Category Archives: Discussions

Take Care Of Each Other

So given that there are still so many patently horrible people in the world, it continues to be important to emphasize what we all can do to contribute to a civilized, mature and inclusive culture around video games, which often seem to be a little slower to it than other entertainment industries and business segments.

How I feel about women in media — and some of my personal experiences being one — was the focus of the talk I gave last month in Toronto at TIFF Nexus, and the video of my keynote is finally online for you to watch! Bear with me: I was incredibly intimidated by the amazing honor of having been invited to speak, and I don’t speak so fast nor drop so many ‘um’s during the talk as I do in the first ten minutes, ha.
During the talk I namecheck Harmonix’s Matt Boch, since I was so struck by what he said at NYU’s PRACTICE event about gender as performance in Dance Central. Although unfortunately I didn’t get that quote down in my initial coverage of his lecture then, ultimately I followed up with him for a larger interview on what exactly that means, and that’s now up at Gamasutra, too — his perspective is fascinating and I highly urge you to read it.
UPDATE! Kirk Hamilton responds at Kotaku, with ‘On Playing Dance Central 2 while male.’
Those Harmonix folks are seriously cool people, by the way, as I had the fortune to observe when I was invited in to do an in-depth studio profile that ran in OXM back in the summer. Check it out if you missed it the first go ’round.
Also, toward the end of the talk I paraphrase a Seth Killian quote from PRACTICE regarding misogyny in the Street Fighter community, and the actual quote plus context in Stephen Totilo’s coverage over at Kotaku.
On the subject of cool people, my friend Denis Farr writes a follow-up at Kotaku about some of his thoughts since the time he first spoke out on the site as a gay gamer who has experienced homophobia (trigger warnings for such, natch), using this Blizzcon incident as a launching point. He is brave and honest and both of his articles are worth your time.
I have absolutely no time for nor interest in the kind of people to whom these voices and perspectives are somehow unwanted (I mean, I’ll forgive you if you don’t sit through my whole keynote, but you get what I mean). Games are for fun, we can play, etc., but as in all things we should all aim to be the kind of people who care about where one another are coming from and who are willing to listen.
That seems really, really basic to me.

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?

Haute Of Breath

If you haven’t had enough retrospectives yet, Slate is doing its year-end conversation between prominent critics on games. It’s one of my favorite features generally (oh-em-gee so flippin’ stoked to have participated last year). This year, in addition to Slate’s MC Chris Suellentrop, there is my friend Tom Bissell, NYT’s Seth Schiesel and a dude with whom I confess to being totes unfamiliar, and they seem to be having a good conversation.

As I type this they seem to be debating how seriously to take video games; Schiesel likes Call of Duty: Black Ops best and says that it’s fine for games just to be fun; Bissell says fun is not the point, that Black Ops is cynical and that Schiesel’s favorite of last year, Dragon Age, is “boner-killing” (yes, thank you).

I have to side with Tom here. I definitely think Seth has a point about a contingent of haute critics so desperate to be taken seriously and/or for games to be treated like “art” that they elect to see depth where fallows lie; in last year’s roundup I think I chided my friend Jamin for weighing Uncharted’s Drake, whom I see as a fairly basic action-hero construct, a knockoff of Indiana Jones, as, like, a meaningful protagonist (despite me finding the franchise to be one of the finest-crafted couple of games we currently have to hold up). I cringe at my own past blogitorials, where I whipped a few poignant play moments into frenzies of gravitas (no, I will not point them out).

Seth says we should just be past that, and if we like blowing things up in Black Ops, it’s cool to just admit it, like the millions and millions of people who’ve bought the game. Games are accepted now, so we no longer really have to worry about their souls. Just like what you like!

I am not the biggest fan of that line of thinking, because it embraces the idea we want a furtherance of the medium of gaming just so that we can be “accepted” or “feel cool” (the main idea of my column in Kill Screen Issue Zero), when I think some of us just want to see how far games can go, want them to be richer and more inclusive.

Either way. Black Ops is a spiritually dead piece of work, and I don’t want to reward that. And that’s all beside the point: Even if games, or just some games, were just for fun, Black Ops isn’t that fun.

I think there’s a fair lot of people so desperate not to take games seriously that they see “fun”where there isn’t any.

Ultimately, when intelligent people get together to discuss their favorite games, the conversation turns out similar: Why do we play? What’s good and valuable about this game versus that? What are our values as critics? I’m not always prepared for these debates, especially as I think the people involved won’t always agree. I get tired just reading the back-and-forth. So tired! That’s why when people want to ask me what’s my game of the year I blurt it out and then I wander off so I don’t have to discuss it.

Oh, yeah, my game of the year. Not time for that yet. But! The developer of my game of the year is listed in my colleague’s article today on 2010′s best developers. Actually, there are two developers listed in here whose games could top my list, but I am trying to work out where to draw the line between “the best” and “my favorite”, which I am not convinced are the same. Sometimes I think it matters and sometimes I don’t.

[today’s good song: galleries + foxes in fiction, ‘borders’]

Privilege

When people who’ve long demanded diversity in the characters and narratives they enjoy in video games get down to discuss the issue, it always comes down to a lingering why they can’t concretely answer — why does male and white-dominated homogeny in video game protagonists persist, when so much of the audience that wants to be personified in interactive entertainment can’t relate?

Even though creativity and self-expression are needed to elevate games beyond predictable “commercial product” industry, the fact remains it’s a high risk, hit-driven business, where the answer to why is usually “because it sells.” But doesn’t the demand for diversity indicate at least some untapped market opportunity, enough to justify the risk?

What if it did? It would mean no more excuses, no more economic reasons not to do things differently. No more data with which to dismiss uncomfortable conversations on why developers won’t or can’t treat race and gender in games. No more marketing spreadsheets to justify taking the path of least resistance. Wouldn’t it be much easier for the army of the status quo to ignore any evidence that would challenge them to do anything new?

Would it even be easier to interpret existing data in whatever fashion’s needed to keep things comfortably the same?

That’s apparently what happens at Activision, according to what I’ve been told by numerous current and former employees of the publisher’s studios. I covered what these insiders had to say in an article today in Gamasutra, and their claims that the company’s decisions on what goes in its games — including the race or gender of its heroes — are based disproportionately on focus tests that, the sources tell me, it often skews to support its “preconceived notions.”

The timing of my article is unfortunate with recent revelations that CEO Bobby Kotick preferred to spend over a million dollars in legal fees to “destroy” one of his employees who accused another of sexual harassment, rather than settle with her for much less. But accusing an entire corporation of inherent bias goes a bit further than I’m aiming, here; I want to be clear on that.

I’ve also heard from plenty who say that it’s not just Activision where this occurs, and despite the focus on a few exemplary anecdotes in my story, this is likely true. Still, the facts on how market-driven methodology — which happens to various extents at every publisher — make it nearly impossible to address new markets or pioneer new and representative game characters are very hard to ignore.

That there is an underlying climate of ignorance and bias wafting in the game industry, populated in significant majority on all levels by white males (to where a female or ethnic developer is still, in 2010, trotted out as worthy of special note) is just the darker undercurrent to this story. People can only create what they know. People are hostile to those unlike them. The game industry’s culture and practices bear the deeply-ingrained stains of its long-term homogeny — and as long as people have “well, we’re making money,” to hide behind, why would anyone want to change?

To those of you who look at internal process information like this and say, “it’s just business,” bear in mind that the line between business and bias is not as simply or as tidily parsed as you would like. Perhaps it is a CEO’s job to relegate the entire conversation about a medium’s creative and cultural future to “this is what sells.”

But you’re their audience. You’re the consumer. You don’t have to feel guilty because you buy and enjoy blockbusters like Gears of War or Call of Duty, but the party-line bottom-line talk should not be your mantle to assume. Don’t tolerate “it’s just a business”, because as those who spoke to me for my article insisted, there exist infinite reams of data that can be applied to prove whatever point the status quo wants to prove, to justify the production of whatever it’s easiest for the status quo to produce.

The issue goes beyond gender equity or even general “character diversity”; few would wish for “more female characters” just out of the arbitrary desire for political-correctness. When I asked you about it on Twitter, many of you said you don’t care what race or gender your characters are as long as they’re interesting.

Instead, it illuminates a larger issue about an environment of progressive creation, about developer happiness, about being a healthy, widely-relevant industry that attracts a broad range of interesting people on the production side and on the audience side. And if you need evidence we’ve got a long way to go, just read some of the comments on the article at Gamasutra.

This issue upsets people. It brings out their ugly side. Nobody wants to face it.

There is no business “formula” for a sure-fire blockbuster video game. Publishers have tried to prove to their investors they’ve discovered one, and ended up shot full of holes. Why do we continue sacrificing innovation to this straw man?

As one dev told me on Twitter: “People get really upset when they have their privilege challenged.” Which means we should do it. And ‘on principle’ is a perfectly valid reason. ‘It’s a business’ is not an excuse.

Oh, Come On

One of the reasons I dislike writing about gender — even when I think my gender might provide useful perspective — is that someone will always use it as an excuse to point out self-victimization. You cannot make any observation about gender without someone demanding that the perfect reverse be also true, and you’re a misogynist/misandrist if not. According to commenters I am either of these at any given time.

When I first started writing professionally, having a gender-neutral name as I do, I wouldn’t even disclose that I was female unless asked directly, not just because I feared backlash, but because I didn’t want to make it relevant. I think I’ve done only a handful of articles that are specifically oriented around a female perspective, and usually only when asked directly by an editor — nonetheless, I think the most vocal commentary I receive about my work has to do with whether I am sexist. That, or the fact that I can’t even bring it up without being accused of ‘using’ it for something. To hear forumgoers and commenters say it, when I am not setting back the women’s movement a hundred years, I am emasculating and victimizing men.

I’m bummed that many commenters on Kotaku have distilled my recent feature down to: “I play as a jerk as a man because men are dicks, but I have a deeper experience when I’m a woman.” That’s not it at all — whenever I play video games that let me create my own character, I develop a “concept” of what kind of person I want to play that is gender-independent; usually this concept has nothing to do with who I am, but more to do with what kind of character I think makes for an interesting story, something I said plainly in the article.

I liked the concept of an aloof, manipulative person as the Persona 3 protagonist. This was easy to execute when I played as a male, but hard to execute when I played as a female – because I am a female, and only then did I notice how much social ideas about how women should behave were weighing on me. If I’d played the game as a woman first, I might have had the same revelations regarding what I unconsciously think men should “be like”, and then it’d be a different article to a similar end.

That I played as a jerk the first time had nothing to do with the fact the original protagonist is male (as far as I’m consciously aware). What I’m saying here is I didn’t think about gender at all, until this second playthrough of the game — where only the gender had been changed, for the most part — made me realize my idea of the kind of character I wanted to play was coming into conflict with preconceptions of how women are taught they should act, things I would have never expected would influence me.

This seemed to be obvious to most of the commenters — many players, their own gender aside, shared experiences of feeling more sympathetic toward Yukari’s jealous insecurities when they played as a woman, or feeling more annoyed or threatened by Junpei’s questioning their authority (two stand-out differences for me as well).

It was an article about how a player’s reactions to characters and situations can change based on your character’s gender, and how those are being informed by social lessons you may have been unconsciously taught. I think that’s an interesting self-exploration experience that only video games can offer, so I shared it. Many commenters pointed this out, but anyone is making it into “men are this and women are that, huh?” is disappointing, so I figured I’d be absolutely clear.

Most of the comments in the thread are on point, but I didn’t want to see the conversation derailed into misandry complaints without stating my firm objection.

Squee Mode


In a predictable state of affairs, writer Leigh Alexander swathed her entire blog in a romantic Persona 3 Portable theme, tweeted on numerous occasions about how she failed to sleep due to Persona 3 Portable, changed her desktop wallpaper from MGS3‘s final boss scene to the above image, and then stopped blogging for two weeks. Guess what she has been doing all this time.

Actually, while I have been playing a lot of Persona 3 Portable, I’ve mainly been writing a lot, once again developing bunches of stories that I can’t wait to share with you as they materialize. Lately, though, I’ve been talking to a lot of developers about the high-stress environment of the game industry. Lots of people get into game writing because they hope to “cross over” — that’s never been me. I feel like there’s nothing that could make me want to work on the other side; let’s pretend I actually did have any game design skills, which I certainly don’t. Writing for the trade I’ve learned something big: I don’t envy them, to say the least!

And having been in games writing for a while now, there are a lot of times, to be honest, that I’m terribly stressed out, too, by the challenges of covering such a specific business — and by the culture of the audience, and I know I’m not alone. And if the audience is capable of causing me so much fatigue and disillusionment sometimes, it makes me wonder what’s wrong with them, too.

I wrote Who Cheers For War last month at Kotaku because I’ve been curious about digging into the darkness I often observe in our hobby — there’s no other way of putting it. Sometimes it even feels like illness. The often unspoken pains that all three spokes of this wheel (devs, media and audience) endure was something I think it’s important to continue to call attention to and examine, and I did this at Gamasutra late last week. Please do check it out and discuss if you missed it. The discussion thread on it has grown epic.

Today at Kotaku, an article about — surprise! — Persona 3 Portable. In my last post I said I hoped to write more about how playing as a female feels different this time around, and I had the opportunity to do that in this month’s feature column. For reference, here’s how it felt for me the first time around, from the archives of my old Aberrant Gamer haunt.

You heard yesterday that GameStop bought Kongregate — Kongregate’s founder, Jim Greer, an industry veteran with whom I’ve had several conversations that make me feel he cares very much about developers, would like you to think twice before applying the “home for indies sells out” narrative to this one, or that’s the message I got from my interview with both companies about the deal.

In other acquisition news, Disney spends quite a sum on third-place Facebook game developer Playdom, and one analyst thinks it’s an over-spend with unclear ROI potential (how’s that Club Penguin thing working out now, I’d like to know?). The contentious environment around social game investments, players and developers, is certainly becoming increasingly fricative, and nothing’s made this clearer than the polarizing response to Ian Bogost’s commentary game, Cow Clicker. For now, check out the heated discussion on his blog about it, and stay tuned for an in-depth follow up from me at Gamasutra coming soon. The whole issue’s fascinating, to say the least.

Speaking of social media, you will notice Blogger has kindly added buttons to allow you to tweet, FB, email and Buzz my posts directly whenever you like. Go for it!

So, also StarCraft II is, uh… something that is happening… it is a game for your computer, a lot of people are playing it, I.. yeah, I don’t know. I don’t know anything about StarCraft. Blind spot. Sorry bros. Are you into it? Lemme know in the new SVGL poll on the sidebar!

The last poll, by the way, showed that the majority of you, at 58%, are not interested in new motion control solutions. 21 percent of you are interested in PlayStation Move, 16 percent prefer Kinect, and only 4 percent of you would like to have both interfaces in your living room. Innnnnnnnteresting! I’ll have to ask you again after launch, when more titles are available…

[‘Today’s Good Song’ is actually an awesome music video! Check out Cosmetics’ ‘Soft Skin‘.]

What Does A Gamer Look Like?


If you are a Brooklynite or you know one, the perception that Manhattan is like ugh so fucking far, impossible miles comprised of inconvenient steps, is familiar to you. Although Brooklyn is as much a part of New York City as any other borough (holding my tongue against the Staten Island jab, because they’ve had enough) , when discussing Manhattan destinations, we talk about “going to the city” as if it were a cross-country road trip.

In fact, it’s just a matter of train stops. It’s not that big a deal. But when I had to go “to the city” yesterday to see the U.S. launch of Dragon Quest IX at the Nintendo World Store, I fully-loaded my iPhone with brand-new music and brought my PSP (YES! I GOT ONE, present from a lovely friend) for the train ride, and in case I had to wait in line when I got there.

Incidentally, what is the etiquette around playing a PSP at a Nintendo launch event? What if you’re using it to re-play Square Enix’s Final Fantasy VII at the launch of a Square Enix game? These are the things I wonder about, friends.

As it turned out, I did not have to wait in line, but I did play a fair bit on the train — the early train sequences in Midgar, incidentally. Semi-surreal; Cloud and his AVALANCHE rebel cohort trying to evade train security so they can take the railway to their scheduled Reactor bombing, while all around me the subway interior is decorated with lectures about “if you see something, say something.” The ride was punctuated by voice-over drones about “suspicious packages.”

You read the ‘Hey Baby’ post, and how unfortunately acclimated girls from my neighborhood get to long stares, unwelcome conversation-starters like “I like your bounce, Mami,” and generally aggressive strange men. So when the guy I sit down next to on the train begins staring at me and grinning stupidly, I simply ignore it, put my headphones on, and keep playing FFVII.

He goes on staring and nodding at me the whole time, this guy in ginormous baggy pants, askew ballcap, sporting a huge diamond stud — like, not my type. By the time we arrive at the station, I take off my headphones and begin putting them away, and glance to make sure this creeper isn’t planning to follow me or something.

But he goes, “Hey, Final Fantasy VII. Old school, that’s cool!”
I was floored and embarrassed, and all I could say was something to the effect of “yeah, it’s pretty essential, right?”

And he goes, “I was surprised. You don’t really look like a gamer.”

Ha. Not for one minute would I have guessed it was my PSP he was staring at, either. Damn, did I feel dumb.

I mean, here I’ve been writing for years about “broadening audiences” and “cultural diversity” and things like that, and yet I suppose I still had in my head an idea about “what a gamer looks like” (those dudes wearing turbans and capes and Slime costumes at the DQIX event, for example).

Do you?

I once wrote this article about the innate desire “we” all have, as part of a culture that’s been historically fairly small, fairly intense and fairly marginalized, to “recognize” one another in the public, offline space. When I wrote it, it was 2007; I lived in Manhattan. I felt very much like the only gamer in the world (if you’ve seen the piece I did for Kill Screen Issue 0, you might recognize some sentiments in common).

To be quite honest, I guess it feels different now, even a few years later. I went to an internet cafe in Williamsburg to print some stuff out and they had a bunch of TW@-branded mousepads there (although, to be fair, the clerk told me I was the only person who’d ever noted the reference). Many weekends I join friends from the local Silent Barn community space in playing and promoting Babycastles, the indie arcade they’ve got going on in the basement (I recently had the privilege of playing Messhof’s Nidhogg with a bunch of my friends whose usual purview is playing music). People at my local hangouts tell me my job is cool. I know one bartender with a Triforce on his arm, and another bartender with a Buster Sword on his calf — and that’s just at one restaurant.

We are proliferating. We should adjust our expectations of strangers.

Bonus material: While we’re on really old articles of mine, one about people who got way too into Final Fantasy VII.

Double bonus: I loaded my iPhone with new music, yes — if you follow me on Twitter you’ve been picking up the mixtapes I regularly post, but if you missed it, here’s volume 2 of my ‘summertime mix’. Due to the limitations of free hosting, it’ll only be available for a limited time, so if you’re remotely curious, grab it now and give an ear to these fantastic artists.

Triple bonus ding-ding-ding: Guess what else I did at the DQIX event? I interviewed Yuji Horii. You’ll get to read that ASAP.
[Slimes on the cobbles of Rockefeller Plaza]


[Today’s Good Song: ‘I’ll Follow You‘, White Fence (via noise narcs)]

Lexicon

If I had to choose one failing in my work, it’d be my tendency to choose vague language. It’s certainly not the only shortcoming I’m working on, but I think I have such a relationship to the sight, taste and impression of certain words that I lose sight of the fact they might not be ideal for communicating concretely with my audience.

If that’s my weakness, then I’m in the right field. In games journalism, vague words like “gameplay” and “mechanic” are commonplace, generally meaningless adjectives like “compelling” are abused to excess, and we use genre descriptors even though our genres have evolved so as to make delineations confusing at best, useless at worst.
This makes it increasingly difficult to talk about games with one another, let alone with non-gamers. When I edit my own work, I slice out entire paragraphs that portray vague sentiment, but tell readers nothing. And when I try to talk about games with my friends, I sound like a babbling idiot.
Thus, my latest Kotaku feature was born. Yeah, yeah, this is the one from like two weeks ago, but I’m getting caught up all in here, alright? If you haven’t seen it yet, have a read! It’s on how, as someone who purports to have built her career around ambassadorship for meaning in games, I feel I’m falling short. I also try to illustrate why it’s important we all do better.
The funniest part is the commenters. Many respond to my frustration at being unable to explain games to non-gamers in a way that explains why the games are good — by offering their own equally obtuse and inadequate explanations and presuming they suffice. The takeaway from that, for me, is that we’re so entrenched in our personal relationships with games and our insular culture; we’re so dependent on shorthand that’s understandable to only us that we can’t even see it.
[Today’s Good Song: ‘Chinatown‘, Wild Nothing]

The Ick Factor


During our discussion the other day on Crysis 2‘s ashen New York City in the context of the attack earlier this decade, Modern Warfare 2 and its imagery — however nonspecific it aims to be — of a fresher conflict came up. No, the Modern Warfare games are not explicitly “about” nor are they set in the real Iraq and Afghan wars, but to say that absolves them from a relationship to current events gives them too easy a pass. They are a reflection of our times.

Because of its ability to make me think about real soldiers, real foreign combatants and real war, I’ve never enjoyed the Modern Warfare games’ campaigns. Regardless of political stance, to “enjoy” war or think of it as something to “play” is anathema to me. The franchise’s success is primarily attributable to its multiplayer, of course, but its spirit isn’t something I think can be so easily divorced from it no matter what mode you’re playing. Imagery’s imagery and association is association.
As the game is apparently quite decisively the “biggest entertainment launch of all time,” or so says the Guinness Book of World Records today, the things about it that bother me clearly don’t bother an unprecedentedly large portion of the global population. Either that, or it does bother them, and they like to be bothered.
I strongly believe the thing about the Modern Warfare games that nobody ever admits is that they must be for many people — consciously or subconsciously — an outlet for common feelings like anxiety about the global environment, or nationalism; in some cases they must be outlets for darker feelings, like revenge fantasies, xenophobia or political supremacy. Frankly, it creeps me out, but not as much as the fact that it’s never discussed.
Real-world soldiers must take a very specific psychological approach to a job where they daily know they may end up losing their own lives or needing to end someone else’s. They tend to be cavalier or even upbeat about it probably by personal necessity. They are allowed to cheer and fistbump when they blow up a helicopter. Gamers doing that is a different matter to me.
I’ve added a new poll to the SVGL sidebar: Does Modern Warfare make you uncomfortable, or is it “just a game?

Linking And Dreaming

Real busy, so just a few quick links for you guys today:

I got an early look at Jason Rohrer’s Sleep is Death. Full story at Kotaku, which I would love for you to read, because this game is like nothing else I’ve ever played and deserves all the exposure it can get.
At Gamasutra, I’ve written on why I think the demise of the console game has been greatly exaggerated, and on wondering why I’m really not that into FF13. Y’know, emotionally.
Check them out, please, and lemme know what you think. Meanwhile, did you get an iPad? I can’t really tell if I would be interested in one or not — it’d need to be financially possible for me to know how I’d feel about it, and it’s not — but no, I don’t have one.
I had a dream I did, though. In this dream, I wandered into my messy living room to find one that I’d apparently forgotten buying, lying on top of a blanket. Realizing I did indeed own an iPad, I felt silly for making fun of people who couldn’t shut up about them on Saturday. However, in this dream, my iPad needed its screen cleaned, and as I tried to polish it gently with a tissue, I caused an enormous gouge to appear on its face. Deciding I’d rather have no iPad than one with a big scratch on the screen, I tossed it aside, reasoning, “guess I’ll never use this again.”