may be indicative of something else, but I choose to ignore it for now.

A New Kind of Warning

All games carry a mandatory seizure warning for epileptics. LittleBIGPlant has driven home to me the need for a new warning for a much more common problem: An OCD Alert. “Warning: this game may prove fatal for anyone suffuring from Obsessive Compulsive Disorder.”

Not that it would have dissuaded me from buying it, but at least I’d have had a fighting chance. I’ve always been a bit susceptible to collection games, but this one seems to tap directly into whatever fold in my brain compels me to play the same level repeatedly to get that one last sticker. Doomed.

Liberty City Dispatch

Been lightly playing GTAIV for a few days now, but it has begun to affect my behavior in troubling ways. 

I can barely contain…the urge to talk in an Eastern European accent and have completely lost control of impulse to call everyone “Cousin!”

The State of Game Storytelling

At GDC, I asked a prominent game designer/blogger when she thought we’d reach a point when games can tell any kind of story without encountering the “think of the children” pitfall. Specifically, I asked how long before games can produce something on the order of “Lolita.” Her answer came instantly. Though I can’t remember the exact number of years, it was a bigg’un.

Suffice to say, I won’t live to see it.

Photo by ak37

Conversations like these usually revolve around sexual content, but occasionally, the outer bounds of the subjects games are “allowed” to put forth are defined by other taboos. Like, say, the Holocaust. This week comes this tidbit about the in-development DS game, Imagination is the Only Escape. Though the article’s headline is a bit premature (no actual decision has been made), there’s obviously a problem brewing for this game. And, sadly, no amount of certainty from its tragically optimistic auteur will likely produce a different result. It’s impossible to tell if the finished product will be as interesting as it appears on first blush, but that’s not why we’ll never play it.

Games, even adult games, are still seen (as comic books were and still, to a lesser extent, are) as toys. Games on the DS, doubly so. Games with child protagonists, trebly so. So, what you have at the end of all this doubling and trebling is a made-to-order demonstration of the glass ceiling for game content. Game + DS + Kids in Peril = NFW.

It’s understandable, of course. Children could get their hands on this game and misunderstand its dark and nuanced message. Parents might thoughtlessly buy it without reading the back of the box or consulting the rating. What, really, do you expect about a story of a child caught in the maelstrom of a brutal 20th century dictatorship and a consuming war who escapes into a fantasy world that funhouse-mirrors the stark moral, ethical, and philosophical issues that he isn’t equipped to comprehend in real life? Remember the massive outcry when parents mistakenly took their kids to see the film Pan’s Labyrinth? Remember the calls to kill the movie before it was released? To ban it from the theaters? To prevent its release on home video?

No. Of course you don’t. Because it wasn’t a game. Now, obviously, the Holocaust is more of a button-pusher than the Spanish Civil War, but I think that’s an extraneous factor. This is about how the pigeonholing of a new medium limits the stories the medium can tell. By limiting the subject matter spectrum of a medium, we retard its growth and force it to take decades longer to develop the vocabulary it needs to deftly handle harder subjects in its own unique way. During this delay, there’s always the chance the poor medium will just wither away or resignedly stay in its infantile state. It’s like killing a tree under the pretense of making it into a bonsai.

Someday, games will be able to make us think about and experience the hard and heavy subjects in a way no other medium can (not better, mind you, just different), but the hysterical exercise of walling them into their long-past childhood smacks of forcing your teenager to wear his Blue’s Clues romper to high school. He’ll never learn how to talk to girls, won’t learn a thing, and will come home bloody every night. And maybe, just maybe, he’ll grow into a fine serial killer instead of the world-changing visionary (the line is a fine one, you know) he could have been.

Flaming Tires and The Involuntary Guffaw

I just took a quick read of Clive Thompson’s mediation on the beauty of destruction (in, specifically, Burnout Paradise), and I instantly knew exactly what he was talking about. Back in the dark days when having a PS3 meant either watching Milla Jovovich’ Ultraviolet or playing Resistance Fall of Man, along came Motorstorm. Though it hardly delivered the system from its humiliating netherworld, it offered exactly the visceral thrill Thompson describes. From my youngest offspring to my parents, men and women alike, anyone present when I (very, very badly) played this game sounded a thundering howl of laughter as my vehicle careened off a cliff at absurd speed, gracefully disintegrating (in slo-mo, of course) into burning spare parts. Like Thompson, I’m not entirely convinced this is mere adolescent fixation or (the even more facile) typical male fetishization of violence. There is a beauty here, working on a very basic and subconscious level. For me, it’s the same response I’ve had whenever I’ve been faced with something truly, divinely beautiful: involuntary and wildly inappropriate laughter. 

How was my week?

Slow. Not much to do. How was yours? Oh, there was this one little thing I forgot about: flinging myself across the entire country for a week of the Game Developers Conference. I had an unspeakably good time, met several interesting and generous people, and came away much better for it. It was, in fact, both everything I hoped it would be and nothing I feared it would be. There isn’t much in life you can say that about. I plan to spend the next few days digging though large piles of business cards with hastily scribbled notes, writing follow-up messages, and regrouping my life in general. For the time being, though, thanks to everyone who took the time to chat with me, answer a question, engage in a good natured argument, or linger over a nourishing catered lunch. If you are one of the people I’ve met recently, I apologize that there isn’t much to see here just now; one of my other priorities is to edit and post a bunch of stuff that got back-burnered in favor of GDC. Have a look around and come back soon for more. 

Super Mario Galaxy? The Clone Army Gives it a Week

My in-house playtesters (8 y.o. Thing 1 and 6 y.o. Thing 2) shall render my (for now) final verdict on Super Mario Galaxy (as I am too immersed in Assassin’s Creed to do it myself): Meh. Though stoked about its arrival from Gamefly, they were urging me to send back for something else after only a week.Not sure what this says about the game (perhaps nothing), but it clearly failed to engage them. Truth is, they’re far more obsessed right now with the non-digital Munchkin than anything the video game lair has to offer. 

I’m so proud, I may forgo a shower today

Whoa! Eerie.

Which Character on The Simpsons Are You?

Created by BuddyTV

Finally got my Big Daddy Helmet on

It took five months (curse you work, the holidays, and Rock Band, in that order), but I have at last finished Bioshock. Observations to follow, but I must say that I didn’t find the resolution as much of a letdown as others have reported. It certainly lacked the imagination evident in almost everything that proceeded it (and the drama of the game’s first denouement), but it worked for me.