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Auf den Treppenstufen der Missgunst - bricks of videogame culture

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Auf den Treppenstufen der Missgunst

Micha, 24. November 2012

“Wer mit sich unzufrieden ist, ist fortwährend bereit, sich dafür zu rächen.”

Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, (1844 - 1900), deutscher Philosoph, Essayist, Lyriker und Schriftsteller

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Videospiele haben sich in den letzten zehn Jahren massiv verändert. Es gibt den offensichtlichen technischen Sprung nach Vorne, als auch viele Designänderungen in den Spielprinzipien. Mit Ihnen hat sich auch die gesamte Kultur gewandelt. Waren Videospiele in den Neunzigern trotz der Erfolge von Nintendo und SEGA zumindest in Deutschland in den Köpfen des Hoi Polloi noch eher Spielzeug, wurden sie ab der Jahrtausendwende wenigstens als Zeitverschwendung registriert. Daraus wurde im Laufe der Jahre aber mehr. Videospielästhetiken beeinflussten immer stärker andere Medienbereiche; das Mainstreampublikum war vor allem seit dem Kinofilm Matrix – zusammengesetzt aus Versatzstücken von Anime und Games – etwas vertrauter mit den Phänomenen. Und dann kamen schließlich die Smartphones, die mit ihren großen Touch-Bildschirmen zum Zocken bestens geeignet sind. Eine neue Generation von Spielern wuchs heran. Solche, die nicht unbedingt Level Schlagmichtot in World of Fantasyirgendwas erreichen wollen, sondern die in den Pausen ein paar Vögel durch die Botanik schleudern oder sich Geschenke in Facebook zuschieben. Einige von Ihnen gewinnen dadurch Interesse an komplexeren Spielen. Schöne Sache also.

Neue Generationen sind auch an anderen Fronten entstanden. World of Fantasyirgendwas ist nur einer von unzählbaren Online-Rollenspielen, die so vor einigen Jahren aus technischen Gründen nicht möglich gewesen wären und ganze Gilden, deren Mitglieder sich teilweise im echten Leben noch nie gesehen haben, treffen sich zu unmöglichen Uhrzeiten um für einen bahnbrechenden Raid ihr Sozialleben zum Teufel zu jagen. Online-Gaming hat sich im Allgemeinen stark verändert: Kooperative Spiele über das Internet sind nun ohne Probleme auf jeder Heimkonsole möglich und man kann im Prinzip mit jedem Menschen spielen, der einen Account in den hiesigen Konsolen-Netzwerken hat. Und Indie-Games! Eine ganze Kultur scharrt sich um sie, erhebt sie zur Gegenbewegung zu den großen Spieletiteln und ist besonders gut darin sich selbst zu feiern. Was gut ist. So merken wir überhaupt, dass sie da sind. Und wer von großen wie kleinen Spielen zu neuen Ideen inspiriert wird, kann zu Modding-Tools greifen oder zumindest erste Schritte in Titeln wie “Little Big Planet” oder “Trackmania” unternehmen.

Die gesamte Spielewelt ist also großartiger wie nie zuvor. Klingt doch fantastisch, oder?
Von wegen!

Ich steige eine Stufe auf der Niveau-Leiter herunter

Zu den oben genannten Errungenschaften hat sich leider eine weitere Gruppe, nein, sogar Generation gebildet: Die der Spieler, die nur meckern, motzen, zetern, zertreten, zerstampfen, miesmachen, rumkotzen, klugscheißen und nur jedes Detail hassen, was sie nur hassen können. Kurz: Eine Generation von Arschgeigen. Das Internet nennt sie auch Hater. Oder Trolle. Der Übergang zwischen beiden ist fließend. Arschgeige ist aber ein Begriff, der mir in dem Zusammenhang schneller von der Zunge geht und für mich in einem Ensemble sinnbildlich perfekt passt: Der Typ, der in der hintersten Reihe sitzt und nicht einmal richtig musizieren kann. Alle sind d’accord’, nur einer spielt schief. Weil er nicht anders kann. Oder absichtlich.

Ich spreche von der Generation von Leuten, die sich in den Kommentarfeldern der Blogs und Magazinen des Internets tummeln und sich dort nicht nur mit voller Absicht verbale Kriege mit unnötig scharfen Angriffen liefern, sondern die auch innerhalb von Minuten auf neu gepostete Beiträge reagieren. Als würden sie wie Geier über der Tastatur kreisen. Gierig, auf das nächste Opfer wartend. Ich spreche von der Generation, die schon bei Vorankündigungen zu Spielen, die noch nicht einmal erschienen sind, bereits mit dem Hasskiefer knirschen und den Untergang der Gaming-Industrie propagieren. Und wenn sie in einer Sache richtig gut sind, dann in der Diffamierung einzelner Personen oder ganzer Gemeinschaften. Die Wortwahl kann dabei durchaus geschickt sein, denn die Missgunst und der Unmut scheint ihre Gehirnzellen mit Kreativität zu überfluten. Auf blumigste Weise, in den verschachtelsten Sätzen, mit den ausgefallensten Vokabeln: Immer drauf. Und zwar fest!

Ich möchte ein paar Beispiele nennen. Etwa die Missgunst gegenüber Notch, dem Erfinder von Minecraft. Sein Spiel ist zu einem Phänomenen geworden und der gute Mann mittlerweile reich. Der Erfolg wird ihm aber von den Arschgeigen nicht gegönnt. Auf Kotaku wurde ein Blogeintrag gepostet, in dem ein paar Bilder von seinem aufwendig gestaltenen Büro zu sehen sind. Es vergehen nur wenige Minuten, schon werden in den Kommentaren die Stimmen laut.

Anyone else suddenly feel…weird, I guess is the best way to put it…about owning a copy? (NightmareAsylum)

Oder …

God damn, there are very few people who can pull off that hat, and Notch is NOT one of them. Overall awesome guy, but holy shit I want to take that hat off and stomp on it. (williagr)

Und diese waren noch freundlich ausgedrückt. Hier hat Notch offenbar etwas getan, was seinem Indie-Image – oder zumindest das Phantombild von dem, was Anhänger der Szene ihm angeheftet haben – massiv geschadet hat. You´re not indie? Fuck you! Aber warum darf der Mann keinen schöneren, größeren Arbeitsplatz haben? Wer wünscht sich diesen nicht? Er hat das Glück sich diesen Wunsch erfüllen zu können; die Vorstellung, ein einsamer Indie-Entwickler würde die Millionen auf seinem Konto häufen, während er im dunklen Kämmerlein geduckt Code in die Tastatur tippt, ist völlig absurd. Neid spielt da vermutlich eine Rolle.

und noch eine Stufe tiefer

Ein weiteres Beispiel: Resident Evil 6. Capcom hat mit diesem Projekt die endgültige Eroberung des westlichen Marktes angestrebt und ungemein hohe finanzielle und personelle Bemühungen aufgebraucht, um dieses Ziel zu erreichen. Das hat aus verschiedenen Gründen nicht ganz hingehauen. Zu viele Köche verderben den Brei. Aus dem intersubjektiven Blinkwinkel ist Resident Evil 6 trotzdem ein unterhaltsames Spiel für Freunde von Actionspielen. Generation Arschgeige ist das egal. Im Gegenteil: Sie weiß, dass das Spiel scheiße ist, ohne es selbst gespielt haben zu müssen. Der erste Trailer erscheint. Es wurde viel Action gezeigt. Die Ankündigung der Produzenten, der neuste Ableger der Serie würde sich Richtung Call of Duty orientieren, hat die Hater tief im Herzen nie glücklicher gemacht. Ohne auch nur einen Frame Gameplay zu sehen häufen sich die Kommentare alá: “Das wird das bekackteste Spiel aller Zeiten!”, “Der Meister des Survival Horror auf dem totalen Tiefpunkt!” oder “Wer will so einen japanischen Vollschrott spielen?” Surft mal unter die Kommentare von Previews. Da steht es. Fast ausnahmslos auf allen Spieleseiten. Der eigentliche Witz aber: Noch bevor der Normalbürger das Spiel erwerben kann, häufen sich schon viele Tage vor Release die negativen Userkritiken. Man liest interessiert genauer, und immer öfter kommt der Nebensatz “… ich habe bisher 2 Stunden gespielt …” . Oder es wird kleinlaut zwischen den Zeilen gebeichtet, nur die Demo gesehen zu haben.
Und doch wird sie losgetreten, die Welle der Erniedrigung, die nahezu identisch übertragbar auf andere Spiele ist, die eine Fanbase nicht überzeugen kann oder die einem gewissen Hype erlegen waren. Selbsternannte Spielekritiker feuern ihren Unmut über das Spiel in die Welt hinaus, mischen ihre in Prozentpunkten ausgedrückte Fanboy- oder Fangirl-Enttäuschung in den Metacritc-Score. Die Texte sind voller Wut, voller Anschuldigungen. Und das steckt an. Userkritiken und Kommentare unter Artikeln kennen dann tagelang nur Plus oder Minus. Keine Grauzonen mit differenzierten Meinungen dazwischen, sondern einfach nur “alles ist scheiße” oder “es ist das beste Spiel der Welt”. Die Minuszeichen der Generation Arschgeige überwiegen. Und leider wird nicht wie in der Mathematik daraus ein Plus.
Dass Resident Evil sich schon seit dem dritten Teil auf der Playstation, in dem Jill Valentine mit Maschinengewehr und Minirock gegen ein Monster mit Nazimantel und Raketenwerfer gekämpft hat, langsam aber zielgerecht auf einen interaktiven Actionfilm zu bewegt, scheint dabei aber völlig egal zu sein. Die Frage steht sogar im Raum, ob das den Hater überhaupt klar ist. Eine differenzierte Auseinandersetzung mit der Spielserie hat vermutlich nie stattgefunden, eine Art “Bildung bis zum Gartenzaun”, die sich für Spiele wie “Recherche bis zum letzten Sequel” übersetzen lässt. Aber das spielt keine Rolle. Etwas schlecht zu finden, weil es andere tun, macht die Backen der Arschgeige schließlich runder. Da gibt es keinen Mut zu Kompromissen oder Bekenntnissen, solange harte Kritik bei ach-so-harten Kritikern die methodische Oberhand hat. Naja, es sei denn, es ist – wie gesagt – “das beste Spiel der Welt”.

Was sich bei Resident Evil 6 schon abzeichnete, wurde bei anderen Spieletiteln umso deutlicher: Die Arschgeigen haben Besitzansprüche. Erhebliche sogar. Im Frühjahr wurden wir Zeugen davon, wie Fans in einem unvergleichlichen Shitstorm “ihr” Ende “ihrer” Mass Effect-Trilogie umgestalten wollen. Leider gab Bioware nach. Aber es geht weiter: Die Körpermaße der weiblichen Kämpfer in Dead or Alive 5 wurden lebensnaher gestaltet als in ihren Vorgängern. Die Reaktion der Fans? Die Brüste von “ihrer” Kasumi sollen gefälligst größer sein und mehr wackeln! Oder Borderlands 2: Gearbox hat den Gewaltgrad etwas zurückgeschraubt, aber das war den Fans zuwider. Sie trommelten sich im offiziellen Forum zusammen und verlangten lauthals die Verschärfung von Splattereffekten in “ihrem” Borderlands. Die Liste der Beispiele lässt sich ellenlang fortführen.

Der vermittelte Eindruck ist dabei relativ eindeutig: Man scheint es diesen Menschen nicht recht machen zu können. Es ist eine immer fortwährende, eifrige Suche nach Kritikpunkten, bei der es absolut keine Rolle spielt, wie viele positive Aspekte überhaupt vorhanden sind. Selbst das gelungenste Spiel kann immer noch durch einen kleinen Ausrutscher in der Luft zerrissen werden. Die Redewendung “eine Mücke zum Elefanten machen” hat hier nie besser gepasst. Nicht ausgeschlossen, dass dies eine Art Beschäftigungstherapie ist, die in gewissen Kreisen für den nötigen Gesprächsstoff sorgt und eine Kompetenz vortäuscht, die vermutlich gar nicht vorhanden ist. Oder für genug Wirbel in den Kommentarfeldern. Als Nebeneffekt – und da mutmaße ich etwas – kommt Lob nach einer Zeit nur sehr schwer oder gar nicht mehr über die Lippen. Die Konzentration liegt so sehr auf der Fehlersuche, dass bei diesem Scheuklappenblick alles Gute aus dem Sichtfeld gerät.

noch ein paar Stufen

Woher kommt sie, die Generation Arschgeige? Man kommt nicht umhin nach Gründen zu suchen und in dem Punkt wird es schwer. Man kennt die Symptome, den allgemeinen negativen Tenor mit Anflug massiver Überheblichkeit, der durch die Kommentarzeilen, Blogs und manchmal sogar Kritikertexte weht. Aber die Ursachen?
Vielleicht ist dies ein Effekt des heutigen Konsumverhaltens. Die ungemeine, eigentlich überfordernde Vielfalt an Spielen, ach, an Medien generell führt vielleicht zum Meckern auf hohem Niveau. Schlechte Spiele, so wie es sie noch zu den ersten beiden Playstation-Generationen gab, sind heute unheimlich selten geworden. Heutige Spiele funktionieren. Sie sind spielbar, sehen im Regelfall mindestens annehmbar aus und haben die gängigsten Konventionen inne. Klar, es gibt Totalausfälle wie das unfassbare “Jumper” für die 360, und die genannten Eigenschaften schützen nicht davor, dass ein Spiel langweilig sein kann. Trotzdem ist der allgemeine Produktionslevel deutlich gestiegen. Kritik fußt daher immer stärker auf Details, auf Kleinigkeiten. Meinetwegen auf einzelne Aspekte. Die Texturen sind einen Tick zu schwammig? Zack, Punktabzug! Und weil die allermeisten Hersteller es mindestens überdurchschnittlich gut machen, tritt eine Gewöhnung ein. Schon wieder ein Deckungsshooter? Funktioniert zwar wie die anderen davor, aber: Das ist sowas von Post-Deckungsshooter! Wir haben schließlich schon alle anderen davor gespielt. Denn die Arschgeige ist nimmersatt und kann trotz hervortretender Adern auf der Stirn nicht die Neugier unterdrücken. Da kann Activision noch so kommerziell und EA noch so sehr Fließband sein: Klammheimlich wird dann vielleicht doch mal das eine oder andere Produkt vom Erzfeind gespielt. Psst, reden müssen wir darüber nicht. Wäre ja peinlich.

Vielleicht ist auch die Presse daran schuld. Das Konsumverhalten giert nach den neuesten und heißesten Scheiß, ein Blick nach hinten auf ältere gute Spiele könnte zum Stolpern führen und so wird jeder noch so kleine Newsschnipsel aufgesogen. Es ist wie damals auf dem Schulhof: Grüppchen werden gebildet, man möchte schließlich auch zu den coolen Leuten dazugehören, die nunmal Bescheid wissen. Schon gewusst? Resident Evil 6 ist total kacke. Ach, neee, hab ich doch schon vor Monaten gesagt.
Spielejournalisten – was für eine fürchterliche Bezeichnung – haben es nach meinem Eindruck ohnehin schwer Einzelaspekte zu loben. Kleine Fehler herauspicken, ja, darin sind sie gut. In einem Rennspiel stehen bleiben und die Bodentexturen beurteilen. Ganz nah an den Levelrand gehen, wo nix los ist, um mal zu sehen, ob da ja auch alles schön modelliert wurde. Oh, hat der NPC dort etwa seine Animation wiederholt? Ich stelle mich mal davor und warte 5 Min, um zu sehen, ob dies nochmal geschieht. Und wenn die Profi-Arschgeigen das machen, müssen die Nachwuchs-Arschgeigen da mitziehen. Das schärft schließlich den Blick für´s Wesentliche. Die Streitereien um 84% oder 85% können das Nitpicking gar nicht deutlicher beweisen. Viele solcher Diskussionen gibt es beispielsweise in den Kommentaren auf Online-Portalen diverser Print-Magazine; Redaktionen, die Nitpicker seit Jahren füttern, die ihnen wiederum sabbernd aus der Hand fressen. Die Profis geben schließlich die ausschlaggebenden Punkte vor, drucken sie schwarz auf weiß, und das wird von den Arschgeigen in überhöhter Form adaptiert. Selbstverständlich gibt es löbliche Ausnahmen, aber wenn prozentual geurteilt wird und Awards ab gewissen Grenzen vergeben werden: Meist ein ziemlich eindeutiges Indiz.

weitere Schritte nach unten

Vielleicht ist auch Twitter daran schuld. Zwischenheitlich ist dort ein seltsames Paralleluniversum entstanden, in denen Menschen darauf trainiert wurden, pointiert Statements zum Besten zu geben, in der Hoffung sie würden retweetet, gar favorisiert werden. Etwas kritisieren war schon immer einfach, in 140 Zeichen ist es sogar noch müheloser und reizvoller geworden. Obwohl man sich gegenseitig eigentlich gar nicht genauer kennt, entstehen individualisierte Kreise mit ähnlichen Interessen, die sich die Kalauer in dem weltweiten, missverstandenen Quasi-Chat mit “me, too”-Mentalität um die Ohren hauen. Die meisten Statusmeldungen haben nicht einmal für nähere Freunde einen besonderen Wert. Wer möchte wissen, was Daniel W. aus D. heute zum Frühstück gegessen hat? Wow, deine Bahn hatte wieder Verspätung? Wahnsinn! Und bitte erzähle mir mehr von deinen Socken! Dank Twitter haben First World-Problems endlich einen Kanal, der das Mitteilungsbedürfnis von Nichtigkeiten im hohem Maß stimuliert.
Wenn es dann zu Meinungsäußerungen kommt, dann ist die Beschränkung auf 140 Zeichen und die Anonymität geradezu ein Geschenk. So fällt nicht so schnell auf, dass man eigentlich nicht mehr als “finde ich gut” oder “finde ich nicht gut” zu sagen hat. Eine differenzierte Auseinandersetzung, vielleicht auch nur in drei- bis viermal mehr Zeichen, dass ist schon zu mühseelig; der Plattform entsprechend wenig handlich. Die gesamte Sexismus-Diskussion zum Beispiel hat durch die Beschränkungen bei Twitter eher zu Missverständnissen als zu Denkanstößen geführt. Und was den generellen Informationsgehalt betrifft: Es ist sicher kein Zufall, dass viele “Amazon-Rezessionen” einen ähnlichen Umfang besitzen.

Und da ist natürlich noch die “Alles umsonst”-Mentalität. Damit meine ich nicht die vielen Indie Bundles oder heruntergesetzte Spiele, denn schließlich hat nicht jeder einen Goldesel zuhause. Vielmehr wird der Informationsfluß durch das Internet als völlig selbstverständlich wahrgenommen. Täglich werden die neuesten Artikel und Podcasts in die Feedreader gespült, ohne dass genau hingeschaut wird, wer und unter welchen Umständen die Autoren die Formate produziert haben. Die Masse an Informationen ist sicher toll, das Filtern Aufgabe des Lesers, doch: Generation Arschgeige richtet den Unmut auch mal gerne gegen Spielejournalisten (schon wieder dieses Wort), macht aber keinen Unterschied zwischen Personen, die dies beruflich oder privat betreiben. Der Text oder der Podcast, der so fertig vor dem Hater auf der Schlachtbank liegt, ist nun einmal da, gefesselt und bereit zerstückelt zu werden. Man würde nie selbst für so ein Prachtstück, für so viel Fleisch jagen gehen, aber hey: Auch hier ist es wieder einfacher, einfach draufzuhacken. Ich habe sehr deutlich das Bild vor Augen, wie zwischen dem Zappen der TV-Kanäle das Ipad hervorgekramt, ein Artikel gelesen und in der Werbepause ein vernichtender Zweizeiler daruntergerotzt wird. Blog, kommerzielles Portal, werbefinanziert? Spielt keine Rolle, wir machen keine Gefangenen. Ein Klischee-Bild aus einem Cartoon? Lest Twitter. Jene Personen dokumentieren es sogar stellenweise selbst. Arschgeigen holen sich dort die Anerkennung auf dem Schulhof.[]

Ein besonderer Witz an der Sache, der mich als Blogger betrifft: Für die Arschgeige spielt keine Rolle, ob ich dies beruflich mache oder nicht. Das regelmäßige Erscheinen von Podcasts, die in der Freizeit von den entsprechenden Autoren entwickelt werden, stehen im Feedreader neben den Publikationen, die klar kommerziell betrieben werden. Das klingt zunächst wie ein Lob, untermauert aber eigentlich, wie scheißegal es gewissen Personen ist. Getreu dem Motto “wer sich auf die Bühne stellt, muss auch einstecken können” werden Freizeit-Veröffentlichungen genauso schlecht (im positiven Fall genauso gut) behandelt. Niemand sollte bevorzugt werden, wenn er privat Artikel oder Podcasts produziert. Ein schlechter Text bleibt schlecht, ein schlechtes Video ist nicht sehenswert und ein schlechter Audiopodcast weiterhin Zeitverschwendung. Aber ein Blog steht unter einem anderem professionellem Maßstab als eine kommerzielle Produktion. Der Arschgeige ist das aber völlig gleichgültig. Unterschiedliche Ansprüche spielen da keine Rolle, da eine ehrliche Erwartungshaltung mit zunehmender Gewohnheit eine immer größer werdende Unwahrscheinlichkeit hat. Am Ende ist es der Text im Feedreader, und der sieht formal erst einmal so aus wie jeder andere auch.[]

Auf der untersten Stufe. Auf Augenhöhe.

Ist es eine allgemeine Unzufriedenheit? Ist dies alles nur ein Gesamteindruck, der daher rührt, dass Menschen sich vor allem dann zu Wort melden, wenn es etwas zu meckern gibt? Neigen Menschen zunächst einmal zur Extreme und relativieren ihre Aussagen erst, wenn man sie damit konfrontiert, getreu dem Motto: So meinte ich das doch gar nicht?
Ich werde aus dem ganzen nicht wirklich schlau, ich kann nur ganz subjektiv sagen: Den Tenor, die Mentalität, die von der beschriebenen Menschengruppe ausgeht, kotzt mich regelrecht an. Es geht um Himmels Willen nicht darum alles nur mit der rosa Brille zu sehen. Es geht auch nicht darum jemanden den Mund zu verbieten oder ihm nicht seinen Geschmack zu lassen. Nein, es geht nur um diese schreckliche Hater-Kultur, die erst durch das Internet so richtig Plattform gewonnen hat und alle möglichen Medienbereiche infiltriert. Sie kennt keinen Respekt, sie hinterfragt nicht, sie ist sich selbst am wichtigsten und obwohl sie nicht viel zu sagen hat, will sie am meisten auffallen.

Hier bin ich also, auf der letzten aller Treppenstufen der Missgunst. Ich bin sprachlich von Abschnitt zu Abschnitt immer einen Schritt herabgestiegen. Meine Argumentationen wurden waghalsiger, es ging mehr und mehr um das Bauchgefühl. Ich atme in diesem Augenblick die Luft der Hater und Trolle, und stelle mit Erschrecken fest, dass ich sie ebenso gut inhalieren kann wie dort oben am anderen Ende. Es ist nicht schwer die Treppe hinab zu steigen und hier unten eine Weile zu leben. Weitaus schwieriger dürfte es sein, sie wieder zu erklimmen.[]

[1] Ich möchte diesen Teil ungern mit Beispielen belegen, da man dort einzelne Twitter-Accounts und somit Personen direkt anspricht. Das ist zu persönlich. Aber ich bin mir sicher, ihr wisst, was ich meine. ↩

[2] Ich möchte keinesfalls wehleidig klingen. Aber das erfährt man als Blogger bzw. über bloggende Kollegen nunmal aus erster Hand. ↩

[3] Lesenswert in diesem Zusammenhang ist übrigens der Artikel von Rainer drüben bei Videogametoursim mit dem klangvollen Titel “Arschlochgamer“ ↩

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Context-Sensitive Spec Ops « Dire Critic

direcritic.com

I was ecstatic to learn that an old high school friend of mine, R., had recently picked up Spec Ops: The Line, and was playing it over Steam just a scant couple days after my own play-through. After leaving high school, R. went into the Marine Corps–he served two tours in Iraq before returning to California to pursue a degree, where we got to reconnect over IM.

R.’s been very open about sharing some of his war experiences with me for my research on an upcoming project, as well as lending his perspective on films and articles I’ve shared with him. (For instance, I linked him W.’s “Call of Apathy” to see whether it jived at all with his own impressions about his fellow vets, or even himself– he said that it didn’t, but he did agree that the most destructive force to reckon with during a tour like his or W.’s is the long stretches of boredom.)

On the subject of war-themed videogames, he and I have generally agreed that they’re horseshit. But having now put Spec Ops: The Line behind me, I was interested what an actual veteran thought of its depiction of war in the Middle East and some would say critical message. So naturally once I learned he’d picked it up I bugged the hell out of him about it.

What follows are a few spoilers for the game. R. isn’t a professional writer so a few of you might be a little disappointed by the brevity of his impressions, but I think he brings a unique take to things, especially since he (as of this writing) hasn’t been exposed to Spec Ops‘ source material either.

Saving Gould:

R.: All that shit I went through to save Gould, and the bastard dies anyway. This motherfucking game.
Kris: I KNOW ISN’T IT GREAT
R.: I get the impression that I will end up really loving this game, but at the moment it’s infuriating. And sometimes for the right reasons.

White Phosphorus:

R.: and now I’m dropping white phosphorus on friendlies.
Kris: did you immediately give the order for that?
Kris: I tried holding out
R.: I had a choice?
Kris: technically, but the enemies infinitely respawn, and you have no means to refill ammo
R.: And now I have to walk slowly though the wreckage and wounded from my WP attack. Fanfuckingtastic.
Kris: oh wait till you get to the underpass of the bridge where you bombed that last humvee
R.: And I murdered civilians. FEEL GOOD GAME OF THE CENTURY!
Kris: I know!

In which R. discovers the bulk of Videogame Criticism:

R.: What they’ve done? WHAT THEY HAVE FUCKING DONE! I’m the one going around indiscriminately murdering before taking accurate assessments of the situation.
Kris: But you haaaaad to do it there was no other way
Kris: In the strict sense, the game doesn’t allow you to proceed unless you do
R.: I want a game where shit like this is the consequence for CHOOSING to be the murdering bastard, not getting railroaded into it.
R.: Actually I just want morality systems in games to grow the fuck up. I’m tired of binary choices that have little impact on the actual game. I want a game where, taking this scenario as an example, I could have used the WP, and then discovered the civilians. or I could have slogged through that army, and maybe saved them, maybe the army would have started killing them when they realized I was coming.

In which R. predicts, well, everything:

R.: My character keeps saying that he’s been forced into being a murderous bastard, but it doesn’t really feel that way.
R.: …there’s no one on the other end of that radio, is there? It’s all in this crazy bastards head. if there was someone there, the other two would react, instead of being confused.
R.: This guy just guesses shit and then passes it to his team as fact.

Design Notes!

R.: I feel there’s a pun in the fact that everytime I crash somewhere, I start with just a Desert Eagle.
Kris: I thought it was just one of the few pistols most laymen recognized
R.: You start the game with an M9, but everytime you crash, it gives you a Desert Eagle. From nowhere.
Kris: Huh, they don’t start you with a Desert Eagle for your off weapon? I never noticed that.
Kris: Maybe he hides it in his trousers like Solid Snake
R.: I think it’s just one more jab by the developers.

Reaching the final chapter:

R.: No Colonel Klink, I do not feel like a hero. I think Captain Insano might think he is, but I don’t feel that way. This game has a weird disconnect between the player and the character.

R.: Claiming to be as sane as Captain insano is not a good claim to make.

R.: So I shot the ghost of Colonel klink.
Kris: ghost, huh?
R.: don’t know a better term off the top of my head.
R.: Poor Lugo. The only one who made any sense throughout all this.
Kris: he was my favorite
Kris: I mean, Adams brought plenty of “wtf is wrong with you”
Kris: but Lugo sure didn’t deserve what happened to him
R.: Adams was all about abandoning Dubai and carrying out the original mission of leaving the city. Lugo followed his commander, and tried to complete the insane objectives, but still raised his objections where he felt it was wrong.

R.: Alright…let me try to think about this game for a minute.
Kris: still on the credits? Or did you reach the epilogue?
R.: still on credits. If I beat a game I don’t skip the credits.
Kris: good man. Well, you can’t skip them and access the epilogue anyhow
R.: Walker has some serious issues. But for most of the game he thinks he’s in the right and his actions have a chance of standing up as self-defence. As the narrative progresses they move farther from justifiable, and into a massacre. Adams seems unwilling to put up with Walkers bullshit, but he’s still the one that suggested the WP mortars. Lugo is more willing to put up with Walker and follow orders, even when he has problems with them which is what I expected out of a Sergeant.

The epilogue:

R.: So I surrendered my weapon in the epilogue.
R.: Shooting them didn’t seem like it would fit with what had happened. Walker still blames the Colonel, but he recognized that it was done.
R.: Although the fact that he’s wearing the colonel’s uniform, and the line “Who said I did” seems to imply that he’s become the colonel in his mind.?
R.: at least in my playthrough, Walker continued to blame Konrad
R.: I think at least part of Walker thinks he is konrad. And that’s the part he blames for all this.

Final thoughts:

Kris: So, overall, worth the time spent playing? You did guess the twist pretty early on
R.: Even figuring out the twist, yeah, still worth playing.
Kris: All my Twitter friends are dying to know your technical nitpicks
R.: Oh there was a bunch wrong. M16′s are not fully automatic, teams tend to be 4 people, not 3, a sniper would have a spotter, a captain would not be leading a team, and said team would not have a lieutenant in it. .50cal barrels do overheat with a sustained rate of fire, but need to be replaced afterwards. The US Military doesn’t use P90′s, or FAMAS, and the shotguns used are Berelli [Benelli] 12 gauge
Kris: I think there was a scene where Lugo served as a spotter while Walker had a sniper rifle. I found that weird seeing as, apparently, Lugo was the team sniper
Kris: I do wonder why they opted for a team of 3 rather than 4
Kris: Apart from making it easier to kill the squaddies off in a timely manner
R.: Oh also, the 33rd seems to have several thousand more people than a battalion would actually have.
Kris: and incredibly well-organized. And fashionable, with all those fedoras.
R.: And the entire premise of a Colonel leading his entire battalion rogue is just wrong.
Kris: that’s pretty much where Apocalypse Now goes as well, hah

Kris: So, I had another question, and it’s really broad and maybe not fair, so take it in whatever direction you like
Kris: but a lot of critics have read Spec Ops as antiwar. It didn’t really read that way to me–more the tale of individuals pushed past a psychological breaking point where war is the setting. That’s sort of a leitmotif in both Vietnam War and Iraq War films
R.: I didn’t see anti-war in it
Kris: do you think it had a few critical things to say about war, or how the American military operates?
Kris: Which again, like you said, the way it portrays its American servicemen is a bit fantastical to begin with.
R.: I think it was critical in dealing with the psychological stress war inflicts, both on servicemen and civilians.
R.: It also gave you some of the perspective of both those in charge and those following

R.: “Freedom is what you do with whats been done to you” Loading screen tip I just got. I like it.

direcritic.com

Allow Natural Death

unwinnable.com

Exactly six years ago I bought a Nintendo Wii – came home from Toys “R” Us, plugged it in. (The box is still there on the floor of my girlhood bedroom, right where I left it in another November.)

“Can you imagine, Al?” my mother asked my father. “In our lifetime?” She was standing around marveling as I – ahem – went bowling.

Then I saw the Wii’s “pacemaker” warning and now I was pushing my adoptive dad out of the room. “Out, out!” I commanded him. I was not going to be the one to murder my father, thank you.

———

I played videogames exactly because I wasn’t permitted to and I reviewed them for money simply to irritate my mother further. If you have a streak of impishness running through you, there is no better motivator than having someone in your life telling you what you cannot do.

It wasn’t until that February column, the one about Creatures, that my mother announced she finally understood.

“I think,” she said to me carefully, “I’ve been telling you the wrong thing.”

“No,” I said, and then I was unusually quiet, because I was beaming. Or maybe gloating. Or maybe I was just standing there quietly: I don’t remember.

I often tell freelancers that every article they write should be a love letter to just one person: they ought to picture that person, maybe pine a little for her or his love, as they write directly to that person. The Creatures column, I’d written directly to my mother.

———

I’ve never cried so hard as when they told me to play music during it – you know, during the whatever. The doctors were telling us to get the house ready: it was the first time anyone openly said death was immanent. I suddenly remembered I’d never gotten the living room CD player fixed. I doubled over; I almost vomited.

———

It has been proposed that the term DNR – literally, “do not resuscitate” – be replaced with the term AND. The words “do not resuscitate” imply crucial treatment is somehow being withheld; “allow natural death,” conversely, suggests that something is being given.

“People ignore families’ wishes all the time,” one of the doctors – the doctor I liked least – told me, smirking.

The words “do not resuscitate” imply crucial treatment is somehow being withheld; “allow natural death,” conversely, suggests that something is being given.

I launched into an angry speech, my If People Died Whenever They Felt Like It, Everyone Would Be Dead diatribe.

“I guess I was hoping there would be another option,” my cousin said to the doctor.

“Well,” I snapped at her, “this isn’t a buffet,” and my cousin burst into tears.

———

My mother didn’t adopt me until 1993, but I moved in with her a few years earlier, in 1989.

When I was a child I was frightened of needles and during my first immunization the doctors had to chase me through the room, had to hold me down and stick me. I have always been scared of doctors.

After that, my mother and I worked out a system: I would concentrate on her face, and she would hold my hand and recite, “I love you, I love you, I love you, I love you—”

———

I sat in the darkened ICU and thought a lot about videogames. I thought about possibilities and branching decision trees.

One very bad night, I realized I’d started thinking about games in which you, the main character, are tasked with giving your victims the “best” possible death, games in which a death can somehow be botched.

It was September 23, near midnight, and the nurse was switching out my mother’s fluids. I watched, alarmed, as my mother’s vitals plunged. Then new bags were connected and the little line graphs on monitors, illustrating how “alive” she was, righted themselves and straightened.

I stared at the nurse. “There isn’t time to get her all the way home,” I said.

“I’m not allowed to guess,” the nurse said. “But—”

I’d worked so hard to improve my mother’s condition; in reality, I had bungled her death instead. I had encouraged what was already, with or without my stabs at intervention, a complete shitshow.

One time, I glanced over and my mother’s eyes were perfectly focused. They were focused on me.

“Oh,” I said to her numbly, “you’re awake. Hang on.” I dug around my totebag.

“I have a couple things I wanted to show you,” I said to her, then, walking to the bed and sitting. “Do you remember the game I did voice for? It came out. Hang on, I’ll show you.”

With multiple organ failure it’s hard to get everything balanced just right so that oxygen is getting to the brain and the person can “wake up.” So, if nothing else, I know how to misallocate an important moment. Here I was, with my mother dying in front of me, and I still wanted her to be proud. Just, proud. Oh, my God, it’s so self-centered.

I demonstrated the game on my iPhone. It was impossible to hear my tinny recorded voice over the sound of her machines, so I repeated the words after I’d heard another version of myself say them. “Line,” I narrated to her. “Hear that? ‘Triangle.’”

My game ended quickly. “Well, okay, that’s that,” I said, putting the phone down and fumbling for something else. “Remember my story? My story came out in the magazine. Um, in August.”

I opened a chapbook in front of her, and she touched its pages, and then she took the magazine from me and shut it and kind of massaged its cover with her thumb. Then she dropped the magazine into the folds of the bed and reached for my hand, and she took my hand and squeezed it.

And squeezed it again. And then I cried, and she squeezed my hand another time, and I looked up and right into her eyes, which were wet and meaningful and so clear, and her face was obscured by the breathing mask but her eyebrows were furrowed the way they always are when I cry, and I apologized to her for hurting her and for being so sad, and I looked down again at our clasped hands, and then I folded myself in half and cried into both our hands.

And then I pitched forward off the chair and onto my knees and I cried into her bedsheets and kissed her hand, because there was that mask forcing air into her and there was too little of her face to kiss.

———

Around the same time, in another part of Texas, Terry demonstrated the last scenes of the game I’d shown my mother, Super Hexagon. It’s Terry’s game, and Terry is better at playing it than anybody else.

Hexagon is an important game. The first time I met Terry I made him stand there and listen to my ideas about that game, about how his game is about living life. I talked about stopping and waiting and then moving, about pivoting your cursor until you find your window of opportunity. I told him about luck and not-luck and memory and decisiveness.

“It sounds very nice when you put it that way,” Terry told me pleasantly.

Recently, Edge‘s Jason Killingsworth asked Terry about the possibility of Super Hexagon being about death instead.

And in that closing scene – spoiler! – where the world slows down and then opens up, and you backtrack through the narrative of your cursor’s life, and it really was impossible to survive much longer…well, I don’t know how else to describe it except as a death. I think it’s very beautiful, that most players will never see it.

Doctors couldn’t’ve convinced me. I thought about never disconnecting the wires and tubes. I thought about adding more tubes. I wondered how much of my life I could execute from that small room: I thought about staying there for the rest of my life. I tried to picture what it might feel like, to live in that room with her.

I remember my cousin helplessly asking one of the doctors what we were supposed to do. She was asking the doctor I fought most, the one I liked least.

“You could hold her hand,” the doctor said. “Skin, ah, has a memory.”

———

Instead of giving the order, I announced I’d give the order in twenty minutes.

I didn’t cry, not right then. Instead I thought about the depths of my own poor judgment. I wished, for her sake and not mine, my mother had any other daughter at the controls.

The obituary I wrote for my mother was stupid. I knew I wanted to honor her, but I wasn’t sure how. I didn’t know how to write about her. Just trying to – I felt a type of shame, like now.

I wrote about her life – where and when she was born, her accomplishments, that she liked tennis – entirely from memory. I wanted to ask her questions; I wanted to fact-check. I wanted to Google her. I wanted to scream.

———

The last words my mother spoke to me were: “Let me go. Let me go. Let me go. Let me go. Let me go.”

I let go of her hand. “No one’s holding you,” I said to her stupidly.

And then I heard myself, and then I was able to hear her, really hear her, and I gasped.

When you choose a natural death for somebody, it might feel like dropping off a cliff when, maybe, in free-fall you say to yourself, “This isn’t what I want, how do I stop this?”

I wanted to stop; instead what I shouted was, “Is this what you guys meant by ‘comfortable.’”

One of the last things I told my mother was “I am letting you go.” In the hospital they tell you to say that to the person in the bed. They told me to say that because her heart just wouldn’t stop.

Thank God she couldn’t hear me: it was a lie.

But the very last thing I told my mother, with my back toward her and my arm crooked behind me, squeezing her hand – and this was the thing I really meant, and probably the rest of the room didn’t know why I suddenly sounded so crazy – was, “I love you, I love you, I love you, I love you—”

———

Follow Jenn Frank on Twitter @Jennatar.

unwinnable.com

Features - Persuasive Games: Wii Can't Go On, Wii'll Go On

gamasutra.com

By Ian Bogost

What is Nintendo really attempting to do with the Wii U? Game designer and researcher Ian Bogost, in the latest installment of Persuasive Games, looks for the answer.

For a century and a quarter, Nintendo has devoted itself to an unspoken mission: making games safe, stripping them of their risk and indecency. The company started as a hanafuda playing card manufacturer in the late nineteeth century. Like most gambling, hanafuda was closely tied to organized crime, and the term yakuza, the Japanese word for an organized crime mafia, finds its origin in that game. Nintendo set up shop just after hanafuda had been made legal in Japan, and the company seems to have remained embroiled in gambling and organized crime even as its products sanitized that practice for a newly enfranchised general public.

But even after 70 years in business, Nintendo still struggled to turn the proverbial tables on playing cards. Finally, in the late 1950s, a licensing deal with Disney allowed Nintendo to produce a series of family-oriented card decks and instructional books, changing its fortunes, and marking its second great taming of the medium of games.

After diversifying into electronic toys in the 1970s, the company imported video games to Japan — it was a distinctly American form of entertainment that had been commercialized by Magnavox and Atari. Nintendo’s first video game products, the TV Game 6 and TV Game 15, were based on Odyssey technology licensed from Magnavox.

But by 1981, original handheld and coin-op games made their way out of Nintendo’s factories — the Game & Watch series and the Donkey Kong cabinet being the most notable of these.

A Bittersweet Savior

Nintendo’s attempt to re-commercialize home console gaming in the West marks the company’s third redemption of games. In the wake of the industry crash of 1983, Nintendo devised an ingenious response that would set the pace for the next three decades — for better and for worse.

First, Nintendo returned video games to the toy marketplace. The Robotic Operating Buddy (R.O.B.) first bundled with the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) helped sell this pitch to American toy retailers, most of whom had been badly burned by the ‘83 crash and had lost their taste for video games.

Second, having learned from its own experiences as a licensor, Nintendo introduced what we now know as the first-party licensing model. A “Seal of Quality” would insure that retailers and consumers knew a product was worthy of their investment. Such a label would have to be licensed from Nintendo by publishers, which Nintendo itself would select and approve. Nintendo would also manufacture all the games at a mark-up commensurate to its influence among retail buyers. Everybody wins — so long as everybody is Nintendo.

The result surely saved the video game retail market in the West, and for that gift anyone who makes a living or a pastime from video games owes Nintendo its gratitude. But this bailout came with a price. It also changed games, reducing them to a children’s medium sold in toy departments and toy stores, rather than a burgeoning form capable of many different uses and experiences.

Popular opinion blames the crash of ‘83 on a flood of poor-quality games — not just scapegoats like Pac-Man and E.T. for Atari 2600, but a whole mess of absurd and unplayable games hacked together by speculators attempting to cash in on the latest fad. But this is an unfair — or at least an incomplete — characterization. Terrible though many games might have been in the Atari/Intellivision era, they were also diverse and distinct, in a way we have only begun to recover in the last half-decade.

The earliest NES games represented familiar genres: mostly sports (10-Yard Fight, Excitebike, Golf) and fantasy adventure (Super Mario Bros., Clu Clu Land, Hogan’s Alley), along with the curious puzzle games made to work with R.O.B. (Gyromite and Stack-Up).

By contrast, in the leading up to the 1983 crash, players could find Atari games that took up the rodeo (Stampede), aeronautic acrobatics (Barnstorming), tax strategy (Tax Avoiders), masturbation (Beat ‘Em & Eat ‘Em), advertisement (Kool-Aid Man) — even adaptations of raunchy, R-rated movies (Porky’s). In the 1970s and early 1980s, games were made for adults as often as they were made for kids — played in bars and bowling alleys as frequently as arcades and basements. Video games might have been new, but they weren’t immature.

Kids Become Teenagers

Before Nintendo came around to rescue video games, the industry was well on its way to becoming just the sort of general-purpose mass medium today’s developers and critics like to think they are inventing anew. Ironically, many of those creators are too young to know what came before, and thus see themselves as saviors contributing to a long-withheld maturity, not realizing that such effort is only necessary thanks to their childhood video game idol.

A similar self-contradiction can be found in Nintendo’s own success. In the 25 years ending in 1985, Nintendo went from an obscure licensor to a major entertainment company with its own intellectual property. But those properties — Mario, Zelda, Metroid, and so on — remained yoked to toy culture. They are children’s characters and children’s games that have persisted long enough that the children who first bought them have become adults with their own children. Thus Nintendo’s reputation: wholesome, yet juvenile. Profitable, but harmless. Pop culture, not art.

The Return to Family Play

In the 30 years since the NES, the rest of the video games industry has “matured,” for certain values of maturity. By the mid-1990s, Nintendo had just released Donkey Kong Country for its purple-and-lavender-clad Super Nintendo. Meanwhile, thanks to the advent of the first-person shooter and the Sony PlayStation, video games became an adolescent’s distraction more than a kiddie toy — something like the statistical average of the 1970s bar and the 1980s basement.

In 2006 Nintendo finally offered a definitive response: the Wii, whose novel physical controls and simplified graphics and interaction models mimicked forgotten aspects of Atari’s business thirty years earlier, and Nintendo’s own business of a hundred years prior — making games safe for families to play together.

The Wii wasn’t so much a “revolution” in interaction design, to invoke the platform’s famous code name, as it was a return to prior ideas: the television as hearth, accessible and appealing family or group play, quick game sessions, lower-cost hardware — all ideas Atari had addressed in the late 1970s. For Nintendo, the Wii was to video games what Disney playing cards had been to hanafuda. But once again, the only reason the Wii had to take on such a role is because Nintendo had inadvertently poisoned adults to video games with the NES two decades earlier.

Press B to Block

Seen in a broader historical context, the new Wii U is a very different beast from the Wii, even though the former is created from the rib of the latter. While the Wii was an offensive move on Nintendo’s part, the Wii U is clearly a defensive one, a hedge that responds to the many trends that have erupted in games, consumer electronics, and home entertainment since the Wii’s 2006 release.

Those include: the launch of Sony Move and Microsoft Kinect; the iPhone, iPad, Android, Kindle and the entire app store economy; the Facebook platform and the whole social games sector; the launch of Steam and the diversification of Xbox Live Arcade and the PlayStation Network; the completion of the 2009 digital television transition; and a drop in HDTV prices by an order of magnitude.

The Wii U responds to each of these shifts in its own way. To its physical interface competitors, the Wii U re-entrenches, making no changes to its existing Wii remote controllers. So confident is Nintendo in its superior physical controls, it doesn’t even include any in the box. Who doesn’t already have some?

To Xbox, PlayStation, and the HDTV market, Nintendo finally caves and adds 1080p HD support and sufficient GPU power to make use of it. It’s a move that silently acknowledges what everyone but Nintendo already knew: we like Peach and Samus, but we also like Marcus Fenix and Nathan Drake.

In fact, Gears of War has as much Nintendo lineage as it does Doom lineage; it’s the first-person shooter as exaggerated cartoon. So-called “core games” have probably Nintendoified more than they have “matured,” so why not play them on a Nintendo?

To Steam et al, Nintendo finally adds a usable online shop with downloadable versions of retail releases and original titles, including independent releases, available on day one. And to Facebook, Twitter, and the rest, Nintendo adds its own private social network, Miiverse, which creates a sharing channel unique to each game, accessible from a single controller button.

The Tablet and the Television

But the Wii U’s most obvious and important response to a current trend is its answer to smartphones and tablets. The Wii U GamePad forces players to confront one of the strangest features of the contemporary media ecosystem: the tension between the television and the handheld computer.

It’s easy to forget, but home console video game systems were designed around the television more than they were designed around the video game. In the 1970s, long before the VCR, the Magnavox Odyssey and Atari Video Computer System had to teach their players about the very idea of connecting a box to their televisions in the first place. And to produce interactive images and sounds, those early consoles were engineered to couple directly with the cathode ray tube television. In the intervening years, we’ve forgotten how novel, weird, and difficult it was to make video games playable in our dens and living rooms in the first place.

The design of the Wii had already attempted to draw a new, explicit connection between the television and the video game console. The Wii remote was meant to be approachable and familiar thanks to its physical and operational similarity to a television remote. And the Wii menu was divided into “channels,” borrowing its organizational logic from television and cable, paradigms everyone who had been alive at any point since the 1960s already understood.

With the Wii U, Nintendo tacitly admits that the Wii took this metaphor too far. Everyone knows how to point a remote in the general direction of the television, but using the Wii remote as a precision pointing device proved tricky and frustrating even for the most experienced and agile players. While the remote can still be used on the Wii U menu, the GamePad presents a more obvious interaction model on boot-up: a grid of channel buttons that can be touched to select and activate.

This feeling — that of looking at a big, HD television display while holding a GamePad in your hands and not knowing where the real action is — this is the central premise of the system. The Wii U is a home console connected to your big, high-resolution plasma display and your 250-watt home theater, which you ignore in favor of a low-res handheld device that can’t even leave the room. Except when it’s a substantial, fast-running handheld computer with a large LCD touch-screen display that you ignore in favor of your 50” flat-screen.

No-Screen Experience

The sensation of being split between the television and the handheld computer feels strange and awkward. But isn’t this precisely how all of us feel today, all the time? Torn between the lush absorption of newly cinematic television and the lo-fi repetition of streams of text and image on our mobile phones and tablets? If the Wii attached to television’s past, the Wii U couples to its present: still seemingly unassailable, the most powerful mass medium around, delivering more and more immersion annually, yet substantially eroded by tiny devices delivering quips, quotes, and cat photos.

Entertainment industry pundits have coined the term “second screen experience” as an explanation for this crisis. Television provides a high-gloss, low-information experience, and now that tablets, phones, and laptops are nearly ubiquitous and literally in our hands already as we sit on the couch, TV viewers increasingly split their attention between the prepared, cinematic experience of HDTV and the data-rich reference function of the internet.

But “second screen experience” is far too neat-and-tidy a name for this phenomenon. For one thing, it subordinates smartphones and computers to televisions — perhaps wishful thinking on the part of the studio executives who deploy the second-screen rhetoric. But more importantly, it describes a far more stable and comfortable situation than the one that actually exists in today’s dens and family rooms.

Whether it’s tweeting real-time reactions during a presidential debate, looking up a seemingly-familiar actor on IMDB, or just scrolling through Facebook while a mediocre sitcom or drama drones on around us, we are no longer watching TV or using our computers — nor are we doing both. Perhaps we’re neither watching television nor conversing on the internet, in fact, but rather interacting with the strange, uncomfortable space between the two. Like a lap only appears when you sit down, this weird interstitial space only exists when we activate both sorts of devices. It’s not a two-screen experience, but a no-screen experience.

Many will miss this innovation and mock the Wii U for not being just another incremental change sold as faux-revolution. Internet purists will scoff, wondering why Nintendo was too timid to integrate directly with Twitter and Facebook. Hardware snobs will mock the GamePad for being neither fish nor fowl, not portable, high resolution, or general purpose enough to replace an iPad or a DS. They’d be right, but they’d also miss the point.

If earlier Nintendo systems made video games safe for homes and families, the Wii U turns the tables: it attempts to make the current trends in the internet and consumer electronics safe for video games. It’s the first earnest, sustained, hardware-invested example of such an effort, and it’s full of risk and danger.

Split-Attention Gaming

The console’s “missing manual” title, Nintendo Land, helps shepherd players through Nintendo’s unexpected gambit with contemporary culture. Those expecting to find a light-hearted, group-play experience akin to Wii Sports will be disappointed, but won’t be justified in their disappointment. The Wii U is not just an HD Wii — not at all. It’s a double agent for both the entertainment and technology industries, playing both sides against the middle. It’s split-attention gaming.

Nintendo Land’s Mario Chase offers the simplest introduction to this central principle of the Wii U. In this hide-and-seek game, one player pilots a Mario-capped Mii on the GamePad screen, while others control toad-hatted Miis on the television screen, via a split view, attempting to find Mario. It’s a simple enough idea, and no description can make it sound compelling. But strangely, it is compelling.

The view on the GamePad is also divided. A top-down map covers most of the screen, and a zoomed-in 3D view shows only a small area around Mario’s current location. The player being chased devotes most of his or her attention to the map, which also displays the locations of the other players in pursuit.

Occasional glances to the 3D view are required to delineate between different types of terrain and obstacles, and occasional glances at the television screen or the other players on the couch also offer fodder for tactical adjustment.

Likewise, the Wii remote players might be tempted to steal glances of the secret information on the GamePad screen, an interesting evolution of the private, sonic cues that were possible with a Wii remote.

These players can also benefit from collaborating through verbal interaction, which the Mario player can hear and respond to as well. If Wii Sports activated the physical space between the couch and the television, games like Mario Chase activate the conceptual space between the couch, the TV, and a third, private screen.

A similar feeling arises from New Super Mario Bros. U. On its surface, the title is just another Mario title, more or less identical in play experience to New Super Mario Bros. Wii. The earlier game had promised collaborative gameplay that would allow players of different skill levels to work together, but in practice three or four players mostly got in each others’ way — particularly if one of those players was considerably less adept at maneuvering a platform character than the others.

The Wii U rendition of Mario offers an out: one player can act as a kind of assistant, touching locations mirrored on the GamePad screen to create temporary platforms that the active players can use in a pinch. The result helps a younger, less experienced, or less interested player participate in the game in a more meaningful way, while offering true benefit to the rest of a group.

Nintendo has been experimenting with this second screen idea for some time, but it’s never really worked out (remember the Tingle Tuner?). New Super Mario Bros. U finally makes good on the idea, and it does so at least partly because we’re now more accustomed to splitting our attention between different devices in front of the television.

Nintendo Land’s single-player games also re-orient the player’s attention. In Captain Falcon’s Twister Race, based on the F-Zero franchise, the player holds the GamePad in a vertical orientation and rotates it to steer the vehicle. The television provides the expected 3D view of the track, while the GamePad offers a top-down, 2D view of the play area.

Thanks to its vertical orientation, more of the track is visible on the GamePad. But due to its 2D, top-down rendering style, it’s much more difficult to discern obstacles on the GamePad, so glances up to the television become advantageous. In some cases, they are required: tunnels sometimes obscure track boosts when viewed top-down on the GamePad, and the player must pilot on-screen in order to maintain enough speed to reach the next checkpoint.

The Zombie Console

The experience of Twister Race is fun and cheery on its surface, but strangely alienating in its experience. There you are, having spent $350 on a new Wii U with accelerated 3D HD graphics, having climbed behind your receiver to route and plug in yet another HDMI cable, and you’re staring at a lousy 2D image of the track you’re not looking at on your giant LCD television. What the hell is going on?

Ubisoft’s Wii U launch title ZombiU helps answer the question. This is an M for Mature offering, a survival horror game with a permadeath feature meant to appeal to the core gamer audience Nintendo has supposedly ignored. During play, the GamePad displays a map of the player’s immediate surroundings and an inventory. It’s also used to perform certain in-game commands. Moving and rotating the GamePad allows the player to look around on the television screen, but this maneuver fixes the player’s position and thus increases vulnerability.

A one-liner on ZombiU’s box copy helpfully summarizes that title: “Feel the tension mount as you try to keep an eye on your TV and controller screen.” This is more than just marketing copy for a single game: it’s a thesis statement for the entire console. The Wii U is a system thrust into the uncomfortable gap between mobile devices and televisions. Just as zombies are neither living nor dead, so Wii U follows suit: today, entertainment in general and video games in particular are neither a televisual medium nor a mobile medium. They are not both, but they are not neither, either. They are something else, something uncanny, unsettling, out of place.

Nintendo Land is Nintendo like Tomorrowland is the Future

It’s no secret that a large part of Nintendo’s appeal comes from its long-running properties: Mario, Zelda, Metroid, Animal Crossing, Pikmin, and so on. The availability of New Super Mario Bros U at console launch satisfies some of that craving, but Nintendo fanpersons are an impatient and finicky bunch bound to flood the internet with demands for a new version of their favorite games.

Over the years, some of those titles have marked significant shifts in the genres they represent: 1996’s Super Mario 64 set the standard conventions for the 3D action-adventure game, and 1986’s The Legend of Zelda made an important advance in what would later be called “open world” games. But overall, Nintendo’s most famous and successful titles don’t offer innovation so much as repetition. In today’s game design community, where innovation is often fetishized but infrequently defined, Nintendo gets a tacit pass. A new Mario game is a new Mario game. Who doesn’t want to play it?

But Nintendo Land doesn’t offer a new Legend of Zelda or Animal Crossing or F-Zero or Pikmin. It doesn’t contain mini-games either, exactly, since many titles are longer and more complex than the name mini-game usually affords. Instead, Nintendo Land offers renditions of possible games that are neither expandable into legitimate titles nor contractible into smaller vignettes. They are not video games so much as they are representations of video games.

Weird as this characterization may sound, the average player won’t notice it, because the entire game is housed within the fictional conceit of a theme park. Individual games can be selected by menu if desired, or the player can pilot a Mii around a circular park and choose a game by entering a bannered portal. Playing games earns coins, which the player can spend in a pachinko-like kiosk at the top of the park’s central tower, yielding curious décor that fills out the park’s empty surfaces.

Theme parks are venues for abstraction. When you ride Peter Pan in Disneyland, you get a quick narrative and physical experience of the story and the film, but you hardly feel immersed in the holodeck sense of the term. Theme park attractions don’t have to persuade visitors that they are real, for those visitors have already agreed to suspend disbelief and to partake of one real, physical world as if it were another.

Likewise, the games in Nintendo Land are not really games, but abstractions of games, icons that stand in for games that are not really present. Just as Tomorrowland isn’t really the future and Adventureland isn’t really an adventure, so Nintendo Land isn’t really a Nintendo game, so much as a game evocative of the sensation of Nintenditude.

The entire title is rendered in a felted or crocheted style reminiscent of LittleBigPlanet, further emphasizing its false yet deliberately crafted style. Just as riding a theme park attraction draws an uncomfortable yet pleasurable dissonance between a source work or idea and a vertiginous physical and audiovisual experience, so playing Nintendo Land offers a strange new view on Nintendo’s catalog. It’s a pretend Nintendo; it’s Nintendo admitting to pretense.

In the West we often forget just how traditionally Japanese Nintendo really is. This aesthetic choice might be seen as sloppy or arrogant in the United States, a failure to make a coherent collection of titles that explain the purpose of the Wii U through methodical demonstration.

I take it as a gesture of humility. Nintendo is stepping back, acknowledging that things have changed. That it can no longer make assumptions about what games are or what they should be. And that its players shouldn’t either. This gesture of humility is a serious and profound one, in that it also refuses to accept the game industry’s standard assumptions about the present reality of games as mobile, social, and free-to-play. Instead, Nintendo presents a substantial, costly effort as its pack-in title, whose overall message amounts to, “we don’t know either.”

Indiegestion

So serious is Nintendo about this act, it has launched its console with an independent, downloadable title that openly mocks the current state of video games. Little Inferno was created by Tomorrow Corporation, a new studio formed by Kyle Gabler (of World of Goo fame) and Allan Blomquist and Kyle Gray (Henry Hatsworth).

The game is both cute and morbid: in a fictional city bombarded by snow for as long as anyone can remember, a toy company (also called Tomorrow Corporation) creates the Little Inferno Entertainment Fireplace, in which children can burn their toys to keep warm. The operation of this virtual fireplace forms the entirety of the game about it: a brick hearth appears on screen, upon which the player can set different children’s toys before igniting them.

Tomorrow Corporation provides catalogs of new toys, which can be purchased with coins earned by… burning more toys. Once purchased, the player must wait a period of time before they are delivered to the fireplace’s inbox, which visually mimics the iOS dock in a not-so-subtle jab at the Apple app economy.

Earning combos by burning objects together in response to a list of clues provides tickets that can be used to speed up delivery, which can take several minutes per item by the end of the game.

It doesn’t take much squinting to find Little Inferno’s tacit message: games have become pointless grinds, absurd hamster wheel exercises meant only to produce their own continuance, to offer just enough novelty to imbue players with curiosity sufficient to press on in the pointless art of clicking on (or burning) another object.

The simulation of a social game-style energy mechanic outside of the context of a free-to-play game with micropayments makes an adept point: sitting there, in front of the useless fireplace that is the television, waiting for progress bars to fill, yields a frosty chill. Is this what players and creators want, or what they have been settling for?

So self-aware is Little Inferno that it even mocks Nintendo as host. One of the game’s catalog of flammables, “1st Person Shopper,” contains video game-themed objects (including references to some popular indie games). Among the items in this catalog is a “handheld fireplace,” shaped more or less like a Wii U GamePad. Upon ordering this object to burn, the player — who probably purchased the virtual object whilst staring down at the GamePad instead of pointing a Wii remote at the television before him or her — can’t help but shiver with postmodern nuisance.

Little Inferno is riddled with the same kind of ambiguity that characterizes the Wii U itself. It is both a silly toy and a real adult game, with real themes worth taking seriously. It’s both a game and the representation of a game, both in turn created by a real and a fictional Tomorrow Corporation. The game itself is unabashedly and shamelessly “indie,” thus realizing Nintendo’s desire to offer an eShop store at console launch, while also remaining available on other platforms with “no copy protection” by guys with “no office” — a deft rhetorical turn for young dudes who have probably burned the piles of cash they made from their previous games on swank cribs with Herman Miller-bedazzled home offices.

It’s a subtle and surprising game about the horror of today’s games that keeps its message close to its chest — until the very end, when it reveals that message in the most heavy-handed, blatant manner possible. In so doing, Little Inferno embraces both the triviality of games and the naiveté of players and developers, while somehow still affording its creators the freedom to advertise such callowness as a “zero waste” aesthetic full of “polish.” It’s as “perfeccct as possible,” the creators boast on their website, which is just to say, typographic tongue in cheek, flawed by design.

Little Inferno is lovely and awful in the way that most indie games are lovely and awful. Pretty and weird, unexpected and ironic, self-referential and earnest, full of youthful scorn for didacticism and pretense, in a manner delivered with moralism and ostentation. Little Inferno is the Wii U saying that it supports indie games, while also saying that indie games are sort of terrible, actually, and wouldn’t you rather just save princesses and kill zombies instead?

I Can’t Go On, I’ll Go On

It’s almost impossible to understand the Wii U in the abstract, without playing it. And even then you won’t be sure of it, because the Wii U isn’t sure of itself, and that’s its greatest virtue. In an age when showy CEOs shout hubristic, trite predictions about the inevitable future of games, The Wii U offers an understated bravado that’s far more courageous. With it, Nintendo admits, “we don’t know either.” We don’t know what video games are anymore, or what they will become. It’s a huge risk, and it’s probably the most daring move Nintendo has made in its 125-year history. Domestication through polite ferocity. Feral design.

Still, let’s not get too romantic: Nintendo’s risk is not daring because the Wii U is good, necessarily. Many will lament what they will perceive as a step back for Nintendo compared to the “innovation” found in the Wii. They might be right. But the Wii U is serious in a way that Nintendo has never attempted. Even Nintendo may not have fully realized what it has done. It has domesticated the wildness of the present moment in video games, consumer electronics, the internet, and home entertainment by caging them out in the open. It’s lurid and beautiful and repugnant and real, like watching Mickey Mouse smoke a joint in the alley behind Space Mountain.

We’ve all been assuming that games “growing up” means growing up in theme, tackling adult issues, achieving the aesthetic feats of literature and painting and film — even if by “film” we usually mean “summer tent-pole movies.”

But there are other ways to grow up. One involves embracing the uncertainty of one’s own form and responding deliberately. That’s what real art does, after all. It admits that it doesn’t know what art is in theory, but only in practice. It gives the finger to its critics because it doesn’t care if they like the results. Some among us keep asking for the Citizen Kane of games. Maybe Nintendo delivered something better, something weirder and more surprising — particularly for a consumer electronics device. Not craft but soul, for once. Even Apple hasn’t succeeded at that.

Around the time Nintendo was gearing up to license Disney’s properties and become a major player in the playing card business, the novelist Samuel Beckett published The Unnamable. The book has no concrete plot or setting, and it’s unclear if the work’s characters and events are real or figments of the narrator’s imagination.

Much of the novel is self-referential, with frequent ponderings over the possibility that the narrator is simply a construction of the language that forms the novel itself. The writing is a mess, full of despair and incoherence, long sentences flowing into one another to the point of illegibility. It ends with this famous passage, which now, surprisingly, improbably, could as easily have been written by Satoru Iwata or Shigeru Miyamoto:

They’re going to stop, I know that well: I can feel it. They’re going to abandon me. It will be the silence, for a moment (a good few moments). Or it will be mine? The lasting one, that didn’t last, that still lasts? It will be I? …

Perhaps it’s done already. Perhaps they have said me already. Perhaps they have carried me to the threshold of my story, before the door that opens on my story. (That would surprise me, if it opens.)

It will be I? It will be the silence, where I am? I don’t know, I’ll never know: in the silence you don’t know.

You must go on.

I can’t go on.

I’ll go on.

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Copyright © 2012 UBM Techweb

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Here's a Devastating Account of the Crap Women in the Games Business Have to Deal With. In 2012.

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Nov 27, 2012 8:30 AM 132,495

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Here’s a Devastating Account of the Crap Women in the Games Business Have to Deal With. In 2012.

Luke Plunkett

Over the past 24 hours or so, a number of women working in the game industry (and some male colleagues) have taken to Twitter to share their stories via the hashtag #1reasonwhy.

They’re not motivational tales. Instead, they’re accounts of the rampant sexism and discrimination many have faced in the past, and are still facing today. The volume of the confessions, not to mention the important and prominent role of many involved, is sobering.

The tag’s name is meant to suggest people are listing the #1 reason why there aren’t more women making games. The scale and variety of responses obviously make a mockery of the whole “#1” bit.

If you’re a guy, and have never really “got” why women face an uphill battle in many parts of the game industry—or why people make a big deal out of it—try and imagine it’s you facing this kind of crap in your workplace. See how insignificant it would be then.

UPDATE - If this has got you down, the flipside hastag #1reasontobe is collecting the reasons women do want to be working in the games business.

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Female voices in games - Emily Short's Interactive Storytelling

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Several people have asked, apropos of recent Twitter/Gamasutra/Metafilter/Kotaku discussions, for lists of women whose games they should know about.

So here is a short list of female authors whose work I’ve especially enjoyed, recently or in the past, with links to most-recommended works by each. It’s not even a little bit complete or comprehensive, and it skews towards indie game designers and women who work in narrative, simply by virtue of the fact that those are the areas I follow most closely. In no particular order, then:

Deirdra Kiai — Deirdra has an extensive catalog, but I particularly like Life Flashes By as an exploration of roads taken and not taken, relationships and career paths pursued or rejected, and the way one’s personality forms in response to or reaction against circumstances, people, and social pressures. ETA: I just today ran into her The Little Girl Nobody Liked, which is very quick and also rather cool.

Rose Estes — as a kid, I had her Dungeon of Dread adventure book. There’s a central sequence about retrieving a key from a well that turns out to contain a water weird. I hadn’t heard of a “water weird” before, and the combination of the strange imagery and interactive sucker-punch made that one of the creepiest CYOA moments I’d yet encountered. Apparently she wrote quite a few other gamebooks as well.

Yoon Ha Lee — Moonlit Tower is still my favorite of her work: full of strange images and yet not exactly alien.

Yasmeen Khan — my very favorite work of hers is content buried deep in Fallen London, so I can’t link directly there. But she also wrote the separate Tales of Fallen London: The Silver Tree.

Katherine (also published as Sarah) Morayati — Katherine’s done several intriguing experiments in IF. Broken Legs — though difficult — is a terrifically fun exploration of the voice of a not-very-nice young woman, and the competitive experiences to be found among dancers.

Naomi Clark — Miss Management, one of her projects at Gamelab, remains pretty much my favorite time management game ever, with a complex story arc and plenty of dialog. Among other things, it explores the female protagonist’s struggles with the role of keeping everyone else happy.

Suzanne Britton — those who came recently to interactive fiction may not recognize the name, but Suzanne’s epic Worlds Apart remains one of the most extensive and polished pieces of science fictional world-building in the IF catalog.

Christine Love — shame on me: I still haven’t had a chance to get to Analogue: A Hate Story, which is probably at the moment her best-known piece. But any of her stuff is worth a look.

Kathleen Fischer — ca 2000-1, Kathleen was writing historical romance IF that used its genre as a lens to talk about women’s freedoms and constraints. I always admired how Masquerade lets you get the boy or walk off and do something completely different with your life instead. I keep hoping that one day she’ll show up again and write more.

Porpentine — in particular, howling dogs, which is very much about women and their experiences (among other things).

Heather Albano — writing for Choice of Games, Heather has worked on several of the CoG titles I enjoyed most: Choice of Broadsides, Choice of Romance and Choice of Intrigues. These works let the player decide what gender to take up and allow for some thought-provoking experimentation with what gender means in the context of that storyworld.

Anna Anthropy — dys4ia remains one of the most heartbreakingly personal games I’ve ever played. I also have huge respect for Anna’s work to bring game creation to people who might not feel they were invited to the party.

Jacqueline Ashwell (also published as Jacqueline Lott) — Jacq’s care and understanding of the natural world comes through strongly in The Fire Tower, an interactive walk in the woods. (If that sounds like a mild experience, it’s not — the terrain is a specific setting, acutely observed and implemented in great depth.) Jacqueline has also put an impressive amount of time and energy into the IF community, running competitions, writing reviews, and sponsoring Club Floyd — a collaborative-play IF group that has met pretty much weekly since 2007.

Amy Briggs — She of Plundered Hearts fame. Plundered Hearts was one of Infocom’s most narratively advanced works, with multiple strongly-characterized NPCs, a definite plot arc, and set scenes that were about relationships rather than object-fiddling. It wasn’t just the romance genre of this work that drew my attention back in the day. It was also just a rompingly entertaining game, and cemented my love of interactive fiction.

Chrysoula Tzavelas — lately she’s mostly been writing non-interactive fiction, but Chrysoula’s shadows on the mirror is a multiple-ending, conversation-based story where the major relationship can go any of a number of directions. I wish there were more of these.

Georgina Bensley (also publishes under Papillon and through Hanako Games) — Georgina’s work includes a broad selection of Ren’Py dating stories and life-sims, and her IF and CYOA also looks at the challenges of juggling romance with other responsibilities. This is probably an oddball choice and not what she’d pick of her own work, but I enjoyed the variety of One Week, where you get to control a high school senior making life-critical choices just before SATs and the prom. I played that thing more times than I’d care to admit.

Meg Jayanth — if you’ve been reading this blog recently, you already know I loved her evocative StoryNexus game Samsara.

Carolyn VanEseltine — she’s written or collaborated on several IF games, but the one that gripped me hardest was One Eye Open; which is saying something, because it’s horror and I generally have a tough time getting into horror games. But it was strangely compelling and I still think about it now and then.

It’s harder to call out the specific effect of people who collaborate on big projects, but one might also look into the contributions of Rhianna Pratchett, Susan O’Connor, Wendy Despain, Holly Gramazio, and Margaret Robertson — several of whom not only do awesome work, but go out of their way to support newcomers to the industry.

And for bonus points: I also recommend Jenni Polodna’s hilarious, verbally pyrotechnic reviews and Leigh Alexander’s reporting.

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Breaking out of a self-centered gamer mentality

nightmaremode.net

Richard Clark

There is one person  I think about when I’m playing a videogame. Here’s a hint: it’s not the characters I’m interacting with, nor the 2-dimensional cardboard cutout of a character acting as my avatar. It’s me.

In fact, when I started playing videogames again after a several-years hiatus, it was because I had convinced myself I deserved it. “I’ve been through a lot,” I told myself. My wife at the time had asked for a divorce, and I found myself at home alone having just finished a masters degree with no real career track to show for it. It was out of self-pity and a self-congratulatory attitude that I traded in my lesser-used Wii for an Xbox 360 and delved deeply into the world of videogames.

Games are, for the most part, contraptions designed for self-gratitude. They cater to my desire for personal success and my nearsighted desire for satisfaction. They are developed with an eye toward “replay value,” making sure I get a sense of immediate gratification from the slightest maneuver or choice.

Games can be insidious little deceptions if we aren’t thoughtful about what we glean from them and what we use them for. They are worlds that revolve around us. Cars are meant for us to crash into them. The people with guns are there for us to kill them. The Pokémon are there to be caught. Buildings exist solely to be found by the player and people are there to be saved by no one else but ourselves.

It’s no wonder, then, that after marathon sessions of playing videogames I start to feel disengaged from the real world. Many of us have experienced that surreal feeling after spending most of the day playing videogames: desperately wanting to crash into things after playing a racing game for an extended period of time, or being irritable after shooting Nazis or monsters for hours. It’s almost an involuntary urge –controllable, but for at least a few minutes, seemingly irrepressible.

Because of how deceptively attractive a world created for our personal pleasure can be, when we stumble upon one that works for us, we are markedly protective of them. They begin to take a holistic role in our lives, living in our thoughts as we work and interact with others. The open worlds and the multiplayer competitions bleed into our reality, and become a kind of ongoing reality that we indulge in most explicitly during our free time. So naturally, gamers are known to become incredibly frustrated when we feel our favorite franchises have been mishandled. When reviewers dare to speak ill of a game we find particularly fun or meaningful, we rage against them with the fury of a riotous mob. We throw tantrums, as if our games were holy objects and that a particular gun being available “only at Gamestop” somehow violates our sacred human rights.

It does not. My own insistence that games, their developers, and their critics bend to my will betrays an ugly truth about human nature that is accentuated by videogames: I am fundamentally self-centered and unloving, desperately concerned with my own well-being to a lopsided degree.

Games didn’t train me to be this way, but they provide an outlet for it. They provide constant positive feedback – regular assurance that even if I fail repeatedly, I am still always “leveling up.” They go out of their way to assure me that I am accomplishing goals and unlocking enough to justify the activity. Games fall over themselves to win me over, and to show me that they are worth my time.

To the degree a game caters to my whims, my play sessions are both engrossing and oppressive. Resigned to chasing present moments ad infinitum, I am desperate to keep them going and hesitant to bring the game session to a close, because what exists outside of it is a set of rules and rewards that are more demanding and less satisfying. The rules of the real world are, by our game-criticism standards, completely broken. The feedback loop feels meaningless and disconnected, and our avatars are slow and fragile. When characters die, related quest lines are broken.

The expectation we have from birth – that the world exists to cater to our needs and desires – does not easily vanish. It is always a shock to emerge from the womb of a well-crafted videogame only to be confronted with a cold, loud and seemingly uncaring existence on the outside.

When I was a child, my mother unplugged the console because I ignored her cries of dinner-time, and I threw the controller across the room in outrage. I pounded against the walls. I told my mom I hated her.

In college I played to protect myself from expectations, finding rewards and success in Tony Hawk, barely aware of the homework deadlines creeping up behind me.

As an adult, I retreated into games as my life ceased to go as planned. As my marriage ended and a career choice was revealed to be misguided, I found solace and meaning in my Xbox. I crawled back into the womb, waiting for the storm to calm before I crawled back out.

But these things don’t calm down. The longer you live, the more personal tragedy becomes commonplace. The world keeps turning without concern for your personal well being or life goals. The mission of the naturally self-centered is to acknowledge our shortsightedness and to adapt. There is no easy or clear reward structure, and there is no one in this world that exists to make us feel happy or fulfilled.

No, we exist for the world, not the other way around. Games can allow us to forget this truth for a time, but I also genuinely believe they can prepare us for the way things really are. In their narratives, games can center stories on the needs of the few and disenfranchised, and not the powerful. Games can allow for acts of selflessness that are implicitly rewarding, not because of what they unlock, but because of the experiences that flow from them. Games can dare to interrupt the feedback loop between player and game just long enough to insert the motivations and desires of some other character.

We’re getting opportunities for selflessness already in some of the more boldly designed games: Journey, The Walking Dead, Minecraft, Bastion all provide opportunities and even motivation to thwart our own selfish impulses. They break new ground, not just graphically or mechanically, but in terms of focus. These are games that, when played, allow you to consider the impact you have on others. They allow for gratitude to be acquired, not from unlocks or clearly marked and accomplished goals, but from the messy work of relationship building and sacrificial serving, by the ways they emphasize community. They shift the focus from personal pleasure to the desires, needs and struggles of others.

When my Dad was dying of cancer, I dealt with it with all sorts of escapism. I remember falling headfirst into several TV shows and films that dealt with what it’s like to lose a loved one. Eventually, I found myself playing To The Moon, the story of a dying man and his wish to make those around him happy. I remember playing that game well into the night, hammering on the space bar to find out not what would happen next to my own character, but to get further inside of the mind of the dying man. I remember feeling like the game was gently rebuking me: I shouldn’t be relating to people who lose loved ones. I should be relating to my Dad. I should be probing his mind, not my own. The guy that’s dying, that’s the one that should matter to me, not myself.

I learned that from a videogame.

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Decipher The Unexpected Hurt

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Commentary

11/28/2012

The undressing of an emotional pain in Borderlands 2 with a paratextual lens.

Lana Polansky

 457  

If the paratext of Borderlands 2 looks like anything, it’s a gun. This has already been more or less established by other critics, knowingly or not. That being said, I don’t blame anybody for not knowing what the hell paratext is. When I first learned about it, it wasn’t even explained to me properly. But I’ll do my best to sum things up.

Now, literary theorist Gérard Genette’s Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation was certainly not written with respect to Borderlands 2, or any game, for that matter. What Genette was describing had to do with the framing mechanisms around a piece of literary work—a novel, or poetry, for instance—that help us to interpret the work’s content. This could refer to internal mechanisms, like cover art or chapters, which Genette identified as the “peritext” of the work. On the other hand, there are external forces that help us interpret a work as well—things like interviews, reviews, conversations and letters. This, Genette calls the “epitext.”

All that being said, I think it’s possible to abstract this theory of “paratext” beyond its application to literary work and use it to talk about the framing devices used for other art forms, like games. In fact, because games rely so much on mechanisms and systems to communicate meaning to players, I think it may be profoundly valuable for us to understand what paratext is and how it can apply to games.

Why does the paratext of Borderlands 2 matter?

Because Borderlands 2 made me cry, and I don’t think it was supposed to.

I don’t really care to talk about the game’s narrative. The game, as Yannick LeJacq points out, doesn’t seem to take its own narrative seriously anyway. Although much of the subject matter is dark and genuinely upsetting, the game is framed in an ironic, self-aware, excessive way. This in itself is a “peritextual” framing device: the veneer of self-referential humour and excessiveness influences how we interpret the subject matter.

The fact that quest stories are fairy negligible can also be considered a part of the game’s peritext: while I will get the gist of the game’s overall narrative by triggering dialogue after completing certain objectives, I can generally ignore subplots or specific details that don’t really help me proceed through the game. Shoot it till it dies, get better equipment. Shoot the next thing more efficiently next time. Get better stuff. And repeat.

There’s a kind of emptiness that the game creates that it then tries to fill, but never really can. As Patricia Hernandez and Brendan Keogh have both touched on, Borderlands 2 can actually be defined by its economy: one that not only entraps you in an overtly capitalistic system where equipment becomes obsolete not long after it’s acquired—but actually defines itself in terms of brands and the characteristics of the weapons you control.

These commentaries—what we might call a part of the game’s “epitext”—make it difficult and complicated for me to talk about sobbing at the unexpected death of a character.

It wasn’t a human character. Death is common in Borderlands 2. It’s used as a pretext for jokes, or plot progression, or as a relatively easy way to punctuate the game’s amusing hyperbole with a sense of drama. Most of these deaths get deleted from my mental inventory quicker than I rid myself of excess guns. But then the game killed Bloodwing—brutally, abruptly, and almost without necessity. Bloodwing, the hawk that accompanies the hunter class character, Mordecai, in the first game, gets kidnapped by arch-villain Handsome Jack. Bloodwing gets experimented upon and mutated. Bloodwing, rabid and frantic and now full of evil, is transformed into a boss that my fellow players and I must fight.

We’re given a glimpse of hope that we can save her. As she cycles through the different elemental abilities she has been given—ones analogous to elemental abilities possessed by many of the game’s weapons—hurling corrosive acid and electric shocks and fire at us, Mordecai insists that if we can just tire her out he can tranquilize her and maybe cure her. Mordecai—and the rest of us—have forgotten one thing. And then Handsome Jack reminds us: the explosive ability.

And there goes Bloodwing’s swollen head, in a million little pieces, in front of my eyes.

And there it is: Handsome Jack killed my bird. The epitext of this moment feels both ridiculous and overwhelming to me: I played Mordecai in the first game. I was attached to that character, and to his special ability. I have memories of fighting alongside my bird, of winning battles, of ranking her up. It was as if she levelled up with me, next to me, as a companion.

That motherfucker killed my bird. I don’t really care what the story is. The game has instilled me with a different kind of emptiness—one that can only be resolved by a bullet to Handsome Jack’s brain.

I’ve cooled off since, but reflecting on this reaction I detect another kind of epitext. My experiences with the first game obviously had a profound effect on how I would behave with the second one, and in ways I didn’t expect. Between the three of us who were playing, I was the only one that had actually spent time playing Mordecai in the first Borderlands. I was the only one that had forged that virtual attachment.

It feels absurd to talk about Borderlands at all in terms of a genuine emotional experience. It seems framed in almost every way to promote the absolute opposite. And yet, the same framing devices—both from within and without the game—are the ones that surprised me into shedding actual tears (ones that I no doubt tried to hide from my teammates). They made me want to kill the villain—of getting the satisfaction of doing it myself—almost regardless of the game’s narrative.

If we were to have an extended conversation about epitext in video games, I might bring up things like Eric Zimmerman’s concept of “meta-interactivity,” which involves the discussion surrounding a particular piece of media, how people express and share their ideas about that media with each other, and so on. I would talk not only about critiques and commentaries, but personal stories, fanfiction, mods, and the list goes on. But what I think is really interesting, in my own experience, is how unpredictable paratext can ultimately be. There is simply no way of knowing all the diverse and nuanced experiences people will have with their games until those experiences have taken place. And, once expressed, those narratives can influence how other people interpret that game as well.

Particularly in an interactive medium, which relies so much on player input, illusions of agency, dynamic environments and feedback from a system, the possible narratives people can form around a game are almost infinite. Not only are we informed by an epitext—in the form of ads, word-of-mouth, personal experiences, expectations, and the critical stuff I listed earlier—but the peritext of games can have a strikingly different and unique effects on individual players. Even a player’s familiarity with the specific device could determine which objectives are met, and which are passed by. Maybe they’ll have different levels of experience with a keyboard and mouse, which will influence how they proceed through a quest. Maybe I won’t trigger that piece of dialogue, or find that radio recording, or do that mission. Maybe someone else will.

Maybe I’ll come into Borderlands 2 with this epitextual, experiential and emotional baggage I acquired in the first one. Maybe that will have had an effect on me I won’t even understand until wiping hot tears away and asking my teammates if I can get the killshot at the end of the game. Save it for me. I need to do this myself. Let the fucker taunt us while he still has time.

In my first playthrough, I didn’t actually get the killshot. Someone else forgot what I had asked and took the shot kneejerkedly while my back was turned. It was almost as though Hernandez’s “vicious circle” experience with Borderlands 2—one that revolved around loot upgrades—took on a different meaning for me. The ultimate upgrade for me would have been the closure of revenge, but Borderlands 2 doesn’t let me do that. I’m here, in my second playthrough, still looking for better loot, still levelling and re-speccing and weighing one class mod against another.

But the way that the overall paratext of this game works, I can replay it infinitely. I will reach the same endgame a hundred times in a row after seeing Bloodwing’s head blow off a hundred times in a row. Out of all those playthroughs, I can keep getting chances at killing the handsome bastard. Will I get my chance this time? Will it mean as much to me to go through those motions again? Will revenge at the barrel of a gun fill up the emptiness that Borderlands 2 has created?

Or will it feel unfulfilling, and meaningless, and absurd, like its paratext tells me it should?

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Lana Polansky is a game critic and writer peddling her wares at Kill Screen, Gameranx, Medium Difficulty and here at Bit Creature. Also, a ludonarrative disco-dancer.

Originals

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Do Video Games Make Depression Worse?

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the gaming life

Nov 26, 2012 12:00 PM 44,657

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by Phil Owen

Until recently, I had never considered the idea that my gaming habit, which could charitably be described as heavy, could be harmful to my mental health. It wasn’t just that I dismissed that idea; the idea had never popped into my head.

But as psychological professionals debate whether or not “gaming addiction” should be listed as a condition in the next update to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (the psychological Bible)—and as I finally take my mental health seriously—I am reevaluating that idea. I’m reevaluating it, even though my psychiatrist and my therapist have never discussed gaming as an issue.

Unfortunately, there is not a whole lot of scientific data, in the form of psychological studies, to help me out in my journey of self-discovery. There are, however, a few researchers who are intent on studying the possible link between gaming and mental disorders like depression. I spoke with two of them to get a more personal perspective than I would have gotten from simply reading their work.

***

The first researcher is Dr. Douglas Gentile of Iowa State University. He, and a handful of other researchers, performed a study a few years back that was published in the journal Pediatrics. It was called Pathological Video Game Use Among Youths: A Two-Year Longitudinal Study. (A longitudinal study looks at one group of subjects over time.) In this study, they looked at the gaming habits of schoolchildren in Singapore over the course of two years to try to determine if what they refer to as “pathological gaming” has an impact on the subjects’ lives and mental health.

They found a definite correlation between heavy gaming and symptoms of depression.

“I was expecting to find that the depression led to gaming,” Gentile told me. “But we found the opposite in that study. The depression seemed to follow the gaming. As kids became addicted—if you want to use that word—then their depression seemed to get worse. And, as they stopped being addicted, the depression seemed to lift.”

Gentile: “I was expecting to find that the depression led to gaming. But we found the opposite in that study.”

Despite the evidence, Gentile didn’t quite buy that.

“I don’t really think [the depression] is following. I think it’s truly comorbid. When a person gets one disorder, they often get more. If you’ve been diagnosed with bipolar disorder, a year or two later you might end up with anxiety problems or social phobias. They all start interacting with each other and make each other worse. [The test subjects’ gaming ‘addiction’ and mental health problems] are close enough in time that they’re probably affecting each other. As you get more depressed you retreat more into games, which doesn’t help, because it doesn’t actually solve the problem. It doesn’t help your depression, so your depression gets worse, so you play more games, so your depression gets worse, etc. It becomes a negative spiral.”

The other researcher I talked do is one Daniel Loton, a PhD candidate at Victoria University in Australia. His study is also longitudinal, but over five months instead of two years. The other main difference is that the participants in this study are older, with an average age of 25.

Loton’s study, which also looks into a link between gaming and mental health, has not yet been published, and, indeed, he has not even completed analysis of all the data in his surveys. So far, he has only fully analyzed how a gaming habit relates to a person’s coping style. For the purposes of this discussion, that is perfect, because Gentile’s study did not examine gaming as a coping mechanism.

Just so we’re clear, Loton defines coping styles as “constantly-changing cognitive and behavioral effort to manage specific external and/or internal demands that are appraised as taxing or exceeding the resources of the person.” More or less, that simply means how a person deals with profound stress in general.

There are three terms you need to know here: approach, distraction and withdrawal. Approach coping would be a person utilizing his or her support circle (family, friends, etc.) when dealing with problems, and, if he or she is suffering from a mental illness, seeing mental health professionals for treatment. Distraction coping is when a person attempts to, ahem, distract himself or herself from their problems for short periods of time. Withdrawal coping is essentially not coping at all; when you withdraw, you aren’t even trying to help your situation because you’ve given up hope.

In Loton’s study, he found that the link between a person’s gaming habits and his or her mental health is bridged by that person’s coping style. Loton asserts that whether or not a person’s gaming habit can be considered unhealthy—whether or not he or she is pathological, as Gentile would say—correlates strongly with coping style. If a person tends to utilize approach coping, then his gaming habits probably won’t negatively impact his life, even if he does what others might consider to be an excessive amount of gaming. If a person usually withdraws, on the other hand, then he is more likely to become a pathological gamer while also having what Loton calls poorer mental health outcomes.

***

When I lost my job in January, I struggled immensely. For the next few weeks, I would spend an hour or so a day looking for more work, while devoting the rest of my day to playing Star Wars: The Old Republic. It was absurd and definitely out of the ordinary for me, but I was depressed. That’s how I dealt with it.

Given that anecdote falls well within the realm of the studies mentioned above, I shared it with both researchers, and I got very different responses. We’ll start with Gentile.

Gentile: “Even kids know that [gaming is] not a very good coping mechanism… And so the problem stays there, ready for you once you’re done.”

“What you did is absolutely no different, even at this time when you were depressed, than you do when you’re not depressed,” Gentile told me. “It just was more extreme, because you were dealing with more extreme issues at that time. And even kids as young as 10 will say they do this. They’ll play games or watch movies as a coping mechanism. But even kids know that it’s not a very good coping mechanism. It’s a distraction. It doesn’t actually solve the problem. And so the problem stays there, ready for you once you’re done.

Loton put a more positive spin on the situation, connecting my game-playing to my efforts to find work.

“Do you feel as though during that time, that those hours of video game playing is what actually allowed you to apply for the jobs? So if you didn’t have something else that you enjoyed like that at the time, you would have been applying for less jobs?”

As I heard these responses, I didn’t feel like either of them was wrong, even though they disagreed.

***

Any good psychological professional will tell you that long-term, clinical depression is far too complex to blame on any one thing. There are usually all sorts of environmental factors in addition to whatever imbalance a person might have in his or her head. Sure, you can sometimes look at a particular depressive episode and point at a cause, but it doesn’t do it justice to ignore everything else that plays a part.

In order to discover just what part The Old Republic played in the episode I described above, we need to take a closer look at what was really going on inside my head. That is no easy task for most people, including myself, but I will do my best to share a holistic view of that situation with you.

When I lost my job, I was a dead man walking. I was not at a point in my mental health treatment that I could deal with something like that in any sort of positive way, and my friends, bless them, weren’t properly equipped to carry me through something like that. It was only a matter of time until I tried to hurt myself.

SWTOR was my morphine. It did not fix me, but it delayed the inevitable and made me comfortable. It held my bad feelings down while I searched in vain for anything tangibly good in the world. The fact that something good did not come in the 16 days between the end of my employment and a night I tried to kill myself is not the game’s fault.

SWTOR was my morphine. It did not fix me, but it delayed the inevitable and made me comfortable.

For 16 days, I lived in a state of numbness, shocked at what had happened but not dead. Some part of me was sad, but my daily dose of SWTOR allowed me to forget that sadness most of the time. It didn’t end up making me happy, and it didn’t find me a job, and it didn’t stop me from eventually going off the edge.

It also didn’t send me over that edge. Without SWTOR, I would have found other, similarly ineffective ways of managing my situation, and I would have spent more time drinking, and the outcome would have been the same. It’s likely, indeed, that without SWTOR my moment of truth would have come sooner. That game gave me more of a shot at life than anything else did. (And, as I’ve written before, in a roundabout way, it helped me.)

Games are not my problem. My problem is that I have a severe mood disorder and a boatload of emotional baggage. When we examine the cause of my myriad emotional issues, it would be unfair to say it was caused by that one thing that makes my life seem more bearable than it otherwise would be.

Were I another person, I would probably view those events differently. Indeed, everyone has different factors that contribute to their depression. We all react to those factors in our own ways. A broad psychological study looks for what people have in common and cannot account for each unique circumstance. The researchers I talked to may find ways to deliver some truths about what happens to us when we’re depressed and playing games.

***

So what’s the answer here? Well, I can’t really give you one for anybody but myself. All I know is that in the case of this one person—me—gaming was a lifeline. Loton said as much. Eventually that lifeline broke, and that’s because, as Gentile offered, playing games a lot was not the solution to my very large problems.

That means that gaming is not bad for me and my mental health.

Ultimately, that means that gaming is not bad for me and my mental health, but maybe I could use a more productive coping mechanism. It’s really that simple.

That analysis may not apply to you. You are different from me. You can learn, broadly, from my take on my situation. You and/or your therapist have the ability to know you better than I or any psychological study can. That, ultimately, is the lesson and the key to understanding whether, when life darkens and we suffer from depression, playing games is a help or a hindrance, a negative force or a relief.

Phil Owen is a freelance entertainment journalist whose work you might have seen at IGN, GameFront, Appolicious and many, many other places. You can follow him on Twitter at @philrowen.

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Dot Matrix Story: Final Fantasy Legend

nightmaremode.net

Andrew Vanden Bossche

Let me tell you about some dumb kid:

Imagine it’s 1993 and it’s summer and it’s time for this kid to go to California. So the kid’s parents buy him a new game for his Gameboy, to waste away the time spent in cars and airplanes.

He’s made this flight once a year since he was born, so he knows what the boredom is, and it’s not the airplane ride so much as all the baggage around it: getting up at 7AM, riding the taxicab to the airport, checking bags, waiting to board, waiting for takeoff, disembarking, finding the rental car, and then the hours and hours on the highway until grandma’s house.

This kid’s Midwestern home is nested by an airport too modest to take them farther than Chicago. So the kid and his family fill the back of a taxi full of suitcases and all three of them pile in the back. He’s a grumpy kid; their flight is early and he had to wake up before the sun and help lift the luggage in the car. He’s too sleepy to play his Gameboy. But once they check their bags there’s still an hour left to takeoff, and the wait bores him awake. So he turns the dim liquid crystal green screen on.

This is a special game. This kid’s wanted it for a long time. His best friend told him about it. His best friend is four years older than him and has taught him about all the coolest things in life.

This game takes place in a tower. The game tells the kid that at the top of the tower is paradise. The tower is full of doors, and each door is full of worlds and people. He gets to be four of those people.

This kid got his Gameboy for his eleventh birthday. It’s big and clunky but he’s super proud of the translucent plastic shell. He can see right through to its naked circuits and diode guts. Gameboys ran on AA batteries. Before this trip, he forgot about the Gameboy for a few months. Then his friend lent him Metroid 2 and once he switched it on to play, the Gameboy’s screen went out with a hiss and a pop. He turned it over and liquid was foaming from the batteries. He threw them out and put in new ones and it sputtered back to life. He didn’t tell his parents. They would have been skeptical of stories of exploding batteries.

It takes almost as much time for them to fly from their modest airport to Chicago as it does to get on and off the plane, and airlines don’t permit portable electronic devices for the first and last fifteen minutes of flight. He barely has time to name the characters.

When he starts the game, it asks him to make up four people. The first is him, and the rest are his friends. They can be boys or girls, but their names can’t be more than four letters long. Four letters is too short. He doesn’t know of anyone with a four letter name. He cuts his own name in half: And, it fits. But then he stops, looking at the pixilated little figures. He has a choice in this game. Boy or Girl. M or F. Four letters, four characters. It’s hard to decide; there are so many combinations, and though he can have them all, only one gets his name. Which one will be And? Boy? Girl?  When he gets older someone will point out to him that it’s a weird thing to do, to think about it before you choose, but whatever. His best friend, Luke, who’s like his older brother, also has four letters. He gets to be a boy.

It’s time to go, so he saves and shuts it off. His parents are always afraid of being late, and he just wants to sit down and get back to the lightless green world in the Gameboy.

At O’Hare neon lights stream out as far as the eye can see under the ground, above the moving walkways. The moving walkway is now in service, the voices repeat. The sounds and lights that go with the voice are pleasant, but insistent. They take walking very seriously there.

While he’s on the moving walkway he tries to take out his Gameboy. He has enough time to pull it out and turn it on and see the dot matrix flood with crystal before it’s time to hurry hurry run don’t walk to the next terminal. He shuts it off but can’t put it away. Is it too much to ask to rest for a minute? He should be patient; they’ll be plenty of time for that on the plane.

Up on that plane, the sun is so naked, so unbearable, that the kid cannot look away. You can’t render a sky like this in dot matrix. The pixels are too big, and what passes for color are varying shades of an ugly yellow-green. What comes out of dot matrix is more like a cave painting. What’s supposed to be a river is a crude parade of moving dots. But this kid isn’t stupid. He’s seen rivers before. He can see them out of the airplane window now. He can put two and two together. The dot matrix river is more real than the ones below, and if his game could show him a picture of the sun, it’d have that same unbearable light too.

The kid reaches a world where people live on clouds. The monster king of this world, the white lion, rules from a floating castle and no one is safe from him. There are a pair of twins who are resisting him. But one betrays the other and the monster king kills her. The sisters hold each other while the wounded one dies. The living one is sorry, and she cries. She gives her tear to the kid and his friends.

The game lets him kill the white lion but, as if to remind him he’s not the one in charge, won’t let him save the girl.

***

California’s landscape, unlike the Midwest’s,  goes up and down, twists around and around. In California, the roads grip the landscape where they can. California is beautiful year round, green in the winter and gold in the summer, so to the kid this place is a bit like paradise. He imagines, from the dot matrix green, that the place he’s looking for at the top of the tower must look a bit like California.

Most of his family lives in California, and those who do not have died here. His mother’s mother died in Sebastopol, up north. His father’s father died in England, but they buried him in California.

His mother’s mother died when he was much younger, and his dad told him this when he was playing in a sandbox in his uncle’s backyard in California. His dad broke the news gently, as if setting down a great weight.

But his son was serene, continuing to move his toy truck back and forth in the sand. He nodded. He understood. He asked if his cousin would come out and play. She wouldn’t; a few years older than him, so she knows what to feel, which this kid now understands. He pushed the truck again. He has to master the simple things in life before the simple facts of death.

Well, years later, that day comes, and the kid is scared of the big nothing, the void, the zero, the off switch, the out-of-batteries. He doesn’t still doesn’t understand church, but he knows what it means. He knows he doesn’t want to die. He stops thinking about it by chanting prayers every minute of the day. He stops it by not stepping on cracks, adding up numbers whenever he sees them, and trying not to worry. He stops it by playing video games. It works.

It’s almost five hours of driving from the airport to his grandmother. The heat in the back of the car suffocates him. The new car smell stews in the heat. It’s dizzying. Sometimes he’s too sick to play Gameboy. Sometimes he’s too sick to do anything but play Gameboy.

Here are the buttons: On switch. Volume. Contrast (he can make the green as pale or dark as he wants). A. B. Start. Select (Select what? Mysterious things).

It’s hard for him to leave the game alone. Trips are restless things. He turns it off, puts it down. Looks at it. Reaches for it, picks it up. After a few minutes he sets it down again.

If he walks around enough, monsters are sure to find him. He can’t see them, but when the screen flashes white-green he knows they’ve come. They all line up in a row and he and his friends take turns fighting. When he’s walking around, the monsters look small and kind of cute. But when he fights them they menace from the screen; bugs, fishes, robots, dragons, and big floating eyes.

This kid wanders through the tower and stumbles on a door to hell. The background tiles look like burning stars. Every step burns him and his friends. There are devils there. They won’t talk to him. The screen flashes after every step. He suffers.

Why is there a hell? It bugs him. It itches. He likes forgiveness. Hell feels like revenge. Why punish someone who’s already dead? How is this supposed to make anything right again? He’s heard there’s a hell outside of this game, but he prefers not to believe in that. But the thought of it is still there, and it won’t go away.

There are people in the game’s hell. When he asks them why, they tell him. It’s not because of anything they did. They’re here because they want to be. They think the stars will burn their sins away and lead them into paradise, whenever that will be. He can come back whenever he wants and they’ll still be there. He can’t get them to leave. They’ll never leave. They’re trapped forever. The door is a few steps away. But only he can go in and out.

He only ever saves the world by accident. The tower is full of worlds of foolish, suffering people. He’s climbing away from them, to somewhere happy.

Death lies lazily in the California sun. This kids thinks about it from time to time. He doesn’t want to, but he can’t forget. Midwest: the four seasons of sex, life, harvest and death. California would be a thoughtless paradise, eternal life and eternal summer, except his family keeps dying here and inconveniently reminding him.

The tower ends for the kid at grandmother’s house, surrounded by eucalyptus groves. This kid helps his family unpack, but he’s too tired for anything else. Together, tomorrow, they’ll all go down to see his cousins. But crowds of adults, even small crowds, are no fun. So he goes to the kid’s bedroom to finish his game.

At the end, there’s another monster, the six armed devil of war. He offers the kid and his friends a piece of the world, guarding the gate to paradise. When the devil of war dies, the kid takes a step forward. And he falls, down, down, down, to the foot of the tower. The door to paradise disappears, and he hears a voice asking, “Can you climb back up?”

He’s back at the beginning, but it’s different now. All his friends are here. And the tower’s different too. No more twisting passages, no more halls full of doors, just stairs leading up, moving faster than he can breathe.

When he gets to the end, again, there’s just an empty field. At the end, there’s a little bridge, and on the other side of the bridge is a table. At the table is a man, and he offers the kid a cup of tea, and tells the kid he created everything. He wants to let the kid know how happy he is that you survived the game. He’s proud of the kid.

The game calls this man Creator. He tells the kid the world got too boring, and so he made up every evil thing so someone would come to remind people what courage and determination meant. The kid’s done a good job, so now he wants to give the kid a wish. But the kid doesn’t want it. He doesn’t want to just be a toy. Creator doesn’t understand what his problem is. He created everything, after all. But he thinks it’s funny, that the kid wants to challenge him. The screen turns white, and there he is, the Creator, covered in flowing robes, radiant even in dot matrix green, looking like the sun, looking like God. And the kid is afraid.

The kids saves the game and turns it off. He’s not sure he can go through with it. He wanders to living room and sits around with his parents and grandma. He wanders around the backyard. It has an apple tree, and wooden ducks his grandfather carved. Their legs spin around in the wind. This place is close to the ocean. If it was earlier in the day, there might be fog, but it’s sunny now. A small lizard suns itself. The kid crouches next to it. He reaches down to touch it, and it scurries away.

nightmaremode.net

Molyneux and Fucking Kickstarter

effingarcade.tumblr.com

They will kill it.

Be in no doubt. These established industry veterans, who could achieve their goals through traditional paths, will kill Kickstarter with their greed.

“Greed” might seem harsh. But here we see Peter Molyneux, as established a figure as you can find in the games industry, asking his audience to take on all the risk associated with his new product. Here is a man who has over-promised and under-delivered for over a decade, asking people like me and you to pay up front for his latest venture. 

Do you believe for even one second that Molyneux couldn’t find that financial backing elsewhere? I don’t.

Kickstarter has shown us many cases where creative people who can’t find the funding to realise their unique vision have been saved by like-minded people who want to see those projects happen. That’s a good thing. I’m not talking about those people. Small teams, great ideas, outsiders. That’s all good.

But these capitalist animals, Molyneux and Braben to name but two, are transforming Kickstarter into a shopping website for products that don’t yet exist. They package their products with ridiculous “bonuses” that the gaming audience are paying small fortunes to secure. This is the same game audience that, just a few years ago, was laughing Bethesda out of the room for charging a small amount of cash for horse armour. And we at least knew something about that game.

We are being exploited. 

Molyneux and Braben have both used the same marketing trick too. Braben goes back to the space games we always wanted him to return to. Molyneux returns to the god games. They’re both saying “HEY GUYS, WE’RE GIVING YOU WHAT YOU WANTED! NOW LET’S DO THIS THING TOGETHER!” It’s a trick. Or maybe Molyneux would call it “an experiment”. What happened to good old fashioned investment, guys? You know, where we gave you some money and shared in the risk and maybe actually fucking GAINED from it somewhere down the line? What happened to THAT experiment?

What is going on is cynical, and it’s ugly. These established game designers have recognised that people have started to use Kickstarter as a thing that helps them to define who they are and what they love. When someone backs a project, it’s not entirely about the specific project. If you back a point and click adventure game, you’re telling the world that you love that genre. You’re saying that it matters to you. That makes you easy to exploit. It’s the easiest thing in the world for a cold fuck in a suit to exploit someone with heart.

It’s great to have people who like your stuff. It’s great to have support. What’s even better is you appreciating that THEY’RE the ones that YOU should be trying to pay back for that support. If people enjoy what you do and have made you in any way relevant in our culture, then YOU owe THEM something.

HEY YOU LOVE ME PAY FOR ME TO RECORD MY ALBUM!

HEY YOU LOVED ME YEARS AGO PAY FOR ME TO RE-DO MY OLD IDEAS!

HEY I’M KINDA SORTA FAMOUS PAY FOR ME TO DO SOME SHIT MAYBE I DUNNO WHATEVER!

You think I haven’t ever considered running a Kickstarter? You think I haven’t thought to myself - “Hey, I could Kickstarter this games blog, raise money to film stuff, raise money for better equipment, raise money so that I can spend more time on it all, raise money to indulge my own ego!”

But then you stop and ask yourself if you can do it on your own.

And if you can? Even if it’s a struggle? And you STILL start a Kickstarter?

Then FUCK YOU, Molyneux. And all who came before you.

And, depressingly, all those yet to inevitably fucking come.

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The Kickstarter Successes: Where Are They Now?

rockpapershotgun.com

The Ultimate Katchup

By John Walker on November 28th, 2012 at 1:00 pm.

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Of all the many interesting discussions raised by the Kickstarter phenomenon of 2012, there’s one that’s only going to get more contentious: release dates. When a gaming project sets up a Kickstarter, they put an estimated date for the delivery of their stretch goals. And since these inevitably include a copy of the game, in doing this, developers are announcing a release date, often before they’ve even drawn any concept art. That’s not really how games development works. And so far, people don’t seem so hot on the guessing. Below is an epic list of all the $100k+ Kickstarters successful this year, and how they’re doing at keeping us up to date.

Kickstarter’s guidelines state that release dates are estimates, and encourage backers to be patient with projects struggling to meet their suggested dates, so long as that project is being open and honest about the process. They say,

“If problems come up, creators are expected to post a project update (which is emailed to all backers) explaining the situation. Sharing the story, speed bumps and all, is crucial. Most backers support projects because they want to see something happen and they’d like to be a part of it. Creators who are honest and transparent will usually find backers to be understanding. It’s not uncommon for things to take longer than expected. Sometimes the execution of the project proves more difficult than the creator had anticipated. If a creator is making a good faith effort to complete their project and is transparent about it, backers should do their best to be patient and understanding while demanding continued accountability from the creator.”

However, at the same time creators are legally obliged to fulfil their promises, or make complete refunds to backers who do not receive what they paid for. Which makes an estimated delivery date quite ambiguous – is it a promise? Or is it a guess, a hope, that we as backers have to accept might be wildly inaccurate? The reality is, we’re handing over money, on the promise of a game, no matter how much it would be more sensible to view Kickstarter pledges as angel investments rather than pre-orders.

So it seems interesting to take a look at the high-profile successes over the last year, and see how they’re doing in terms of meeting deadlines, or how likely they look to do so. These are the games that raised $100,000 or more this year, up to those finishing in October, almost nearly in chronological order. What I’m looking for alongside deadlines is how well they’re updating people with progress, and whether they’re being open about meeting targets. It’s a surprisingly poor show.

Double Fine Adventure Double Fine
Raised: $3,336,371
Release date: Aug 2012

Well clearly that didn’t happen. But everybody who cares at least knows it, with every step of the development being filmed. The game, codenamed “Reds”, is getting a brand new engine, which is what’s taken up a lot of the last eight months. Development is due to “ramp up” next year. Sadly, their Kickstarter updates – while enormously detailed – are all for “backers only”, which rather misses the point of promoting a game.

FTL: Faster Than Light Subset Games
Raised: $200,542
Release date: Aug 2012

They were closer than many. The game was officially released in September this year, and of course has been hugely well received. A real Kickstarter success story, from the initial incredible sight of seeing it receive 2,000% of its funding goal, to just how much we’ve enjoyed it.

Wasteland 2 inXile entertainment
Raised: $2,933,252
Release date: Oct 2013

Very sensibly setting its release date a year and a half away, the second huge Kickstarter success has shown tantalising screenshots, and one very brief video of game footage, but so far all of the same patch of land. Brian Fargo assures that development is going well, and they’re very pleased with progress, although promises of more frequent updates don’t seem to be too well kept. You can read a HUGE amount about what they’re up to here.

The Banner Saga Stoic
Raised: $723,886
Release date: Nov 2012

Making over seven times more money than they’d asked for, it’s understandable that plans for The Banner Saga ramped up since the release date was given. While the original plan was to release “Chapter 1″ of the game by November this year, instead the beta version of the combat portion of the game has now reached backers, with promises of the full RPG sensibly put at an unspecified point in the future.

Shadowrun Returns Harebrained Schemes
Raised: $1,836,447
Release date: Jan 2013

Giving themselves nine months didn’t seem very realistic at the time. A few months back they acknowledged it would be in May or June 2013. I’d be astonished if they met that too, based on the Horace Principle, which states: “Any release date that includes more than one potential month isn’t going to be hit”. Again, in making more than four times what they’d asked for, ambitions obviously increased, and that takes longer to make.

The Dead Linger Sandswept Studios
Raised: $154,968
Release date: Jun 2012

June was clearly idiotic for a projected funded in April – a good example of how such dates really aren’t taken seriously. Instead, by October this year an alpha was released, with .003 released last week. So it’s happening, for sure, but oddly enough took longer than two months to finish. But right now you absolutely can download the current version of the game and play it.

Leisure Suit Larry Replay Games
Raised: $655,182
Release date: Oct 2012

This is the first on the list that worries me. After some very peculiar antics regarding changing the studio making the game for them (still haven’t got to the bottom of that one, but I think it will bubble up again soon enough), so far all that’s been seen of the game are some background shots of one location, and concept stuff. Now, the game they’re remaking, the first Larry, isn’t very big, but even in the descriptions of how far they’ve got, they’re still talking about only now receiving backgrounds for locations. They’ve not signed the music yet, animation still seems to be in the concept stage. In October they reported they’d not developed any of the puzzles. Back in May is the last time I can find them mentioning a release date, and then it was a maybe December, maybe January. But I can’t find a word since. Not at all impressive.

Nekro darkForge
Raised: $158,733
Release date: Jun 2013

I’m not too familiar with this one, but Jim spoke to the team about it back in June. They set themselves a sensible release date, and a recent update reports lots of good progress, and that it’s internally playable in its current form. However, even this project is now bumped until Q4 2013, with a beta ahead of that.

Starlight Inception Escape Hatch Entertainment
Raised: $158,152
Release date: Aug 2013

Just seeing the “2013″ on the release date pleases my eyes, on a project funded in May this year. The Wing Commander-cum-Freespace project is clearly a huge task, and good, clear updates show exactly how far along they are with production. They remain confident they can hit next August.

Republique Camouflaj
Raised: $555,662
Release date: Sep 2013

Kickstarter’s first really high profile will-it-won’t-it eventually did, in the eleventh hour exceeding its goal by a healthy $50k. And again, there was common sense in their release date, giving them well over a year to get it done. Sadly, they’ve chosen to make all their updates for backers only, so following progress isn’t for the unfunding masses. A fairly heftily stupid decision by any Kickstarter – the 11,611 backers are precisely the people who won’t be paying for your game once it’s released. They might want to speak to the 6,999,988,389 people who haven’t paid for it yet. Even their own website isn’t keeping track of progress. Guys – this isn’t the way to do it.

Grim Dawn Crate Entertainment
Raised: $537,515
Release date: Aug 2013

I have to admit I was gutted when I first saw this was August 2013, despite being pleased they’re not over-promising. We’ve been following progress since 2010, and just want to play it! Even with the stupendous Kickstarter success (doubling their goal), it’s still so far away! But that’s obviously fine – it takes as long as it takes, and that’s as it should be. They’ve even hired four new full time staff, plucking some from the sadly closed 38 Studios. Still, it would be nice to see an awful lot more updates appearing.

Jane Jensen’s Moebius Pinkerton Road
Raised: $435,316
Release date: Mar 2013

This was always an odd one. A pitch video that was Jensen’s family pratting around and not actually talking about games, and no fixed game for the project. Since then, apart from when plugging sales on their own social games, their updates are also blocked to people who might want to buy the released games. Utterly stupid. Even via their own website you cannot follow progress on Moebius without paying for it first. So who bloody knows if it’ll make its optimistic March release date. It’s hard to care, once you’re clearly told it’s none of your business.

Carmageddon: Reincarnation Stainless Games
Raised: $625,143
Release date: Feb 2013

Scant few updates are mostly blocked to people who didn’t pledge, so another huge “fuck off” to potential customers. Except they then post the same content on their own website for everyone to see. Siiiiiigggggghhhhhh. Their site also says they’re in the “early stages” of designing the game, but thankfully progress updates show that isn’t really the case. I doubt very much they’ll make February, and it would be nice to see some clearer indication of where they’re actually aiming for with the three quarters of a million dollars.

Pathfinder Online Technology Demo Goblinworks
Raised: $307,843
Release date: Oct 2012

I’m sure no one was more surprised that an openly flagged tech demo received six times its funding than Goblinworks themselves. After fees and failed payments, they received nearly $280k, which they had spent by September, the vast majority of which was salaries. And finished the tech demo! So they did it pretty much perfectly. Now they’re in full production for the game itself, with funding sourced from elsewhere. However, saying that, rewards aren’t shipped as yet, but that should be happening by January.

Xenonauts Goldhawk Interactive
Raised: $154,715
Release date: Oct 2012

Phew, just in time! When I started compiling this list yesterday, there hadn’t been an update since August, and I was stern. But coincidentally a very apologetic update appeared overnight, saving their skin from my fiery wrath. However, regular updates can be found on their forums. They obviously didn’t hit their beta deadline for September, nor their release for October, but the beta is edging ever closer.

Two Guys Space Venture Two Guys From Andromeda
Raised: $539,767
Release date: Feb 2013

The Space Quest (except not with that name) sequel seemed to come from peer pressure more than anything else. Two developers who hadn’t spoken to each other in many years, getting back together to surf the wave of their contemporaries all seeming to do the same. It seemed almost reluctant at first… and then the updates came. And didn’t stop coming. Good lord, they didn’t shut up. Fortunately, they haven’t since, meaning people are kept up to date with progress. However, I’m not seeing any evidence of the game itself, which doesn’t really feel very good. A February release seems extremely unlikely bearing in mind they said this month the story was only worked out on a “high level”, but I can’t find anywhere acknowledging that, nor something more realistic. Not impressive.

Tex Murphy – Project Fedora Big Finish Games
Raised: $598,104
Release date: Dec 2012

In-game footage was shown to backers only (although most of their updates are public) in August this year, but during this they explain that filming hadn’t even started. Otherwise news is pretty sparse, their own site massively out of date, and no acknowledgement that I can find saying that they won’t make their December deadline. Again, not great.

Word Realms Asymmetric
Raised: $121,442
Release date: Oct 2012

While backers got instant access to the beta, and have been receiving updates to it since, they obviously didn’t meet their release target. That’s always heavily countered by there being a playable version in backers’ hands, but it’s still a huge shame to see all their updates locked to backers only. They’re still aiming for the end of the year, however.

Zombie Playground Massive Black
Raised: $167,590
Release date: Mar 2013

There hasn’t been a Kickstarter update for a month, but the last one included details of the closed alpha which is due this December for backers. The public alpha is still due for March, which was always what their release date intended on. So that’s all looking rather proper!

Dead State DoubleBear Productions
Raised: $332,635
Release date: Dec 2013

The winner for Most Realistic Release Date In A Kickstarter Before July 2012 goes to… However, the Joint Award For Idiotically Making Updates For Backers Only also reaches Dead State, along with so many others. At least it’s still a long way away, meaning they’re not in a phase for raising public awareness just yet. And while those updates are appearing monthly, the game’s own site looks like it was abandoned months ago, cobwebs all over the last update from June. Which isn’t great bearing in mind the Kickstarter didn’t finish until the beginning of July.

CLANG Subutai Corporation
Raised: $526,125
Release date: Feb 2013

Not a lot of updates since getting funded, there is at least this epic post about… scary sword laser magic. No word on whether February is still possible, and even less information on the game’s own site, where you’d think it was still July.

STAR COMMAND War Balloon Games
Raised: $151,806
Release date: Oct 2012

Always a bit odd, this one, since the iPad version was supposed to be close to finished when the PC version/iPad second round Kickstarter launched. However, while the release date has obviously been missed, there is an open update from this month explaining where things are at, and three weeks back they thought it might be done by the end of this month. Doesn’t seem quite so likely now, as there’s no release hype, so I expect this one might disappear into Christmas. Here’s 13 minutes of it to prove it exists:

Defense Grid 2 Hidden Path Entertainment
Raised: $271,726
Release date: Dec 2012

Lots of public updates, which is good to see. And even more impressively, closed beta access keys have begun being sent out. This is of course for the “Containment” version of the game, with the larger game planned to take a lot longer. But it’s looking pretty good for its projected release date.

Shadowrun Online Cliffhanger Productions
Raised: $558,863
Release date: May 2013

Updates have dried up since September, which is a shame, especially now Jagged Alliance Online is firmly out the door. But those that have appeared have been open, at least. Although the sillybillies have been putting splendid updates directly onto their website, without linking from the KS page everyone knows to go to. Concept art began appearing early this month, making May seem pretty unlikely.

Castle Story Sauropod Studio
Raised: $702,516
Release date: Oct 2012

They only asked for $80,000! My goodness, imagine how thrilling it would be to watch that total just climb and climb. Personally, I think when an indie raises nine times more than they asked for, they should be able to use at least half of the money to buy themselves a lovely house. They only promised a beta for their release date, and by criminy, they did it. Kind of. A prototype version was released in October, and the team is clearly still overjoyed and overwhelmed by the attention.

Project Giana Black Forest Games
Raised: $186,158
Release date: Oct 2012

It was clearly ridiculous to put an October release date on a Kickstarter that didn’t finish until the end of August. Er, except it came out in October, and was really good!

SolForge Gary Games
Raised: $429,715
Release date: Jan 2013

A perfect example of a post-funded Kickstarter. Regular, detailed, open updates on the digital trading card game, pre-order information for those who didn’t pledge, and clear information on their pre-order page that the Jan deadline isn’t going to be met. They’re now predicting “Spring”.

Mercenary Kings Tribute Games
Raised: $116,064
Release date: May 2013

Only finishing in September, by this point you’d hope projects were at least guessing the middle of 2013. However, only two updates since isn’t great. And worse, the game isn’t even listed on their own site as existing. The last time they mentioned the game was to announce its Kickstarter, other than a quick aside that they’ve hired a programmer.

Planetary Annihilation Uber Entertainment
Raised: $2,229,344
Release date: Jul 2013

After raising a simply epic amount of money, their decent number of open updates have mostly focused on fulfilling other tier rewards, with little info on game development. There’s nothing more on the game’s main site, either, and the pre-order page doesn’t list a release date at all. So is next July realistic? No way to know.

Broken Sword – The Serpent’s Curse Revolution Software
Raised: $771,560
Release date: Apr 2013

Lots of open updates, including details of Uncle Charles’ “research trip” (holiday) to the Middle East. But not a lot of info on the game, or its progress. More frustrating is that Revolution’s website has no info on the game whatsoever. April seems incredibly optimistic to me.

Project Eternity Obsidian Entertainment
Raised: $3,986,929
Release date: Apr 2014

Sound the trumpets! A sensible release date prediction! Clearly an RPG on the scale Obsidian are planning is going to take a heck of a long time. And now they’re equipped with $4m, ambitions will have raised. But most of all, their regular open updates actually detail the progress they’re making on the game. Absolutely perfect. I doubt they’ll be out before Christmas 2014 though…

So what have we learned?

Don’t put a release date you obviously aren’t going to manage. Even my left big toe knows that it takes more than six months to develop a game, and what possible harm could there be in picking a pessimistic date and coming in ahead of schedule?

Be honest about missing release dates. Don’t hide the information two-thirds through a post linked from an update – your Kickstarter is there forever, and the given release date is the thing people are going to read. When that date is in the past, and it’s not clear what the new one is, you look damned dodgy.

Make at least some of your post-campaign updates public. The people who pledged have already given you their money. It’s the attention of the people who didn’t pledge that you rather desperately need now. And hiding info from outsiders just makes your game look like it’s not for them. Sure, there’s backer exclusive content, and you’ll keep some stuff just for them. But radio silence for the rest of your audience is simply bad business.

Keep your own websites up to date! Sure, announcing a game as early as the concept stage is very abnormal in this industry, and keeping people updated about those early stages isn’t normally done. But unfortunately if you Kickstartered, you announced it, and leaving your site fallow for six months makes it look an awful lot like you took the money and ran. You didn’t! So why act like you did?

And put development progress in your updates. Sure, you don’t want to show too much too soon, but just tell us what you’re doing with the money! If your team spent the week coding a robot’s AI, tell us that. It gives a strong sense of progress, that absolutely is not achieved when all your updates are about whether you sent out some stickers yet. You exposed yourself early, and now you’re committed to that.

PS. To be abundantly clear, this is about what information can be learned from visiting the Kickstarter page for a project, and any links immediately from it. Information may be hidden away elsewhere, but that’s hardly relevant to the purpose of this piece. Indeed, as a member of the press I could have contacted developers directly to ask, but again this wouldn’t demonstrate what I consider to be possible poor handling of a post-Kickstarter project.

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rockpapershotgun.com

News - Six most important lessons from Kickstarter so far

gamasutra.com

November 30, 2012   |   By Leigh Alexander
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Although Star Citizen, the latest game to break Kickstarter records with $6.2 million, was funded just weeks ago, signs of maturation for the crowdfunding platform are on the horizon.

The days when big names could expect automatic plentitude are over, and now that so many desired titles have hit their goals, backers are getting updates about release window delays more often than not. A wave of countless products trading on nostalgia value has begun to create clear consumer fatigue.

The rise of the crowdfunding platform has created an entirely new avenue for the marketing, development and release of games, as well as for developers to build direct relationships with their players. But getting funded on Kickstarter now seems to be a much more complicated proposition than it once was. Any investor will become more risk-averse and more attuned to best practices the more information they’re given about process and result — and that’s true even when your investors are crowds of fans.

So what have we learned?

Nostalgia’s not enough anymore. Why don’t they make old-school RPGs and point-and-click adventure games anymore? Why, the evil publishers don’t believe there’s money in them. What about those favorite old characters, brands? Nope, no money in them. But I’d throw money at them, gamers have been shouting on forums for years. Along comes Kickstarter, and finally, gamers could. The nostalgia boom was so powerful that Space Quest’s Two Guys From Andromeda overcame decades of estrangement to get back on board.

But taking a little audience pulse now reveals gamers have become complacent. Nothing can soothe the power of years of forlorn longing like instant access, and games won’t gain funding simply because players remember this or that from when they were little. Look at the case of the Oliver Twins’ recent campaign for a new game starring the cartoon egg Dizzy, one of the 1980s’ most iconic game characters in Europe. As of press time it’s performing anemically at under £20,000 of its £350,000 goal.

Meanwhile, Spuds Quest, an indie-made homage with similar features and a much more modest £5000 ask, has beat its goal and will probably please ZX Spectrum fans just as much. In an era where fans can have nearly everything they want, they’re less likely to open their wallets wider than necessary just for the sake of a brand.

Your backers aren’t the entire audience. Over at Rock Paper Shotgun, UK journalist John Walker’s done an excellent status report on the major game funding successes on Kickstarter, checking in on how well they’re keeping their audiences informed and whether they’ve met promised release windows. On both counts, many aren’t doing so hot, with release dates vague and delayed and with information available only to backers.

If we view Kickstarter as similar to a conventional publishing model where information on the game’s earliest stages is available only to those who have a financial stake, it makes sense that part of what backers have paid for is the privilege of being part of the process from day one. But a major component of the value in the platform is the ability to build a relationship with potential audiences.

It’s good to serve your backers — but too much opacity is sure to alienate other people who would otherwise be completely willing to buy your game when it’s finished. This degree of transparency is unfamiliar to devs and probably a bit scary, but one lesson we can take from Kickstarter is that this is what fans expect, now. Game makers will have to learn to leverage that if they want to continue to monetize new audiences with the product early adopters have funded.

Kickstarter can be just the beginning. Given that it’s getting harder and harder to reach ambitious funding goals on the abundant and rapidly-maturing platform, many developers are starting to look at Kickstarter as one of multiple avenues for investment. It’s clear now that Kickstarter can simply be a powerful way to demonstrate demand in the quest for bigger dollars, or an avenue to fund a risky prototype for funding sources that would ask for more than a good pitch.

Many projects that got fully-funded on Kickstarter might actually come back to the platform for further resources based on what the community demands. Already, listing “stretch goals” — promises to adjust the project if more cash comes in that requested — is par for the course on Kickstarter. Further down the line if a project is going well and fans are able to see it’s going well through good community management and regular updates, expect devs to try leveraging their audiences for another funding round for expansions on the original vision, depending on what they’re able to do with the initial round.

Many devs will also learn from their Kickstarter failures, and may approach the platform again with a better-angled proposal. We recently spoke to BrightDriver, which aims to create a platform for mobile games that can be played via audio and voice in the car. In failing to hit its Kickstarter goal the co-founders had to examine the idea that it would have been better to approach crowdfunding with a specific game for their platform, perhaps one bolstered by desirable partners, that people would want. The door is open for them to try crowdfunding again in the future, armed with more information than they would have had if they hadn’t attempted it.

You need a clear and realistic plan — no matter who you are. Fan love for developers can play a major role in Kickstarter successes, as we saw with Double Fine Adventure. But pedigree isn’t everything, and fans are quickly becoming much more circumspect about that.

Veterans Brenda Brathwaite and Tom Hall learned this the hard way. At the beginning of the Kickstarter boom, the idea of an old-school RPG from the creators of Wizardry, Anachronox and more might have been enough to inspire fan faith, but the pair ended up surprised at how much detail and specificity fans demanded when they went live. The pair decided to halt their Kickstarter until they could come back with a stronger plan and a clearer trajectory.

Even though it’s possible they could have made their goal in the end, the audience feedback and slow start to the funding was an important sign to Brathwaite and Hall about what even the most experienced developers need to know about the Kickstarter environment.

Don’t try your backers’ patience. One upside, if you can call it that, to the traditional publishing model may be that developers don’t set their own schedule. For better or for worse, milestones are milestones and few studios ever have the luxury of blowing too many. Forced time constraints have created incredible stress in the games industry — but also incredible resourcefulness. If only the idea of thousands of backers eagerly counting on you could inspire the same careful planning.

Fans invested in a game and receiving reliable communication about its project may be surprisingly willing to be incredibly patient and give it the time it needs to gestate. But their faith requires self-aware developers setting realistic deadlines and then keeping them at all costs. Walker’s list of Kickstarter successes is most notable for how spotty most of them are about timing, with deadlines vague, constantly moving or obviously overly-ambitious.

Audiences know Kickstarter is a new frontier, and they’re willing to watch and see while devs sort it out. But they spent money, and can be expected to become disgruntled quickly if they feel someone’s taken that money and then shut the communication channel in their face. For the health of the crowdfunding ecosystem, everyone seeking funding on Kickstarter will need to make a commitment to schedule and timing.

People want cultural capital. People want deliverables, yes, but they simultaneously want the pleasure of being associated with something popular, something that feels worth believing in. Ian Bogost has even suggested that part of what people pay for is “the entertainment value of expressing your support for… a hypothetical [product].”

Considering these lessons from Kickstarter it’s clear that the joy of buying a fantasy isn’t enough to satisfy most backers, but it’s certainly worth thinking about when it comes to rewards on offer at various tiers. Fans don’t consider the honor of being exposed to your dev process, or of being the earliest beta testers, to be a “reward”; it’s now the basic thing they expect for backing you. So what might they want instead?

The tricky part of crowdfunding is that you can escape traditional channels, but your audience is now your boss. Perhaps if we understand them to be motivated somewhat by their desire to participate in culture, it makes sense to consider they might be rewarded by something that lets them show that, something tangible that lets their fellow fans know they were there first.

When we start seeing the first wave of finished Kickstarter-funded games reach their audiences, surely there’ll be more lessons to learn. But the days of crowdfunding’s exciting anything-goes Wild West seem to be ebbing, and developers will be more successful — and the platform will be healthier and more stable — if we take stock of what we’ve learned and how we can implement these lessons going forward.

gamasutra.com

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