Category Archives: My Articles


Dear ‘gamers’ — I’m surprised at you. You have been showing up here at Sexy Videogameland to swoon over Catherine trailers; you pile on my Formspring to ask me about my nerdy Metal Gear Solid theories (when you are not asking me creepy questions about my sex life and/or shoe size). If you are really cool, you’ve tossed a couple bucks the way of Babycastles, because you believe that the work of indie designers should have a home in New York City. To be a part of something special! For the future! For your children! Or because you want a copy of Katamari Damacy autographed by Keita Takahashi, whatever.

You don’t just enjoy video games; you love them and you live them. Maybe you grew up with them, like I did, as described in my current series at Thought Catalog (now up to Part Two! Part One is here.) But when I told you about how developers tell me some game publishers overuse focus testing to rationalize developing only formula-driven, risk-averse status quo video games, thus stifling their creativity and resulting in an industry where innovation is rare and challenging, so many of you shrugged breezily and told me, “it’s just a business.”
It’s naive and idealistic to think that games are more than simple consumer products and that there’s more potential in the medium than its ability to make tons of money. So lemme me naive and idealistic — I’m the one that has to get up in front of everyone and yak about it, so you guys can nod along or not.
So, uh… why aren’t you all nodding along? Are games just consumer products to you, like soap or something? At Kotaku this month, I examine the schism between our experiential, artistic and emotional fondness for games and the biz-driven “product” identity games have carried since the 1980′s when they were sold as novelties beside VCRs and music players. Check it out!
Fun insider image — while editing my column Stephen Totilo and I took bets on how long it would take someone to post a picture of Soap McTavish. Guess.
Wii remote soap in the image was found here, along with some other pictures of crazy/awesome video game soap. The new banner was a present from Matthew Carstensen, who has a pretty interesting blog.
Today’s good song is the chip-ish and flipping excellent cover of Japandroids’ Wet Hair done by Teen Daze. I’m posting it here rather than tucking it away in brackets because it has a game-like sound you guys might like. This looks like a fan-made video done, appropriately, to animations from the Scott Pilgrim video game.

And while I am slamming amazing things into your faces, let me remind you that you pretty much have to get the soundtrack to that game. Duh, Anamanaguchi.

Remember when I did an interview article on them circa 2k9? Think I said they ‘might break through’. Think I was ‘totally right.’

All Work, A Little Play

At Gamasutra we’ve been so busy with coverage of GDC Europe and GamesCom that I’ve hardly had time to eat, let alone blog! But if you’re at all interested in what game designers did in Europe all last week, we’ve got lots of coverage for you, so check out: my interview with Mattias Myllyrinne and Avni Yerli on the Euro scene, plus our Day 1, and Day 2-3 roundups for everything you need.

I’ve been doing a lot of interviews and things myself, lately. I just talked to Crystal Dynamics’ GM Darrell Gallagher about Lara Croft and the Guardian of Light, the new co-op game for downloadable platforms (there’s a full, AI-less single-player mode, too). This game is extremely rad. Studio obviously knows what it’s doing in that space — and that’s not really a facile observation to make in emerging markets, even for a studio with that pedigree. For their first outing of a major IP on downloadable, I think they knocked it out of the park.

Another thing we’ve published lately worth noticing is that a number of the prominent indies whose games you love would like you — well, “us”, really, the critics — to stop weighing a game on how long it is or isn’t, and instead to look at it as a holistic experience. It is understandable that consumers are concerned about “value per dollar”, but why is value being measured in minutes? I’ve gotta say, I’m very much behind their sentiments, so you should read this editorial from Klei’s Jamie Cheng and the numerous essays published simultaneously from other devs linked in the piece.

Terminal Reality seems to have come out of nowhere as a powerhouse on the game engine scene. It’s the Ghostbusters engine, and it’s only been publicly available for licensing since then — but they already have some 25 games in development on the Infernal Engine. VP Joe Kreiner explains to me how they quietly ramped up, and tells me they have a Kinect project in house. I think I have a good idea what it is.

Despite the Madden series being one of my #videogameblindspots, I am weirdly fascinated with the annual development of the product. Maybe this interview I did with the EP will shed some light on how deceptively complex it is.

My goodness, how could I forget — I was here at the New York City event when Irrational showed off the new BioShock game, BioShock Infinite. I heard a lot of “why call it BioShock if there’s no Rapture” muttering from the internet, but hopefully my event coverage and interview with the art director will help answer that question. And maybe it’ll even make you as psyched for the game as I am!

This is just a little bit of what’s been keeping my colleagues and I running lately. With so much work going on, I’ve gotta play a little, right? Oftentimes, a lot of the ways I have fun look a lot like work, but hey.

Here’s an LA Times article I just wrote about Babycastles, the fantastic indie arcade some friends of mine are setting up in the basement of a community space where I love to hang out. It’s so cool seeing an indie game scene here merging with the music scene. I wish you could all check it out for yourselves, but until then, read the piece, willya?

Finally, I am weirding out the lovely literate community at Thought Catalog with a proud chronology of my gaming history; these are some personal memories of every game console I’ve ever owned — part one of four (it’s a long chronology!) Pass it ’round if you are into it. I’m really fond of Thought Catalog and read it for fun, and you should check it out too.

Oh, yeah. And still lots and lots of Persona 3 Portable. In general I think P3 is a much weaker game than P4; halfway through, it tends to take major shortcuts on narrative trajectories that it previously explored in-depth; whereas getting to know your housemates and discovering Fuuka early on were fairly fleshed plotlines, later on it just seems to start throwing party members at you. I loved the way that in P4, every character had their own individual story; P3‘s more like “okay, I said what you wanted, S. Link level up!” I guess preference for either installment depends more on whether it’s atmosphere or individuals that motivate you as a player.


[Today’s Good Song: ‘Murder Dull Mind‘, Amen Dunes’]

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‘.]

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]

Future Storytelling


Does the phrase “platform-agnostic IP” mean anything to you? Well, what it is is when a fictional concept — a universe, a story, and the characters within it — are conceived not for any one particular medium, but for several of them. In other words, it’s an idea that can work simultaneously as a video game, a movie or television show, and a set of books or comic books, for example. You get it.

The idea’s loosely called transmedia, and it’s what the Syfy channel is hoping to do by working with video game companies: Trion, with an upcoming MMO, and THQ. As for the latter, Syfy wants to start by creating more traditional extensions (film and television series) of de Blob and Red Faction, and then they hope to co-create projects together.
It’s interesting stuff. On one hand, it’s traditional media finally seeing the value in persistence and interactivity in creating additional engagement for users. It has unbelievable potential to make gaming more mainstream, and to help it become a core component of the way people conceive of and experience entertainment. It’s also not without its challenges — generally, TV people don’t know a lot about games, and vice versa.
So to build a property that can bridge two media worlds that historically have had only the most cursory relationship with one another is no small feat, but I interviewed the president of Syfy and he explained to me that that’s exactly what they’re hoping to do:

“What’s fantastic about this strategy is, if we get it right, we’ll figure out ways for people to consume those characters and stories across multiple platforms whenever and however they choose to,” says Howe. “It’s an always-on world we’re living in, and that’s exciting to us. Dynamic, immersive experience is critical to future storytelling.”

Check out the interview!

[By the way, I think I’m going to start linking to my fave music blogs to share current tracks I like on a regular basis. Nothing to do with video games, I know, but it’s nice to share my interests in more than one medium, ya dig? And I’ll make it tiny so you can ignore it if you don’t care. Here’s The Love Language’s ‘Heart to Tell’, via Pasta Primavera.]

The Real World

You can change your LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook portraits back to your real face if you had a Second Life portrait up. I mean, seriously, please do, because when you use an avatar picture as if you were an in-world character instead of a real human being, it looks weird. Especially ’cause that whole thing is kinda over.

Sincerely, hey, y’know, whatever you’re into, I don’t judge (see my Formspring anonymous question repository, where someone asked me if playing Bayonetta naked is wrong). But the big virtual worlds boom seems like it’s all but done to me — y’know, kind of like what I thought might happen in an environment driven by ideals that were a little bit too eager to throw out established best practices and declare gaming, online social behavior and the web itself “over”.
When I spoke at Worlds in Motion cautioning excited virtual worlds gold-rushers not to get too lost in a fantasy of actualizing Snow Crash and to pay a little more attention to the way users were already doing things I fielded an impassioned argument from someone who basically said I was wrong. That person made their living selling virtual something-or-other in Second Life. I wonder how their business is doing these days.
Anyway, back then, the loudest voices in favor of the new paradigm’s triumph were those who had already had tons and tons of the Kool Aid (and who had put millions and millions of dollars behind the ideas). It kind of reminds me of the echo chamber around Facebook gaming right now. Don’t get me wrong — I think Facebook gaming is a lot more relevant and viable than the “3D Web” and “virtual life” fantasy ever were, and I think Twitter really has changed the world forever, but there’s definitely something of a bubble forming.
I reflect on this bubble in my latest editorial at Gamasutra. The virtual worlds craze wasn’t entirely wasted time, of course — I parse out the permanent lessons that we learned and the way we’ve incorporated them into new media, too. Caution and pragmatism, entrepreneurs!

Shooter Shooter Shooter Shooter

Sometimes I get triple-A fatigue and I feel just a little tapped out. I find myself a little niche where the only gaming of note I do is on my DS. I can dump hundreds of hours into a Harvest Moon or Pokemon game and never look back — in fact, I’m not even HeartGold or SoulSilver-ing yet because I’m just focusing on Harvest Moon: Sunshine Islands. Yep, that’s about it!

These phases lend themselves to being light on blogging — at times like that, I’m glad I have my Twitter to toss quick thoughts and links out to you guys. Of course, I’m also busy as usual at Gamasutra. You know I love indie games that try to push or change the medium; I spent time with Jason Rohrer’s Sleep is Death, my writing on which you might have read at Kotaku, so just a little bit later, I caught up with the fascinating, loquacious and giant-brained Eskil Steenberg at Gamasutra to talk about his work on the impressionist-art MMO (though he resists the word “MMO”) LOVE.
We talk about how he suddenly decided to develop his own self-contained game engine and persistent multiplayer world without any significant design experience (truly, truly impressive), and why LOVE is, in his view, completely different than other games, most of which don’t interest him much.
I went to see Crysis 2 unveiled in New York City late last week, and I talked to Crytek boss Cevat Yerli about why, in a world where crappy-looking Facebook games can pull millions of users in just a few weeks (as venture capitalists are I think over-fond of pointing out), AAA graphics still matter. Last night on Jimmy Fallon (Kotaku has video), Cliff Bleszinski answered “graphics” first of all when asked what makes a blockbuster — because they “pull people in” initially, he qualified. Yerli and Bleszinski both work for companies with perhaps the largest footprints in the high-end development engine biz, so certainly they have an interest in that point of view.
Oh yeah, Bleszinski was premiering Gears 3‘s trailer, by the way. It has a lot of ashes and dust in it, kind of like Crysis 2‘s trailer. Ashes are so in for 2011! Seriously, it looks cool, though, and as Cliff says, it has female soldiers for the first time. He says that’s thanks to fan feedback.
Most of my time yesterday, however, was spent covering the latest and greatest in the Activision-versus-Infinity Ward drama, which you know I have been following in some depth for some time. As I’m sure you’ve heard by now, exiled IW bosses Jason West and Vince Zampella now have their own studio in Respawn Entertainment, and surprise-surprise, they have EA’s backing. Wedbush’s Michael Pachter told me this is the ‘ultimate screw-you’ to Activision.
I would guess the ‘ultimate screw-you’ to Activision will happen when employees of not only Infinity Ward, but of certain other studios under its umbrella who are sick of being crunched to obscene, five-years-ago levels try to get out and send their resumes to what’s likely to be a more comfortable situation. At Respawn, I would assume they put lights in the cubicles all the time, not just when the press is visiting.
But anyway, after writing about them for weeks on weeks now, it was neat to finally talk to Zampella, West and EA (read my interview!), even if just on the studio kickoff. Most people assume the two are going to lead some kind of Modern Warfare killer on EA’s behalf, although they aren’t yet willing to confirm anything whatsoever about their project. Theoretically, they could be making anything, although I’m not exactly expecting a cartoon platformer.
It’ll be interesting to see how their product is positioned — after all, anything that competes with Modern Warfare is going to compete with Battlefield, too. As Pachter said to me yesterday, the vertex of the market that would make the most sense for the pair is the future/sci-fi-ish genre, where their only major rival would be a little franchise called Halo (and maybe Killzone or something).
Shooter, shooter, shooter, shooter. Graphics, graphics, graphics, graphics. Bummer that the industry’s top talent keeps making the same kind of games. Or maybe I’m not the market. If you’re into this kinda thing, you must be going out of your head with this bounty of exciting news.
Now I return to Harvest Moon, where I will plant and pluck turnips over and over and over and over and over.