Author Archives: Leigh Alexander

Sexy Jerks


If I go on Twitter or read blog comments or engage with strangers from the internet for too long, I become annoyed and depressed. So I set about a new game of Fable 3 last night, resolving to be the biggest asshole Albion had ever seen. Like, I was just gonna pretty much kill shit, I said to myself. I was gonna have like five wives living in hovels and wear mad tattoos and belch on everyone.

It wasn’t just that I was feeling sort of irritable and wanted to expunge some anger. I mean, Fable 3 provides for me to be pretty much as big of a chicken-kicking scumbag as I want, so it’s not like it’s even real rule-breaking. It’s more I’ve never been very good at playing the bad guy in games. I want everything to come out nice. I care what people think.

When I’m looking at some happy video game villager, I just don’t have it in me to do the wrong thing. I’ve watched friends playing Fallout 3 blowing away innocent folk and their two-headed cows with a sort of envious glee, but with a vague anxiety in my gut. It’s not I want to be a goody-goody; I think moral ambiguity makes interesting characters.

It’s just I kind of want to make a really bad mess of my gameworlds and laugh about it and not take it seriously. I wish I could say it’s because of really compelling design that I’m never able to do it, but no. I’m just hard-wired to be a good girl. I think that’s why people really like Grand Theft Auto games so very much: There’s no good-guy option. Messing the world up is what there is to do.

I mean, we’ll see. I don’t have to shoot a housewife in the face in order to be a really big jerk, so I might still be able to achieve my dreams.

Speaking of wanting everything to look nice, I’m for some reason preoccupied with how my hero looks. I futz around with his hair and outfits until I think he looks “sexy.” I can’t really tell what drives my character-creation decisions most of the time; sometimes I go with an intangible “tone” that suits what I hope to get out of the story, others I make people I’m attracted to, or sometimes I develop an idea of a character and then assign looks that go with.

But I do notice there’s a strong correlation for me, when I’m playing a game that requires me to make my own hero, between physical attraction and character admiration. I don’t want a bad-looking person. I have to stare at them for hours. I’m objectifying them like paper dolls. Is that what male game designers do when they’re creating sexy female heroines — you know, the kind we have so much trouble with? Kinda scary thought.

In The Habit

So, a report that aired on the BBC about “video game addicts” is basically bullshit, right? I didn’t see it, but that’s what everyone seems to be saying. Of course, “everyone” would get their panties in a bunch any time it’s implied that video games are anything less than a perfect, virtuous and ideal use of one hundred percent of your time. That’s why John Walker’s RPS piece, being fairly measured, is my favorite response to the documentary.

Of course, even the largest and noblest of media outlets can’t resist a sensational angle, which is why the “games addiction” phenomenon can be so exciting to folks like the BBC. In the ’90s, it was all about “internet addiction”, remember? However, it’s more than sensationalism that makes the angle a little problematic. It’s that video games are here getting stuck into a larger social problem: The psychiatrizing (allow me to use a made-up word) of everything, and the excessive abuse of clinical terms to explain away coping difficulties or to compartmentalize larger life problems into their own individual symptoms and syndromes.

Think about how many times you’ve used clinical terms over the past few years. You’re addicted to True Blood; you’re “a little OCD” about doing your dishes, you’re “depressed” about your sports team losing, you’re “having a panic attack” about running late to work. Of course, in the vast majority of cases, you are not actually. You’re exaggerating. Maybe because every other nightly news ad is a prescription drug commercial, making the idea of widespread disease frighteningly normal. Maybe because your world is so crowded with the noise of social media and awareness of mass culture that you feel you need to use hyperbole to be heard.

Who knows. But when we talk about “addiction” to non-chemical things, there’s a very significant difference between “a person is unable to stop repeating a behavior because they suffer extreme emotional and/or physical stress when they try” and “a person refuses to stop repeating a behavior and denies it is harming them.” The former is addiction. The latter is someone who’s just failing to develop as a human.

The type of people in this documentary, people who play 20 hours a day of WoW until their relatives become concerned, are not addicts. They’re just losers. And if they didn’t have WoW, they’d probably be doing something else to the unhealthy exclusion of all else.

That being said, I continue to be alarmed by some gamers’ refusal to even examine their play habits. Defensively, they claim, “would people be complaining if I read books for 20 hours a day? What about film buffs who spend all their time on movies?” People would probably be complaining, yes. But guess what: Game designers create compulsion loops on purpose. They want you to feel invested in goals and satisfied by achieving them. That’s not inherently harmful, but maybe it is to vulnerable people?

News flash: The metric of an online game’s success is how many hours people are spending playing. Engagement metrics are how projects get funded and remain commercially viable. It is in the designer’s best interest to make sure you stay playing, that you keep coming back. Again, that’s not to say “people are designing addiction” or “making games people will want to return to and enjoy for long periods is wrong.” It’s just to say that it’s irresponsible to ignore this fact, if you want to have a reasoned say in any “addiction” conversation.

So maybe “game addiction” is an of-yet unsubstantiated concept. But those defensive gamers aren’t doing anyone any favors by vehemently rationalizing the fact they push buttons all day to the exclusion of all else. They just make normal gamers look bad.

People die in Chinese internet cafes, of exhaustion or starvation, bottles of pee under their desk. What’s going on there? We’re going to have to have good answers to these questions as games become a bigger and bigger part of society, so I hope auto-apologists develop an interest in being ready.

[Since people complained in comments: I should probably clarify that I am not categorizing psychological addiction as people who are losers that just don’t do anything else with their lives.

I’m saying that psychological addiction is an actual problem, not just people who don’t see anything better to do with themselves than play video games and refuse to try. There are plenty of people who have legitimate psychological dependencies on games or other behaviors.

But let’s look closely at the issue instead of just calling someone with no life an “addict.” The over-diagnosing of American society leads a lot of people to complain that they are “addicts” as an excuse to make a developmental failure or laziness into a real problem. A large number of people would rather claim they have a “condition” than deal with life; it’s like when people are dangerously obese in the absence of a medical cause and, shrugging, blame their genes without addressing their diet.

the thing i’m saying here is that psychological addiction to games is likely to be a genuine issue that is not able to be correctly examined because of all the people who use clinical addiction as an excuse for their failure to nurture an emotional life, and because of all the people who are so defensive about their focus on games that they don’t want to look at or talk about the issue. if you are an addict or have known one, as i have, this is what should offend you, the aimless firing of the word into an important discussion.]

It’s The Little Things

Yesterday I wrote about the big gameplay-and-narrative friction we often find in RPGs, but there are all kinds of smaller ones, too.

The Guiltless Hero: You’re the only one who can save this world — but only after you go in that stranger’s basement and open all his treasure chests, and then take all the coins out of that lady’s kitchen cabinet, and then smash people’s crockery to see if there’s anything in it. They don’t even notice!

The Shameless Invader: Hey, what’s up? I’m just making dinner, please do open my door at any time you like and come on in so I can talk to you about stew ingredients, my bratty son or how scared I am for my life. It’s not like you’re on a quest or something.

The Distracted Wanderer: It’s finally time to bring that object you almost died retrieving to that guy who desperately needs it so that he can give you something crucial to this world-saving quest that only you can undertake. Oh, wait, hang on a sec, why don’t you just check that grassy field over there first? Might be, I dunno, some mushrooms or flowers or something you could use for something. No? How about in that random cave?

The Castle VIP: Welcome, heavily-armed stranger! I’m totally the king of this city, and my castle is crawling with guards with pointy spears. Their job is to stand at either side of each door and chat about how great I am. Make yourself at home! The treasure room is upstairs. No, you can’t get in there now, but you know you will at some point. No one’ll stop you! Make sure and stop by my throne room and introduce yourself before you leave? Maybe after you’re done rummaging around my gorgeous daughter’s room for who knows what?

The Pushover: So hey, do you want to undertake this thing? Your input is really important to me. No? Oh, well, too bad, because you kind of have to. Why did I ask you? Because you like having choices when you’re adventuring! Oh, dude, do you wanna help out this chick over here, too? No? Aw, too bad, guess you’ll miss your ultimate weapon. Did you realize you’re supposed to answer “yes” to everything, and your being asked is only a formality? Yes? Now you understand.

The Ingenious Collector: Hey, pal! Heard you’re pretty good at adventuring and stuff. I really really don’t know what I’ll do unless I get one of these thingummies… small, round, costs five bucks at the store over there? Thanks, pal, you’re a lifesaver! I’ll name my firstborn child after you!

The Sucker: Okay, not to be a pain or anything, but now I need something else… there’s a five percent chance you might find one after spending ten hours in the world’s most dangerous dungeon, but I really absolutely need that thing. Oh, you got it? Oh, man, thanks! Here’s one of those cheezy things they sell for five bucks at the store over there! Use it well!

The Neglectful Leader: You and your loyal band of friends braved trial untold to reach this place, the final battle. You might die tonight, but at least you have each other. This epic journey has taught you the meaning of love, sacrifice and true friendship. You’re all in this together, so everybody give one last high-five and shout out what you’re fighting for! Your loyal party-mates, that person with the awesome special skill that you had with you for a while, and… wait, who’s that dude? Oh, yeah, he joined your party and then you ignored him because he sucks. Group hug, what’syourface! Your personal motives are totes important to me, yeah, the… yeah.

I seriously love RPGs so much.

Party System


It’s that “too many games to play” time of year. I don’t deal with it well. I’m pretty poor at multitasking, in fact — I like to concentrate on one game at a time, and if it grabs me such that I feel like finishing it, I’m compelled to do so before I start anything else. Of course, I can take diversions into downloadable action games, or take one disc out of the Xbox 360 so that my friends can do that multiplayer deathmatch whatever thing they love to do in Reach, but mostly I’m a one-thing-at-a-time kind of gamer.

Actually, sometimes I get so overwhelmed I don’t really play anything at all. I celebrated my birthday by partying a lot and going to a lot of music festival bands (fortunately, my result was a lot better than this), and in terms of gaming all I really did was beat Persona 3 Portable. You know, basically the game I already beat a while back when it was out on PlayStation 2.

Actually, it felt quite a lot different this time. Although it changed really nothing about the gameplay (although making those P4-style tweaks to the battle system was much, much needed), the gender swap changed lots about the narrative for me and the way I related to the characters. Remember that Kotaku article I wrote about that?

RPGs are kind of tough that way. On one hand, it’s a “role-playing game”; it’s meant to be the story of a character’s journey, and any good story allows different people to get different things out of it. On the other hand, the gameplay is most central, and in most cases there is an “optimal” way to do everything. Story-driven decisions can sometimes be directly at odds with the decisions you “should” be making to optimize your character’s strength or progress.

For example, in the case of Persona 3, your character starts dating another character and you’d rather they spend every possible day together — but because your “rank” with the game’s characters affects your power to create the Personas you summon in battle, it makes more sense to distribute your time equally among other characters, even those you’re disinterested in. In fact, it’s essential.

The conflict between what you’d like to do to create your story and what’s ideal for the gameplay is probably the primary problem with RPGs. That’s why open-world RPGs like Fallout 3 are so good; their format makes great strides toward alleviating that friction. By the way, I’m almost relieved New Vegas is so buggy — “oh, I’m waiting for a patch, that’s not out yet, is it, I dunno, I haven’t looked” takes some of the pressure off my queue of games to play by the end of the year.

The other main issue, particularly in the Japanese RPG format, is that you can make a million different character classes for the player to choose from, and each one still has an optimal set of equipment and attributes that renders all others useless. It’s puzzled me since the ’90s: You go to a new town and the shops offer a whole raft of equipment, but one is the best, period. Why not just buy that one? Oh, can’t afford it? If not for “better stuff”, then what are you grinding for, anyway? Go kill some whatevers until you get some more currency, solved problem.

It’s made that whole customizing and outfitting process seem very pointless, some kind of tacked-on relic that’s no longer relevant. I go through those motions and sigh, “oh, so this is one of the things they mean when they always say ‘Japanese design doesn’t know how to get up to date.’”

Not that I really believe that, of course. The Persona games could never have come out of the West, for example. And in fact, it’s a completely traditionalist JRPG franchise that’s taken the first approach to characterization and customizing that I really like, the first marriage of party system and leveling mechanics that I’m having a ton of fun with.

I dunno why I just assumed I wasn’t going to like Dragon Quest IX. I haven’t played a Dragon Quest game since I was a child, and that’s because I just assumed I’d have to be killing a million slimes in an endless dungeon and being all super old-school and shit. But I decided to give it a try, mainly just to do due-diligence, and am finding DQIX completely enchanting. With the Final Fantasy series having lost its way so badly lately, DQIX demonstrates a real opportunity for the brand to become the quintessential must-have fantasy RPG.

You have a main character, a Chrono Trigger-style silent protagonist, and the central story arc blooms neatly into many smaller side-threads that feel organic — something that I think Western RPGs lack, as you often find yourself feeling as if you’re fulfilling tacked-on errands for a character you have no narrative reason to support or be interested in.

And you generate your party as your own custom characters that you can swap in and out at any time, with no limitations to how many you can create within a given class (they cap how many characters in total you can create, but it’s a pretty generous number). You create their look and name them — which basically means you’re free to imagine whatever you want about who they are and why they’re with you.

I used to be turned off by these kinds of systems; I’d rather have a party of story-based and well-realized characters working together, than view my heroes as interchangeable dummies, the sum of their abilities and nothing more. But the world is rich enough that you want to make little people you believe could exist there, and it solves the “only one optimal choice” problem in a neat way.

Say you decide to make a Priest for your party; you conceptualize a little bit what you want that character to look like. But outfit them in the items that provide the best bonuses to their strength and defense and suddenly my floppy-haired staff and robe character looks awkward in the same kind of armor that another character is wearing. They don’t look like the character I’ve visualized; they don’t look like they’re going to be playing the role of healer in my party.

For the first time, I start choosing stuff that’s less-than-optimal from a stats standpoint because it just looks cool on the character; it makes them look how I want them to look. I want my Mage in a dress and heels, dammit, and if it makes her weaker — aren’t the magic users supposed to be more sensitive to damage than the hero is, anyway? I can deal.

It breaks the boring “upgrade to new equipment, sell the old equipment, repeat” cycle in a way that enhances my concept of my characters at the same time. I find myself hanging on to all the cute little robes and hats and armor plates and outfits there are, because I might want to use them on a new character. Seeing what kinds of new characters I can make up and add to my hero’s journey becomes a big part of the game’s fun. They all look so cute!

Also cute: NEW KITTEN. I decided on naming her Yorda. Shh, we can make fun of me later.

Cathy

If you don’t recognize SVGL’s new banner, get up to date! I’m more excited about Catherine than I’ve been about any other “well, I don’t know too much about it but this seems awesome” title in some time, so I’m very psyched at the Catherine banner made for me by Cristopher Boyer.

Nice work, eh? Cristopher is Detroit’s IGDA coordinator, and is CEO and co-founder of media development company Variant. His work involves helping nurture and support new game development, web and tech businesses in Michigan — “It’s all about the new economies here right now,” he tells me. Good lookin’ out, Cristopher, and thanks so much for the banner.

As always, past banners by me and by wonderful generous gift artists can be seen at the official Sexy Videogameland banner gallery!

A little while back, fellow Atlus fan Colette Bennett wrote at Gamasutra about why she’s looking forward to the game so much and the kinds of themes and interactions she thinks have the potential to emerge. Check it out.

What I’ve done regarding Catherine is, uh. Despite having an embarrassment of riches in my “to play” pile, I have been diligently aiming to finish Persona 3 Portable, and when I encountered Vincent’s little cameo in the game…

Okay. I don’t know what’s lamer. That I made a YTMND, that I am showing everyone, or that I keep loading it up so that I can laugh at the thing. That I made. Yeah. Well, here you go.

Music For Nerds

Because I’m big into music and always yakking about bands, I get a lot of people asking me about “nerdcore” bands and, like The Protomen or whatever. I always say I don’t like them — totally willing to admit I’m biased because I make my entire living in the world of video games, but I really dislike the idea that gamer fandom is something that needs to seep into every single pore of a person’s waking life. Also I think they’re just bad, but that’s subjective.

Why should I make it, like, a personal mandate to browbeat gamers into being interested in things other than games? If games are all you like and you want to eat (McFarmville?), sleep, breathe and listen them every minute of your day, that’s totally your business, isn’t it? More power to you. Do what you love.

It’s just that personally I think we can have a richer experience relating to interactive worlds when we have well-rounded lives — and more importantly, we as consumers will ask for more nuanced, more genuinely social and more diverse game experiences when we are broader and more curious media consumers.

And whether or not it applies to me (protip: it does) I’ve always flinched at the idea that ‘nerd’ is a label we should all brag about, like we deserve to be segregated for our interests, like we must embrace this stereotype of being single-minded and socially inept just because we like this or that. We want people to get with the idea that games aren’t particularly weird, that they belong in people’s lives, right?

Anyway. As much as I am sassy and opinionated about most stuff, at the end of the day it’s mostly a big put-on. I’d never tell someone in seriousness that they shouldn’t enjoy something that’s important to them. But this article on SomethingAwful basically encapsulates, in more depth than I’ve ever gone into, why I mostly don’t really dig “gamer music.”

Which makes the YouTube I’ve posted at the head of this post a little bit of a guilty pleasure, right? (The author of the SA piece told me on Twitter, though I can’t find the Tweet now, that this tune is more forgivable because it is self-aware and not taking itself seriously).

In related news, you might all like (or become angry at) this Hosta song, ‘No More Video Games‘, which I stumbled across today on Indie Rock Cafe’s decent Summer 2010 mixtape. I came there looking for tracks by Sleep Good, a band from Austin, which is where I spent my entire past week (more on GDC Online later! I’m still catching up on sleep!)

Salute

Sometimes people are ugly when they’re being honest, but let me be honest.

When I decided I was going to try to enter games journalism I also decided I was going to reach the top of my field, you know, be “the best” at the kind of writing I intended to do. I think if people told me how hard it was to break in I wouldn’t have started. But once I broke in, and I wanted to keep succeeding, when everyone said to me, “well, it’s hard”, I’d silently append maybe for you.

And people would say stuff like all games journalism sucks and it’ll never be a serious profession and you’ll never make your career this way and things like that, and I’d nod sincerely, but privately I felt that I had the capacity to change those rules, even if those who were warning me had become cynical. I suppose I’d set a goal not just to succeed, but to succeed in areas where others had failed. I had a special pride.

So with that in mind — whenever a publication shut its doors, or a prominent voice left journalism for development, or someone migrated into another field or fell out of the public conversation because they couldn’t keep sustainable work, I confess, I felt a little satisfied. You don’t feel there’s anything more to be done here; I do.

Like they’d failed for a good reason. Or if they left for a better opportunity, it’s because they missed the chance to make better opportunities in game writing, which meant there were more for me to discover. Even when it was people I liked very much and whose work I would miss. Even when it was good people losing jobs and I felt for them — it’s not like I’m glad to see people out of work — there was always that subtle satisfaction in the fact that no matter what the reason, I was hanging in where others weren’t.

And for every writer that retired, was fired, gave up, was promoted out of editorial, I felt I automatically advanced, like when someone stepped out of the line, I could step forward. Some of the time, I even felt like a reduction in the noise everyone was producing was a good thing for game journalism, like pruning branches from a tree so that it doesn’t choke itself.

Mostly I’m happy with my career. There are only a few people who could make me second-guess that, who make me think that if they don’t feel there’s anything more to do here, maybe there isn’t. And, I mean, could is theoretical. Since I started, no one has left that has made me feel loss instead of that self-serving sense of opportunity until today.

Writers of my particular breed have the opportunities we do because of people like Kieron — really, him and a handful of others — being the really-really-first. I remember after a few weeks of Aberrant Gamer columns, largely the first pieces of writing with which I distinguished myself in any way, I saw that he had posted some kind of neutral comment, I don’t even remember what it said. And I remember becoming really overwhelmed and excited and thinking that if Kieron was noticing my work, well, then, I was pretty much going to be okay.

Since we began talking a few years ago he was one of those few people that I held up, on various fronts, to say I want to be like you. That he was “here” in this space and had done it forever for so long and in his way always made me feel like I had more growing to do, like there was more room here for that. It wasn’t just his writing, it was his attitude about writing, about audiences, about games, everything, that made me feel like this is an arena for sophisticated people and I wasn’t wasting my time.

I knew about his plans but I got choked up today nonetheless because I’m a big sap and he’ll probably be embarrassed but I’m always a little embarrassing like that when I actually admire someone instead of paying lip service to the concept of admiration, the latter being something Kieron would probably never do.

Not like I’m going anywhere right now. And it’s not like he’s dead or something, geez, Leigh! But the transition of Kieron Gillen makes me consider for the first time that a battle won in a war of attrition isn’t much of a victory. I suppose I still have to keep getting better and more useful to this space, then.

So. Thanks for everything, man.