Category Archives: Discussions

Nerd Crush

My friend works at a restaurant where I had a little thing with the bartender. “I beat the campaign of Modern Warfare 2 in three hours,” he announces when I come in to visit her one day after work.

“Stop,” I tell him immediately. I decline to greet by hugging, I frown stiffly, and I can hear a worn, thin tone snappish in my voice. “I don’t want to talk about work,” I tell him. I immediately feel bad for being bitchy. He’s a nice kid, and he’s told me before that bringing up “game stuff” is an easy way for him to start conversation with me, and he’s just so enthusiastic he can’t help it, no matter how many times I try to change the subject.
A lot of guys I meet feel the same way, whether they want to date me or not. Such a novelty is it for them to discover a neighborhood gal who presumably “plays video games all day” that they seem over the moon to find a girl they can talk about games with. This should make me feel cool. It makes me annoyed.
Yeah, of course I have played [insert new title here]. It’s my job. And yes, of course you may come over and play [game that isn't out yet] with me. Just bring me a bottle of gin and have something else to talk about, please. My house is not an arcade. Sometimes when I’m off the clock video games are the last thing I want to look at, think about or talk about.
Does this sound really unfair of me? Am I sometimes over-sensitive to people who are just trying to be nice or share an interest in my field? Probably, but try to understand it really sucks for men to continually make of me a novelty. I don’t want to be a novelty. I am not my job.
And I imagine any gal who’s an avid gamer even for a hobby, not for a living, has to deal with the same thing, endless barrages of breathless shock from guys that can’t believe you exist. And maybe gals for whom it’s just a hobby find this flattering. I don’t.
You wouldn’t ask your friend who’s a lawyer for free legal advice every time you see him. You wouldn’t ask your friend who’s a tax preparer to share his expertise gratis. You wouldn’t bug your psychologist friend about your traumatic childhood every time she simply wants to have coffee with you. You pay people for that stuff.
Maybe I should charge people to play video games with me. Maybe I should refuse to talk about them unless I’m being paid. Maybe I should only allow guys at the bar to ask me if God of War III is any good (“yes, awesome.” Like, what else can I reply?) after they’ve bought me a drink.
…Of course I’m not serious. I wouldn’t do this if I didn’t love it, and while I definitely get impatient at being pigeonholed as some kind of nerd goddess who’s about nothing else but video games, I understand I’m a rarity and I hope I can contribute something useful in my perspectives because of that. It does help me bond with new people, since there aren’t too many of us gamers out there who “get it”.
But I bring it up because so many of you wrote me asking what I think about GameCrush.com, wherein gamers pay for “PlayDates” with real live females. As I said on Twitter, do you really need a girl to tell you it’s demeaning and insulting for you to believe it?
It’s stupid, but y’know, I get it. In Japan, girls get compensated for any number of things, from chaste dates to having lunch with salarymen while dressed up as maids with rabbit ears. Part of me feels like it’s hard enough to be a female gamer in a culture where — well, where men would pay women to play games with them — that they might as well make some money at it. I dunno that any amount of money would be worth the heavy breathing the girl’s gonna have to sit through when she’s playing MW2 with the kind of guy who’d pay women to play games with him.
What if I auctioned off the opportunity to play and discuss the Metal Gear Solid or Silent Hill Series with me at my house? Would you bid on that, let’s say, if it were for charity? Would your opinion change if I for some reason needed the money to keep this blog up? What if I just wanted the money for myself? I am quite sure some of you would, because I am quite sure some of you are here because I am a girl generally determined by others to be pretty. Judging by some of the emails and comments I sometimes receive and promptly delete, a few of you are here only for that.
There’s a really ugly reality to our landscape, and while I firmly believe it will evolve and improve, I am also pessimistic that that ugly underbelly can ever fully go away. The way I see it, it was only a matter of time before someone found a way to capitalize on it. I’m not, like, full of outrage. It’s just dumb, and I didn’t even think it really needed addressing.
I will say I can’t wait to interview the girls about what it’s like, though!

Are We Gonna Be Together?


Keeping an eye on our local BioShock sidebar poll here, I’m actually fairly surprised at what an overwhelming percentage of you are Little Sister rescuers. I think the SVGL audience skews more empathetic than the average core gamer, judging by the discussions we have here — but even still!

I find the results especially surprising because of all the talk I’ve heard around the Little Sister choice in the games — people always say it’s not really a “choice” since you receive a gameplay benefit in either case, or because it doesn’t change much about the story save for the ending; people find them creepy AIs, not cute little people at the crux of a meaningful moral conflict, blah blah. If all that is so, why do so many of you care?
I killed all the Little Sisters in the first BioShock. To me, to do so seemed to suit the narrative better — I was a faceless stranger in a man-eat-man world. I liked the repellent desperation that made Rapture so lawless, and so amoral was its world I thought I’d play along. Did I feel good about doing it? Not exactly, but to make my decisions based on a hunger for power felt appropriate for the story.
And I’ve always maintained I had a better experience in the first game because of it. When the things I was led to believe came crashing down, having to face what I’d done made the story’s later revelations more of a gutpunch. Arriving at Tennenbaum’s safehouse as a Little Sister killer was one of the most memorable gaming experiences I’d had that year. One thing I wish is that the game could have given me the opportunity to redeem myself, to start handling the little sisters as fellow victims instead of as prey once I knew what the real deal was — but then, that might have violated the game’s message of “no real agency”.
I am hesitant to say much yet about BioShock 2 because I’m doing a review for Paste, but I’ll say that the choice felt much different to me this time. Although the harvest-or-rescue decision is more nuanced and complex from a gameplay perspective, it seems not a decision at all from a narrative standpoint — in the first BioShock, it felt equally realistic to take either path. In the second, I personally find it implausible to do anything but rescue. But maybe that’s just me.
It does bring me to an interesting point: What’s your motivation when you play a video game that allows you some agency? Are you writing a story and creating a character? Or are you using the medium of interactivity to express your own self — and see how the environment responds to you?
What determines your harvest-or-rescue decision, for example — something inside the game, or something inside of you?
Bonus Content: Header image is this wallpaper.
August 2007, I write my Aberrant Gamer column for GameSetWatch on the original Little Sister choice and what creates emotional impact versus basic cost-benefit analysis.
August 2007, I write a different Aberrant Gamer column on the Little Sisters themselves, and the use of creepy girlchildren in survival horror.
July 2008, at Kotaku EA boss John Riccitiello tells me that he, too, was a Little Sister killer.

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.

Going Out

At his Cut Scene blog, Variety’s Ben Fritz has responded to ‘Coming Home,’ my much-trafficked, post-Homecoming rant here at SVGL. You could say I wrote it because I was touchy about being the one of the only reviewers to like the game (that did make me feel weird)[*], but what I was touchy about is how highly arbitrary the strikes critics levied against it were. Some reviews complained there are too many health packs and the game was too easy; others said there weren’t enough health packs and the game was too hard.

For the record, I think there were just the right amount of health packs, and survival horror fans know how to pace themselves. Noobs soon learn, and people who prefer plentiful supplies probably should not play survival horror or any game in the Silent Hill franchise.

But that’s neither here nor there! The health pack thing is just an example, albeit a slightly off-point one. Anyway, largely, I was expressing some exasperation at the tendency of reviewers (not excluding myself) to be arbitrarily nitpicky — and what Ben seems to suggest in his response post is that reviewers are actually more inclined to be overly positive than overly negative:

I didn’t see many critics deliberately searching for things to dislike in “Grand Theft Auto IV” or “Halo 3″ or “Mass Effect” or “Super Mario Galaxy” or “Super Smash Bros. Brawl.” On the contrary, these AAA, heavily marketed franchises (mostly sequels) with gameplay very similar to what the hardcore audience has seen and loved before got overwhelmingly positive reviews. Sure, many admitted, the story in “Halo 3″ was inpenetrable and the the combat in “Mass Effect” was wonky and “Brawl” is barely an advance over the last installment and has major problems with online play, but those were largely brushed aside as minor considerations.

I felt the same way about Brawl, actually, and wrote an entire column about how we were sold on it before we even played it because of positive associations with the characters. I agree with Ben on the over-positivity thing in general, which is part of why I was frustrated when I felt many Homecoming reviews elected to miss the big picture and focus on the details, or fault it heavily for things that are a matter of taste without recognizing that there’s an entire swath of the audience who doesn’t have the same taste — when they’d been so willing to wave other franchise titles through with 9′s and without similar close scrutiny.

Ben wrote:

Basically, I think another way of saying what Leigh’s getting at is that many game critics, particularly those who write for avid fans, can obsess over controls or menu design problems in titles that are doing something innovative in tone or theme, but downplay the same types of faults in games that are essentially improvements on the ones they already love.

Thanks, Ben — that’s exactly what I was getting at, actually. I neglected to present the flip side of the coin with an example like Grand Theft Auto IV — as Ben says, now that we’re several months out from its release, we can raise a bit more of a skeptical brow at review quotes like “Oscar-caliber drama”(IGN) than we did when we were still in the afterglow of positive feelings around its release and the fact that our expectations — and desires — for it were so, so high.

And maybe this also helps explain the puzzling “four-month bell curve” that I’ve written about before, wherein titles are considered to be near-perfection at the time of their launch and then suffer a fall from grace — sometimes an out-and-out backlash, as in BioShock‘s case — about four months later.

Now, on one hand it makes sense that games with familiar formulas get better reviews than titles that really try to do something odd. There’s a reason the formula’s being repeated — because we’re familiar with it and it works well. To some extent, games have a laundry list of “things not to do in design,” and often when design avoids those line items, the result is largely similar to other things that have been successful.

That’s just logic; it’s just smart evolution. When a title attempts to explore uncharted areas, it risks stumbling into areas that have been neglected for a good reason — because they don’t work as well. But when we fault them for trying, without recognizing that the game might have done a few new things well, or when we treat creativity or an attempt at inventiveness as a design flaw, we’re sending the industry some problematic mixed messages. We demand innovation and invention, and then we crucify any attempts in that direction.

Ben also said something to the same effect:

The result is that we don’t value innovation or attempts to do something big and new, like make a funny game that’s thematically consistent with an all-time great TV show or create psychological impact through artful storytelling integrated with gameplay, because we obsess on the mechanical problems or the length of the cutscenes. Not that those things don’t matter. But they don’t matter that much, especially for an artistically immature medium in desperate need of innovation and freshness.

The nature of game design suggests that there probably won’t be any overwhelming overnight overhauls. Iteration happens gradually over time, and it probably is a wise strategy — both in terms of design logic and sales numbers — to try and make subtle evolutions on the familiar rather than try something totally new. Very few games go way out to left field and do well unless they are both very skilled and very fortunate — think Portal, Braid, Katamari Damacy.

But the funny thing was, Silent Hill: Homecoming was far from totally new. In fact, it was a subtle iteration on a formula — a formula Double Helix aped quite admirably for not having originated it. It was about as different from prior Silent Hill games as any of them are from each other, and fans will probably disagree widely on whether or not it worked. Fans have always had subtle Silent Hill disagreements — which one’s “the best” and why, for example.

The fact that I read so many forums and comments and get so much email is actually probably a problem as well for me as a reviewer — and for others. All of the reviews I’ve been citing thus far are online. I and my colleagues serve an internet audience. When our readers have expectations, preconceptions or hopes for a title’s outcome, they’re looking to our review to either affirm or deny. Often, our reviews end up being an extension of their feelings — after all, we’re responsible for addressing their concerns and fears as we’ve perceived them, or at least we feel like we are.

Moreover, we’re part of the community, too, perhaps to an unusual extent. I wrote about groupthink and the hype cycle yesterday — if there’s a tidal wave of buzz, we’re riding along on it, too. Interestingly, reviews tend to be the most inconsistent when “the internet” had no preconception or prevailing opinion ahead of the release. Do reviewers feel like they’re “supposed to” like a title just because their readers or colleagues are excited about it, or “supposed to” be extra critical just because there are tons of early warnings? I wonder.

I’m always a little surprised at what the world is like when I shut the computer off — no lie. Even when I go to GameStop, where you’d expect that most of the shoppers would be something “like us.” I end up chatting with other customers and am always disoriented — believe it or not, people shopping at GameStop usually haven’t heard of Kotaku. They haven’t heard that the game they’re in line to buy was delayed twice or is made by the wrong studio.

Then, when those people start to talk to me about what they’ve been playing lately, I’m always surprised to learn that they enjoyed, say, Kane and Lynch. They didn’t notice the problems reviewers did. They never heard of Gerstmann-Gate. They don’t know who he is, and they certainly don’t know who I am. They thought The Darkness was the best game they played last year. They like Geometry Wars but not Braid. They love Madden and don’t even know that “we” snub it.

In other words, they’re normal consumers, and their opinion is different than ours. They have a kind of distance on the industry that we just don’t. I should try talking to these people more often.

I’ve digressed all over the place, but anyway, Ben’s whole response to my post is very thought-provoking and worth reading.

[*]Oh, addendum: Aside from UGO, whom I noted, Destructoid also liked it.