Category Archives: Uncategorized

Second Adolescence

“In an age when showy CEOs shout hubristic, trite predictions about the inevitable future of games, The Wii U offers an understated bravado that’s far more courageous. With it, Nintendo admits, “we don’t know either.” We don’t know what video games are anymore, or what they will become. It’s a huge risk, and it’s probably the most daring move Nintendo has made in its 125-year history. Domestication through polite ferocity. Feral design.”

– Ian Bogost, “Wii Can’t Go On, Wii’ll Go On“

I’ve Done It Now

Welp, my colleague Quintin Smith and I have just collaborated on probably the most let’s-call-it-experimental thing I’ve probably ever published. I describe the project here a little bit, but really, you should just go and read it.

…Probably?

Happy Thanksgiving!

[latest music recos: slightly late to naomi punk, which is shocking considering how cool it makes early grunge sound again — love this track best, i think. for spotify users, i have two recent mixtapes: this one is robust and eclectic, this one is for warm drinks, frozen leaves and early sunsets.]

How To Be A Game Journalist

Do you like video games? If so, you may already qualify for your dream job. That’s right: Games journalism, the art of writing about games in order to gain fame, prestige, and free copies of things. It can also be quite lucrative, so if you’re reading this, feel free to send your boss the kiss-off email you’ve been composing in your head for years. The rest of your life is about to begin now.

Not only will games journalism give you a career, it’ll give you the social network and peer recognition you’ve always longed for. Lonely? Not anymore! Get ready to meet your 200 new internet friends and thousands of Twitter followers!

This sounds great, you’re saying. But how do I do games journalism?

You need a lot of feelings and opinions. This part is essential. Unlike other people, when you play a video game you have experiences and responses and thoughts, and probably most people have never had those before. You should write them down. If you don’t have particularly strong opinions, fear not: Just be very emotional, and you will get a lot of attention. Attention is, of course, the measure of quality.

You need a lot of passion and faith. Nobody believes in the games industry like you do, and you need to show those jaded assholes how much you care. That you have a heart in your chest that beats sets you apart from so many others who don’t have feelings or who don’t believe in anything. You are more honest than everyone else, and that’s admirable. That’s all that counts.

You need the nobility to pour your heart out for free on a daily basis if gaming is ever to be saved. Oh, yeah. It needs saving, which is why you must write that blog post. Spend three weeks on it. Tweet about it many times; it is tough but you are making progress. It’s important work.

You must keep in mind that everyone who is more experienced than you are is always wrong. Doing games journalism is not a want, it is a need. You have suffered in silence too long, praying quietly at the altar of your living room console while all of these boring jerks do all this work in the industry. How have you let them ruin everything for so long? Why have you deprived them of the change engine fueling your single voice? Rise now, tell them what’s broken and how to fix it. You can make, like, two bucks a word telling people how to fix things. Didn’t you know that?

Wait. No. You don’t care about money. This isn’t about money. You and your friends have run a fansite for years because you care, and your caring about video games must continue to supersede your self respect or your interest in craft or boring things like that. You don’t want to be a professional, you just want to live your dream, do what you love and save the games industry, and those are the most important activities.

Like, you’re just a games journalist, not some, like, journalist. Anyone who asks to be taken seriously or paid well is the enemy. Don’t forget it. Scrutinize everything they do. It’s a thankless job, but at least you’ll get to be the first person to see some trailer someday. You will get a bobblehead that none of your friends have. Tell them that they can’t even buy it in a store. It’s a press gift. You’re press. Oh my god, your badge says press and you can walk to the front of the line.

You might even get an email from a developer you’ve heard of telling you that you did a good job writing about their game. The day you see that name in your inbox will make up for all of your suffering. You can tell your colleagues you were ‘just talking to’ so and so. 

You must root out corruption wherever you find it. Don’t stand for it. Everyone but you accepts junkets, bribes and freebies. This is just how the games industry is, and you don’t even have to work in it to know that. You’re just that special. And if you’ve been at this for a long time, like a year or something, that’s when you get really good at calling people out on their shit. Think about it: One day they’re names on your most favorite website, the next they’ve got a lot of explaining to do. They’re accountable to you. That’s part of your job.

Wait, yeah. This is your job. You’re not some fan writer. You’re going to get an award for this someday. People who say there’s no journalism in games have never read your interview with the guy who made that thing, and they’ve never read it because they don’t get it so you have nothing to explain, not to that sort. You can laugh quietly to yourself; they’ll learn.

You should be a contrarian. You get together with your coworkers in the bar and have a beer and laugh about how you’re going to do this, like, crazy thing. You’re going to give Halo 4 a score of 2. Wait, how, why? Oh my god, you guys. You’ll see. Spread yourself out in the booth. Stick your chest out. You’re a breath of fresh air, you’re a rebel. Fuck professionalism, there’s no name for what you do.

This is your work. This is your identity. You are above reproach, except for when you’re not, and then while you seethe in secret about having your incredibly hard work and your precious integrity undermined, you know how to blog the perfect apology. You are so deferential. You call your readers “folks.” You tell them how hard you’ve been working to build something or other and how they’ve been helping. You all love games. Isn’t that what it’s all about, the games?

Yeah. It’s all about the games. That’s why you do this.

With Friends

I’m just back from delivering a keynote at the Boston Festival of Indie Games’ first annual event! Hey look it’s me (thanks for the picture, Elliott)! While I was there, I did some lite recon on the Boston dev culture and community to find out how the locals feel about working there these days. Read my newest article: ‘In Boston, strong community means resilience in the face of change.’

I’ve been thinking a lot about community events lately; in my latest Creators’ Project column I write about some things designers I like are doing to foster public gaming and participatory events. One of the guys I wrote about is Hokra creator Ramiro Corbetta, who I just interviewed in some depth at Gamasutra about ways to encourage design that brings people together: Check out ‘Why indie games make meaningful spectator sports‘.

People have played with simple, timeless things forever — find me someone who doesn’t know how to play tic-tac-toe, and even if you can do that, bet you they can learn it in under five minutes. Minesweeper is one of those games I’d say has reached, or nearly reached, modern folk status as far as being (along with Solitaire) a continuous feature of the PC experience. Read my new piece, Reinventing Minesweeper: It was almost purple, about how Microsoft has tapped a NY-based company to bring those classics up to date. Like, where do you even begin? How has the “casual”  audience changed?

Speaking of playing together in person, I went to Nintendo’s Wii U event. I’m still getting used to saying “Wii U.” Don’t like to say it, so I keep saying “Nintendo’s new thing.” Can’t help but think of how much we laughed at how the word Wii would never take off, right before the word Wii proceeded to be something that everyone understands to mean a Nintendo game console.

It looks like a fun thing you can play on your couch. With your girlfriend, because girls are shit at video games. Obviously I’m messing with you, but you can read my new article on “Girlfriend Mode” — a firm did a study that suggests controversial name conventions can actually be extremely useful in selling people totally reasonable and cool features.

Nostalgia culture

Coincidentally, two pieces I’ve done relating to nostalgia and childhood memory have come online at about the same time. You might know I do a column in Edge magazine, and then a couple months after those hit newsstands the columns come online. Wasn’t that long ago that my last one, about how the way we cover and examine games needs to grow up, was generating some discussion on Twitter, which, by the way, I very much appreciated following!

I guess it makes sense to follow a discussion on looking ahead with one about looking back. Here, I discuss the important role nostalgia plays in both writing about and creating games. At the same time, today’s column at Gamasutra takes the idea a step further: While ultimately languishing in terminal adolescence and obsessing on the memory of what little boys used to like is one of the greatest forces holding games back, there exist some clear examples of how a selective and insightful relationship with our childhood memories can actually create more timeless and universal games.

It’s the idea of “intelligent nostalgia” — what to keep from our valuable past and what to let go of.

Okay, okay

Despite the degree to which Formspring once exhausted me, I’ve experienced a temporary leave of my senses and opened my page up again. Fielding questions on there has let me know how much some of you miss having regular posts here at this blog, an occupation I’ve let lie since May of this year.

I stopped blogging here for a couple obvious reasons: I’ve been short on time, and now that I’m full-time freelance (editor-at-large at Gamasutra, and making contributions to other sites in the rest of my time) I need every last idea spark I can get to develop work across the platforms I serve. If it’s worth pestering you about here, it’s probably worth formalizing into something I can actually sell.

That never stopped me from blogging before, since I always thought it was important to have a one-stop repository that connects me to the people that read my work. But I’ve gotten so active on social media platforms that there’s always a home for people who want to follow me: I promote links and discussion on Twitter, have a Facebook page for people who prefer to get links and to comment there, and I even have a Google+ page if you hate Twitter and Facebook.

But a lot of people have been telling me they wish I still updated here, and if that’s what you want I’m gonna try to do that, at least until I get a proper website, an ambition I’ve kind of fruitlessly cultivated for a couple years now.

It was also nice of you guys to ask on Formspring about memep00l, sort of my first actual experiment into writing any kind of fiction in public. I’m into the social media format and am very pleased that some people care about the narrative so far. I’ll be catching up on that soon.

I’ve also been spending time with another first-for-me — I’ve always wanted to learn to do interactive fiction, since I’m such a big fan of it. I’m very slowly teaching myself Inform 7 using Aaron Reed’s excellent book, and in the meantime I thought I’d explore interactive writing using a simpler tool that lets me experiment with how to structure story and choices.

I have been enjoying playing with Inklewriter (thought I’d give it a try after writing about it here) — incidentally, it has a Future Voices competition closing in just a few days if anyone wants to try and slip an entry in under the wire. I seem to struggle with finishing large projects, but hopefully I will have a little “game” to show one of these days soon.

More recently, I’ve done an editorial on whether there’s a conflict between telling complex stories — that might not have neat or nice endings — and the player’s desire to win. Would love to know what you think. I also went in-depth with FarmVille 2‘s head designer on whether the game addresses some of the chronic and fricative design problems I’ve seen with Zynga games in the past.

Aside from that, I attended an art exhibit about cats with money, which sent me musing at Boing Boing on internet cat culture and classism.

I have loads going on in the coming weeks, as per usual, I guess, but I’ll give blogging more a shot. Thanks for everything, everyone!

About That ‘Fake Geek Girls’ Article

I’m not really into being called a “geek” or a “nerd.” Everyone tells me, “of course you are: you’re in video games for a living.” They roll out checklists, even, a litany of things I like, things I did in high school; skills I’ve got, things I know, or even measures of how much I know about those things or how much I like them, as if to make sure I know how nerdy I am.

I wouldn’t say it bothers me, exactly, but I don’t think the label really applies, either. First, I’m not a stereotype. I’m defined by the things I like and the things I do, sure — but I’m not labeled by them, I’m not consigned or obligated to some group because of them.
Second, being someone who’d be passionate about a few things to the exclusion of all else, who prizes some list of entertainment media over social skills and the human experience, is not something I’d be proud of. I’m proud that I know a lot about a lot of offbeat things. I’m proud that I’ve grown up on the internet. But I never thought I had to choose between that and feeling included among people in the world.
I know that “geekdom” was something a lot of us did in high school because we felt marginalized, we didn’t blend in, we needed safe havens. But dude, I’m not in high school anymore. I spend all my working days talking about how games and fantasy worlds can be something adults can still enjoy. I’m not concerned with the labeling and judgment that teenagers do.
Most importantly, “geek” doesn’t even really mean anything anymore. Someone on Twitter said that the fact I Tweet about Game of Thrones makes me a nerd. Uh, it’s on HBO. That’s mainstream entertainment. Even Lana del Rey can figure out how to use Twitter. None of this stuff is exclusive anymore.
Traditional ideas about geekiness are dying a slow death in the social media age. The socially-awkward computer nerd is not society’s embarrassing chaff, but rather an admired hero driving connectivity and innovation. Steve Jobs has been practically canonized. Video games are, thank god, becoming something that anyone can enjoy and understand on whatever level they choose.

Some say that geekiness or nerddom or whatever isn’t defined by your interests, but how obsessed you are with those things: Like say, it isn’t the fact you have a weekly D&D session or belong to a WoW guild or like Robert Jordan books; it’s the fact you spend hours writing your own campaigns or would rather play WoW than go out or that you own every Robert Jordan book and have read each one at least three times and you submit to a fanfiction forum.

But if geekiness is about degree rather than subject, then the girl who has practically made a part-time job out of knitting animals for her Etsy store is a “geek”. You’re a geek if you go to law or medical school, which require obsessive focus and attention to detail. If you are a banker who plays fantasy football and memorizes player stats, and then routinely meets your league-mates for beer on Sunday, you’re a geek.

It’s just not A Thing anymore, in this world where we have access to endless volumes of information and access to a wider swath of insight into the diversity in other people’s lives than we ever had. You’d think we’d all be happy about it, people like us who grew up putting grocery bags around our books so no one would know we were reading shojo manga in 8th grade health class and laugh at us.

When it comes to video games, I’m psyched — now people from all walks of life will be contributing their talents and experiences to the medium, people who might have gone off and just did movies or something instead, and it’ll be richer and there’ll be more people to have fun with and it’ll just be better.

But for some reason, the normalization of “geekdom”, the fact we now have the freedom and ability for everyone to get obsessed with whatever they want whenever and share it with whomever or not, is super threatening to a lot of people.

And it’s not that I don’t understand: You made a secret fort to hide your heart in when you were a child who was hurting, and now you feel like people are trying to take your fort away.

But part of becoming a damn adult is understanding that shit can’t hurt you anymore. You can keep yourself safe.

You don’t need to judge, label and fight with people because of your stupid video games and fantasy books. I mean, it’s crazy that I even have to say this, even to some people that are presumably adults. But maybe, if “geek” does mean anything, if I had to pick a definition for it, it’d be “person who’s afraid to grow up”, or “person who can’t adjust.”

That’s sure what it looks like to me when I read this article. Sidenote: Forbes has really been batting a thousand lately when it comes to “geek interest” writing; my guess is they’ve hired new writers that they don’t have to pay very much, and relying on the guaranteed forum and Reddit hits that come from telling superfans of “geek culture” what they want to hear.

Kinda gross; first, there was this piece about how the writer’s inexperienced outsider status somehow made him more qualified to tell BioWare fans they deserved a new ending for Mass Effect than we industry-bought jaded game journo types; actually, there were multiple different blog-style stories from multiple authors that seemed pretty transparently geared to exploit the environment of fan ire toward BioWare and toward game reviewers.

Now this gem. Here’s an author tired of what she views as an epidemic of “fake geek girls” who are, in her view, emulating “geek culture” in order to gain male attention. I’m not really sure where this supposed phenomenon is centralized; she says “girls”, so maybe she means “in high school,” but then she says she is married, so presumably she is an adult woman who is here to … police young women?

If you believe that your interests define your identity, then our present-day environment, where it’s suddenly easy to access obsessive reams of information on anything and to connect with the like-minded, means it’s easier than ever to be anyone you want. Anyone can own a popular Tumblr or flirt with YouTube stardom or have hundreds of followers and plenty of people try. People are fascinated with building identity through participatory online media.

That’s probably why the wider Western culture seems obsessed with authenticity right now: A word as prevalent as “geek” is “hipster”, an equally overblown term that refers to someone deeply concerned with appearing cool in an authentic way — even if it means inauthentically borrowing superficial signifiers, like fashion or music, from other cultures or eras.

The author of the article takes great pains to establish her own authenticity and attack the authenticity of others, for… why again? Presumably she feels threatened, like her “geeky” pastimes should remain secret forts that everyone needs to know the password to get into. It’s a weird, sad way for an adult to behave.

It’s true we’re fascinated with authenticity and the lack thereof these days. But here’s a little news flash to the author: Curiosity about other societies and people, and a desire to be included, is a perfectly valid reason to adopt or espouse a new hobby. If the acne-clad pungence of the basement stereotype around certain hobbies has now been dissipated, it’s totally logical that new faces would be attracted to our culture, hoping to get involved.

Yes, probably they want to be liked. Probably they will try hard. This does not make them “fake.” It makes them human. It’s normal. Everyone, whether they will admit it or not, secretly wants to be liked.

And didn’t you hide inside your computer games and fantasy books because when you were young you tried to be liked and you failed? And now even though that was years ago you’re going to make sure you get your revenge? Seriously, how old are you?
Also, to the author: Girls have always pretended to like things in order to get boys to like them. In ninth grade I paid a dollar for an older girl’s cigarette so that I could be seen holding it (unlit) by this kid I liked so that he wouldn’t think I was too goody-goody for him. I did not even smoke. Was I being fake? Yes. Was I being normal? Duh. (The gentleman involved was not fooled, incidentally.)

Boys often pretend to be a little cooler or smarter about this or that than they are because they want girls to like them, too. That the author genders her argument against “fake girls” makes it really, really weird to me. Does she think her male friends are so stupid they will be misled by truly false people? Does she have a deep-seated insecurity that makes her feel the need to be the most authentic girl in the room?

When we were kids being a geek girl made us feel sort of rare and special. It was all boys and then us, and for some of those nerdy boys, we were the only girl they really talked to. We were the center of attention. Maybe this girl is still acting on the subconscious need to keep other women away so that she can still feel special. Clearly she has some misdirected anger, and a paucity of self-awareness.

This is the worst kind of thing to me, because not only is it sad for her, but it sucks for all of us. Women in our space, having once been something of a scarcity, face particular challenges. We lack for companions and mentors. We regularly experience sexism. We are constantly having our authenticity undermined by people who assume we can’t possibly be competent, knowledgeable or genuine. We don’t need other women to actually try to make it harder.

Whoa, wait. Does the author’s bio really say that she works with a mentorship org and runs a tech group for women? That’s scary.

The article even presents a Venn diagram that shows that “geekdom” lies at the intersection of intelligence with social ineptitude and obsession. I think it leaves out “arrested development,” because again, when I look at the argument from this girl — and from any “geek” with an unsettling refusal to accept growth and diversity — all I see is people who think they are still in high school, who are afraid of losing their safety fort to girls who go shopping, because going shopping is something something only fake girls blah blah.

I mean, really?
Tara “Tiger” Brown is worried about fake geek girls. Tara, you are a woman now, okay?
And incidentally, if you’re going to start articles with aggressive lists of proof of your authenticity, I wouldn’t brag about the Sierra Quest games. That’s kinda entry-level stuff. And Transformers? Didn’t Michael Bay make a movie about those?
Yeah. If being a geek is just about competing to see who can be the most obsessed and unpleasant, fuck it, I’m not that.

Revisiting My Favorites

How’s everyone been? I could talk about how many brand new video games I have over here; I could talk about Skyward Sword or Skyrim or something like that. But I won’t, actually — there are a lot of places you can read that stuff, and since I so rarely get time to update SVGL, I figured I’d talk about something different, though hopefully no less timely.

The Metal Gear Solid HD collection is out, and it looks shockingly good. I think it’s a pretty well-known fact that I’m a huge, sentimental fan of the franchise. To be quite honest, it’s one of those few I love enough that I don’t know where my personal reaction begins and my critical lens — you know, the distanced thought I try to give games so that I can talk to you guys about them independently of my own taste — ends.
Okay, I’m a huge fan. But then, even in my work I’m known to prefer games with voice and character. In MGS, that voice and character often veers into the arena of self-indulgence, and jeopardizes things like mass appeal or conventional design wisdom, and even still I prefer it to games that are cleaner and much better crafted.
MGS demands a lot from its players in terms of investment and patience. Its story is not accessible, and it turns over and over on itself like a coiling snake in its attempts to make its numerous meta-meta-plot loops connect. Yes, you have to sit through a lot of dialogue and cut scenes that are nakedly imitative of film. Some people argue that Hideo Kojima, who is director of the series and thus assumedly responsible for its tone and character, is plainly resentful of his audience and of the industry in which he works (I agree). Plenty don’t like that.
But to me, a work of creative storytelling needs to reflect the creator. I want to be able to talk about what he or she wants to say, and what their work says about them. I always have something to say about MGS. The media I know I really love will put the hair up on my arms no matter how much time passes, and no matter how many times I experience it (sidenote: I feel this way about Neutral Milk Hotel’s song ‘Naomi,’ one of my favorite songs ever).

My dear game industry: I rarely write scored reviews, but if I had, I would put an eight and higher on everything you have released this fall and winter. You have done well, you have done so, so well. Congratulations. It’s one of the highest-quality crops of games I’ve ever seen. But I will not remember them in ten years. I am sorry.
I’ve never met a working game designer that thinks MGS is great. I spoke to one lately who said that Tetris is perfect and MGS is not, end of story — but the thing I think the games industry fails to understand about its audience is that we care a lot less about perfection than it thinks. So for the people who always are asking me what’s the big deal about MGS for me, even that’d suffice as an answer: Because it’s interesting and I want to talk about it.
I’ve started sort of replaying all of them since the HD collection came out. My friend Sarah is my copilot, having read in Tom Bissell’s lovely book‘s appendix about the time when he spent a few hours playing MGS4 with me and listening to me chatter about how I feel it’s a metaphor for the things Kojima wants to say about the 21st century games industry. No, I’m serious.
People ask me a lot if I have written much about my thoughts on MGS, which I’ve mostly shared through conversations with others and on Twitter and stuff. Writing it out formally has always seemed too fangirlish. But in the next couple weeks I’m going to try to do it, like, to some extent. Hope you guys join in.
Meanwhile, here’s some of what I have done over the last few weeks that I haven’t linked yet:

Also, I was on NPR with Ian Bogost in a segment that was based on my recent Kotaku piece on his Cow Clicker game. Cool!

How’s everyone been? I could talk about how many brand new video games I have over here; I could talk about Skyward Sword or Skyrim or something like that. But I won’t, actually — there are a lot of places you can read that stuff, and since I so rarely get time to update SVGL, I figured I’d talk about something different, though hopefully no less timely.

The Metal Gear Solid HD collection is out, and it looks shockingly good. I think it’s a pretty well-known fact that I’m a huge, sentimental fan of the franchise. To be quite honest, it’s one of those few I love enough that I don’t know where my personal reaction begins and my critical lens — you know, the distanced thought I try to give games so that I can talk to you guys about them independently of my own taste — ends.
Okay, I’m a huge fan. But then, even in my work I’m known to prefer games with voice and character. In MGS, that voice and character often veers into the arena of self-indulgence, and jeopardizes things like mass appeal or conventional design wisdom, and even still I prefer it to games that are cleaner and much better crafted.
MGS demands a lot from its players in terms of investment and patience. Its story is not accessible, and it turns over and over on itself like a coiling snake in its attempts to make its numerous meta-meta-plot loops connect. Yes, you have to sit through a lot of dialogue and cut scenes that are nakedly imitative of film. Some people argue that Hideo Kojima, who is director of the series and thus assumedly responsible for its tone and character, is plainly resentful of his audience and of the industry in which he works (I agree). Plenty don’t like that.
But to me, a work of creative storytelling needs to reflect the creator. I want to be able to talk about what he or she wants to say, and what their work says about them. I always have something to say about MGS. The media I know I really love will put the hair up on my arms no matter how much time passes, and no matter how many times I experience it (sidenote: I feel this way about Neutral Milk Hotel’s song ‘Naomi,’ one of my favorite songs ever).

My dear game industry: I rarely write scored reviews, but if I had, I would put an eight and higher on everything you have released this fall and winter. You have done well, you have done so, so well. Congratulations. It’s one of the highest-quality crops of games I’ve ever seen. But I will not remember them in ten years. I am sorry.
I’ve never met a working game designer that thinks MGS is great. I spoke to one lately who said that Tetris is perfect and MGS is not, end of story — but the thing I think the games industry fails to understand about its audience is that we care a lot less about perfection than it thinks. So for the people who always are asking me what’s the big deal about MGS for me, even that’d suffice as an answer: Because it’s interesting and I want to talk about it.
I’ve started sort of replaying all of them since the HD collection came out. My friend Sarah is my copilot, having read in Tom Bissell’s lovely book‘s appendix about the time when he spent a few hours playing MGS4 with me and listening to me chatter about how I feel it’s a metaphor for the things Kojima wants to say about the 21st century games industry. No, I’m serious.
People ask me a lot if I have written much about my thoughts on MGS, which I’ve mostly shared through conversations with others and on Twitter and stuff. Writing it out formally has always seemed too fangirlish. But in the next couple weeks I’m going to try to do it, like, to some extent.
Speaking of fangirlish, I’ve also made a few MGS1 tribute banners and

Tonight I saw Naughty Dog’s Rich Lemarchand talk about how the team’s intention for the Uncharted franchise, was (to some extent) was to explore games’ equivalent of the classic summer blockbuster film. Well, summer may be blockbuster season for movies, but we’re in it now.

I’m getting a little overwhelmed by all of these new games. I know, you’re playing me the world’s tiniest violin,