Category Archives: controversy

A Tale Of Two Jims

On Wired now is a long public apology of sorts from Jim Redner, the one-man PR team that 2K Games had contracted to deliver Duke Nukem Forever to reviewers. You may have already heard what went down: In a now-infamous Tweet (since deleted, but now screencapped on the Wired site), Redner implicitly threatened to withhold future review copies from those in the press whose tone he didn’t like.

Naturally, we games journalists do not take kindly to those kinds of threats. The review copy isn’t payola; we do not make a bargain with PR to help them get good press and sell their games. The job of the reviewer is to evaluate the product for consumers.
Before I go any further, a clarification is in order: I don’t write “reviews” per se myself these days, although many of you have read my critical responses to or articles about certain games and called them “reviews.” For the context of this discussion, “review” refers to work done by the employed games press with a score that appears on Metacritic, as those are the reviewers of primary interest to public relations.
Although in the past, I’ve done regular reviews for Paste, Variety and the Onion’s AV Club, I don’t do that kind of work anymore, for several reasons some of which would probably constitute their own blog post. However, I consider all of the professional games press to be colleagues, as we’re all in the business of talking to gamers and the industry about games, and I consider us to share a common interest, although we may approach our work from different angles and for different subsets of the audience.
For the record, I didn’t receive a review copy of DNF, nor did I play it or write about it after launch. In Nylon Guys I did a pre-release article about the environment around the game’s launch and Gearbox’s attempt to resurrect a classic, featuring an interview with Randy Pitchford. Aside from some blog-based personal editorialization that illustrates I’ve a negative opinion of DNF’s tone and themes, I have not published any opinions on the final product itself except to direct you to coverage done by others — colleagues whose opinions I trust as educated, and whose reviews I believe.
Okay, Now That That’s Out Of The Way
Most of us, myself included, publicly bristled at Redner’s implied threat. In our long-fought battle to earn credibility with our audience, it’s become important to us to both demonstrate and inhabit honesty to consumers at all costs, even if game companies get angry at us. That’s our job. Conversely, it’s PR’s job to ensure the best possible coverage for the game they are representing. If that means denying coverage to reviewers they expect will treat the game negatively, that’s their right to do.
It’s an uneasy dance that often gets difficult when what game journalists want (to be truthful) clashes with what PR wants (to be positive). In fact, that tension is what makes it hard for all of us, whether we write reviews or not, to do our job. In an industry where so much hinges on Metacritic, a bad score can be devastating to a development team, its publisher and its PR team alike: After two years’ work and millions of dollars, a score can ruin it all. It’s a lot for us to carry and to think about.
Scoring and Metacritic are problematic in and of themselves (Adam Sessler’s GDC 2009 anti-Metacritic rant is an excellent illustration why). But where that tension exists, the fundamental mistrust and struggle for control between writers and PR escalates into a bigger struggle between games journalists in general and the games industry. Because so many reviewers also do other types of work, such as interviewing developers, looking inside industry process as part of a preview, or attending events, that there is so much fear and mistrust means it’s often impossible to get at the truth.
Very few of us are trusted well enough to be allowed access to even a neutered on-message interview with executives who make major decisions on the industry’s shape. Very few of us are allowed inside a studio for an honest look at how games are made, or at the people who make them, information that would illuminate and enrich audience experience with the medium — and equally-importantly, as far as I’m concerned, would educate developers at different studios about one another and the business in which they work.
The games industry seems to me to be unusually secretive, and it continues to be allowed to be secretive because there’s no easy solution to this vicious cycle of mistrust. The unfortunate side effect is that gamers hardly trust their games press, either, watching to see which of us are being “bought”, making the wrong kinds of ethical compromises, whether we’re telling them the truth.
The net effect: At least when it comes to consumer-facing stuff, we’re a crippled, often powerless media contingent that feels bad even using the word “journalist” to describe ourselves even when that is absolutely what we do for a living. We hear all the time that we’re “not real journalists” or that there’s “no real games journalism.”
Neither of those things are true, but you can’t deny that there’s a landscape that might often lead people to be that reductive about it. There’s a poor definition of roles: My audience can’t tell a consumer review from free-roaming critical thought; can’t tell a news report from an opinion piece, can’t tell a business article from a blog post (“great blog on Gamasutra,” someone will tell me, after I publish a news interview wholly free from my own voice).
That sucks for our readers, it sucks for us, and it sucks for the game industry.
The Review In Question
Ever since Redner’s self-described Twitter “brain-fart”, he’s said that it was one particular review that set him off — both in today’s Wired guest column and in a long email apology he sent to numerous members of the games press. He claims that this one was not a fair opinion of DNF, but a “scathing diatribe.” Personally, I feel that his explication loses most of its steam when he refuses to call out which review was so egregiously possessed of “venom” that it warranted that kind of response — how can we evaluate whether or not his position is fair unless we can weigh the review in question?
However, the offending review is widely believed to have been done by Destructoid’s Jim Sterling, who gave the game a 2 out of 10 and said the game could “only endear itself to the sociopathic and mentally maladjusted.” Not having played the game, I can’t personally say whether his blisteringly low opinion is warranted. That it’s such an outlier tone and score-wise from many other decisively negative reviews of the game seems telling to me, but either way, it’s definitely a venomous writeup.
Harsh, yes, but not surprising: Jim’s made a career out of his inflammatory public persona, biting language, and viewpoints that are as likely to be jaw-droppingly juvenile and offensive as they are to be crazy hilarious to some.
You may not know this, but years ago I was part of Destructoid’s staff with Jim. The site was quite young then — we would all talk amongst ourselves about how we dreamed of making it big –and I was still learning how to do this games journalism thing. Without the welcome of Niero, the site’s founder, and Colette Bennett, the friend who discovered Sexy Videogameland and invited me to join the scrappy Dtoid team, I don’t know whether this blog would have discovered its wider initial audience, or whether I would have become visible to those who eventually hired me for the projects on which I built my career. I owe them a great debt of thanks, and I think well of the entire staff as people.
Oddly, that includes Jim, to an extent. While I definitely don’t always approve of his language, his tactics, many of his viewpoints or his method of dealing with conflicts, I respect his right to do it. He has an audience that likes his shtick and he drives massive traffic for those who employ him. It’s not the way I’d do it, but there’s room for all kinds. I told him as much when I saw him at E3, gave him a hug and tweeted a photograph of us together. While we’ll probably clash in public many times when he insults someone or something I like, we’ll probably never want to work together, and we’ll probably never want to read much of what one another writes, there’s no actual feud.
Whenever people ask me about this, I’ve always said, “The fact that Jim’s out there doing his thing doesn’t stop me or anyone else from doing ours.”
However, an episode like this makes me wonder if that’s really true.
Well, Actually, It Makes Our Lives Harder
Jim Redner did the wrong thing, of course; while he is free to send or not send review copies to whomever he wants, threatening people in the public forum is just tacky. It got him fired by 2K. Yet, what’s the responsibility of a reviewer, especially in the Metacritic era where that stupid number means so much?
Jim Sterling’s cult of personality commands such a large and loyal fanbase that it would be foolish for the public relations community to ignore him. More importantly, it would be foolish for his employers to stifle and censor him: He defines communities wherever he goes, and he manages to command the conversation. Here I am writing about him right now, and this happens whenever a Sterling-centric conflict flares. That’s power, whether anyone likes it or not.
Maybe we don’t owe anyone good press or a positive review, but do we owe the review process — and by extension, the industry we cover — a basic level of dignity? That’s an open question for all of us to chew on, but more importantly, for now: To what extent should a cult of personality impact the way this industry relates to its press?
One thing I’ve always appreciated about Jim is that, at least in the conversations I’ve been involved in, he has never claimed to be a “games journalist.” He’s accepted his role as pundit and entertainer and he enjoys it, and he’s been honest about not giving a damn how professional we think he is. Again, let him do his thing.
The problem is, Jim disdains the idea of being a professional, but the industry is forced to treat him like one because of the audience he governs. Imagine if a PR firm said, “no, Jim, we don’t like ‘that thing you do’, and we’re not going to send you any more review copies.” Mass hysteria from the community! “Someone is blackballing Destructoid,” the conversation would go; “they’re quashing Jim’s voice!” people would shout.
That kind of snafu would be even more destructive to a company and its brand than a bad review from Jim. So when Jim doesn’t like something, PR has got no choice but to take the hit. That’s as much of a vicious standoff as anything PR has ever done to the games press.
Not only does that seem a little unfair, but it does affect the rest of us. We may be able to see Jim as a single figure in a broad landscape of writers, but some of our audience doesn’t. The industry doesn’t. Again, we suffer from our poor definition of roles. I can’t tell you how many people have told me that they think “we are all” bullshit, and they cite Jim Sterling. How many times do the rest of us have to say, “we’re not like that?”
Even still, all we can do is to do our own thing, the best we can. I’m not disputing that. The issue I have is this: Why call Jim Sterling a “reviewer” and allow him to participate in the Metacritic system when his methods are so frequently aberrant from the work the rest of the product review community does?
So Hey, Jim?
I’m sure someone will point this blog post out to you, and if you’re reading this, all I’d like is for you to consider framing your Destructoid work outside of the review format and to remove yourself, just your “reviews”, from Metacritic. Probably achievable just by not headlining it ‘review’ or whatever — no one makes Yahtzee give an “official” score. Yes, again, Metacritic sucks and is problematic, but unfortunately it’s the ultimate distillation of our relationship with the industry and until we find a better solution, I believe it’s best for everyone involved if we approach it with a sense of responsibility and a measured attitude.
I know you believe we cover an entertainment medium and none of us should take ourselves seriously, but you chose your own role, so let us choose ours. We can respect what you do for your readers, but we’d like you to respect what we’re trying to do for ours. If you don’t want to be a professional, if you don’t want to be a games journalist, then leave the reviewers to their own space.
It’d be a win for everyone, I think: You’d be free to say and do whatever you want, and about whatever games you want, without busybodies like me banging on about how you should be more responsible; Destructoid will probably have an even better time working with the business once PR’s less afraid of your power as a rogue variable, your audience can get whatever uncensored whimsy you feel like producing at any given time, and no one on any side of the fence will have to argue about whether the impact you’re having on people’s scores is fair.
Part of why I hate writing formal reviews is because of this ethical minefield and these drawn-out conversations that keep rearing their heads. Bet you hate them, too. So let’s neither of us be reviewers, and hopefully the result is more fun for you and helps us journalists improve our relationship with the industry.
Please just think about it?
UPDATE: Responding via Twitter, Jim politely disagreed with me; the following is an unedited quote from his feed:

“To answer: If I wrote my reviews in the same tone that I write my satirical or rant pieces, I think there’d be a point in what Leigh says. However, I do not. I didn’t write the Duke review, or any review, to be “funny.” There’s a significant change in tone when I write them. Even when harsh, I work VERY hard to back up my scores with solid reasoning & feel points of view similar to mind deserve a voice on MCritic.

And as far as DNF goes? I’m not the only one and Redner may not have even been talking about me. This was harsher: http://is.gd/sXGODu Anyway, that’s my response. Feel free to debate it, but don’t flame Leigh or anything. I respectfully disagree – emphasis, *respectfully*.”

Chains Of Meaning

Post-GDC, it takes forever to get back to normal. Like, weeks! I’m still working on it! But here are a few fun things I’ve been working on in the meantime.

If you couldn’t tell, I’m a big fan of Jason Rohrer (remember when I got to play Sleep is Death with him last year?) This GDC, he participated in Eric Zimmerman’s annual game design challenge, where a panel of sharp designers are tasked with creating a concept based on a certain theme. This year’s was religion, and you can read about how Rohrer won the challenge in my coverage here.

I did an interview with Rohrer on his new game, Inside a Star-Filled Sky. He’s a fascinating person to talk to, and despite the whole “art game” thing that canopies much of his work, he’s terribly pragmatic and upbeat (that contrast between his heavy death themes and his approachable personality is one of the things I asked him about).

Anyway, Rohrer’s challenge-winning Chain World design is now at the center of something of an interesting controversy. If you haven’t heard about it, catch up here. The most interesting thing about the debate is that even though it seems that Rohrer’s intentions for Chain World are being “subverted” (depending on whom you ask), this very sort of discussion and debate — what defines “good”, what is the fate of the “holy object”, who can participate, should money be involved and what principles are most important — is inherent to religion.

I haven’t asked Rohrer about this but I have to think he was aware of the possibility that people would disobey his “rules” for Chain World, or that it would mutate in some fashion beyond his foreseeing. But that we’re still discussing the “chain of meaning” behind that little USB key is even more proof that his design was a success, I think.

Other than that, I’ve launched into an analysis of the narrative of pretty much my favorite album, Joanna Newsom’s Have One On Me, speaking of meaning. It’s a very personal album to me. Probably only people who are curious about music or who like the record would be interested, but I did it one disc at a time: Part One, Part Two, Part Three.

Special thanks/blame for the Joanna series goes to friend/hero Kieron Gillen, whose idea it was. By the way, Gillen just got married this past weekend, and I regard him more highly than most people I know, so feel free to spam his inbox with congratulatory notes, because he isn’t busy CONTROLLING THE FUCKING X-MEN or anything.


Today’s Good Song: “I’m Losing Myself“, Robin Pecknold (Fleet Foxes) feat. Ed Droste (Grizzly Bear) [via Said The Gramophone]

Love Means Sometimes Having To Say You’re Sorry


I didn’t really want to come out with some huge statement about dickwolves. I am aware of my status as one of the more prominent female voices on games, which means people often would like to see me lead discussion on things people categorize as “feminist issues.”

Note I think it’s perilous for anyone to suggest rape is something only women can talk about. But in any event, whenever I say something about an issue people see as a “feminist issue”I always somehow manage to whip up the jerks and dissatisfy the feminists; I get boxed into being “that woman writer” again, and not only do I have to deal with emails about what a dumb bitch I am, I don’t actually feel like I’m helping the conversation.

But I was asked on Formspring for my opinion and it seems my response got pretty widely circulated, so I figured I’d link to it here.

Two depressing things: First, I said how I felt and have now been aggregated, from what I can tell, into some kind of “anti PA” box despite the fact my response says “I love Penny Arcade” and that I was refraining from opinion on the joke itself, which does not really personally offend me. [Note: After I complained about this on Twitter, the ‘Pratfall’ timeline made an edit to note this — this site is a great, uncolored chronology of the events and I appreciate the keeper’s attention to my position.]

Second, after I basically said “since I don’t have a strong opinion it seems obvious to default to respect for people’s feelings”, someone still saw fit to say “the truth of the matter” is that people are making too big a deal out of it. I wonder if it’s a gamer thing, to always need to segregate everything into two opposing sides, and to genuinely believe that the idea of absolute fact can be applied to every situation. The truth, huh?

Actually, since I answered that question and began following the discussion more closely I probably approve less about how Mike is handling things publicly. The joke doesn’t offend me, but the idea that what people wear or don’t wear at PAX is going to create some sinister delineation between people who were hurt and people who weren’t creeps me out.

This weird combativeness, like promising to wear the shirt to PAX, or playing Tori Amos while drawing? [Amos has sung about surviving rape and was a founding member and major fundraiser of the Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network, which will receive proceeds from the ‘anti-Dickwolves shirt‘, but Mike says playing her music was just a coincidence, his iTunes was on shuffle and that you would be “crazy” to suggest otherwise.]

I do understand it sucks a lot to be at the center of an echo chamber that seems to be saying you’re a bad person because you made a joke you didn’t intend as offensive. But the willful refusal to even consider “hey, we may have been wrong here, and we feel bad that some of our fans are hurt” just seems weird, and inconsistent with the smart, fun tone I’ve always enjoyed about PA.

People are going on Twitter to try to publicly harass and insult rape survivors over this. They’re leaving harassing comments for one of the most vocal objectors in this conversation claiming she must be fat, ugly and bitter to be insulted by rape jokes. You guys. This is fucking sick.

Who tolerates this? Regardless of their own position Gabe & Tycho have an opportunity to speak up to at least encourage compassion and education within a gamer community that’s so often self-absorbed, immature, entitled and outright hateful. I’m trying to understand what would make them want to pass on that.

Something I learned in writing about games is that after a point you do kind of have to feel responsible. “I’m just doing my own thing and if you don’t like it you can leave” doesn’t work anymore after you’ve taken active steps to cultivate and lead a community. I’ve written some articles or blog posts in the past or said some things in public that I am not super proud of, looking back, things I would never consider saying now that there is a much larger community of readers who may be influenced.

Nobody asks to have others look up to them, and you could argue that if you’re just making art, or comedy, or commentary, it’s others’ decision to pay attention or not and that you don’t owe them anything (I sure feel that way about my Twitter account!).

But like it or not, if your audience grows large enough, people will start to look to you to help them shape the way they feel about issues or interact in their community. I do the work I do because I love the world of gaming, and because I love it, I try to make sure that the examples I set will help create positivity in the community.

I mean, sometimes I feel angry or resentful or aggressive and that comes across in my work. I have a bold personality, I sometimes speak before I think. I feel irritated sometimes at the obligation to be super duper nice to people and I can sometimes be haughty or judgmental. I’m not going to sit here and represent myself as some shining example of social responsibility. And it can be hard to field people’s anger if I’ve said the wrong thing– or even if they just think I have and I disagree.

You work for years doing everything you can to contribute good stuff to the gaming community, and then you do one ugly thing and the sheer volume of noise online can make you feel like the whole world’s razed everything you created and now hates you.

I’ve been there. There’s been a time or two (in my past, not related to this discussion) that I made some visible missteps and ended up not coming out of my room for a week. It felt like the whole world wanted to make fun of me, say these hateful, sexist, abusive things to me, and discuss how I acted on one or two occasions without knowing me at all — and I hadn’t actually said anything that could be perceived as discriminatory or injurious.

So despite the fact that deep-down, I wasn’t pleased with my own behavior, I determined not to be sorry to those losers for anything. I clung instead only to people who would stick up for me.

Maybe that’s how Jerry and Mike feel right now. Maybe it feels like an enormous assault over something that to them was one of however many zillions of jokes they’ve made over the years. The feeling that everything you’ve worked for can be made worthless to some people over one misstep is actually traumatic.

For me, the worst thing about my experience was not the negative reactions themselves. The worst part was feeling like people had got me wrong. That people now believed I was this awful person, that the fact I had been rude once meant I didn’t respect others or that I wasn’t loved enough as a child or something.

Maybe Jerry and Mike feel like people have got them wrong, too, that they’re now being accused of “supporting rape” or of being these dismissive, insensitive people. When a community turns on you like that it’s sick-making. It can be hard to want to say you’re sorry. It’s hard not to say “if you don’t like me anymore, then leave.” Admitting you’re wrong often feels like you’re giving your power away to these people who are tearing you down or are taking their reactions to an extreme that feels unfair.

I mean, those are the only reasons I can think of for those two not to take a more constructive stance here, to try to lead the discussion in a positive direction. Because unfortunately when you become a community leader, whether or not you explicitly asked for it, people look to you for how to act and react sometimes. It’s not always easy to find ways you can do the right thing and still be yourself, but you should try. It’s your job. People are believing in you.

Anyway. I said I didn’t wanna say much about this, but I guess I never could shut up, eh? That should do it; I said on Formspring already and now I’ll say here that that’s all I want to say on this.

Post [About] Some Fxcking Cats (And Bulletstorm)

So I did this article about why despite the fact that research shows exponentially more people self-identify as “dog people” rather than “cat people”, cats are virtually the unofficial mascot of internet culture. Even weirder, I assert the cat phenomenon originated in the most aberrant and un-cute of places. Read it, will you?

It relies on the idea that culture’s like a living organism; like a cell culture, maybe, like a species, or like a volatile compound. It compensates for inertia, it evolves around environmental events, against homogeny and in response to its own weaknesses. Weird to think of ‘cat pictures on the internet’ as potential evidence for this concept, but I think it is.

Do you think game culture is evolving? Maybe “game culture” hasn’t really been “a thing” for long enough, but when I look at the way creators represent themselves in mainstream games and the way the consumer culture reacts, I just never see anything changing. Of course, the interesting changes, statements and reactions, are happening at the fringe.

There are things happening in indie culture and in those that consume it that are commentary on or responses to (or against) the mainstream. But in all other entertainment media, you can look at trends in even the lowest-common-denominator works and see that they reflect their times.

Film genres evolve as ways for people to represent and express the way they feel about the things that are happening in their world or in their society. Each period of music history has a sound that correlates to the unique circumstances of that era. Do games do this?

I find myself weirdly depressed reading Richard Clark’s Gamasutra analysis today about Bulletstorm. He, like many people (including myself, in general) is impatient with adolescent violence. The game’s lead designer himself responds in the heated and thought-provoking comments discussion to say he’s an adult catering to other adults; that having fun being immature is not the same thing as catering to teenage boys.

Some commenters seem annoyed that gloriously, silly-stupid violent games like Bulletstorm keep on getting made despite the fact that the primary negative stereotype about games and gamers is that they are silly, stupid and violent. That stereotype doesn’t just make us look weird in front of our friends and families, it results in ignorant government and legal trouble.

Yet others ask an equally-valid question: Is Bulletstorm supposed to feel responsible for “elevating the medium”? Does it need to feel guilty if people think it’s “bringing it down?” It’s just one product, one idea in a sea of many.

I had no problem with the silly-stupid sexuality in Bayonetta because I thought it was refreshingly different camp stylization, so I’m probably not in a position to complain about the visual and auditory stupidity of Bulletstorm.

I bet I’d even have fun playing Bulletstorm. I’m a hundred percent behind the idea of a statement that modern shooters, with their bald heads, sullen frowns, “gritty” landscapes and lobotomized attempts at creating “emotion” through hackish and often offensive storytelling, take themselves way too seriously, try way too hard to be “adult.” I love that the designers see Bulletstorm as a protest of that tradition.

After all, people complained about Bayonetta, I rolled my eyes and thought, “stop taking yourselves so seriously; not every video game needs to be a Good Example.” I felt that letting Bayonetta be weird and naked if she wants to be was a more positive statement than telling me if I wanted to respect myself as a woman I was only allowed to play as a turtlenecked androgyne.

I saw nothing destructive, and I was disappointed that people feeling alienated by Bayonetta prevented them from seeing what a fun, stylish freak of a game she was in.

And I still feel that way — and maybe more others would too, if exploitive shit wasn’t the rule, not the exception. I don’t really fault people for disagreeing with me and for being unable to smile much at Bay-bay-bay’s naked hair wolves. We’ve been looking at CGI boob physics for too long to be anything less than cynical and bored.

That’s probably why some of the Gamasutra commenters are uncomfortable about Bulletstorm. I could sit here and say “but Bulletstorm doesn’t look stylish, it just looks gross and childish,” but plenty of people felt that way about Bayonetta and I saw that as just a matter of taste; that mine was simply different from theirs.

So I see both sides, I guess. Most of all, I’m just bummed that this is a conversation we keep having, that big fancy new games are either so samey-same as to cause no ripple when they sink down quietly in the fast-moving river of this industry — or controversial in the same old way, over and over again.

What’s more boring — an endless parade of man-child bloodbath games, or endless circular conversations about them?

Fight!


So, you saw this lawsuit, right? I feel like at least one of the people whose name appears in the complaint has diligently studied this article of mine.

I’m no lawyer, but it looks like the people who are in the deepest ‘ish’ are West and Zampella, if Activision turns out to be able to prove any of this. And I am told little off-the-record anecdotes by people who would know that seem to suggest that the behavior on their part — specifically as concerns being difficult to Activision and Treyarch — is at least plausible.

I have seen Jason West in person only once in my life; it was at Bungie’s Halo Reach booth, where he was shuttling in to see a private demo.

But, you know, I don’t know. Numerous lines in these legal documents are redacted, primarily to protect EA, according to the notes on them, but Activision is promising to try to get that information unsealed. Surely all of the facts remain to be determined by a court. It’s unseemly for a member of the press to armchair-speculate. But you guys can do that all you want!

ANYWAY. Tension between Activision and EA has been brewing for some time and becomes increasingly uglier. This is the ugliest yet. So! It’s time to choose your sides. Who is the evillest empire?!

Renowned academic, designer and satirist Ian Bogost, of Cow Clicker fame, is offering Facebook users the opportunity to show, via bovine demonstration, which side you support in this battle royale. Do you work best in an environment of “pessimism and fear”, or do you like “a mean BBQ”? Which of these two execs really got the horns put on him when West and Zampella Respawned?

“Today we settle disputes in the courtroom or the boardroom,” said Bogost, speaking exclusively to SVGL. “But in different times men clicked to the death to resolve their differences. Thanks to the power of the Web, once again we can let the people decide! Click your cow to victory! Click it for democracy and truth and justice! Click!”

Play Cow Clicker, pick either Bobby Kowtick or John Riccowtiello and show your support. On Facebook. Which is about being social and sharing your feelings on things, right?

PS: Cow Clicker was named one of 2010′s top 10 Cult Hits on today’s Gamasutra top five by GD Mag editor Brandon Sheffield.

PPS: This cowfight may or may not have been my idea

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.]

You Look Nice, Miss


Hokay, I’m gonna get semi-personal for a minute.

I am a young woman living in an urban area. As such, I have special considerations that men, or women living in more rural or more gentrified areas, may not. To put it succinctly, I can’t walk to the train without someone catcalling me, smacking their lips at me, or blowing their car horn at me.
Even when there’s no auditory cues, there are sometimes visual ones. I’m still sometimes aware in my periphery of people leering at me as I pass by. This background din is annoying; I deal with it by wearing headphones so I can’t hear it, and sunglasses so that I feel safe from unwanted eye contact.
You could say this happens because I’m a good looking young woman, and I should “take it as a compliment.” It’s not a compliment, and it has little to do with how I look, as it happens to a lot of girls I know.
I resent that I have to take different routes home than the direct ones, to avoid the blocks where I know there are a lot of workers or neighborhood guys hanging out on the sidewalk as if the girls walking by were some kind of show for their entertainment. I resent that I can’t wear a cute dress without it being perceived as an invitation for comments from strangers. I’m just trying to go jogging outdoors and people are saying things as I pass them that make me horrendously body-conscious when I just want to work out. I’ve sometimes chosen my clothes based on where I’m going and the sort of areas I plan to walk through on my way. That sucks.
At best, it’s a little bit irritating, part and parcel of living in a big city. At worst, it makes me unsafe. I don’t walk alone at night in residential areas, ever. I’ve had cars follow me. A comment or solicitation that’s just gross and annoying yelled out of a car window on a busy street by day becomes frightening and sinister on an empty block at night. It really sucks.
Anyway, the point of all that is as a preface to something that does, in fact, have to do with gaming.
My friend Erin Robinson, who recently released the wonderful Puzzle Bots with Wadjet Eye Games (on a happy note, check it out, it’s adorable!) recently visited me here in Brooklyn, and she was fairly astonished by the culture of street harassment that is so commonplace here. While we were walking to the train, she seemed surprised that I easily ignored or blocked out so many muttered comments, car horns and “hey ladies” that were aimed at us on our way; she was surprised that this was common enough to be something one just gets used to.
Actually, we’d been talking about games, of course — she’s a designer, and so she’d asked me what kind of game I would make if by some miracle I developed an interest in development. I jokingly said I’d probably come up with some kind of revenge simulator that let you shoot scumbag catcallers.
It’s crude and it’s terrible — the person who sent it to me called it “more of a game experience and conversation catalyst than a game.” But boy, does it look like my neighborhood, right down to the water towers on the rooftops and the ice cream truck jingle that’s so ubiquitous around here in the summer (the season when you feel like you’re making yourself vulnerable just by wearing warm-weather clothes). The things they say are pretty realistic — and appear on the tombstones that pop up once you kill a strolling aggressor.
I think you all will find it disturbing to play. The sad thing is how I fear many guys out there will respond.
I just know that there are plenty of you reading this thinking that these male neighbors of mine are “just going about it the wrong way,” and that there’s a “nice way” to bother a woman walking alone or out shopping.
Plenty of people do do it “the nice way” — they patiently and politely insist on just talking to me for a minute, or they just want to step into my path to tell me my eyes are nice. And can’t I take a compliment?
To that, I say, why don’t I have the right to go to my corner store and home again without feeling obligated to be friendly to strangers on the sidewalk just because the strangers are physically attracted to me? Do I owe them something? Yes, it’s rather nice that the workers in my bodega all want to shake my hand and ask me all about how I’m doing and what I’m up to every time I go in in the morning, it’s so good that they’re friendly, but maybe I just want to buy a damn pack of cigarettes without having to explain what I’m all dressed up for.
Maybe I don’t like that I have to walk several blocks to a faraway store for feminine products or other personal things because I don’t feel comfortable asking my “friends” to get them for me from where they’re kept behind the counter.
The worst is so many guys on the street are jerks that I often feel like I have to force a smile and a polite attitude for people who are “just paying me a compliment” or are being nice about it. Over time, little incidents like that — when I indulge conversation with men because they’re “just trying to be nice” even though I don’t feel like talking, or when I smile when I don’t really want to smile — start to make me feel as personally violated as the harsher transgressions that are easier to ignore.
No, wait, here’s the worst. The worst is that there are entire demographics of people out there who would dismiss my complaints — oh, poor you, you get attention because people think you’re pretty, they say. Again, I don’t think this has anything to do with how I look (although I had a friend tell me recently she fantasizes about disfiguring herself so that she never has to worry about this happening), because it’s not like I’m a model or something.
It’s latent misogyny that happens in big cities; it takes my power away. It makes me an object in front of people I don’t even know, and that’s not okay whether they’re nice about it or not. It is nothing less than a slow-burning chronic trauma.
My favorite catcall in the ‘Hey Baby Game’? “Smile for me, baby.” It fills me with rage that a stranger on the street feels at liberty to demand that I smile. I smile when I feel like it, and I sure as shit don’t want to do it for you, buddy.
So someone’s made a game that’s an outlet for that rage, that wants us to discuss that rage. Discuss. And be civil — do not make me close the comments, please.
(Yeah, I didn’t even want to really go here, but a couple of commenters on RPS need a little bit of education on what sexism is.)
[UPDATE: From Gillen. Excerpt: “If you’re a man, and you’ve acted like this, the woman you do it to, beneath the polite smile she has to offer, has probably fantasised about you dying.” Thank you very much.]

Dysfunctional Family Circle


First off, thanks everyone for the birthday wishes! It was so nice to get so many comments.

Video games have the potential to be a plodding, tech-focused industry, and while there is certainly a broad and nuanced consumer base for them (broader than most realize), those who read internet game journalism still represent a fairly niche portion of the audience. We’re not accustomed to being buzzworthy or sexy, the way, say, celebrity gossip, fashion or the film biz is. And yet, we’d like to be a little more buzzworthy, in general — we’ve got the hot-looking (albeit digital) icons, we’ve got the big explosions, the talent, the high action and the tearjerkers. Why can’t we have some sexy headlines, too?

It’s sort of a sensible demand, and I agree with the sentiment that the industry needs more celebrities, more champions, more people that can really stand at the forefront of things as beloved ambassadors — as Cliff Bleszinski says in Gamasutra’s current feature, “visionaries.” We’ve got a few of those, of course, but generally those folks don’t talk to the media much. They tend to be “Wizard of Oz” personas behind the scenes, don’t they?

I’ve written before about how, failing actual celebrities, we’ve made “controversial” figures out of just about anything we can get our hands on, ready to seize on vague quotes to create an imagined feud, ready to populate and respawn relatively tame challenges or dissensions from industry people to craft them into maverick media stars.

Imposing Our Personal Narratives

Though the quote didn’t make it into my final interview stories, I remember that during my talk with EA CEO John Riccitiello recently, he noted that “people wanted to impose their personal narrative” on his company’s bid to acquire Take-Two, imagining a contentious war of egos, fierce verbal exchanges and slamming boardroom doors, an out-and-out, one-on-one testosterone battle between Riccitiello and the (rather generative!) Strauss Zelnick. Though I’m sure Riccitiello would not have told me if it’d indeed been that way, he maintains the negotiations were professional, civil, and essentially uneventful — but that doesn’t make good headlines, does it?

People want to impose their personal narratives on a lot of things, and often the media caters to this wish — they do it with politics, business, art and film, whatever you pick. And “the media” is often criticized (as if “the media” comprised some nebulous, single-headed monster) for its steps over the line between sensationalism and its duty to the truth.

So yeah, this Edge story about Deus Ex. I’m slightly lazy today, so I’ll let Gillen explain:

The forthcoming issue of videogame bible Edge has a large feature on Eidos Montreal’s development of Deus Ex 3. To tease it, Edge Online runs a short story with the headline “Deus Ex was “Kinda Slow” Says Deus Ex 3 Dev” before offering a quote from Lead Designer Jean-Francois Dugas: “There weren’t enough exciting, memorable moments. It was aimed more towards a simulation rather than a game experience.”. Internet explodes.

It is only part of the story. In a literal sense.

In other words, the “kinda slow” line was out of context and dredged out of an interview with a plethora of much more relevant quotes, or at the very least, quotes that could have been taken out of context to precisely the opposite effect. And yes, this happens often in media — but on the internet, news stories can provoke widespread reaction. And that reaction can impact people’s relationship to their work at best — and their game performance and their job status at worst.

Why This Happens

We live in a world where blogs, forums and Digg influence game-buying habits as much as, if not more than, “proper” media. When a journalist takes something out of context to grab a headline, that angle on the truth is free to proliferate across amateur sites and aggregators even further out of context — in short, it becomes a game of Telephone, where the end result could theoretically turn out so divorced from its source that the source can no longer be found.

For example, Kotaku — which, in my experience usually aims to be more responsible about context and sourcing than it’s often given credit for — picked up Edge’s headline, and Luke Plunkett was apparently so worried about people’s inappropriate reactions that he qualified the statement with plenty of context — in italics, even! But even despite this, a good portion of Kotaku’s audience is unlikely to read the whole post, and the editorializing will take place in the comments anyway.

So yes, I do think Edge crossed a line. I think it was poorly done of what’s normally a very high-quality site. But while I could sit here and self-righteously exoriate Edge for being irresponsible, unethical, hit-driven, traffic-obsessed, blah blah blah, and all the things it seems knee-jerk to do, it’s unfortunately not that simple.

Joined By Challenge

Both game developers and game journalists have a couple key things in common: serving their audience is their job, and if they do this well, they will be successful. And their industries are both highly competitive, even saturated — game developers must do their best to ensure that their game is the one that the average consumer drops $60 on this month, and game journalists must do their best to ensure that their site is the one that garners the biggest piece of the Web traffic pie.

(Note the traffic thing is simplified; not all journalists are paid on the traffic they do, and not all sites have a direct correlation between traffic and money. It depends on other factors of a media company’s business models. But the point remains that a web site that nobody reads won’t be around for long; a writer who doesn’t get read isn’t going to have a job for long.)

And this is the era of New Media. While journalists are busily aiming to score proper interviews, do research, cite their sources and observe embargoes and all those fussy details — you know, journalism — blogs not only have more freedom to make entertainment more important than ethics, but they also frequently have a devoted community around them that enjoys being free to speak back. So news sites like Edge (and like its competitor, Gamasutra, which employs me) face stiff competition in attaining an audience’s attention.

Not an excuse, I know; that’s just business. And as Wolf_Dog wrote to me in a recent email, “sensationalism is nothing new.” But I think we’ve got something a little different here in the games biz, something unique to us, that makes it complicated.

Consumption Culture

I feel like situations like this might occur less often if we didn’t have a larger culture within the gaming audience wherein we have, as I recently wrote at length, become extremely demanding in a fashion that borders on entitlement. Our hit-driven business has created among the consumer culture an environment where each new event is required to be more exciting than the last, and the hype cycle breeds such high expectations that chronic cynicism and negativity is an inevitability. I mean, here we are, talking about how inappropriate it was to bait explosive audience reaction — regarding what’s really a vague, tepid criticism of an old game. Why is it such a big deal?

Oh, and here’s another thing journalists and game developers have in common: They feel, quite a lot of the time, that they will never be able to please their audience no matter what they do.

We won’t be able to make you happy, so we’ll stand for just being able to hang on to your attention. Somewhere in the world at this very moment, game designers are putting heads together trying to puzzle out just what tactic they can try to make you play their next game for longer than you played their last one. At the same time, a game publication’s brass are discussing with their editors how they can boost reader retention.

If neither of them can cater to the consumption habits of their audience, they won’t last — especially in an oversaturated space where there is plenty of competition. And so to align with the audience’s consumption habits, both games and game journalism are forced to align with the audience’s culture — a culture that wants celebrity, wants controversy, wants things to buzz about, and, unfortunately, wants things to complain about, to take up arms about, to band together over.

Chickens And Eggs

And certainly, one end does perpetuate the other. Has the audience been trained to expect disappointment, to have minimal attention spans, by the hype-driven (and thus continually disappointing) game industry? Has the audience developed its resentful mob mentality by being told what they do and don’t want by a slate of envious, immature game journalists whose largest qualification is that they are more obsessive enthusiasts than those for whom they write?

Journalists and developers will say that they’ve become whatever it is they’ve become because of turning backbends to please an unpleasable audience; the audience can just as easily say they’ve been made what they are by the media they consume.

I have in the past plucked out what I think is the juiciest headline quote from an interview I’ve done. And I confess that my standards for juiciness have at least a little to do with an awareness of what people will click on. I like to think I’m responsible about it, but I’m pretty sure Edge didn’t think it was being irresponsible with this Deus Ex quote either. As a matter of fact, I wonder if I might not have zeroed in on the exact same headline. I can’t say for sure.

It’s kind of a slippery slope, and the crap thing is that it isn’t really anybody’s fault. In the dysfunctional family circle of game industry, game media, and game consumer, anyone can always point the finger to the left or to the right of themselves.

A Controversial Tracklist, An Awesome One, And A Terrible One


Keeping up with blog topics is almost as difficult as keeping up with games. There are a couple things I want to write about before they get away from me, as most everything else is — and I will. Soon. But for now, just a couple of quick notes.

Controversial: Stephen Totilo spoke to Toumani Diabate, the Malian musician behind the song that got LittleBigPlanet pulled (but not before I got it here in the ‘hood when they broke street, nyah!). Fascinating article — not only does Diabate explain his intentions behind putting the words in his music, but the record label discusses the context for the Koran words in his song. Beliefnet editor Dilshad Ali and Council on American-Islamic Relations spokesperson Ibrahim Hooper also weigh in on why, precisely, the song might offend Muslims. Interesting stuff.

“I could see Christians or Jews objecting if verses from the Bible were used in a similar way,” Hooper told Totilo. I puzzled over this a little, because I’m not so sure that’s the case, at least not in any kind of broad way here. Quoting the Bible casually has become a part of American culture, even for the non-religious, and plenty of pop songs have biblical references, even direct quotes.

I remember people getting worked up over Madonna’s Like A Prayer video, but I believe that’s because she was burning crosses in it, right? I don’t really remember.

Anyway, these are cultural/religious values clearly different than the ones with which I was raised, but it sounds like the spokespeople Totilo talked to appreciate Sony’s decision to remove the song and avoid offending anyone.

Second, a couple of the reviews I’ve worked on recently are up at Variety.

Awesome: Not having a huge affinity for car games, to say the least, I’m surprised at how much I like Midnight Club: Los Angeles. I enjoy playing it and keep squeezing in race time between work and dinner. The real kicker is that I liked the multiplayer. If you’ve been reading this blog, you know I’m never into multiplayer and actively avoid it when I can. It’s why I rarely give out my gamertag — I get nervous shooting, driving, or doing anything skill-based in front of other people. Still, if you pick up this game, email me your gamertag so I can add you to my friends and play MCLA with you. Just don’t expect greatness!

One thing I’m kicking myself for neglecting to mention in the review is how hawt the soundtrack is. I mean, you know Rockstar can sure pick music, but still.

Terrible: On the flip side, I did not like Rock Revolution. Like, at all.