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Der hohe Preis von Gratisspielen - Games

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foto: zynga; montage: zsolt wilhelm

Was ist Free2Play?

Videospiele, die nach dem Free2Play-Modell (F2P) vertrieben werden, stehen Spielern kostenlos zur Verfügung. Einnahmen werden durch Verkäufe von zusätzlichen Spielgegenständen wie Ausrüstungen und Waffen generiert. Nach Smartphone- und Web-Games stützen sich auch zunehmend größere PC- und Konsolen-Produktionen auf das neue Geschäftsmodell. Bei Spielern ist F2P umstritten. Befürchtet wird, dass dies den Wettbewerb verfälscht, da nicht mehr zwangsläufig der beste, sondern vielleicht der am meisten zahlende Spieler gewinnt. Hersteller suchen deshalb Wege, um Bezahlinhalte gleichermaßen attraktiv, aber nicht spielentscheidend zu gestalten.

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foto: screenshot

“Warframe” soll trotz F2P-Modell Blockbuster-Qualitäten mit sich bringen.

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foto: screenshot

“Siedler Online” ist eines der erfolgreichsten F2P-Werke des französischen Herstellers Ubisoft.

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foto: screenshot

“Farmville 2” ist eines der vielen F2P-Spiele, denen Spielermanipulation zur Monetarisierung vorgeworfen wird. Oft leidet darunter der eigentliche Spielinhalt.

Die Spielindustrie sieht im Free2Play-Geschäftsmodell die Zukunft - Für Spieler könnte das aber zum Ärgernis werden

Die Gamesbranche hat einen Startvorteil: Während sich der Rest der Unterhaltungsindustrien, von der Musik- über die Filmindustrie bis hin zum Verlagswesen, erst seit dem Aufkommen von Internet, Kompressionsmethoden und elektronischen Lesegeräten um das Überleben seines zuvor analogen Geschäftsmodells in der digitalen Welt den Kopf zerbrechen muss, handelt die Gamesindustrie seit ihren Anfängen mit digitalen Waren, bei denen die Verbreitung durch einfache Kopie quasi Bestandteil des Produkts ist. Schon lange vor Tauschbörsen und DRM wurden Floppydisks oder gar Datassetten auf den Schulhöfen oder per schlichtem Postversand verbreitet, und so ist die Geschichte der Gamesindustrie zugleich die Geschichte eines konstanten, langen und letztlich aussichtslosen Kampfes gegen die “Raubkopie”.

Chance ausgelassen

Die Gamesbranche hat diesen Startvorteil allerdings nur wenig genutzt: Während die Musikindustrie nach verzweifelten Versuchen, ihre Kunden zuerst durch Klagen und später durch technische Maßnahmen vom Kopieren abzuhalten, inzwischen großteils auf DRM verzichtet, werden drakonische Kopierschutzmaßnahmen im Games-Bereich, etwa Ubisofts “Always online”-DRM, nur zögerlich und nach teils jahrelangen Spielerprotesten zurückgenommen. Im Gegenteil: Populäre Plattformen wie Steam nehmen sich Rechte gegenüber ihren Käufern heraus, die an Sittenwidrigkeit grenzen, und Blockbuster wie “Diablo 3” opfern gar ganze Spielelemente wie etwa einen Offline-Singleplayermodus nur notdürftig verschleiert auf dem Altar der Verkaufsmaximierung.

Stimmt der Preis, stimmt der Absatz

Dass die Musikindustrie ihren noch vor wenigen Jahren aussichtslos erscheinenden Todesmarsch mit einer kleinen Trendwende beenden konnte, hat sicher auch mit dem Drehen an einer einfachen Schraube zu tun: Seit auf Downloadportalen wie Apples iTunes Musik zu einem deutlich reduzierten Preis DRM-frei gekauft werden kann, steigt die Bereitschaft der Kunden, wieder Geld für Musik in die Hand zu nehmen. Stimmt der Preis, stimmt der Absatz - trotz Gratisangeboten im Netz.

Nun tut sich die Gamesbranche seit Jahren schwer, ihre Preispolitik zu modernisieren. Trotz rückläufiger Spieldauer pendelt der Preis für ein Spiel seit Jahren bei der psychologisch hohen Grenze von 50 Euro bei PC und 60 Euro bei Konsolen. Auch wenn zugleich Experimente wie Humble Indie Bundles oder der Erfolg von zeitlich begrenzten Abverkäufen wie Steam Sales eigentlich eine deutliche Sprache sprechen: Als Valve nur wenige Wochen nach Release von “Left4Dead” im Herbst 2009 ein Wochenende lang den Preis des Spiels um die Hälfte senkte, erhöhte sich der Verkauf um satte 3000 Prozent. Da stellt sich eigentlich eine Frage: Sind Spiele vielleicht schlicht “zu teuer”?

Free2Play als Zukunft?

Die mögliche Erkenntnis, dass die Senkung der regulären Spielepreise zu unverhältnismäßig größeren Einnahmen und einem gleichzeitigen Rückgang des Problems “Raubkopieren” führen könnte, hat sich bei den Größen der Gamesbranche bisher nicht durchgesetzt. Stattdessen setzt man zunehmend auf einen radikal anderen Zugang: Free2Play, so der Schwenk vieler großer Publisher, gehört die Zukunft.

Und wieder ist es die böse “Raubkopie”, die offiziell diesen Paradigmenwechsel einläutet: Wegen angeblicher 95 % Piraterierate sei F2P für die Publisher letztlich lukrativer, so prophezeite Ubisoft-Boss Yves Guillemot in einem Interview - eine Aussage, die für viele Beobachter schon allein aufgrund der schlicht nicht seriös erhebbaren realen Zahlen einen seltsamen Beigeschmack hat.

Gratis, aber nicht umsonst

Ist das also die rosige Games-Zukunft? Die Spiele gratis, keine Fehlkäufe mehr, konstanter Support und Nachschub für Spieler, sorgloses Ausprobieren, das auch Gelegenheitsspielern entgegenkommt - die Liste der Vorteile von F2P ist nicht unbeeindruckend. Was auf den ersten Blick wie eine gute Botschaft für Spieler klingt, ist aber möglicherweise eine gefährliche Drohung. Denn Geld, so viel war auch ohne Guillemots Aussagen klar, wollen die Entwickler natürlich trotzdem verdienen - am besten mehr als mit Vollpreistiteln. Statt die psychologische Hürde des Vollpreises vor Spielbeginn zu setzen, sollen Freemium-Angebote oder In-Game-Verkäufe gegen echtes Geld die Kassen klingeln lassen. Das Modell soll ambitioniert in alle Genres erweitert werden: “Warframe”, “Siedler Online”, “Mechwarrior Online”, “Might and Magic: Heroes Online” und unzählige andere Titel auch aus traditionellen Vollpreisnischen setzen mittelfristig auf F2P.

Zugegeben: F2P hat sich in einigen Nischen hervorragend bewährt. Online-Spiele wie “League of Legends” oder “World of Tanks” schaffen die profitable Balance zwischen Gratisspaß und freiwilligem Bezahlen bereits jetzt, während vor allem in der Welt der MMOs zunehmend Abomodelle zugunsten von F2P verschwinden, wie bei der Umstellung von “Star Wars: The Old Republic” auf F2P oder als Mischformen wie “Guild Wars 2” reüssieren.

Die dunkle Seite des F2P

Die größte - und zugleich am meisten zur Sorge Anlass gebende - F2P-Erfolgsgeschichte findet sich aber im Casual-Bereich: In Gratisspielen wie “Farmville” oder “Tiny Tower” haben Spieler die Option, ohne Bezahlung zu spielen, gegen echtes Geld aber können Abkürzungen genommen werden - und die wichtigste Aufgabe des Spieldesigns ist es, den Spielern dies schmackhaft zu machen. Erfolgreiche F2P-Titel wie “Farmville”, “Sims Social” oder eben auch “Tiny Tower” werden, wie ein vielbeachteter Text des Journalisten Tim Rogers bereits letztes Jahr anschaulich demonstrierte, von hochspezialisierten Teams aus Psychologen und Mathematikern schließlich zu genau einem Zweck entworfen: Monetisierung.

Der Weg dorthin führt über mehrere verhaltenspsychologische Stadien, beginnend beim “leichten Einstieg”, über die anfangs kontinuierliche Belohnung und darauf einsetzende Suchtspirale bis hin - und darin unterscheiden sich F2P-Titel schlussendlich alle grundlegend von regulären Spielen - zur absichtlichen Frustration seiner früher oder später immer mehr in der Spielwelt engagierten Spieler. Diese absichtliche Frustration ist essenziell, denn nur sie bringt den Spieler dazu, die Brieftasche zu zücken.

Fun Pain

Besonders vielsagend ist hier der Begriff des “fun pain” als Monetisierungsstrategie: Das F2P-Spiel SOLL seine Spieler gerade so weit langweilen und frustrieren, dass sie bereit sind, Geld zu bezahlen - das bedeutet nicht “Pay2Win”, ein weitgehend verpöntes Geschäftsmodell, das Spielern nur gegen Geld spielentscheidende Vorteile verschafft, aber bedingt allein durch seine Struktur ein anderes Spieldesign: Ein Spiel, das mit F2P-Modell Geld verdienen will, muss seine Spieler naturgemäß manipulieren - sonst bezahlen sie schließlich nicht.

Das traditionelle Geschäftsmodell verlangt relativ viel Geld für ein Vollpreisspiel, das in der Folge als Qualitätskriterium hat, möglichst viel Spaß zu machen, um die Anfangsinvestition zu rechtfertigen. Free2Play als Geschäftsmodell hingegen stellt neben die Grundprämisse Spaß - sonst spielt schließlich niemand - als ebenso wichtiges, gleichberechtigtes Element die Manipulation des Spielers, um ihn zum Zücken der Brieftasche zu bewegen. Es ist ein schmaler Grat, der hier beschritten werden soll. Es bleibt zu hoffen, dass die Balance zwischen Qualität und Manipulation so bewältigt wird, dass die Spieler sich nicht gegängelt fühlen, sondern freiwillig Geld in einen Titel investieren, der ihnen dann dank echtem Mehrwert noch mehr Spaß macht.

Modell ohne Manipulation

Zu hoffen ist aber noch etwas anderes: Dass die Spielebranche, wie vor ihr die Musikindustrie, endlich jenen Komfortpreisbereich findet, der ganz ohne psychologische Tricks und Manipulation auch frühere “Raubkopierer” selbstverständlich zu Kunden werden lässt.

Free2Play wird seine Kunden finden. Die alleinige Zukunft des Spielens dürfte es, auch angesichts der Fülle alternativer Erfolgsmodelle wie etwa Pay-what-you want, Kickstarter oder episodenhaften Spielen wie “The Walking Dead”, aber wohl eher doch nicht werden - zum Glück. (Rainer Sigl, derStandard.at, 16.10.2012)

- GameStandard-Blog

Die große Social-Gaming-Lüge [19]

Weshalb “Farmville” und Co. spielerisch und ökonomisch massiv überschätzt wurden.

- Xbox 360

“Halo 4”-Trailer zeigt Master Chiefs Gesicht [21]

Launch-Trailer des “Fight Club”-Regisseurs verrät erste Details zur neuen Bedrohung.

- “Beeindruckend”

“Gran Turismo 5” in 4K-Auflösung auf vier PlayStations 3 spielbar [106]

Tester: “Eiger-Nordwand-Strecke in 4K und 60 Bildern pro Sekunde setzt neue Maßstäbe”

- Meilenstein

70 Millionen Xbox 360-Konsolen verkauft [49]

Gewinneinbruch aufgrund sinkender Nachfrage und gestiegener Entwicklungskosten

- Kickstarter

“Star Citizen”-Schöpfer bittet Fans um Unterstützung [4]

Kickstarter-Kampagne soll zur Finanzierung beitragen.

- Criterion

“Burnout”: Das Stunt-Rennspiel wird fortgesetzt [12]

Criterion plant Fortsetzung frühestens nach “Need for Speed: Most Wanted”.

- Xbox 360

Microsoft stellt Facebook- und Twitter-App für Xbox 360 ein [12]

Nutzer sollen anstatt dessen den neuen Webbrowser benutzen.

- PS3, PS Vita, PSP

Neuer PlayStation Store öffnet die Pforten [8]

Sony habe auf die User gehört: Neues Interface soll für mehr Übersicht sorgen.

- Ansichtssache

Faszinierende Einblicke in die Entstehung von “Dishonored” [25]

Art Director Sebastien Mitton von Arkane Studios zeigt die Kunst hinter dem Steampunk-Epos.

- PC, PS3, Xbox 360

“Assassin’s Creed 3”: Multiplayer-Modus macht unsichtbar [4]

Frische Einblicke in den Mehrspielermodus des Action-Adventures

- Nintendo

Foxconn ließ Spielkonsole Wii U von Kindern produzieren [50]

Nintendo geht Missständen auf die Spur und nimmt seine Verantwortung “sehr ernst”

- Nintendo

Wie portabel ist das Wii U Gamepad? [28]

Nintendo spezifiziert Reichweite und Akkulaufzeit des Tablet-Controllers.

- Next-Gen

Gearbox-Chef: “Sind am weg zum Holodeck” [17]

Laut Pitchford seien Holodecks noch in weiter Ferne, die Grundsteine würden jedoch schon gelegt.

- Sammelrekord

“Project Eternity”: Fans finanzieren Rollenspiel mit 4 Millionen Dollar [55]

Bislang erfolgreichste Videospielkampagne bei Kickstarter

- Pressestimmen

“Forza Horizon”: Gelungener Richtungswechsel der Rennspielserie [63]

Die Mischung aus Simulation und Spiel stimmt die Tester positiv.

- PC, PS3, Xbox 360

“Call of Duty Elite” kostenlos für “Black Ops 2”-Spieler [7]

Online-Service bietet künftig für alle Spieler Premium-Funktionen

- PC, PS3, Xbox 360

“Call of Duty: Black Ops 2”: Bombastischer Launch-Trailer mit AC/DC-Sound [25]

Video zeigt neue Szenen aus dem Blockbuster.

- Cloud-Gaming

Sony bewirbt Gaikai mit PlayStation-Spielen [3]

Cloud-Gaming-Anbieter wird schrittweise integriert

- Vertragsbruch

Ubisoft klagt The Black Eyed Peas auf eine Million Dollar [19]

Studio wirft der Popband Vertragsbruch bei iOS-Spiel vor.

- Musik-Streaming

Xbox Music nicht für Windows 7, auf Xbox 360 nur kostenpflichtig [18]

iTunes-Rivale startet Ende Oktober und bringt 30 Millionen Songs.

- Der hohe Preis von Gratisspielen [297]

- Rockstar

“Grand Theft Auto 5”: Vorschau im Dezember, Release im März? [16]

Rockstar Games kündigt zudem eine Antologie mit den populärsten Spielen der vergangenen Jahre an

- Dashboard

Xbox-360-Update startet mit Webbrowser und Sprachsuche [38]

Alle Neuerungen des System-Updates im Überblick

- Zynga

Wenn die “Farmville”-Blase platzt [58]

Zyngas Börsen-Poker ist nicht aufgegangen. Nur ein Jahr nach dem Höhenflug steckt das Studio in der Krise.

- Windows, Mac

“SimCity”: Video zeigt UFO-Angriffe und andere Katastrophen [11]

Neue Vorschau gibt Tipps, wie man seine Stadt schützen kann.

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Electronic Arts - EA Blog

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Das Erzählen von Geschichten ist eine der ältesten kulturellen Gaben der Menscheit. Über alle Epochen und Kulturkreise sind die Menschen von Geschichten fasziniert, die sie aus ihrem Alltag oder der Realität reißen und  ihre Sehnsüchte erfüllen. Waren es zu Beginn vor allem mündliche Erzählungen, die von Generation zu Generation überliefert wurden, verbreiteten sich Geschichten im Laufe der Zeit zunehmend auf schriftlichem Wege. Homers „Ilias“ gilt hier als eines der ersten schriftlich fixierten Werke Europas und war schon damals über viele Kulturkreise hinweg bekannt und erfolgreich. Und die Entwicklung setzte sich fort. Mit dem technischen Fortschritt bildeten sich immer mehr Medien heraus, die zum Transport von fesselnden Geschichten geeignet sind. Hörspiele oder Filme können hierbei als die erfolgreichsten Formate des letzten Jahrhunderts genannt werden. Natürlich lassen sich auch durch Computer- und Videospiele spannende und schöne Geschichten erzählen.

Wie in fast allen Geschichten haben auch die meisten Spiele einen Protagonisten oder Helden, in dessen Rolle die Spieler schlüpfen können, der über den gesamten Zeitraum der Handlung ein gewisses Ziel zu erreichen versucht. Die Motivation der Helden kann dabei ganz unterschiedlich sein. Die Bandbreite reicht von Liebe über Rache bis hin zur Rettung der Welt. Bei solch ambitionierten Zielen ist es nicht verwunderlich, dass dabei viele Hindernisse und Widerstände überwunden werden müssen. Dazu werden dem Protagonisten eine ganze Reihe ungewöhnlicher Fähigkeiten an die Hand gegeben. Ohne seinen dicken Schädel oder seine außergewöhnliche Sprungkraft hätte Mario es sicherlich nicht geschafft seine geliebte Prinzessin aus den Händen von Bowser zu retten. Der Spieler begleitet und steuert den Helden auf den verschiedenen Stationen seiner Reise und macht die innere Entwicklung des Charakters, die ja Hand in Hand mit der äußeren Entwicklung der Handlung geht, von Anfang bis Ende mit.

Es gibt zahlreiche filmwissenschaftliche Theorien zur Analyse von Erzählstrukturen in Geschichten. Diese teilen die Handlung in mehr oder weniger große Blöcke auf deren Inhalte sich in groben Zügen durch fast alle Geschichten ziehen. Orientiert man sich an der von Syd Field eingeführten und im deutschsprachigen Raum u.a. von Michaela Krützen verfeinertem Modell kann man die Reise des Helden in drei Erzählphasen einteilen.

1. Trennung:

Zu Beginn der Geschichte wird der Protagonist in seiner vertrauten Umgebung gezeigt, deren Status Quo kurze Zeit später durch die Manifestation eines zentralen Konflikts aus den Fugen gerät. Dieser Konflikt kann durch innere oder äußere Problem ausgelöst werden und schafft eine Diskrepanz zwischen den Bedürfnissen der Hauptperson und der aktuellen Situation, die aufgelöst werden muss. Um dies zu bewerkstelligen, verlässt der Protagonist seine vertraute Umgebung. Die nächste Phase der Erzählung beginnt.

2. Prüfungen (Konfrontation)

Mit Antritt seiner Reise beginnt die längste Phase seiner Geschichte. Der Protagonist muss hier allerlei Konflikte lösen, Hindernisse überwinden und Prüfungen bestehen. Dabei trifft er auf neue Antagonisten und findet neue Freunde und Verbündete. Gleichzeitig macht der Protagonist eine tiefgreifende Entwicklung mit. Seine Fähigkeiten erweitern sich und sein Weltbild passt sich den neuen Gegebenheiten an. Wie der Schmetterling aus der Raupe wird der Held weitaus mehr als er zu Beginn der Reise war.

3. Rückkehr

Nachdem er seine Entwicklung zu Ende gebracht und sich die notwendigen Fähigkeiten und Einblicke in sein Innerstes angeeignet hat, ist der Protagonist bereit für die finale Auseinandersetzung und der Lösung des zentralen Konflikts. Je nach Geschichte wird sich den eigenen Ängsten, dem großen Antagonisten oder dem belastenden Umstand gestellt. Nachdem diese überwunden sind, kann der Held in seine bekannte Welt zurückkehren oder beginnt, da er sich tiefgreifend verändert hat, ein neues Leben.

Genau wie in Büchern oder Filmen, lässt sich diese narrative Struktur auch in vielen Computer- und Videospielen erkennen. So wird der Spieler zu Beginn der aktuelleren Spiele der Legend of Zelda-Serie ganz behutsam an die Spielmechaniken und die Steuerung herangeführt, indem der Protagonist Link kleinere alltägliche Aufgaben in seinem Heimatdorf erledigt. Nach kurzer Zeit zeigen sich erste Zeichen drohenden Unheils und der Held muss sein Dorf verlassen um sich der Bedrohung zu stellen. Im Verlauf der Geschichte eignet er sich neue Fähigkeiten und Ausrüstungsgegenstände an, ohne die er die finale Konfrontation nicht bewältigen könnte. Ähnlich aber doch anders stellt es sich bei Spielen wie Heavy Rain dar. Hier wird der Protagonist durch zwei Schicksalsschläge aus seinem Alltag gerissen. Von Schuldgefühlen geplagt, macht er sich auf seine Reise. Seine Entwicklung ist allerdings nicht wie bei Zelda von der Aneignung neuer Fähigkeiten geprägt, sondern schlägt sich stärker in seiner Psyche und seinem Verhalten nieder. Die zunehmende Verbitterung und Angst des Protagonisten spiegelt sich nicht nur in seinem Verhalten, sondern auch optisch wider, da er immer mehr verwahrlost. Am Ende muss auch er sich dem Konflikt stellen und der Spieler hat bis dahin hoffentlich alles für ein Happy End in die Wege geleitet.

Die genannten Beispiele stellen die mögliche Bandbreite sehr schön dar. Auf der einen Seite die vornehmlich äußere Entwicklung der Fähigkeiten der Helden und auf der anderen Seite liegt der Fokus auf der inneren Entwicklung des Protagonisten und seinen Emotionen. Natürlich gibt es gerade im Bereich der Rollenspiele Beispiele, die beide Entwicklungen fesselnd darstellen. In der Baldurs Gate Serie beginnt der Spieler als einfache Haushaltshilfe und beendet es als göttliches Wesen, das seinen Platz in der Götterwelt sucht und entscheiden muss, wie er seine neugewonnenen Kräfte einsetzt. Auch Spielereihen wie Mass Effect oder Dragon Age gelten als Meilensteine bei der Inszenierung von Geschichte und begeistern Spieler auf der ganzen Welt mit ihren ausgearbeiteten Szenarien und einer großen Entscheidungsfreiheit. Insgesamt lässt sich sehr schön erkennen, dass über das Medium Spiel genau inzwischen die gleichen Geschichten erzählt werden können wie in Büchern oder Filmen. Ein maßgeblicher Unterschied besteht vor allem in der hohen Interaktivität des Mediums Spiel, die dem Rezipienten oftmals ein hohes Maß an Handlungs- und Entscheidungsfreiheit zugesteht. Der Spieler kann selbst bestimmen wie schnell er in der Handlung voranschreitet oder welche Wendungen sie nimmt. Das Medium ändert sich aber Art, Inhalte und Aufbau der Geschichten bleiben gleich.

Weitere Links zum Thema:

Blog: Geschichten in Videospielen: Vom Einzeiler zum Epos

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How a Videogame God Inspired a Twitter Doppelgänger — and Resurrected His Career - Game

wired.com • Archive • Like & Archive • Like

Peter Molyneux (left) and Adam Capone, aka @PeterMolydeux
Photo: Levon Biss

Peter Molyneux has always been a dreamer. As a student at England’s Southampton Solent University in the early ’80s, he hatched a scheme to make a fortune by driving up to Scotland, buying a bunch of salmon, and then returning to sell it to local restaurants at a fantastic profit. It was only on the way home, after spending his savings, that he realized he had forgotten about refrigeration, leaving him broke and his car smelling of spoiled fish. In 1984 Molyneux designed his first videogame, a business simulator called The Entrepreneur, and was so sure of its success that he warned the local post office to hire extra mail carriers to cope with the onslaught of orders. In the end he received two—both, Molyneux suspects, from his mother. By his midtwenties, he was well on his way to becoming one of those guys with a million grandiose plans that never quite pan out.

Then Molyneux had one of his craziest ideas yet: What if you made a videogame that gave players control not just of a character but of the entire game? That concept resulted in 1989′s Populous, a battle-strategy game with a twist. Players didn’t simply move soldiers around a map—they manipulated the map itself, building up mountains or plunging coastlines into the sea. Their armies shuttled around the territory as if by their own free will. There was no single correct way to complete the game; players could do whatever they liked, and the game responded to their decisions.

Populous was a hit; it was also a conceptual breakthrough. Up to that point, most game designers saw themselves as something like film directors—they created fictional worlds, then guided audiences through them, scene by scene. Populous showed that videogames could be more than movies with joysticks—they could be a radically new narrative art form. Gamers didn’t have to be just members of an audience; they could write their own stories.

Over the course of the next two decades, Molyneux would explore this idea in a string of high-concept hits. In 1994, Theme Park did for tourist attractions what Populous had done for warfare: It gave players the ability to design and manage a virtual environment—in this case an amusement park—then watch hundreds of in-game patrons enjoy the creation. Dungeon Keeper, released in 1997, subverted the standard fantasy adventure game by putting players in the role of a final boss who must keep a crusading hero away from his hidden treasures. And 2001′s Black & White was an even more ambitious “God game” than Populous, letting players decide whether to treat their tribe of followers with mercy or wrath. It also featured a beast that players could raise with compassion or cruelty; the creature’s behavior and appearance changed based on players’ decisions.

The Tweets of @PeterMolydeux

Adam Capone started his @PeterMolydeux feed as a send-up of Peter Molyneux’s heady, unworkable game concepts. But it became a rallying cry for many who want game developers to take more risks. Scattered throughout the story are some of his craziest, most profound tweets.

- Imagine a game that lasts forever where your children and their children continue playing your profile.

That spirit of intellectual playfulness established Molyneux as one of the most innovative game designers in the world. He helped turn his home of Guildford—a Saxon-era shire of red-tile-roofed row houses about an hour outside of London—into an unlikely videogame-industry hotbed. He built and sold two companies: Bullfrog Productions, acquired by Electronic Arts in 1995, and Lionhead Studios, which Microsoft purchased in 2006. Molyneux continued his success as an executive at Microsoft, helming the popular Fable series of role-playing games and rising to become creative director of the company’s European game studios. By the time he hit his early fifties, Molyneux seemed destined to spend the remainder of his career in comfort and security.

And yet, by the middle of 2011, Molyneux was in a funk. Working at Microsoft was almost too comfortable; he missed the risk-it-all adventure of running a startup. Instead of getting his hands dirty building games, he was spending all of his time on flights to Redmond and worrying about office politics. He feared that his best work was behind him; Fable III, his latest release, had garnered some scathing reviews.

Then there was the crushingly disappointing fate of Milo, a Kinect game based on another of Molyneux’s head-exploding ideas. His son, Lucas, had recently turned 4. It got Molyneux thinking: What if you could create a virtual boy so lifelike that players formed a genuine emotional connection with him? Over the course of 18 months, Molyneux’s team built a digital child that players could interact with and train. If a player yelled, Milo would cower in fear; if the player offered encouragement, the boy would come out of his shell. Players could teach Milo to skip stones or console him after an argument with his parents. Molyneux demonstrated the game at a 2010 TEDGlobal talk in Oxford, boasting that his team had managed to “create a real, living being in a computer.” But Microsoft executives weren’t as enthusiastic—they thought the concept was too off-the-wall to be commercial. (Some members of the Milo team also report that the game was glitchy.) Microsoft discontinued the project not long after.

Molyneux took the news hard. He had developed a Gepetto-like paternal bond with Milo, who was modeled, after all, on his own son. From his perspective, shutting down the project was the emotional equivalent of the scene in 2001 where Dave unplugs HAL—or even infanticide.

- Have you ever played a racing game and wanted to play as the road rather than the cars? I know I
have …

The Milo debacle also gave ammunition to Molyneux’s growing number of critics. This wasn’t the first time his outsize ambitions had left him unable to deliver on a promise. The problems began in 2002, when he was developing the first installment of the Fable series. Molyneux rhapsodized to the gaming press about the unparalleled freedom players would enjoy. They could do anything they wanted! Get married! Have kids! Plant an acorn that grows into an oak over the course of the game! But when it was released, Fable had none of those features; it felt more like a standard RPG than a vibrant alternate universe. Disgruntled fanboys pounced. After weeks of scathing online criticism, Molyneux posted an open letter online pledging not to make any more promises he couldn’t keep.

Ironically, even that proved to be a promise he couldn’t keep. In the buildup to every new release, Molyneux would admit to overhyping his previous game while making lofty claims for the next one. Before the release of Fable II in 2008, he confessed that Fable had “some mechanics in there that just didn’t work” and advised everyone to “skip it,” while promising that the latest game would make players actually experience love, thanks to a new canine sidekick. Two years later, he confessed that Fable II was filled with “schoolboy errors” that made him want to “stand in front of a mirror and punch myself in the face,” while lauding the uniquely engaging story line in his forthcoming Fable III. A year later, he admitted that Fable III “wasn’t quite up-to-date” but assured his fans that any future addition to the franchise would “stand head and shoulders with anybody else out there—the best of the best—in terms of its technology, its drama, and its storytelling.”

Frustrated gamers poured on the vitriol. Last year an epic 25-minute YouTube screed entitled “SCREW Peter Molyneux” dubbed him “king of liars.” The griping became so widespread that when you typed his name into Google’s search engine, autofill suggested “peter molyneux lies.” Within the industry, Molyneux was still highly respected—a legend, even. But in some gaming circles, he had become a punch line.

Molyneux couldn’t fault the critics. They had a point. He too considered each release something of a letdown. For Molyneux, starting work on a new project was like stepping onto a stone outcrop, looking out over a blanket of fog, and waiting for the mist to clear and reveal what was lying underneath. He couldn’t stop himself from conjuring up the most tantalizing possibilities—the equivalent of finding himself atop a mountain, a lush landscape rolling beneath him. And so every time the fog lifted, he couldn’t help but be a little disappointed. Now, at the presumed twilight of his career, it seemed as though he’d never get a chance to create a game that was worthy of his dreams.

There was at least one person who seemed to understand his frustration. In the summer of 2011, Microsoft’s PR department alerted Molyneux to @PeterMolydeux, a satirical Twitter feed that parodied his public persona. At first Molyneux found the feed annoying; @PeterMolydeux was a pathetic character. His shtick was to spout overheated, ridiculous game ideas that could never get made. One tweet described a Kinect game that required players to cry before they could pass through a gate. Another posited a racing game in which you controlled the road instead of the cars. But over time Molyneux found himself drawn to his online impersonator. The ideas were silly, yes, but they were also oddly compelling. It was clear that whoever was coming up with these concepts had to be awfully clever:

Online sidescrolling co-op 8 player game where each person controls a leg of an octopus. Each leg can attach guns which the player can fire.

War game where at the end you walk through a graveyard looking at each and every headstone of those you killed followed with 1 minute of silence.

3D adventure game where you have amnesia and wake up in a gigantic museum where every room is devoted to a year of your life.

Games of Peter Molyneux

- Virtual boy from Peter Molyneux’s canceled Milo.

- His open-ended role-playing game Fable III (2010).

- The building and management sim Theme Park (1994).

- The battle/strategy game Populous (1989), in which players control the map, not the troops.

- Screenshots: Microsoft; Electronic Arts

Molyneux had to admire @PeterMolydeux’s creativity. The updates were like messages from his younger self, reminding him of the excitement and energy he used to feel when he was building something the world had never seen before. Those tweets formed a chorus with the niggling voice inside his own head urging him to take just one more shot, to try one last time to make a game that could live up to his mad visions.

On March 7, 2012, Molyneux announced that he was leaving Microsoft to start an independent game company called 22Cans. The news came as a shock to many. At Microsoft he had 150 people working on his games. Now he was investing “substantial amounts” of his own money to work long hours with a team of about 20. One online wit suggested the company’s name was a “reference to the amount of beer he consumed on the night he decided to go it alone.”

But @PeterMolydeux seemed to get it. On the day Molyneux announced his resignation, his doppelgänger posted a celebratory tweet: I’m freeeeee! Microsoft’s PR department had always dissuaded Molyneux from contacting the mystery tweeter, but now he could do whatever he wanted. Within minutes he had composed his reply: @PeterMolydeux yes we are.

Adam Capone, the man behind @PeterMolydeux, fell in love with Molyneux’s games when he first played Theme Park as a child. While most games locked you into a precise series of actions, Theme Park took an open-ended approach—players could try to maximize profits or just build an unstable roller coaster and watch cars fly off the track. Over the years, Capone remained vaguely aware of Molyneux’s career. He knew that Molyneux had a reputation for overpromising, but he was always more won over by the game designer’s ambitions than annoyed at his failure to accomplish them. “When he made the comment that Fable II would have a dog that would make you cry, I was just so enamored of that,” Capone says. “I could see what he was trying to do.”

A game artist himself, Capone wished that more developers had the guts to overreach as spectacularly as Molyneux did. As budgets skyrocketed—it now costs tens of millions to produce a major title—mainstream developers grew timid, afraid to venture outside genre conventions that had become as rigidly defined as a Hollywood rom-com’s, often revolving around the identical sort of immaculately rendered violence.

Although he’d never met Molyneux, Capone began to see him as a tragicomic character, forever coming up with outlandish game concepts that were met with apathy or downright hostility. “I imagined him going through the supermarket with a digital recorder and coming up with ideas while shopping,” Capone says. “And over dinner, he’s rearranging his peas and saying. ‘Is this giving me a game idea?’ And his wife is saying, ‘Shut up, Peter. Just eat your food.’”

On June 11, 2009, Capone set up his parody Twitter account. He was soon posting several game ideas a week:

Imagine carrying a radioactive baby in a pitch black environment, your baby would act as a torch. Rocking the baby intensifies the glow etc.

I also love the idea of playing a character who is PRETENDING to be blind, so you have to keep bumping into things to not arouse suspicion.

How about a game where you get to be a mother-in-law who bullies your son’s young wife? The aim is to have her thrown out within x months.

It took a couple of years for the gaming press to catch on to what Capone was up to, but when they did they became fans. Journalists like Gamasutra’s Leigh Alexander and GiantBomb’s Alex Navarro began retweeting some of his posts. Sites like Kotaku and GameSetWatch also ran coverage of the mysterious online figure, who maintained his anonymity in the press. The exposure helped @PeterMolydeux hit 23,000 followers by the end of 2011. And gamer cognoscenti weren’t reading it just as a cruel joke at Molyneux’s expense; @PeterMolydeux was becoming an outlet for the widespread dissatisfaction within the industry, a voice for the thousands of developers who had grown tired of the limitations of mainstream gaming. If anything, the Twitter feed gave some followers more respect for Molyneux.

- You live in a little house made of guns. You need many guns to fight invaders but you also need to keep a roof on top of your many children.

In early March, just after Molyneux left Microsoft, a San Francisco game developer named Anna Kipnis posted a portentous tweet: Has there already been an indie game jam where each team picks an idea from @PeterMolydeux and goes for it? It needs to happen. (Game jams are informal gatherings where teams of developers race to create entire games in a weekend.) Within minutes, some of her followers in the indie-gaming community had volunteered to help organize such an event. A few hours later, Kipnis’ message had been retweeted dozens of times. Capone gave it his blessing with an @PeterMolydeux tweet: If anyone ever wanted to base a serious gamejam on my world changing designs, I would give it my blessing and support. The organizers found a free space in San Francisco and began putting together a jam called What Would Molydeux? But it quickly became clear that the outpouring of interest couldn’t be contained to one location. Soon the organizers were helping to set up sister jams around the world—New York City, Melbourne, the Netherlands.

Capone kept his distance from the events, but he did help out with a promotional video, complete with a sweeping operatic score and title cards that framed the jam in typically overheated terms. “It is time for us to come together and reclaim creativity from the oppressors,” the captions announced. “The time for emotional games is now.” At the end of the video, dozens of tiny green pixels flew into a series of office buildings—presumably the headquarters of big- budget game developers—smashing them to rubble.

On March 30, about 1,000 participants showed up for 32 jams all over the globe. The attendees included gamer celebrities—David Hellman, who provided the artwork for indie hit Braid, dropped in on the San Francisco jam—as well as absolute novices who had never worked on a game before. The organizers set up a live videofeed so anyone who was unable to attend could follow along; at its busiest, it pulled in 60,000 viewers.

Around 7 pm, the London jam was treated to a special keynote—from Peter Molyneux himself. He had eagerly followed the development of the event, now dubbed Molyjam, since Capone first tweeted about it, seeing it as a kind of cosmic confirmation of his decision to leave Microsoft. He had toyed with the idea of joining the jam, but he had too much on his plate, what with transitioning out of his old job and building a new company. Still, he was pleased to take the stage and say a few words. Throughout most of his career, he had been a model of diplomacy, but the revolutionary fervor of the event appeared to have roused his inner Howard Beale.

- I want to make a game in space. Not set in space, I mean actually develop a game in space.

“Personally, I’m just a bit bored,” he said. “Bored of all the same pap that’s been popped out year after year after year. What we need is innovation, and we need to come together and do crazy things, whether they be radioactive babies or blind men walking into lampposts—I don’t care what it is. That’s what the world wants from us.” It was a debatable assertion, but Molyneux powered through it. “Now let’s go and do it!” he concluded, and the room erupted in applause.

The appearance cemented Molyneux’s new reputation as patron saint of the indie-game movement. Just weeks earlier, Molyneux had been eagerly promoting the forthcoming Fable installment; now he was railing against the small-mindedness of the entire videogame industry. If you closed your eyes, it was hard to tell who was speaking: Molyneux or Molydeux?

Forty-eight hours later, the Molyjammers had created about 300 games. In Coo, a pigeon presents suicidal businesspeople with emotionally charged objects in an effort to dissuade them from killing themselves. In Unbearable, a bear runs out of oxygen unless it hugs someone every few seconds—usually crushing them in the process. Cody and Kari Raos Clark, a husband-and-wife team who had never designed a videogame, made Secret Dad, a poignant game about a divorced father who must help his estranged family while evading their notice.

But while the games were funny and some even fun, most weren’t exactly revolutionary. They tended to wrap rote mechanics—catching objects, dodging enemies, beating a timer—in an eccentric skin. Capone estimates that in the end only about 15 games were “really interesting.” That’s not a bad ratio, especially when you consider that the purpose of Molyjam wasn’t to produce a bunch of great games but to celebrate the creative act itself. Still, in a game jam inspired by Molyneux, the most Molyneuxian touch may have been the sense that when the fog lifted, the results fell somewhat short of all the impossibly overblown rhetoric.

On an overcast July afternoon, Peter Molyneux is eating lunch with his family in his stately home just outside of Guildford. The house, like Molyneux himself, is an appealing mix of British tradition and contemporary wit—a renovated stone manor with an English garden out back and a life-size model of a Doctor Who Dalek in the basement. Molyneux is dressed in a short-sleeved polo shirt and jeans. He is joined by his wife, Emma, and their moppet of a son, Lucas. When Molyneux left Microsoft, he made a commitment to reserve the weekends for his family. By all accounts that seems to be working.

- What if your body is essentially a hourglass? Intense acrobatic game where you have to make sure sand is always falling and never stops.

“He was happy at Microsoft, but I can see now he’s happier,” Emma says. “I think it’s obvious that he’s doing more of the creative stuff that he wants to do.”

“It’s a little scary, in part because you don’t have people around you to tell you when you’re doing silly or stupid things,” Molyneux says. “And also, going out into the world and saying, ‘I’m going to make a game that has 100 million DAUs’—that’s scary.”

“Are you saying that?” Emma laughs. “Oh my God.”

DAU stands for daily active users, and this is Molyneux’s latest dream: a game that will be played every day by 1.4 percent of the world’s population. (For reference, all of Zynga’s games—from FarmVille to Draw Something—together pulled in a grand total of 72 million DAUs in July.) Molyneux says that he was motivated to build the game when he realized we had entered a new gaming era, in which an audience of several million hardcore PC and console gamers had given way to hundreds of millions of casual gamers tapping away on their smartphones. It’s also a more dynamic age: Every one of Molyneux’s games has been sold as a shrink-wrapped product, but now companies like Zynga use player feedback and advanced analytics to further refine and tweak their offerings postrelease.

Beyond those general details, Molyneux is uncharacteristically tight-lipped about the game. When I press for more information, his eyes get a devilish glint.

“Well, you do know what I’ve got planned,” he says.

“I do?” I respond.

“Very simply, I’ve spent the past 20 years designing it. You could guess—you could almost guess—the sort of game I’m making.”

“Now there’s a challenge,” Emma chimes in.

“It’s going to be a world, isn’t it?” Molyneux continues. “There’s going to be something to do with life and artificial intelligence and simulation, that’s for sure. And it’s going to embrace this new creative world that we’re entering now. And it’s going to be more a hobby than it is a game. And you put all those things together …”

“And there it is!” Emma concludes, the mystery no further illuminated. “Do you want more coffee?”

Molyneux is working toward releasing the game—which he has said will be “the greatest game I’ve ever made”—in the near future. In the meantime, the 22Cans team is building out a series of experiments that will inform the final product. They’re working on the first one now, a free game—initially for iPhone and iPad but eventually playable on Android devices and in web browsers—called Curiosity. The idea is so absurdly high-concept that it might have been spawned from an @PeterMolydeux tweet: The whole world collectively chips away at a giant box, and only the player who opens it gets to discover the secret inside. Here’s the long version: Players tap their screens to knock pieces off a giant cube. They can buy chisels to make themselves more powerful, blasting away bigger chunks of cube with each tap. As the outer shell of the cube disappears, it reveals another surface beneath it. The process continues until the players reach the cube’s innermost layer. Only one player will strike the final blow, uncovering a secret that will be revealed to that player alone. Meanwhile, Molyneux’s team will be collecting data every step of the way. What are the most effective techniques for motivating people to tap? How long will it take people to break all 60-billion-plus miniboxes that make up the cube? How does the victor go about sharing the news of what’s inside?

- Online sidescrolling co-op 8 player game where each person controls a leg of a octopus. Each leg can attach guns which the player can fire.

Molyneux hasn’t told anyone what’s in the cube—not his wife, not his son, not even his coworkers. Instead, he has described the secret in vague terms that sound uncomfortably familiar. “What is inside the cube is life-changingly amazing by any definition,” he assures me. “That’s all I’m going to say.” In Molyneux’s vision, the question of what’s inside becomes a global obsession—he fantasizes that, on the day the cube is finally opened, the revelation of its contents will lead nightly newscasts around the world.

Unsurprisingly, Molyneux’s legion of online critics have leapt on this as yet another example of overpromising. “If you told me that what’s actually inside the cube is a gigantic picture of Molyneux’s scrotum, I would believe it,” one commenter remarked. “It wouldn’t be very different from what this man has done before. Just more direct.”

Even within his own home, Molyneux faces some doubt. “I don’t know what’s in there that would be worth it,” says Emma, who routinely plays the role of cheery skeptic to her husband’s unquenchable optimist. “Peter says it is, but it’s hard to believe.”

“Maybe it’s just friendship inside the cube,” Lucas offers. “Just the word friendship.”

“Well, that would be a disappointment to a lot of people,” Emma says. Across the table, Molyneux smiles cryptically.

Capone, who has followed the development of Curiosity from afar, acknowledges that Molyneux may again be promising more than he can possibly deliver. “But I love that,” he says, “because it gets people curious. (Capone has posted his own satirically overblown Molydeux videos promoting the game. One promises that “the events of the world will come to a halt” and the discovery “will make the God particle seem smaller than an atom.”)

At the time of my visit, Curiosity was scheduled to launch on August 22. By the time this article went to press, that date had been pushed to October. (The name had also been adjusted to avoid confusion with the rakish Mars rover. It’s now called Curiosity—What’s Inside the Cube?) Perhaps by the time you read this, the game will have already become an international phenomenon, with tens of millions of people tapping away at the cube’s surface. It’s possible that the cube will have even been opened by now, that its secrets will have captivated the planet and shown up on the nightly news, that its contents will have proven to be as world-altering as Molyneux promised.

- A game where if you touch the floor you die. The only way to progress is to kill enemies and use their bodies as platforms.

Of course, there are plenty of reasons to think that’s not what’s going to happen—but good luck convincing Molyneux of that. And to those who suggest he might want to temper his expectations, to tone down the enthusiasm, he responds that they’re looking at the wrong side of the equation. “I don’t want to believe less in something,” he says. “I want to make something that is worthy of the emotion behind it.”

For the time being, Molyneux’s team is still building out some features. A few hours after we have lunch with his family, the game designer and I are at 22Cans, a 600-square-foot unit in a 70-acre office complex near a cramped roundabout. In case anyone forgets his mission, Molyneux has posted printouts every 5 feet around the perimeter of the office that read, “100,000,000 DAUs in 32 months.” CTO Tim Rance gathers the entire staff around his computer for a demonstration. While the idea behind Curiosity is simple, the technological infrastructure is tricky—22Cans needs to find a way to let potentially millions of people see the same dynamic object at the exact same time. When one player smashes a cubelet, it needs to disappear on the screen of every other player around the world at just that moment.

Rance pulls up the latest build. A bright white room fills the screen of his iMac, a dark gray cube floating in its center. As he zooms in, the object reveals itself to be massive—it is only by magnifying the cube about 800 times that we begin to see the millions of minicubes that make up its surface. Rance queues up thousands of bots, algorithms that each mimic a single player chipping at the cube, so we can get a sense of what the game will look like when it goes live. But we can’t see anything; the surface of the cube is too vast. Rance jacks up the power, but the cube remains opaque. It’s only when he pumps up his algorithms even further—the equivalent of 30,000 people clicking four times a second—that we can begin to see the vanishing blocks. They start as freckles, dotting the cube’s outer shell, then expand into clusters. Soon whole sheets of the surface begin to disappear. It’s the simulation of a dream, of tens of thousands of players all feverishly clicking away at Molyneux’s creation, racing to unearth the promised treasure he has buried within. Team members gasp as they watch the layers melt away. Molyneux leans forward in his chair and squints. It looks to him like fog clearing.

Jason Tanz (jason_tanz@wired.com) is Wired’s New York editor. He wrote about Cow Clicker in issue 20.01.

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One woman’s battle against the anxious masculinity of the fighting-games scene - Videogames

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One woman’s battle against the anxious masculinity of the fighting-games scene

A Challenger Appears
By MADDY MYERS  |  October 16, 2012

Game Underground
You can’t get real Street Fighter skills if you play by yourself. Same goes for Marvel vs. Capcom, or Mortal Kombat, or any fighting game. You have to leave your house. You have to lose, hundreds of times, to better players. You have to learn why they win before you can do the same. You have to go to Fight Night.

Arcades are dead, but the fighting-games community has straggled on without them, via gaming meet-ups in stores, bars, and basements.

I first went to a fight night at a store in Framingham called Game Underground a couple of years ago. Actually, I guess my first fight nights went down at arcades in my elementary school years … and never stopped. I’ve been gaming across all the genres, from Counter-Strike to StarCraft to Diablo, for what feels like forever, and I’ve been writing about games professionally for five years. But I’ve never felt good enough at any one game to compete in a tournament. I can usually beat my friends at fighting games in particular, though. So I feel ready to get schooled by a more experienced set.

GU still hosts fight nights every Tuesday and Friday night, so I go back on a recent Friday. I walk down into the windowless basement, armed only with a five-dollar bill and a chip on my shoulder. I hand the cashier my money. He looks confused.

“It’s five dollars, right?” I say.

He pauses. “For Fight Night … ?”

No, for tampons. What else?

I am a woman. The only woman in a basement of 25 guys. No ladies descending the stairs with a joystick in hand. Not even a bored girlfriend retrieving a McDonald’s cheeseburger for her sweetheart. I’m on my own in here. And I’m about to invite a room full of strange men to kick my virtual ass.

I see a few backs stiffen with discomfort and a few hard looks in my direction as I turn from the cash register and walk toward the circle of TV screens. Women don’t come and play fighting games here. It. Just. Doesn’t. Happen. The guys are confused. They’re uncomfortable. But I promise you, no one is more uncomfortable than I am.

Nearly everyone has arcade sticks with them, except for me. Take that metaphor and run with it. And right now, I miss my old arcade stick more than ever; I gave it away after my ex-boyfriend moved out and took the PS3 with him. Instead, I’ve been practicing with an Xbox controller all week, and I’ll just have to make do with one of those tonight.

I see a bearded guy with a controller in hand — the only other person without a stick.

“Where’d you get the controller?” I ask him. He either doesn’t hear me or ignores me.

“Oh, you didn’t bring a controller?” someone else pipes up.

“Last time I was here, I used the game-store ones,” I mumble.

“When was that?”

“I don’t know. A couple years ago.” I’m not just a newbie — I’m also a misinformed, out-of-date newbie. Great.

Someone hands me a controller. I clutch it and watch Controller Guy playing Ultimate Marvel vs. Capcom 3. He’s losing. He’s not happy. He grunts about unfairness.

His opponent doesn’t rise to the trash-talking and just keeps his mind and fast-tapping fingers on the game. He’s been on a lucky streak all night (or so the surrounding players say), and he’s not backing down now. After the two guys play what feels like 200 matches, someone asks me if I have next game. I say yes, and realize I should’ve said that earlier.

If you don’t shout “Next!” every few matches, the guys gaming in front of you will try to sneak in more and more clicks of the old Rematch button. You might even have to grab a stranger’s shoulder and demand to cut in. You’ve got to be a jerk about it, because everybody else is going to be.

The longer I wait, the more convinced I become of my impending embarrassment. There’s no way I can win. But I’m here. And I have to try. This is the beginning. All heroes start out at rock bottom. Cue Rocky theme.

1  |  2  |  3  |  4  |  5  |   next >
Topics: Videogames , fighting, gaming, Street Fighter,  More

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A Slave Obeys « Electron Dance

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16Oct/1224

A Slave Obeys

Arkane Studios’ Dishonored skidded onto the scene last week, a game that echoes Looking Glass Studios’ seminal Thief although sports skill upgrades a la Deus Ex. Inevitably there was both great praise (“awesome”) and great disappointment (“short”).

Over on Minnesota Daily, Simon Benarroch wrote how Dishonored lets us down because it doesn’t encourage the player to take advantage of all the skills and items on offer. An interesting argument in itself, one I’ve considered before with other games; what good are all these wonderful toys if players do not use them?

But Benarroch then confuses the situation:

It wanted so badly for you to have all the options all the time that you never really had to stop and think. Because you can do everything exactly the way you want to, it becomes clear once again that you aren’t really creating your own narrative, but playing someone else’s.

Blink, blink.

Because you can play exactly the way you want to, you aren’t creating your own narrative.

I’ve spent five hours on Dishonored so far and only just started the second mission of the game. I’m being Thief-style thorough and will definitely not finish in the standard ten hours, a figure derided as “too short”. So I admit I’m not approaching this topic from the perspective of experience.

Nonetheless, my reaction to Benarroch’s essay was this: What?

Meanwhile in psychology

In 2004, psychologist Barry Schwartz published a book called “The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less” which argues that increasing choice makes us unhappy. First, more choice makes for burdensome decisions; I’ve seen many people go into a Starbucks saying they just want a coffee and have no desire to know what “skinny mocha with cream” means. Second, after making a decision, we are apt to second-guess ourselves, wondering if an alternative choice was the more optimal. Schwartz gave an entertaining TED talk on the subject in 2005.

The jury is still out evidence-wise but it is worth mentioning a research paper by Sheena Iyengar and Mark Lepper published in 2000, titled “When Choice is Demotivating: Can One Desire Too Much of a Good Thing?”. Iyengar and Lepper detailed an experiment in which they measured customer response while varying choice.

The research team set up a tasting booth to advertise a new brand of jams at a grocery store. The display would alternate each hour between a limited range of 6 products and an extensive range of 24. As might be expected, more people stopped at the booth when the extensive range was on show. But the startling result was that customers were ten times more likely to buy from the limited range than the extensive range.

As consumers, do we actually want choice? Or just the comfortable illusion of choice?

Neo talks to The Architect

When we talk about choices in games, we’re usually talking about chunky discrete decisions: dialogue choices in a decision tree; whether to avoid, stun or kill an opponent; continue or rage-quit. This makes for a narrow conversation.

A choice is any opportunity for input. Even nudging an avatar one pixel to the left is the player making a decision.

Sid Meier has said that a game is a series of interesting choices and his portfolio is stuffed full of works like Civilization whose decisions are analogue approximations, featuring a wide spectrum of action and consequence. Although experienced players of these games are familiar with context-specific strategies, it is impossible to reduce them to a simple decision tree.

RTS games also offer analogue choices such as resource allocation, site selection for infrastructure development and tactical decisions on how to repel and invade opponents. RTS developers are aware they have to tutorialize players towards understanding but I tend to find RTS games overwhelming as each new piece or upgrade or power multiplies the organisational complexity.

If I don’t keep playing on regular basis before reaching mastery, the embryonic rule-set in my head rots away and I eventually turn the game off for good. I can’t digest all that choice in one go. Actually, I’m often unhappy with my RTS performance when I seem to win by accident rather than through smart tactical play.

There’s always talk about having “real choices” in games and I’ve previously mused on how decisions can be made more potent by rendering consequences permanent or obfuscating cause and effect. But more players engage Minecraft and Bioshock rather than Dwarf Fortress, Armageddon Empires, Solium Infernum and Cart Life - games which are nothing but complex, nerve-wracking decisions. Bioshock even lampooned the idea of player autonomy with its Andrew Ryan showdown.

As players, do we actually want choice? Or just the comfortable illusion of choice?

A Man Chooses

But here’s the curious thing. Dishonored, at its heart, is a sandbox.

Choices, seen through the prism of a sandbox game, are a form of personal expression. Games like Minecraft and GTA III eschew education and invite the player to muck around. You are a sexy artist, the developer says, show me what you can do.

Dishonored hurls an enormous set of tools at players and asks them to play the way they want. Right now I’m a stealthy pacifist, reliving my Thief days… but I also want to play it again as a brutal assassin, who cares nothing for the blood he spills. This will make for two entirely different games.

The important choices are not to be found in the plot nor in the simplistic moral consequences echoed in the rat population. The important choices are the colours I apply to the canvas. This is artistic freedom, not the burdensome purchasing decisions that beleaguer the consumer.

Such is the reaction from some quarters, I can’t help but wonder whether the polished funnels of mainstream games have blunted the minds of some players. Have they spawned a generation who really believe that freedom is the enemy of choice?

That would be an awesome sound bite to end on but we’re overrun with a rampaging herd of elephants in the room. Consider the epic success of Dark Souls, which tortures the player with critical decisions at every turn. Consider the open world of Skyrim in which millions of players lost months of their lives.

But I reserve the right to be concerned. I mean, even Kill Screen piled in.

A man chooses…

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Reader, I Dated a Gamer: Discussions on Love, Sex, and Games

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Reader, I Dated a Gamer: Discussions on Love, Sex, and Games

An in depth look at gamer relationships by Cara Ellison.

by Gameranx Staff on 7th Oct, 2012

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Sex is a hybrid rhythm action and roleplaying game from the developers behind Fighting and Talking. You take control of one of two characters (though mods have enabled support for several more) and attempt to induce a paroxysm in your opponent through a mixture of theatre, gymnastics and button-mashing. (Most style guides suggest I mention the game in the first 50 words.)

I thought that sex was a game that everyone (over the age rating) could play. But since Date A Gamer has appeared on the scene, I’ve grown increasingly annoyed that this geek dating site (and many a male gamer) places an emphasis on a supposed power struggle between the sexes. There is no man geek: helpless, woman geek: powerful. There is only a constant state of people withholding or wanting sex from other people in an eternal dance totally incidental of gender. The reality is that we all want to do it with a certain person at a certain time, it just depends on whether that person returns those feelings of genital longing or whether they’d rather shag someone you regard as less interesting/hot/good at D&D on the bed you always thought you’d get to be on. (It is mostly the latter. Get used to it.)

But sometimes you roll a natural twenty. The first person I ever fell in love with, I was on the edge of seventeen. I was nerdier than anything, a lot thinner and less curvy than I am now, a lot less prone to hangovers but still with deliberately large nerd glasses. I had no writerly voice, I had no idea what oral sex was and I was fascinated by terrible Prima Strategy Guides: the first two probably stem from the last. There was something deeply romantic about the fact that both of our lives revolved around the sharp sounds of Counter Strike gunfire at 10am or the hum of the Splinter Cell: Pandora Tomorrow menu screen idling lazily in the dark, ignored. We built a Frankenstein’s monster of a PC together; our monstrous child outlasted our five year relationship by two years. I’m turning 27 on Friday and I still miss him (the guy not the computer), but he taught me that liking games is something that isn’t a substitute for life. Games can be your touchstone, but like in multiplayer mode, everything is enhanced by hearing the voice of someone else by your side to strike out with, have other off-the-track adventures with. And often, that voice tells you when you need it that you are a fuckhead.

What’s odd about the Date A Gamer site is that it suggests that women, and perhaps even non-geek men, think geek men to be a lesser species, unable to fend for themselves in social situations, or somehow encumbered with virginity. YOU HAVE LOOTED TOO FEW VAGINAS. YOU ARE ENCUMBERED. YOU MUST DROP SOME VIRGINITIES TO MOVE. (Virginity is totally irrelevant to anything, considering sex is a thing that is always new territory with every new partner anyway. I don’t expect anyone to be good at sex the first time with a new partner — including myself: everyone knows how different people are from each other, and how much every person’s sexual tastes differ. It’s like being in a new test chamber of Portal each time. You’ve got a rough idea that some things go in and out of stuff - but you’re not supposed to know what order or even what the hell that button does. Yeah. Chill the hell out. We’re all constant newbs in the bedroom.)

The thing is, everyone pretends like women aren’t out there trying to ask you out. We definitely, almost certainly are.

I have never regarded male gamers as being an undateable species. And yet, in these new videos John Walker so rightly raged against  male gamers are portrayed as being helpless idiots who are titillated at the slightest sight of…well… tits. This stereotyping has got to stop, mainstream. You sit there and tell a young boy who likes video games he is doomed to be estranged from women, and he will never talk to women. Women aren’t a mysterious thing. We are exactly the same as men but for some other silly biological parts. We have the same libido. We get just as lonely. We worry about social situations. We worry we aren’t good looking enough or cool enough; we worry about when to kiss you or whether we should be destroying that nice friendship we always had by daring to suggest we take our clothes off.

The thing is, everyone pretends like women aren’t out there trying to ask you out. We definitely, almost certainly are. The problem is we are just as shy as you and we bottle it just as much. It’s a geek standoff. I have actually seen two geeks pine over each other for months before I gulped down two whiskies and in a moment of absolute celibate rage told one that the other thought they were ‘pretty cool’. They got together in a glorious trainwreck of a relationship and I didn’t see them for months because they were having so much horizontal fun. They could have had it weeks before if they’d just said something. Anything.

All the men I have dated have been nerdy in their own right. They may not all have been into games, but they certainly had one thing going for them: that they were usually pretty smart. [Not all of them though — some of them didn’t call me the next day. — Ha!] Chicks dig Egon Spengler’s large cranium. This is not a traditionally-lauded Hot Thing. Well. It is hot. If you are crazy smart and like interesting things such as games, there’s a pretty large chance that some girl has the hots for you. You just have to leave the house and find her. That is literally the only thing you have to do. Talk and smile and be around people you like. Put that cranium on display, for Samus sake. And say something. Anything.

Of course it’s entirely possible for games to not be part of a healthy relationship - and that isn’t necessarily a reason to date someone — which is part of why Date A Gamer is misleading. It preys upon the idea that mutual obsessions are necessarily the basis of something real.

Maybe all these thoughts are unusual? Maybe my lady-geek point of view is nuts? I called up the only man who could tell me how it really is for the guys: the one and only Dr Nerdlove.

Dr Nerdlove was born on a podcast called League of Extremely Ordinary Gentlemen, in an episode based on Scott Pilgrim, where listeners could submit their dating problems and the podcasters could give their advice. At the time author and artist Harris O’Malley was the only single one and spent a lot of time in bars hooking up with ladies. On Valentine’s Day there were too many questions for him to answer. He found his calling: dating advice for guy nerds. The website Dr Nerdlove was born.

Cara: You’ve got a bit of a reputation for being a stud, so you’re definitely good poster boy for nerds [fluffles hair].

Dr Nerdlove: There is not a mistake that any nerd out there has made that I haven’t made a thousand times before - my dating life up to a certain point was just absolutely pathetic. I’ve tried my hardest to be just the nicest of the Nice Guys - I call it the “platonic backdoor friendship gambit”. And the one time it ever worked for me I really should have realised that something was wrong because I ended up in the worst, most toxic relationship I’ve ever had. But yeah, it was a lot of cases of really liking girls but having no idea how to get together with them and basing all my ideas on how romance worked and how i was supposed to get together with women mostly from pop culture - a long diet of romantic comedies and odd ideas picked up about chivalry and whatnot from fantasy novels and somehow I’m supposed to make this work in the real world. What ultimately happened was I had my ‘Batman moment’. I’d been coming off a couple of really bad breakups, one that really messed with my head, and I went to my brother’s wedding. One of my oldest and dearest friends - he’s a natural with women - he attracts women the way that mice are attracted to cheese.  …He looks like the lovechild of Rob Lowe and Hugh Grant.

Cara: Hot.

Dr Nerdlove: Yeah, I love him dearly and it was getting to the point I was going to throw acid in his face. But he and I ended up going head to head over the same girl, who was a guest at the wedding - and I lost badly. It was kind of humiliating. I ended up back in my room, crying, planning to use my tears as lube for jerking off. And it was really kind of what I call my ‘Batman moment’. Like ‘this will never happen again.’ I started…looking around and studying… looking at people who are good with women, and trying to backwards engineer it… why does this work? What is it about this that gets people’s attention? And a lot of things like… it’s not that women like assholes, it’s women like these traits that are associated with assholes: it’s like here’s what confidence looks like, and other little tricks like your body influencing your mind - like if you smile, your body will eventually make yourself feel happy, if you adopt confident body language you will eventually start feeling confident. Just a lot of studying like that. Going out and making a lot of mistakes.

Cara: Sometimes I think that geek men regard me as a mysterious creature to be studied though. It’s weird. Like I am different from them. I don’t feel different.

Dr Nerdlove: It’s like this weird sense of Othering. They’re intimidated by [women], so they avoid them, but at the same time they want to get with them, and there’s these conflicting natures, and then you get the ones that get really resentful of the fact that they are not getting the women they supposedly deserve. A lot of it’s just built up in the head and not realising that people are people.

Cara: Sometimes even when I am dating a lovely geek dude they are fucking terrified of doing something wrong, as if I’ll run away… They can just talk to me about it.

Dr Nerdlove: They’re really afraid. It’s like ‘I’ve got this thing, and it’s going great, and if I do something wrong, they’re gonna leave.’ Always feeling like you’re having to walk on eggshells because you had to work so hard to get there in the first place.

Cara: And even when they want to not date you, they have a huge amount of trouble telling you so. Sometimes they just avoid you. Pure and simple. No talking. Just running away.

Dr Nerdlove: Nerds are notoriously conflict averse. A lot of us come from backgrounds where we were bullied and we see: conflict is bad, we want to avoid that.

Cara: I read your site a lot and I’m always struck by all these nerd men who think they are somehow undesirable and the bottom of the pile when in fact I know a ton of nerd women who would give their WASD arm to date someone caring and interesting like them. There are all these women out there who are looking for exactly them. They go out of their way to impress women who hate video games when there are ones who love them right there.

Dr Nerdlove: A lot of it is absorbing their own mythology that the geek is the dateless virgin who is no good with women… when in reality lots of women are looking for nerdy intellectual guys. I mean, Joseph Gordon Levitt is the new sex symbol at the moment.

Cara: I always think male nerds have an unnecessary anxiety about their virginity too.

Dr Nerdlove: That’s a cultural thing. It’s that weird sexual double standard we have: it’s so prevalent that there’s even a TV trope - you know - A Man Is Not A Virgin, and it’s just this anxiety that guys feel, ‘Oh I’m supposed to have lost my virginity by X year and if I haven’t that means something’s wrong - I’ve missed my window.’

Cara: Men think that this is the thing that they are going to be judged by but I’m not sure I would ever care about it.

Dr Nerdlove: Everyone fetishises virginity, whether it’s something to be desired or something to be abhorred. Really when it comes right down to it - I mean there are physical differences - what with women and the hymen and all - but what it all comes down to… is a set of experiences you haven’t had yet.

Cara: That’s what’s really annoying about all this marketing for the Date A Gamer, Shag A Gamer stuff -

Dr Nerdlove: - Yeah I just read their press release - and holy crap is it insulting.

Cara: It is very insulting, and I think the stereotype is really damaging. Obviously it’s just a front for a shitty dating website though.

Dr Nerdlove: PCGamesN did a great expose of where it all came from [Steeeeeeeve!]. It’s a completely out of the box, prebuilt dating network, with a centralised pool of people, and that’s also how Date A Gamer or Date A Ginger (which is part of the site [Cara: Whaaaaaaat?!]) makes their money.

Cara: I hate how predatory it is. And it seemed from what Steve said about Shag A Gamer that it’s really hard to leave the subscription.

Dr Nerdlove: Yeah it’s like trying to get out of AOL back in the day.

Cara: So, I haven’t had that many negative experiences dating gamers, but maybe we should discuss some traits that might actually be undesirable in a single gamer?

Dr Nerdlove: The only undateable aspects of being a gamer is when that’s your life - when that’s all you do.

Cara: Oh lord yes.

Dr Nerdlove: You get home after school, after work, and you spend all your time in front of World of Warcraft, Modern Warfare, Mass Effect, whatever your gaming flavour is, and you just sit there and piss the day away.

[There’s also] the view that gaming is an exclusively male hobby and somehow that makes vagina disappear, when - I don’t remember the exact numbers - but WoW alone has a staggering, insane number of subscribers and they are not all dudes. I know people who have met their wives off of WoW.

The other problem with gaming culture - and it’s a problem with nerd culture in general - is that it’s become unabashedly male, and in a lot of ways kind of misogynistic. Not intentionally so, not out of maliciousness, but more out of ignorance than anything else. Just through the way women are portrayed: women are told constantly that your involvement in this is as a consumable object - you’re the player’s girlfriend or at the end of the game - the prize at the bottom of the box. And if you’re not that then you’re the sexy eye candy…

And the whole Miranda Pakodzi thing with Cross Assault - she was one of the better players on the team but she was constantly being harassed by her coach and just nobody was doing anything about it. And her coach came out and said ‘Calling women sluts and whores and threatening to rape them - that’s all part of gaming culture - you can’t take that away from us!’ - because whenever you bring up the idea that maybe gamer culture is a little sexist, a little misogynist - maybe you should tone down calling people whore and threatening to rape them… They all freak out about it. …Can’t we do this without calling people ‘fag’ every five seconds or racial slurs?

Cara: Indulgence in those habits are off-putting  to women, yeah. Sometimes I feel like I’ve been so absorbed into this culture that it is taking you to point out to me how bad it is to normalize this behaviour. [Though I guess I did once play Heroes of Newerth and get annoyed.] As for traits that might be desirable in gamers, these days the geek inherits the earth… You make a heck of a lot more money doing something nerdy than you would doing something else, so these days it’s the geeks and not the jocks that hold all the power, and power and ambition is as attractive in a man as it is in a woman.

Dr Nerdlove: Now you’ve got the glory days where the jocks are working at a used car lot and all the nerds are going on to invent Facebook. We create the summer blockbusters.

Cara: Do you get a lot of guys who ask for advice on how to meet nerdy women?

Dr Nerdlove: Yeah, all the time. I get a lot of questions about how to talk to women and still be a nerd. It’s just that you don’t roll out being a nerd like it’s a problem. Just be able to have a normal conversation about topics beyond your narrow scope of interests. For the longest time the only thing I wanted to talk about was anime and comic books and video games - “Wait, why are you walking away?” At the time that’s all I cared about. I wasn’t really going out having an interesting life.

Cara: You focus on advice for men, but do you get a lot of emails from women?

Dr Nerdlove [slightly smugly]: I do. The site focuses mainly on men because there are more resources out there for women. Women are socialised to talk about their dating lives - there’s entire industries out there dedicated to helping women get better - books, magazines (bad ones like Cosmo), TV shows, whereas with guys you’re taught that if you’re not good with women, then you’re a loser and there’s nothing you can do about it. But worse if you admit that you’re not good with women, then you’re an even bigger loser. And this really seems to be the only area where guys are told that this is a binary thing - you’re good with women or not good with women. You don’t really see men saying at basketball, “Oh man you’re not good a basketball, why are you practicing?”

Cara: There’s a binary thing that goes on with women as well where we’re told by cultural discourse that we are either attractive looking, or not attractive looking and the latter means no deal. We’re often treated like inert objects that men examine rather than talk to as an equal, so we’re never really encouraged to approach a man - which I guess must add to the pain of being a shy nerd guy.

Dr Nerdlove: It’s all entice them to come to you, rather than go and ask them.

Cara: Exactly.

Dr Nerdlove: Women are taught to put others’ concerns and feelings over their own. Don’t get too confrontational about something or too assertive about something or you might hurt a guy’s feelings. …But as women are writing in more, I tailor more information specifically to them and a couple of times, information that applies regardless of gender. …Women ask me a lot of the same questions guys do, like… what do I do on this date or why doesn’t this dude call me back.  The one thing I get really often is ‘Why do guys find me intimidating and what can I do about that?’

Cara: Oh. Hey. I’ve never said that before.

Dr Nerdlove: It’s one of the cases where you say, ‘well, why are they finding you intimidating?’ ‘Because I’m smart and assertive.’ Well you have two choices: you can either pretend to be less assertive and less intelligent, or you could keep looking for guys who are able to handle smart and intelligent women. That can be a hard answer, because it’s a lot of, ‘Yeah it’s gonna suck. HANG IN THERE.’  [Aw man.] I think it’s starting to change, I think men are really starting to appreciate the equality of the sexes more, and I think pop culture is starting to lead the way there - Buffy, Katniss. Women can be the heroes, women can save their own ass.

Cara: I still find that rare in video games. We have Lara who is really for men, and Jade from Beyond Good and Evil at a pinch. I did like Bayonetta though.

Do you ever get an email from some guy and an email from some girl and you just wanna hook them up?

Dr Nerdlove: I am actually really tempted by that, but I just see LAWSUIT [when it goes wrong].

Cara: What’s your most frequent question?

Dr Nerdlove: “I like this girl, how do I get her to go out with me?”

Cara: Hmm. I guess just ask. Do you have any questions for me…?

Dr Nerdlove [thinks, then comes up with the most comic book nerd question of all]: Um…. What’s Kieron Gillen like?

Cara: He is very popular with teenage boys.

Thank you for your time. At ease, Doc.

Header image credit: Bodies of Art Tumblr

Cara works in games production and is a regular contributor to RockPaperShotgun.com. You can find her on Twitter at @Carachan1

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Chris Donlan plays through L.A. Noire with his dad, who grew up in the city in the 1940s.

By Christian Donlan Published 17 October, 2012

Today, I’m going to tell you about the time my grandfather shot a man in the ass.

The year was 1949. The place was downtown Los Angeles. The occasion was a robbery with violence. A small store, I think: a tailor’s, or maybe a family-run grocery market? History has not recorded all of the details.

It’s recorded some of the details, though. “The guy was getting away,” my dad explained to me the other day. “He was running fast and he’d pulled a gun. In those days, in that city, when somebody pulled a gun on a cop, the cop had to pull a gun in return. The objective back then was that you had to shoot to kill. You never shot to wound.” Dad paused. Blinked. “But dad wouldn’t have been able to live with himself if he’d killed anybody. So dad shot this guy in the ass. He meant to shoot them in the ankle, I figure - nobody plans to shoot a guy in the ass. But he wasn’t as good a shot as he thought he was.”

Case closed, Donlan style. It was the only time my grandfather ever used his gun - and that’s just one of the things I learned playing L.A. Noire with my dad a few weeks back.

I don’t often play video games with dad. He hates games, actually, or at least that’s the schtick. In his mind, they’re just violence and noise, and they’re all variations on Call of Duty multiplayer. “I don’t like the opportunities that video games present for reclusive men,” he likes to say, just before he asks - for the fiftieth time - why I decided to grow a beard.

The reason I wanted to play L.A. Noire with my game-hating, beard-doubting dad, though, wasn’t just to show him how different games could be to the vision of them that he had in his head. It was also because I’d heard a lot about how authentic this particular game’s atmosphere was, and I wondered what somebody who grew up in L.A. in the 1940s would make of it. Rockstar’s open-world police procedural is set in 1947. Dad was born in 1943, and he spent his early years in Crenshaw, a district in the south-west of the city. (It’s close to where the body of the Black Dahlia was found.) Best of all, his dad was a beat cop - a beat cop who, as we’ve already discovered, once shot a guilty man in the ass. The game world was the world of dad’s childhood, then. Would he recognise it?

The cars are beautifully rendered, but do they have the right engine sounds?

Actually, and forgive a meandering aside, my grandfather was very briefly a semi-famous beat cop. In November, 1944, he caught a serial killer - okay, technically a spree killer - because he’d glimpsed his face while out on his patrol one morning, and then seen a mugshot of the guy back at the station. My grandfather - his name was Harry Edward Donlan, which isn’t a bad name for a cop - had a freakishly good visual memory: he’d glance at somebody and then they were locked in his mind forever. When the killer’s details were wired back to HQ, my grandfather told his lieutenant that he’d spotted the perp in a bar at Third and Hill, and could go and bag him right there and then - an easy win for the LAPD. The lieutenant assumed Sergeant Donlan was trying to knock off early to meet some floozy (grandpa had two non-grandma ladies on the go at the time: one named Peaches Puccivinelli, and another called Bubbles Bochivinski) so he quietly suggested that, if it was such a big deal, it could probably wait until lunchbreak came around.

Sergeant Donlan waited until his lunchbreak, and then he went back to the bar and brought the guy in. It was the killer all right, a fry cook named Otto Stephen Wilson. Sure, my grandfather didn’t do any of the investigation work, but he caught the guy drinking beer with a woman who would probably have become his third victim. “He used to dismember them and cannibalise them!” dad told me, cheerfully. Papers around the US ran the story, and one of them just printed a shot of my grandfather’s striking, rather stern face, staring straight at the camera. The paper called him Sergeant Harry “Deadeye” Donlan: The Cop With The Eyes That Never Forget. The case gets a fleeting mention in James Ellroy’s novel Silent Terror, too. True story.

Harry became a cop because he was canny but deeply untrusting - ‘watchful’ is the word my dad generally uses - and he had a subconscious need to be close to conflict. There was something dark at the secret centre of his personality; he was the kind of person who would wake up every morning and march up the side of a mountain just to pick a fight with rocks. The same was true of his two brothers, both of whom were also cops at one time or another. All three were, in their own little ways, criminals as well as police officers, mind you.

My great uncle Joe was a sharpshooter, for example, who was brought to L.A. because he could stand on the running board of a moving car and blast the rear-view mirror out of another moving car - I like to think that the people in the second car would be bank robbers rather than day-trippers, but with my family you can never be entirely sure. Joe left the force in semi-disgrace after trying to blackmail a city official using what was always referred to in our house as “a home-made honey trap”. I always pictured something with springs and dials and a little glass vial filled with bees, but I think he just hid in a motel wardrobe and popped out at an embarrassing moment. Surprise! It says a lot about the LAPD in the 1940s that a uniformed policeman being caught blackmailing people only led to semi-disgrace.

Harry? Harry wasn’t a blackmailer or anything like that, but, as my dad once said, “We did get a lot of bottles of whisky at Christmas.” Sergeant Donlan didn’t turn a blind eye to anything serious, but he would overlook small-scale stuff like parking violations and zoning infringements: he was getting in with his neighbours. “As police went at the time,” admitted his son, begrudgingly, “he was probably one of the better ones.”

Harry E. Donlan in the 1940s.

This isn’t quite as irrelevant and self-indulgent as it seems (although, sorry, it is largely irrelevant and self-indulgent). See, one of the things I like about L.A. Noire is how it captures this double nature of the LAPD: the fact that, although they’re chasing down perps and getting in wonky fist fights with swarthy men wearing rakish hats, you can never quite decide whether you’re siding with the good guys or not. Those “Hey! Join the Police Already!” advertisements you pass on the side of buildings as you head deeper into virtual Downtown can seem quietly sinister, quietly fascist. To use the parlance of the times, there’s something a little off about them - and there’s something a little off about the wider force, too. When I was a kid, I always assumed my grandfather was a hero - not least, most likely, because he would regularly tell me he was. When I got older, when I read James Ellroy and - even more damningly - Walter Mosley, I thought: “Ah.” I thought: “Hmmm.”

There’s a lot of ah and hmmm in L.A. Noire, but ambiguity’s not the game’s only strength. Another is the environment: miles of beautiful Angeleno real estate enjoying the quiet years before the Bonaventure landed. One of the reasons why dad and I spent an entire afternoon playing the game without even cracking the spine on Cole Phelps’ notebook, in fact, was because dad was in a nostalgic mood. We had a sweet car - a brand new ‘47 Ford with a V8 sound effect incorrectly applied to a six cylinder engine - and he really wanted to tool around for a bit, griping about the the wrong gear ratio noises, and hopefully finding the Richfield Tower.

Built by the Richfield Oil company in 1929, the tower was a glorious, gaudy, and yet somehow serious thing. Its black marble and gold leaf exterior hinted at the nature of the geysering fortune that built it, while a weird flattened spire stuck on top served as a reminder that, even as America lurched into the depression, it was willing to spend considerable amounts of cash on follies, just so long as they looked cool enough in the publicity pictures.

The Richfield Tower, now the site of the Arco Towers.

In the publicity pictures, the Richfield Tower looks like a cross between Liberace’s refrigerator and an over-engineered art deco tombstone, in fact. It was torn down in 1969, and my dad hadn’t seen it since 1961 when he left L.A. to become a priest. I wasn’t expecting to see it in the game, because I’d never heard anyone but him ever talking about it. I told dad we’d look for it, but I wasn’t optimistic.

I’ll never forget the moment we found it. Dad could just about remember the cross-streets - 6th and Flower - and I had a little trouble fiddling round in the game’s map to set a waypoint. Then we were off. On the drive, dad kept up a low-level muttering trail of recollections and fiercely specific critiques: the lamps on this bridge were right, but the large dumpsters in alleyways weren’t like anything he remembered seeing; a gas station’s Coke machine was just perfect, but little skirtings of exposed brickwork around the low walls of vacant lots ‘didn’t seem very Californian’; this was meant to be 1947? Why was that a 1950 Chevy, then? When we finally turned onto 6th, though, he suddenly stopped talking.

Like any son with a father in his late 60s, I assumed his sudden silence meant he was having a minor cardiac event. He wasn’t, however: he was simply back in the presence of a building he hadn’t seen in half a century.

We got out of the car and circled the mass of black marble. Dad didn’t say much for a minute or so, but I was astonished that this forgotten edifice had made the cut in Rockstar’s highly compressed take on Los Angeles. As landmarks go, it was long gone in real life, and in California, long gone generally means it’s also forgotten. It was never a world-famous edifice, like the bleached white sepulchre of City Hall that dwarfs the surrounding area in the game (in 2012, however, it looks quaint, cruelly hemmed in by glass and steel megastructures), and it wasn’t particularly chic, like the Public Library, the pyramid spire of which you can see briefly in the game’s opening credits. It’s the kind of building that wouldn’t really be missed, and yet here it was, and dad was visibly shaken.

We drove about for another hour or two after that, and by this point dad was hooked. Not hooked on L.A. Noire’s narrative, perhaps, or caught up in the complex chains of missions, but hooked on the city, on the fascinating, insightful job that Rockstar had done in stitching the past together. Even though I can’t actually drive, and the car we were in wasn’t a real car anyway, I had a strong sense that I was in the front seat, turning the wheel beneath my hands, and he was riding low in the back, face pressed to the glass. Role reversal. It happens to all fathers and sons eventually, I guess. Why shouldn’t it happen because of games?

We’re a family of family stories, and I thought L.A. Noire would trigger more of that kind of stuff. In the end, however, the whole experience was actually far more affecting, I think, and far more powerful, too. Dad just trailed off, really, lost in the texture of L.A. Noire, surfacing now and then to announce a car or a familiar sight. ‘40 Buick, ‘46 Olds, ‘39 Dodge. I remember that restaurant. Rialto? God, that place used to show all the old burlesque stuff. What’s the name on that oil pump?

At one moment, as dawn was breaking on the road to Hollywood, he suddenly leaned forward and shouted out “Willies!” and I said a silent prayer of thanks that I had my stepmother’s phone number on speed dial. It turned out he was actually saying, “Willys! You almost never see a Willys in old films! It’s a lesser make. Not so popular. They did the Willys jeeps for the war, and after that they went broke.”

So did my dad find L.A. Noire accurate? Intoxicatingly so, I suspect: he thought the streets were wider than he remembered, but he liked the way they were fairly dark, just like the underlit boulevards he knew when he was a kid. He liked the white painted boxes in the middle of the roads, where people would queue for the streetcars - even though he said that traffic used to slip around on the streetcar railings a lot more than they did in the game. The little details were the most affecting, though: the tyre-changing bay outside a gas station, or the wooden crate of bottles stacked next to a vending machine. The cop uniforms looked the way his dad’s had when he left for work in the morning. The diners had the right kind of window displays and lettering.

And even when he felt a detail was wrong, or not quite the way he remembered things personally, the inaccuracy was often quietly instructive. “A policeman driving a brand new Chrysler Town and Country is pretty unrealistic,” he said, seconds into the game’s opening cinematic. “Working for the city, he could never afford it.” Elsewhere, on a similar note, he baulked at the sheer number of cars tooling around the streets decked out in gleaming whitewalls. “In 1947, you almost never saw a whitewall,” he said. “Whitewall tyres were much more expensive than regular tyres, and city cars wouldn’t get them. No police cars had whitewalls at all, I think - they were purely for the most affluent. It was a real status thing, and they only became much more common later on. This is only just after the war, right? Whitewalls started coming in heavily around 1949, probably. Before then, they were, like, six bucks extra per tyre, and Los Angeles wasn’t going to pay for them.”

Lucky they didn’t have many TVs in those days - the glare through the blinds would be infuriating.

I was surprised by that. When I try and picture the 1940s, every car that drives through my sickly imagination has whitewalls, and when you find out why they didn’t, you actually end up learning something. It makes sense, I guess: you’d no more waste luxury on a cop car than you’d shoot a guy in the ass with a crystal bullet - and remember, my family knows a thing or two about shooting people in the ass. The point is that even the little details often open up the past in interesting ways, keying you into the class issues and the general hierarchy of the period. History is the big things, like the Richfield Tower, but it’s the tiny things, as well, like the trimmings on your ride.

In truth, I was surprised by L.A. Noire, too. It’s one of Rockstar’s most interesting games, but it can also feel like one of its frostiest - a period piece so meticulously put together that there doesn’t seem to be much room for the human element to fit in. Playing it with my dad made me realise that those very pains the team took to recreate the past is where the humanity of the whole production actually emerges, whether it’s all the hundreds of insignificant things the team got right, or all the dozens of insignificant things they got wrong. I just needed someone to show it all to me. Someone, like a good beat cop, who knew the territory and could tell me what was what. Someone who could truly appreciate the achievement.

A couple of weeks after we got together to play L.A. Noire, I asked dad to send me a few thoughts on what he’d seen. I expected a sentence or two, or maybe even one of his ludicrously dense text messages, often composed of a single sentence, fractured into complex inter-locking clauses. Instead, I got a neat little Word document titled ‘Virtual Return to Los Angeles’. Here’s what he wrote:

“Viewing L.A. Noire was an exciting and thoughtful experience. For a few hours I was able to re-explore the L.A. I knew in the late forties and early fifties with my son. The city was dark, but even with the period’s dim street lighting and within the slightly truncated map of the city, we were able to find our way around. The prizes for me were the Richfield Building, Angels Flight (located where it belonged next to the 3rd Street tunnel - it has since been relocated one block south) and the wonderful cars of the era. I was able to remember exactly how to get around from both the towering City Hall and the slightly uncomfortable space of Pershing Square. This seemed a refreshingly thoughtful-almost intellectual-scenario that I would not have expected in something called a game.

“The accuracy with which the city structures and roadways are recreated is really astounding, and the details were almost perfect! Minor faults would not be evident to most who did not live in the city at that time. For sure this was a real as well as a virtual return for me to that complex and dark city at that time.

“To be able to experience it again with my son who was born 20 years after I first left the city was, I think, wonderful for us both.”

Sincere apologies to everyone I’ve bored with stories of my grandfather over the years. I think I’m finally ready to move on.

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The XCOM: Enemy Unknown review that took 18 years to write

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Time travel has not yet been invented. But thirty years from now, it will have been. This will lead to a series of events that would take me all day to diagram with straws, and even then, trying to understand it would fry your brain like an egg. Suffice to say, time travel will allow me to write the following XCOM review with the help of a leading authority on all things X-Com: myself.

After the jump, I came across time for you, X-Com

2012 Tom: Hello, I’m Tom Chick. I’ve been playing videogames for as long as they’ve been around.

1994 Tom: And I’m Tom Chick, too. I’ve also been playing videogames for as long as they’ve been around.

2012 Tom: Well, they just haven’t been around as long for you.

1994 Tom: I don’t see what that has to do with anything.

2012 Tom: The games I play are more advanced.

1994 Tom: Excuse me?

2012 Tom: More advanced. The people who make them have had more time to figure out how to do it better.

1994 Tom: By more advanced, you mean they’re made to be more competitive with other forms of entertainment. They’re easier to get into, they’re more immediately gratifying. They’re flashier. They’re suited to playing in shorter bursts.

2012 Tom: How would you know?

1994 Tom: You had me play the XCOM remake.

2012 Tom: Well, you make it sound like those are bad things.

1994 Tom: I’m guessing games in 2012 are made to sell before they’re made to play. I’m guessing a lot of the games I play have no place in 2012. I love X-Com, Civilization, Red Baron, and even war games with CRTs. Do you even remember what CRT stands for?

2012 Tom: Do I remember what CRT stands for? Of course. Cathode ray tube. I still have some of those monitors in the garage.

1994 Tom: You so do not deserve an X-Com remake. You should really let me handle this review.

2012 Tom: No, because you’d just start out complaining about the hyphen and it would go into a nerdcore rabbit hole from there. Just be grateful that I’ve invited you into the future to play a game you won’t get to play for another 18 years. Besides, it’s not a remake. It’s an update, or an homage, or a reimagining. It’s its own thing.

1994 Tom: If it was its own thing, it wouldn’t be called XCOM. But it is called XCOM and it’s missing a lot of stuff from the original X-Com.

2012 Tom: That’s not necessarily a bad thing.

1994 Tom: Maybe. Maybe not. But a lot of the missing stuff is conspicuous for us X-Com fans. For instance, why aren’t there nighttime missions?

2012 Tom: Some of the missions are at night.

1994 Tom: Which isn’t the same thing. Nighttime missions have a whole other feel in the original X-Com. That was one of the few games that really appreciated darkness for what it is: a real pain in the ass when you need to see stuff. Remember F-19 Stealth Fighter? Flying at night?

2012 Tom: Wow, that takes me back.

1994 Tom: I bet flight sims are really cool in 2012.

2012 Tom: Well.

1994 Tom: I bet the dynamic campaigns are unlike anything I can imagine.

2012 Tom: That’s, uh, yeah. That’s one way to put it.

1994 Tom: I bet the flight models are amazingly realistic.

2012 Tom: Yeah, we’ll get into that another time. But these days, it takes an indie project like Day Z to really turn off the lights.

1994 Tom: Day Z? What’s that?

2012 Tom: It’s a zombie game.

1994 Tom: They made a whole game about zombies? Like, the whole game? Cool.

2012 Tom: Taking visibility away from the player is way too harsh. Just turn everything a little bluer and call it a night. If it’s good enough for movies, it’s good enough for games.

1994 Tom: That’s the kind of thinking that brought us all those full motion video CD-ROM games. But it’s not just the lack of meaningful nighttime. The missions overall have a whole other feel in the original X-Com. X-Com is like war. Long periods of boredom punctuated by moments of terror. I haven’t played them yet, but I know I’ll love games like Far Cry 2, Wind Waker, and Silent Hill when they come out.

2012 Tom: Hey, that’s dirty pool.

1994 Tom: I bet you’re still playing serious submarine sims.

2012 Tom: Lots of people didn’t like those games, and lots of people don’t need long stretches of boredom to punctuate their sheer moments of terror. Sometimes moments of sheer terror can be efficiently orchestrated.

1994 Tom: But you like it when that stuff happens organically. When the terror, when the action is all the more meaningful for the downtime.

2012 Tom: I do, but in 2012, I don’t necessarily need it. I don’t mind that this XCOM is densely packed with a certain number of aliens per screenful of map.

1994 Tom: There aren’t many screenfuls of these maps. Why are they so small? Why is there so little room to move? Why is it always so obvious which direction you have to go?

2012 Tom: It isn’t always. Some of the maps are bigger.

1994 Tom: Please. You played the original X-Com. You know what I’m saying. X-Com played out in large areas where you didn’t always have the luxury of putting your back to an inviolable map edge, much less the luxury of knowing where the aliens will be waiting for you. That uncertainty, that expanse, made X-Com X-Com.

2012 Tom: I have a feeling a lot of your reservations about this XCOM involve specific ideas about what made X-Com X-Com. I’d rather talk about what makes XCOM XCOM. The frequent discrete choices. The boardgameyness.

1994 Tom: Boardgameyness? What does that even mean? Like Monopoly?

2012 Tom: Like Shadow Watch.

1994 Tom: What’s that?

2012 Tom: Really, you don’t know Shadow Watch?

1994 Tom: Not for another six years.

2012 Tom: Well, you’re in for a treat. But in terms of gameplay, XCOM owes more to the great boardgames of the 21st century than to the original X-Com. This is a design about establishing simple rules and then breaking them. For instance, a soldier only gets to do two things a turn. Simple rule. But a heavy soldier with bullet swarm gets to fire before doing its two things, or an assault soldier with run-and-gun gets to move twice and then fire. Simple rule broken.

1994 Tom: Time units were better. You could do more things.

2012 Tom: More isn’t better. Has Sid Meier said that thing about good games being a series of interesting choices yet? Because this is that. Spending eight turns deciding who’s going to move next while you’re going down the street isn’t interesting. Why not compress that street, and those turns, into one important decision? Why not get down to brass tacks?

1994 Tom: You know what’s an interesting choice? Who’s going to get off the Sky Ranger first. The Sky Ranger isn’t even in this game.

2012 Tom: Yes it is.

1994 Tom: Just its butt. You have a big ol’ Sky Ranger butt at the corner of every map. That’s not a Sky Ranger. You walk around underneath a Sky Ranger. A Sky Ranger has wheels for you to hide behind. You jetpack up on top of a Sky Ranger to see better. A Sky Ranger has a ramp you come down.

2012 Tom: Yeah, like those boats that Tom Hanks came out of on D-Day. I do miss that.

1994 Tom: Tom Hanks was at D-Day?

2012 Tom: It’s a movie.

1994 Tom: That would make a cool videogame. How come no games have a D-Day level? Hey, did you get to the Sidonia level in XCOM?

2012 Tom: Wait, don’t tell me. That’s a spoiler.

1994 Tom: Didn’t you finish the game?

2012 Tom: Well.

1994 Tom: Did you get to the end?

2012 Tom: No. I got pretty far before my game was killed by a bug. Everything hanged during an alien activity phase. I hadn’t saved in over three hours.

1994 Tom: Ouch.

2012 Tom: Yeah. In that respect, it’s like the original X-Com. Do you people from 1994 even know about the difficulty bug yet?

1994 Tom: What difficulty bug?

2012 Tom: What difficulty level are you playing on?

1994 Tom: Veteran.

2012 Tom: Keep telling yourself that. But I didn’t really mind restarting XCOM. I’ve since gotten a couple more games going, but I’m trying to play on the harder difficulty level, which is so gratifying for how frustrating it can be. It’s a perfect expression of games as enjoyable frustration.

1994 Tom: I don’t like all this hoo-ha about satellites. And why does America have cheaper airplanes but South America is better at autopsies? That makes no sense.

2012 Tom: Games are inevitably about abstracting things. You play Civilization I and you have a problem with the continental bonuses in XCOM? How are those phalanxes doing against your battleships?

1994 Tom: Wait, you said Civilization I. There’s more than one Civilization in the future?

2012 Tom: I love the sleek strategic stuff. I love the sorts of decisions I have to make at the base. I love how well it creates a sense of tension from passing time at the base, how important events are always just a few days away, much more efficiently than the original game.

1994 Tom: So you haven’t gotten to the base assaults yet?

2012 Tom: The alien base assaults? Sure, I’ve gotten to those.

1994 Tom: No, I mean the XCOM base assault. You haven’t gotten to that yet? Where the aliens attack your base?

2012 Tom: No.

1994 Tom: Well guess what? You’re not going to. The aliens don’t assault your base in XCOM.

2012 Tom: That’s too bad. I love that idea that your home base isn’t as safe as you assume. I’m playing another game now called Cargo Commander, and it’s a great moment when you realize that aliens can get into your ship to attack you. You’re going to love that in a game called Fatal Frame 3 one day. But that makes sense in XCOM that they can’t attack your base. How are they going to attack a base from a side view?

1994 Tom: I know, right?

2012 Tom: I don’t mind the side view, though. I actually like it. It has a certain amount of charm. It looks like a Wes Anderson thing, like the cutaway of the ship in Life Aquatic.

1994 Tom: Who’s Wes Anderson?

2012 Tom: You and me come from such different worlds.

1994 Tom: Well, in my world, X-Com is way better than XCOM. I have serious problems with this fancy new version. I can see how the masses might like it. I can see how it would sell well. I can see how Microprose has sold out and you went right along with them. But there’s too much missing. There’s not enough of the essentials that made X-Com the game that it was. I’d give it two stars.

2012 Tom: Well, you don’t get to rate it. You can be a part of the review, but you can’t be a part of the final call.

1994 Tom: Why not?

2012 Tom: Because it’s not 1994 anymore. It’s 2012. This is a real shot of innovation and bold creativity and relevance in terms of bringing something older into the modern world of videogame design. As an example of game design in the year 2012, it’s inspired. Compare this to Dishonored, for example.

1994 Tom: What’s that?

2012 Tom: You know Thief?

1994 Tom: No.

2012 Tom: Well, Dishonored is like a game you haven’t played yet called Thief. And it still uses all the same tropes, from hoarding arrows, to creeping around vision cones, to navigating patrol paths. Dishonored might be a good game, but it acts as if the games we played in the 90s transplant just fine to the 2010s. Sometimes they don’t. XCOM knows that.

1994 Tom: I don’t believe you believe that. I don’t believe you think the games I love from this time — the games you loved — aren’t great in any time.

2012 Tom: It’s not just that. It’s more about how game design evolves, and changes, and adapts over time. You don’t know yet what’s going to happen to flight sims and strategy games and RPGs and RTSs.

1994 Tom: What are RTSs?

2012 Tom: Like Warcraft. Like Command and Conquer.

1994 Tom: What’s that?

2012 Tom: You have so much to learn. You don’t know yet how many kinds of games are going to go through a downward spiral of getting too detailed, too involved, too esoteric, of catering to increasingly vocal hardcore players like you and me. Yet all the while, publishers will need to see bigger returns on their investments, so they’ll realize they can’t cater to those people, to us. You don’t know yet what we’re going to do to videogames. Entire genres will all but vanish. You’re going to have a tough time of it.

1994 Tom: Well, as long as id keeps making great games. I’ve been playing a lot of Doom II. Imagine X-Com as a Doom II style game. I hope someone in the future thinks that up.

2012 Tom: Which reminds me that you don’t know yet how lucky you are that a developer plucked a game from your time and decided to update it to my time. Besides, if you want the original X-Com experience in 2012, you can still set up an emulator to play the original X-Com. Or you can play a really good clone on the iPad called Aliens vs Humans.

1994 Tom: What’s an Eye Pad?

2012 Tom: You don’t want to know. Your life will be 18 years of sheer hell waiting for it to be invented.

1994 Tom: Come on, tell me.

2012 Tom: You know the Gameboy?

1994 Tom: Yeah.

2012 Tom: It’s like that.

1994 Tom: Oh.

2012 Tom: Look. In six years, you’re going to write an article for IGN in which you list the four things that made X-Com great. You don’t know what they’re going to be yet, so I’ll tell you. One, the sense of attachment to your troops. Write this down. Two, the way the gameplay unfolds in the campaign. Three, the atmosphere. Are you getting this? And, four, the way you can break stuff. This new XCOM gets all four of those things right, even if it does some of them in different ways. It knows. It understands. But not blindly, not slavishly. More than a fan of X-Com, this game is a fan of the tenets of modern game design. It’s doing exactly the right thing, in exactly the right ways, at exactly the right time.

1994 Tom: What’s IGN?

4 stars
PC

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News Detail Medien Zeitjung

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Mit superlevel.de hat Fabu einen der bekanntesten Gaming-Blogs Deutschlands gegründet - wieso erklärt er uns heute.

Erklär doch mal das Internet, Fabu!

15.10.2012

Erklär doch mal das Internet

Zwischen Retrocharme und Kritik am Journalismus: Der Gründer von superlevel.de erklärt das Internet.

„Superlevel – Indiegames, Browsergames, Freewaregames, Retrokultur & Rock’n’Roll“, so wird jeder Besucher auf einem der bekanntesten deutschen Spieleblogs begrüßt. Superlevel ist jung, frisch und schafft es irgendwie sich von allen anderen abzuheben.

Das liegt vor allem an einem: Fabu.

„Voll krass! Bei Facebook werden Brüste und Genitalien auf Fotos jetzt automatisch beim Upload mit Balken versehen. Unbedingt mal testen!!!!“ - @herrfabu

Fabu hat Superlevel gegründet und steuert seitdem sein Schiff aus Nerdtum, Gaming Know How und abgefahrenen Spielen durch die Untiefen des Internets abseits von Spiegel Online und GMX. Für uns hat er kurz zwischengespeichert und erklärt, dass er durchaus mehr macht, als nur die Nächte durchzuspielen.

ZEITjUNG: Wieso beschließt man irgendwann, einen Gaming-Blog zu starten und macht nicht was, womit sogar die Großeltern was anfangen können, wie zum Beispiel Pilot werden?

Fabu: 2007 suchte Electronic Arts einen Blogger für ein Projekt, bei dem rein zufällig auch meine damalige Freundin als Autorin arbeitete. Über diese Beziehung gelang ich dann an den Job. Das machte ich ein Jahr lang, bis das Blog schließlich eingestellt wurde. Da ich aber Gefallen am Schreiben über Spiele und Spielkram fand und nicht darauf verzichten wollte, entstand in einer Nacht und Nebel-Aktion Superlevel.
Das hast du doch erfunden. Frauen, die Spieleblogs toll finden? Oder kannst du dir die Damen gar nicht mehr vom Hals halten, seitdem du mit Superlevel erfolgreich bist?

Ich habe Interviews schon für weniger dämliche Fragen abgebrochen.
Auf so eine Antwort hätte ich mich eigentlich schon einstellen können. Du hast ja erst am 12.10. darüber geschrieben, wie tragisch schlecht du die Qualität des deutschen Spielejournalismus findest. Sollten sich die Macher der großen Deutschen Spielemagazine ein Beispiel an Superlevel nehmen?

Es ist natürlich nicht alles schlecht, aber ich wünschte, Magazine wären etwas mutiger und kreativer im Umgang mit der Thematik. Ich möchte beim Lesen eines Textes in eine Stimmung versetzt werden, die Inhalte und Atmosphäre des Spiels widerspiegeln. Das emotionslose Zusammenfassen von Daten und Fakten, angereichert mit einer Handvoll Floskeln, empfinde ich persönlich als Zeitverschwendung.
Geistreichere Ansätze haben jedoch den Nachteil, dass die Leser sich einbringen müssen. Es müssen Metaphern verstanden, Rückschlüsse gezogen und Interpretationen interpretiert werden. Für sowas ist längst nicht jeder zugänglich, deswegen halten viele Magazine an Mustern fest, die weitesgehend narrensicher sind und sicherstellen, den Leser nicht zu überfordern.
Du als Blogger: Wie schätzt du die Printkrise ein? Denkst du dieses Festhalten an solchen starren Richtlinien ist schuld?

Nein, das ist in erster Linie der Lauf der Dinge. Menschen wenden sich irgendwann von einem Medium ab und dem Fortschritt zu. Ich war beispielsweise das letzte Mal vor fünf Jahren in einer Videothek, weil ich auf digitalem Wege schneller und kostengünstiger an die gleichen Inhalte gelange. Ähnlich verhält es sich mit Printerzeugnissen. Menschen wollen möglichst billig, möglichst schnell möglichst viel bekommen – da können Zeitschriften und Zeitungen auf Dauer nicht mithalten. Printmedien sterben aus, nur der Zeitpunkt ist ungewiss. Vielleicht in 5 Jahren, vielleicht aber auch erst in 50.
Ab dann muss man sich mit allen Infos, lustigen Katzenfotos und Absonderlichkeiten online versorgen. Wo bekommst du deine tägliche Dosis Nerdtum her?

Ich gehe da recht systematisch vor und habe etwa 200 Feeds abonniert, die ich täglich mehrfach prüfe. Hinzu kommen natürlich Kanäle wie Twitter und Facebook, wobei letzteres primär der sinnbefreiten Unterhaltung dient. Der Großteil meiner Quellen ist im englischsprachigen Raum angesiedelt, allerdings mache ich um große Seiten wie Kotaku und Joystiq eher einen Bogen. Reine News sind für mich nur mäßig interessant und Mittel zum Zweck, an gewissen Stellen tiefer zu bohren. Und sei es nur in der Nase.

Foto: Fabu

© 2012 Microsoft und Lieferanten. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

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